PRESS RELEASE
Contact: Henry Herrera
Telephone: +1-301-801-0608
Email: info@menandboys.net

UN Media Campaigns Normalize Bias Against Men

May 20, 2026 – On May 17, UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, posted the following message on the social media platform X: “Women now outnumber men in higher education globally. Yet important gaps remain. Women continue to be underrepresented at doctoral level and hold only around one quarter of senior leadership positions in academia.” (1).

UNESCO acknowledged male underrepresentation as a global concern. But instead of logically calling for programs to help men, UNESCO recommended greater attention to increase the representation of women at the doctoral level.

Readers were outraged. The post drew over 400 public comments, the vast majority of them critical of UNESCO for viewing male underrepresentation as a mere backdrop to women’s progress.

The pattern is broader. Earlier this year, the President of the United Nations General Assembly launched the global #LikeAWoman campaign to spotlight women’s leadership across politics, science, business, sports, and public life (2). No equivalent United Nations initiative exists to highlight the contributions of men and boys, and the UN programs that do engage males largely frame masculinity as a problem to be corrected rather than a strength to be recognized (3).

Since 2015, UN Women and UNESCO have built substantial infrastructure to challenge gender stereotypes affecting women:

  • The Unstereotype Alliance, convened by UN Women in 2017, partners with major advertisers to promote empowering portrayals of women in media (4).
  • The Global Media Monitoring Project, supported by UN Women, tracks female representation in news coverage across more than one hundred countries (5).
  • Overall, UNESCO’s gender and media program funds workshops, toolkits, and policy guidance to dismantle stereotypes that limit women and girls (6).

By contrast, UN programs that engage men and boys center on behavioral reform. The UN Women framework on engaging boys and young men is built around challenging “harmful” norms, redefining male identity, and preventing violence against women (3). The framework contains no parallel commitment to recognizing the fathers, coaches, mentors, and male role models already serving their families and communities.

The imbalance extends into media coverage itself. A five-year content analysis of mainstream news media by Australian researcher Jim Macnamara found that approximately 69% of coverage of men was unfavorable, compared with only 12% that was favorable (7). Persistent negative framing of fathers and male role models has been linked to declining public confidence in male caregivers and to weakened recognition of men’s constructive contributions to families, schools, and communities (8).

What the United Nations acknowledges about men, it does not act upon. What it identifies for women, it advances with funding, frameworks, and global campaigns.

The ICMB calls on policymakers, media organizations, and United Nations agencies to advance balanced representation of men and boys, study the effects of negative male portrayals, and develop initiatives that honor positive male contributions.

The International Council for Men and Boys is a non-governmental organization working to end the 12 sex disparities that affect men and boys worldwide. The ICMB is a leader of the emerging global movement to address these disparities. https://www.menandboys.net/

Links:

  1. https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/numbers-tell-story-women-men-higher-education
  2. https://www.un.org/pga/80/2026/03/04/press-release-united-nations-president-of-the-general-assembly-launches-global-campaign-like-a-woman-to-challenge-stereotypes-and-spotlight-womens-leadership-across-sectors/
  3. https://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/youth/engaging-boys-and-young-men-in-gender-equality
  4. https://www.unstereotypealliance.org/en/about
  5. https://whomakesthenews.org/global-media-monitoring-project/
  6. https://www.unesco.org/en/gender-equality/media-gender-equality
  7. https://phys.org/news/2006-11-men-main-gender-wars.html
  8. https://ifstudies.org/blog/no-most-dads-are-not-shiftless-sexist-slouches

A review of publicly available United Nations materials on media representation, gender stereotypes, masculinity, fatherhood, and portrayals of men and boys analyzed for this release may be accessed here: https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMi1jb3B5_e6d55b69-63b5-42b1-a51e-c5737c38c3a1

The ICMB analysis of the United Nations is available here: https://www.menandboys.net/un-2/