The Nuzzo Letter

STEM and WomenThe seemingly never-ending campaign to recruit more women into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) continues in Australia. On November 26, 2025, the federal government’s Department of Industry, Science and Resources announced that it would invest another $9.77 million into the Women in STEM and Entrepreneurship program. According to the Department, the program supports “investment in gender equity initiatives that aim for lasting systemic change by eliminating barriers for women’s participation in STEM education and careers, and entrepreneurship.”More specifically, the program will fund projects that:(a) reduce and/or mitigate systemic and cultural barriers to participation in STEM education, careers, innovation and entrepreneurship by girls and women;(b) reduce the multiplier effect of intersectional barriers to participation, development and leadership of girls and women in STEM education, careers, innovation and entrepreneurship;(c) address inequality or discrimination against girls and women in STEM education, careers, innovation and/or entrepreneurship.Psychology and …Interestingly, a couple of weeks later, on December 15, 2025, the Australian Department of Health, Disability and Ageing announced funding of $16 million for its Postgraduate Psychology Incentive Program. This program is part of the government’s larger grant scheme called Addressing Critical Psychology Shortages. The scheme is intended to resolve current bottlenecks in the psychology training pipeline that are apparently impacting workforce availability and service delivery.If one traces back the various rounds of funding associated with this scheme, one finds that a purpose of Round 1 of funding in 2024 was to support universities who create “additional postgraduate psychology places in courses which lead to general registration and can lead to relevant areas of practice endorsement.” Importantly, this round of funding was contingent upon universities demonstrating the ability to grow postgraduate student enrolments by at least 8.7%. However, unlike the STEM grants, no mention was made of student sex. Instead, the government stated that half the internship and supervisor trainings associated with the programs will be offered to “people in First Nations communities, culturally and linguistically diverse communities and people living in regional, rural and remote areas of Australia.”Sex Bias in the “Underrepresentation” ArgumentThe main aim of the psychology workforce grants is to increase the number of student placements. Secondary aims appear to be to increase student enrolments in psychology and to create an overall more efficient psychology training pathway to meet society’s mental health needs. Thus, given that sex differences in proportional representations are the bases for other Australian education and career development grants, such as those aimed at increasing women’s representation in STEM, it is odd that sex differences in proportional representations were not considered in the desire to create an overall more robust and efficient psychology workforce.In Australia, the proportion of university psychology students who are men (presumably ~20%) is significantly less than the proportion of university STEM students who are women (37%). Moreover, the proportion of registered psychologists in Australia who are men (19.6%) is not too drastically different than the proportion of persons employed in STEM jobs who are women (15%). Thus, Australian bureaucrats exhibit sex bias when they use “underrepresentation” as a basis for sex-specific education and career development grants in STEM but not in psychology.The criticisms of the government’s philosophy do not end there.Need vs. Luxury GrantsThe “needs” put forward by the government in the STEM and psychology grants are not the same. In the psychology grants, the government has stated that a workforce shortage in the mental health sector exists, and the purpose of the grants is to resolve this societal need. For the Women in STEM grants, the government did not state that the purpose of the investment was to resolve a workforce shortage. Therefore, the Women in STEM grants appear to be luxury grants, influenced by gender ideology. Their motivation is political not practical.This illustrates the depth of gynocentrism in the government. Even when there is a societal need that could be helped by using the “underrepresentation” philosophy, which the government uses regularly when it argues for women’s education and career development, it still will not adopt the philosophy. Doing so would show an explicit interest in men’s education and career development, and that is something that bureaucrats and academics are not willing to do.Contradictory AimsAnother issue with these two grant schemes is that their aims somewhat contradict each other in terms of women’s workforce participation. By not framing the psychology grants in a male-specific way, the Australian government presumably believes that the psychology grants will incentive more women to enter and stay in the field of psychology. In fact, one media report implied that “a flood of female graduates” could be the solution to the psychology workforce shortage. Yet, resolving the psychology workforce shortage by increasing the number of female workers conflicts with the idea of getting more women into STEM fields. There are only so many women around, and most of them prefer psychology over STEM when given a choice.Men in PsychologyIn terms of overall bodies that could be recruited to enter psychology to resolve a workforce shortage, many male bodies in the community are available. Fewer men than women are enrolled at Australian universities, with men comprising 43%of students. Thus, there is a larger pool of non-university men than women to incentivize to enrol in university to study psychology. Also, of the men who are already enrolled in universities, many of them are studying topics other than psychology. Thus, the Australian government could incentivize male university students to switch fields to psychology. Such incentives might appeal to male students who are “on the fence” about different career options or who have equal interest in psychology and another field.Nevertheless, sex differences in vocational interests and preferences exist, and they are rooted in biology. Consequently, incentives and other social engineering schemes will only go so far in changing proportional representations in vocations. In one survey of more than 45,000 high school students in Australia, males ranked psychology as their 17th most popular career choice, whereas females ranked psychology as their top choice. Moreover, males rated six different engineering fields in their top 20 careers, whereas females did not rate a single engineering field in their top 20. Thus, neither STEM nor psychology should be expected to exhibit equal male and female representations.Still, if the government is going to use workforce “diversity” as a reason for recruiting more women into STEM, then the same rationale ought to apply to the field of psychology, and patient preferences support doing so. One study of approximately 2,000 men in Australia found that 19.1% of the men prefer a male psychologist. In a different study, 17% of men and 5% of women indicated that they prefer a male psychologist. In both studies, approximately 60% of individuals did not have a preference for the sex of their psychologist, meaning that they would happily talk to either a male or female psychologist, whereas approximately 20% of men and 34% of women said that they would prefer to talk to a female psychologist. Thus, unlike the Women in STEM grants, which are luxury grants, there is a practical reason that might justify the psychology workforce grants being sex-specific: consumer demand for male psychologists.Nevertheless, government incentives alone will not be enough to cause large numbers of men to start swarming to university psychology departments. Part of men’s arrival in those departments is likely predicated on those departments uprooting the misandry and anti-male bias that exists in them. Few men of healthy self-esteem will want to dedicate their life’s work to a field and professional community that continually bashes them. Such men do not want to learn about and implement masculinity measurement tools that are rigged from the start. Such men do not want to care for boys and men using feminist-informed guidelines. Such men do not want to read academic papers on “male privilege,” “mankeeping,” “mansplaining,” and other topics that reflect a misguided understanding of human nature.Evidence of the disconnect between men and academia, particularly the humanities departments, is all around us. One male student recently described his experiences in a psychology program as one of feeling unwelcomed, isolated, monitored, and silenced. Similarly, I was recently contacted by a male psychology student in Australia who expressed frustrations with the program that he is enrolled in. He told me that the university that he attends regularly pushes DEI and gender pay gap propaganda on him. He added that his psychology coursework often includes anti-male, anti-white, and anti-heterosexual asides. The man said that he is thinking about dropping out of the program. He asked me if I was aware of any psychology programs that do not push critical and feminist theories onto students. Sadly, I did not have a positive answer from him.Government bureaucrats and university administrators also do not have positive answers for men like this, namely, because they do not care. They are not interested in hearing his concerns. They believe that they are doing a fantastic job – sex-biased grants and all.Related Content at The Nuzzo LetterSUPPORT THE NUZZO LETTERIf you appreciated this content, please consider supporting The Nuzzo Letter with a one-time or recurring donation. Your support is greatly appreciated. It helps me to continue to work on independent research projects and fight for my evidence-based discourse. To donate, click the DonorBox logo. In two simple steps, you can donate using ApplePay, PayPal, or another service. Thank you.Thanks for reading The Nuzzo Letter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jameslnuzzo.substack.com

The United States (U.S.) Office of Research on Women’s Health was created within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1990. Organizationally, the Office is positioned within the Office of the Director of the NIH. The original goals of the Office of Research on Women’s Health were:“(1) to strengthen, develop, and increase research into diseases, disorders, and conditions that are unique to, more prevalent among, or more serious in women, or for which there are different risk factors for women than for men;(2) to ensure that women are appropriately represented in biomedical and biobehavioral research studies, especially clinical trials, that are supported by the NIH; and(3) to direct initiatives to increase the number of women in biomedical careers.”All three goals have been achieved. The goal of increasing the number of female participants in clinical research trials was based on the claim that women were historically excluded from clinical research trials. This claim was largely unsubstantiated at the time that it was made, and numerous studies have since shown that women are not underrepresented as participants in medical research. In fact, reports published by the Office of Research on Women’s Health show that women have comprised 55-60% of participants in NIH-funded trials for the past three decades.The notion that women have been “underrepresented” in research trials has also been historically linked to the idea that women’s health research has been “underfunded.” This claim is also untrue.First, as shown in the graph below, the Office of Research on Women’s Health has had its own budget for supporting and coordinating women’s health research since 1991. That budget has totalled approximately $1.3 billion over the past 35 years.Second, the amount of money that the NIH expends on women’s health research across all its institutes is significantly greater than the amount it expends on men’ health research. As shown in the graph below, approximately 81% of the NIH’s research funding is not sex-specific. However, of the remaining funding that is sex-specific, women’s health receives approximately 13% each year, whereas men’s health receives approximately 6% each year. This amounts to approximately $4.1 billion each year for women’s health research and $1.8 billion per year for men’s health research.Given the substantial amount of money invested into women’s health research, and the more-than-adequate representation of females as participants in NIH-funded clinical trials, the Office of Research on Women’s Health has presumably also achieved its goal of strengthening, developing, and increasing research into diseases, disorders, and conditions that are unique to or more prevalent among women. If such goals have not been achieved, then taxpayers are owed an explanation for how this could be possible given the billions of dollars that has been invested into women’s health research.The third goal of the Office of Research on Women’s Health was to increase the number of women in biomedical careers. This goal has long since been achieved. Women comprise the majority of students who graduate from U.S. universities with degrees in health-related fields. Greater numbers of female than male graduates are now observed in many health and medical fields including public health, healthcare administration and management, pharmacy, medicine, dentistry, optometry, physical therapy, occupational therapy, nursing, and psychology. In 2021-22, women comprised 80% of university graduates across all health-related fields.Given all of this information, one might think that women’s health advocates would want to celebrate the achievements of their original goals. After the celebration finishes, they might even take a moment to consider whether public health attention has gone too far in the female direction, given that male life expectancy is 5.3 years shorter than female life expectancy, and no Office of Research on Men’s Health has ever been created.As Dr. Warren Farrell says, “When only one sex wins, both sexes lose.”Unfortunately, no “mission accomplished” celebration seems to have ever occurred, and Dr. Farrell’s conceptualization still does not seem to be understood by many individuals who work within the academic and public health sectors.National AcademiesIn December of 2024, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine – with the input of 17 committee members, two fellows, 10 study staff, eight consultants, and 17 reviewers – published a report titled, “A New Vision for Women's Health Research: Transformative Change at the National Institutes of Health.” The report was also subsequently covered in a piece in Science titled, “NIH needs a new institute for women’s health research, expert panel says.”The National Academies are not a government agency. According to their website, “The National Academies provide independent, objective advice to inform policy with evidence, spark progress and innovation, and confront challenging issues for the benefit of society.”From the National Academies’ website, one also learns of their vision, mission, and core values. Their vision is a “nation and a world that rely on scientific evidence to make decisions that benefit humanity.” Their mission is to “provide independent, trustworthy advice and facilitate solutions to complex challenges by mobilizing expertise, practice, and knowledge.” Their core values are “Independence, Objectivity, Rigor, Integrity, Inclusivity, Truth.”Here, my first aim is to introduce the recommendations made by the National Academies regarding the future of the NIH and women’s health research. My second aim is to highlight the flaws in the National Academies’ report and suggest that these flaws are evidence of the National Academies’ failure to live up to its own professed vision, mission, and core values.National Academies’ Recommendation #1: NIH Organizational Structure“The National Institutes of Health (NIH) should form a new Institute to address the gaps in women’s health research (WHR) and create a new interdisciplinary research fund. Furthermore, NIH leadership should expand its oversight and support for WHR across the Institutes and Centers (ICs). Congress should appropriate additional funding to adequately support these new efforts.”Under this recommendation, the National Academies further specify that they believe the Office of Research on Women’s Health should be elevated to a position of an independent institute within the NIH and that the Office should be given its own budget of at least $4 billion over the first five years. In addition to this separate budget, the National Academies recommend that Congress establish a new separate fund for women’s health research through the Office of the NIH director. They state that this fund should equal $11.4 billion over the first five years.National Academies’ Recommendation #2: Oversight and Tracking Investment into Women’s Health Research“The National Institutes of Health (NIH) should reform its process for tracking and analyzing its investments in research funding to improve accuracy for reporting to Congress and the public on expenditures on women’s health research (WHR).”Under this recommendation, the National Academies suggest that the NIH is not currently categorizing women’s health research accurately and that a modified categorization system is necessary to better summarize how much money the NIH expends on women’s health research.National Academies’ Recommendation #3: Prioritizing Women’s Health Research“The Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) should develop and implement a transparent, biennial process to set priorities for women’s health research (WHR). The process should be data driven and include input from the scientific and practitioner communities and the public. Priorities of the director and the Institutes and Centers (ICs) should respond to the gaps in the evidence base and evolving women’s health needs.”Under this recommendation, the National Academies also state that most NIH Institutes and Center have plans that “rarely mention women’s health” and that “significant gaps in WHR at NIH are the result of the substantial historical underrepresentation, lack of accountability, inadequate funding, and dearth of comprehensive research that have long characterized this field. Decades of insufficient focus have resulted in critical knowledge deficits and disparities in health outcomes for women.”National Academies’ Recommendation #4: Careers in Women’s Health Research“The National Institutes of Health (NIH) should augment existing and develop new programs to attract researchers and support career pathways for scientists through all stages of the careers of women’s health researchers.”Under this recommendation, the National Academies discuss a loan repayment program for researchers who investigate women’s health, expansion of NIH support for early- and mid-career researchers who study women’s health, and additional special considerations for researchers who apply for women’s health research grants.National Academies’ Recommendation #5: Expanding the Women’s Health Research Workforce“The National Institutes of Health (NIH) should augment existing and develop new grant programs specifically designed to promote interdisciplinary science and career development in areas related to women’s health. NIH should prioritize and promote participation of women and investigators from underrepresented communities.”Under this recommendation, the National Academies discuss expanding the following centers and programs: the Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health (BIRCWH) Program, the Specialized Centers of Research Excellence (SCORE) on Sex Differences, the Women’s Reproductive Health Research (WRHR) program, and the Research Scientist Development Program (RSDP).National Academies’ Recommendation #6: Women’s Health Expertise on Grant Review Panels“The National Institutes of Health (NIH) should continue and strengthen its efforts to ensure balanced representation and appropriate expertise when evaluating grant proposals pertaining to women’s health and sex differences research in the peer review process.”Under this recommendation, the National Academies want the NIH to ensure that individuals who serve as reviewers of NIH grant applications have adequate expertise in women’s health and that these review panels have “balance representation.”National Academies’ Recommendation #7: Sex as a Biological Variable“The National Institutes of Health (NIH) should revise how it supports and implements its sex as a biological variable (SABV) policy to ensure it fulfills the intended goals.”Under this recommendation, the National Academies further specify that the NIH should expand education around sex as a biological variable and that studies that plan to include sex-segregated data should be given priority in the funding pipeline. Ironically, this recommendation of more research on sex as a biological variable falls within a report that uses phrase like “birthing people,” “assigned at birth,” “girls and gender minorities with uteruses,” and “women and those capable of pregnancy.”National Academies’ Recommendation #8: Research TopicsUnder this recommendation, the National Academies listed a range of basic, clinical, and population-level women’s health research topics that it believes the NIH should prioritize. This list of study topics includes everything from endometriosis, to pregnancy physiology, to menopause, to the “structural and social determinants” of health.Flawed PlanThe National Academies’ report and its eight recommendations for the future of women’s health at the NIH is flawed for several reasons. The fundamental issue with the plan is that it ignores men’s health. The National Academies did not present epidemiological data on men’s health, nor did the National Academies present data on men’s participation in research trials or on NIH funding of men’s health research. For example, on eight pages in the report, the National Academies say that women’s health has been “underfunded.” Yet, the National Academies did not mention that no office for research men’s health has ever been created, nor did the group present data on funding of men’s health research. Had these presentations been made, readers would have clearly seen that women’s health research has received significantly more NIH funds than has men’s health research. Moreover, on 17 pages in the report, the National Academies say that women’s health has been “understudied.” Yet, the National Academies did not present data on male and female participation in NIH-funded trials. Had these presentations been made, readers would have clearly seen that women have made up 55-60% of participants in NIH-funded research trials since at least 1995. Thus, by not presenting information about men’s health, the National Academies’ report starts from a biased position. Therefore, the report lacks in intellectual integrity.Damning if TrueThe National Academies’ report is also problematic in that it is damning if its contents are indeed true. Much of what is revealed in the report implies that the Office of Research on Women’s Health has been entirely incompetent over the past 35 years in completing its mission of supporting and coordinating women’s health research. For example, the National Academies say that we know very little about women’s health and that women’s health has been “understudied” and “underfunded.” How can this be possible with annual women’s health research budgets in the billions of dollars, if not for incompetence? And why should taxpayers then entrust more money and power in the hands of the Office of Research on Women’s Health if this history of underperformance is indeed true?The reality, of course, is that women’s health has not been “understudied” or “underfunded.” We know many things about women’s health. By suggesting the opposite, and by playing the female victim card to make a political gain, the National Academies unintentionally made the NIH and Office of Research on Women’s Health look foolish and incompetent.Men’s and Women’s Health TogetherOne can care about women’s and men’s health simultaneously. The National Academies, via their report, demonstrated that they do not understand this simple humanitarian idea. Instead of choosing to write a report or perhaps two separate reports that included plans for both women’s and men’s health, the National Academies chose to write a report only on the future of women’s health research. In doing this, the National Academies’ failed to demonstrate intellectual rigour and a moral compass, and they failed to live up to the organization’s professed vision, mission, and core values. The National Academies dismissed the sex difference in life expectancy, and it misled readers by not presenting data on men’s health, men’s participation in research trials, and funding of men’s health research. Presentation of this information would have allowed readers to see that women’s health has not been “underfunded” or “understudied” and that the average male in the U.S. dies about five years earlier than the average female.Instead of arguing only to prioritize women’s health, the National Academies could have simply acknowledged the causes of the sex difference in life expectancy and advocated for increased attention toward specific areas of both women’s health and men’s health.Instead of arguing for a new single institute for women’s health, the National Academies could have advocated for institutes for both sexes, or it could have advocated for an Institute on Sex-Specific Research that has two branches: one for women’s health and one for men’s health.Instead of arguing for billions more dollars for women’s health research, the National Academies could have recognized that both men’s and women’s health are important and often intertwined, and therefore, pubic funds ought to be split between men’s and women’s health research.Instead of arguing only for a larger women’s health workforce and enhanced career development pathways for women’s health researchers, the National Academies could have suggested these things for both the fields of women’s and men’s health research.Instead of arguing for improved oversight and tracking only for women’s health research, the National Academies could have easily suggested that the same be done for men’s health. In fact, we already know that this problem exists for men’s health research. Biennial reports from the Office of Research on Women’s Health used to include data on both women’s and men’s health research participation and funding, but the Office of Research on Women’s Health ceased this practice in its last report. Moreover, the new NIH Research, Condition, and Disease Categorization (RCDC) system does not list a category for men’s health research and the funding that this category receives, whereas the NIH’s system does list a category for women’s health research and its funding. Thus, we currently have no idea how much money the NIH is investing into male-specific research.The National Academies chose not to propose any of these things. They chose not to extend their empathy and understanding toward men. For these choices, the National Academies ought to be called out.Dodged a BulletThe National Academies report was published in the final months of 2024. The report was likely written with the hope that Democrats would be in charge of the administrative and legislative branches of the U.S. government going into 2025. Democrat power in these two government branches would have facilitated implementation of the National Academies’ plan, as the previous four years of the Biden administration demonstrated a Democrat bias in funding women’s causes. This bias can be seen in multiple graphs published at The Nuzzo Letter. During the Biden years, increased funding can be seen in the budgets of the Office of Research on Women’s Health, the Office on Violence Against Women, and the Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau. During the Biden years, the NIH also increased its spending on violence against women research, and the Department of Health and Human Services increased its spending on women’s shelters. Moreover, the Biden administration created the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research, which allocated another $100 million to women’s health research. Finally, the Biden era was also the time when the Office of Research on Women’s Health stopped publishing men’s health funding data alongside with women’s health funding data – something that the Office had done in all previous biennial reports dating back to 2007.In other words, those who seek the fair and equal treatment of the sexes dodged a bullet with Democrat losses in the November 2024 elections. Had Kamala Harris won the presidency, and had more Democrats won more seats in Congress, the chances of the National Academies’ grand plan being adopted by the U.S. government would have increased markedly, whereas the Trump administration and the Republicans in Congress are unlikely to adopt the biased plan.Nevertheless, though the National Academies’ report deserves to be tossed into the dust bin of history for its bias and its lack of genuine humanitarianism, the report should not be forgotten. It will remain dormant, waiting for the next gynocentric administration to come along and implement it. Let us hope that in the meantime, the National Academies see the error of their ways and that they discover a moral compass that points them down an intellectual pathway that involves contemplation of the health of the other half of the American population.Related Content at The Nuzzo LetterSUPPORT THE NUZZO LETTERIf you appreciated this content, please consider supporting The Nuzzo Letter with a one-time or recurring donation. Your support is greatly appreciated. It helps me to continue to work on independent research projects and fight for my evidence-based discourse. To donate, click the DonorBox logo. In two simple steps, you can donate using ApplePay, PayPal, or another service. Thank you.Thanks for reading The Nuzzo Letter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jameslnuzzo.substack.com

Just when you thought the unrelenting attacks on men from academia could not get any worse, they have.In the journal Psychology of Men & Masculinities, the concept “mankeeping” was recently introduced by Angelica Ferrara and Dylan Vergara of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. The title of their paper was, “Theorizing Mankeeping: The Male Friendship Recession and Women’s Associated Labor as a Structural Component of Gender Inequality.”“Mankeeping” adds to the litany of words and concepts that academics have created to ridicule the male sex. Other examples include “toxic masculinity,” “male privilege,” “mansplaining,” “manels,” and “manferences.”Ferrara and Vergara defined “mankeeping” as “the labor that women take on to shore up losses in men’s social networks and reduce the burden of men’s isolation on families, the heterosexual bond, and on men.” And, they added:“[m]ankeeping is best conceived as a mechanism through which women support and bolster men’s levels of social support.”According to Ferrara and Vergara, “mankeeping” is a form of women’s unpaid and unequal emotional care work. Some examples of this “invisibilized labor” provided by the authors included the following:* A woman suggesting that her husband reconnect with old friends* A girlfriend facilitating a group outing to help her boyfriend bond with other men* A wife sending a husband on a “man date” with other men* A mother suggesting to her son that he contact his friends* A woman reminding a man to join a men’s group* A woman “checking in on her husband’s emotional state after learning he has had a stressful day at work”* A wife helping her husband “articulate his own feelings through a process of deciphering limited social and emotional cues”And what are the fundamental causes and final consequences of “mankeeping”? According to the authors, “mankeeping” is “a component of patriarchy’s persistence within the heterosexual bond, asserting that an unequal distribution of social support is part and parcel of the everyday social reproduction of gender inequality.”To summarize, the flow of ideas underlying Ferrara and Vergara’s concept of “mankeeping” goes as follows:* Increased numbers of men are lonely or social disconnected;* Women have to pick up the slack in men’s lack of social relationships;* Women perform unpaid labor when serving as social and emotional facilitators for men;* Women’s social and emotional labor is unpaid and unequal and therefore it reinforces the patriarchy and exacerbates gender inequality.Here, my purpose is to highlight various flaws with Ferrara and Vergara’s concept of “mankeeping.”Lack of Empathy for MenThe first issue with Ferrara and Vergara’s concept of “mankeeping” is that it lacks empathy for men. To the extent that men are lacking healthy social relationships, the focus of a paper in a “men and masculinities” journal ought to be the causes and solutions of men’s mental and emotional health issues. Yet, in predictable gynocentric fashion, the authors made the story about women.“Men and masculinities scholars must interrogate how the effects of these trends, while troubling for men themselves, may cascade beyond men.”In other words, men’s health is merely a launching pad for discussing additional ways that society can accommodate women.To further illustrate the degree to which the authors had no interest in discussing men’s health, one need only look at the incoherent sentence where the authors placed the phrase “male issue” in quotes. This was done, presumably, to mock or minimize the notion that men’s health, not gender inequality, be the main point of discussion.“To conceptualize men’s thinner social networks as a mere symptom of gender inequality, or a “male issue,” rather than a structural component of how patriarchy is upheld and reproduced, is to miss a critical avenue for social change. Our concept of mankeeping presents one mechanism through which men’s social isolation could reproduce existing inequalities…”Women as Social Beings and CarersAnother issue with Ferrara and Vergara’s concept of “mankeeping” is that it seems to assume that men and women would, if unchained from the restrictive patriarchy, exhibit near-identical social behaviors and indicators and that women would not be more inclined than men to want be emotional carers. But on what grounds are such assumptions made, given the substantial research literature on sex differences in preferences, interests, and behaviours?Sex differences in vocational interests is one example. Women are more likely than men to prefer working with people than things, whereas men are more likely than women to prefer working with things than people. This is why more women than men study and work in fields like psychology and social work. In fact, psychology and social work are also fields that involve providing emotional care to others (i.e., “mankeeping” or “womankeeping”) and thus also illustrate the greater female than male inclination for wanting to provide emotional care to both men and women.Other lines of evidence also point to women being naturally more social than men. The American Time Use Survey consistently shows that women spend more time than men “socializing and communicating,” including in face-to-face interactions, hosting or attending social events, and communicating with others via the telephone and internet. A recent Pew poll of over 6,000 American residents also found that women were more likely than men to keep in touch with friends by phone, text, and social media.Thus, women appear to acquire much value and meaning out of life from frequent social interactions. Many of these interactions will involve emotional care for others. These sex differences are likely biologically driven. Results from a study in hamsters suggest that the average female and male brain respond differently to social interactions, with oxytocin playing a key role in the heightened female response.Relationship Trade-OffsFerrara and Vergara’s failure to reference the biological basis of sex differences then leads to lack of acknowledgement of trade-offs in relationships. Their presentation of male-female relationships was one-sided: the woman does the vast majority of the care work and apparently the man offers very little in return.A man and a woman both bring unique attributes to a partnership. The man could be any number of things: funny, caring, rich, intelligent, a hard worker, physically attractive, friendly, reliable, the father of their children, good at fixing things around the house, good at making the woman feel safe and protected, etc. These characteristics would all be reasons why his female partner would want to care for him. It is in her self-interest to do so. Without him, she loses her greatest value.Yet, instead of discussing trade-offs in partnerships, and the unique currency that men bring to the relationship exchange, Ferrara and Vergara presented a story in which women’s emotional care work is presented independent of the larger context of the natural given and take of romantic partnerships. For example, whereas a wife might take on more of the unpaid household work, her husband might take on more of the paid work outside the home (often at risk to his health), such that when hours of all work are summed, men and women contribute roughly equally to the partnership. Thus, to the extent that women might be providing a disproportionate amount of emotional care, men are likely providing their own unique type of care at a disproportionate level. In fact, the husband’s job might be paying for all of his wife’s healthcare!Women’s Perceptions of Emotional CareFerrara and Vergara also do not account for women’s perception of how much “mankeeping” that they think they need to perform versus how much care a man actually needs or desires. A wife who is constantly worrying about some aspect of her husband’s life might be doing so unnecessarily. She might think that she needs to repeatedly call or text him, but the man might find this excessive. Compared to men, women worry more, experience greater levels of anxiety, and exhibit a greater overall neurotic profile. Thus, by seemingly taking women’s word for it, Ferrara and Vergara, have assumed that all female emotional labor is necessary. It may be; it may not be.Lesbians and Men Who Carry the Emotional LoadAnother issue with the concept of “mankeeping” is that “womankeeping” also exists. Ferrara and Vergara eventually admitted this when they said: “there are many relationships in which men carry out an outsized portion of emotion work on behalf of women and other genders.”Nevertheless, the authors did not explore the topic of “womankeeping” in any detail. One example that is familiar to me, based on previous research that I helped conduct, is Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is a physically, mentally, and emotionally debilitating condition. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is more prevalent in women than men. In the United States, approximately 1.7% of women and 0.9% of men have received a diagnosis of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Consequently, who serves as the primary physical and emotional carer for heterosexual women who live with this condition? Husbands.Ferrara and Vergara also conveniently ignored lesbian relationships. They did not explain if “mankeeping” exists in these relationships, and assuming that an imbalance of emotional care does exist between lesbians, the authors did not explain if this somehow also reinforces the patriarchy and gender inequality.Men’s Social Networks Must be Feminist-Approved or Else…According to Ferrara and Vergara, a root cause of “mankeeping” is men’s declining social networks. Therefore, a solution to “mankeeping” is men engaging in more social activities. However, men finding genuine fraternal connection through increased engagement with their own social networks is often viewed by feminists as a threat to feminism. Thus, Ferrara and Vergara’s support for the solution to “mankeeping” is highly conditional. The authors qualified their statement about increased funding for programs that “allow men to meet their social and emotional needs without creating new forms or emotion work for women” by stating that men’s programs must be feminist-approved:“This effort must be careful not to create male spaces that reproduce men’s social dominance in ways that university fraternities and other men’s social clubs have long helped facilitate.”Remarkably, Ferrara and Vergara even expressed hesitation regarding the largely successful Men’s Shed program, because the program brings men together through “the expectation of an explicit masculine activity.”Sadly, such disapproval of men’s spaces is not specific to Ferrara and Vergara’s paper. For example, UN Women, a feminist organization funded to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars per year by the world’s taxpayers, recently condemned the “manosphere” for its supposedly dangerous influence on boys and men, though many boys and men find solace in reasonable discussions that occur within this male space.The message from all of this is clear: men are allowed to socialize only where, when, and with whom feminists permit. And if this guarantee cannot be met, women will simply demand access to male spaces. This has already occurred with Men’s Sheds in Australia and the United Kingdom, and one woman’s sense of entitlement to this space served as the headline to a recent BBC article on the topic: 'We put the pressure on to join Men in Sheds'. Other similar examples include girls demanding access to the Boy Scouts, (now called Scouting America) and women playing on men’s sports teams and entering male locker rooms.Feminist Contradiction Between Men’s Leisure and the Solution to “Mankeeping”Beyond women demanding control over, or access to male spaces, there is yet a greater irony in the solution to “mankeeping” being men expanding their social networks.Men spending time with other men is social leisure. This leisure can take many forms. It might involve a man playing on a recreational sports team, a man attending a sports event with work colleagues, or a man attending a concert with close mates. Yet, men participating in increased leisure is contradictory to other feminist demands. Historically, feminists have lambasted men for spending too much time participating leisure activities and not enough time at home helping with the dishes, the laundry, and the kids.Thus, Ferrara and Vergara’s concept of “mankeeping” is internally inconsistent. On one hand, it proposes that the solution to “mankeeping” is for men to become more socially engaged – that is, participate in more leisure activities. On the other hand, increased time in leisure activities means less time at home – that is, men contributing less to unpaid domestic labour. Thus, if men socialize with the boys, they are blamed for not doing enough work at home. If men stay at home to help around the house, then they are blamed for their lack of an independent social life.Blokes just can’t catch a break!ConclusionIn closing, Ferrara and Vergara’s concept of “mankeeping” has many flaws. It lacks empathy for men; it misunderstands the male and female experiences; it ignores sex differences in interests and behaviours; it overlooks relationship trade-offs; it desires to control men’s social connections; and it suffers from multiple internal inconsistencies. Consequently, Ferrara and Vergara’s concept of “mankeeping” should be rejected.However, Ferrara and Vergara’s paper should not be taken lightly. It is not a one-off. The authors allocated a significant chunk of their paper to describing a future research agenda. Moreover, their paper was published in a special journal issue that was described by the American Psychological Association as “Unchartered territory: the future of men and masculinities.”This future research agenda, which will consist of projects conducted largely at taxpayer expense, is likely to involve the development of a “mankeeping” questionnaire. This research is then likely to be supplemented with interview and focus group studies. All of this research will be rigged from the start. Items on a “mankeeping” questionnaire will be written in a way that forces respondents to confirm the researcher’s ideology, and interview and focus group responses will be shoved into the researcher’s pre-existing feminist framework rather than being contemplated and integrated inductively. Men will likely not be invited to participate in such research, and if they are, any comments that they make that run counter to feminist narrative are likely to be turned against them. Why do I suggest this? For one, we already have evidence that this is occurring in this area of “research.” And secondly, Ferrara and Vergara’s closing statement displays a high level of confidence that their conceptualization of “mankeeping” is indeed already correct, and thus, future research will merely fill in the gaps of knowledge pertaining to female disadvantage and gender inequality.“We look to a future where boys and men can create and sustain connection in ways that are unencumbered by rigid masculine norms, and where the meeting of men’s social and emotional needs does not depend on women’s unpaid and unequal care work.”For many of us, our vision of the world and for the future is much different than Ferrara’s, Vergara’s, and all their feminist allies’. In contrast to their position, many of us look forward to a future where boys and men create and sustain connection in ways that are unencumbered by rigid feminist theory, and where discussions of men’s social and emotional needs do not depend on ridicule and treating boys and men unfairly, and instead, involve empathy, understanding, and a rigorous examination of the facts of human nature.Related Content at The Nuzzo LetterSUPPORT THE NUZZO LETTERIf you appreciated this content, please consider supporting The Nuzzo Letter with a one-time or recurring donation. Your support is greatly appreciated. It helps me to continue to work on independent research projects and fight for my evidence-based discourse. To donate, click the DonorBox logo. In two simple steps, you can donate using ApplePay, PayPal, or another service. Thank you.Thanks for reading The Nuzzo Letter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jameslnuzzo.substack.com

“This is feminist economic policy in action.”Chrystia Freeland, Canadian Deputy PM, Minister of Finance (Budget 2022)Investigations into the way that government’s allocate money into health research is important, because taxpayers should know how their money is being used and if that use aligns with broader societal interest and medical need.At The Nuzzo Letter, I have previously shown that substantial differences exist in funding of men’s and women’s health research in Australia and the United States (U.S.). In Australia, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) invests about five times more money into women’s than men’s health research (graph below). In the U.S., the National Institutes of Health (NIH) invests about 14% of its annual research budget into women’s health and 6% of its annual research budget into men’s health (graph below). Obtaining the funding data from Australia was not difficult, as the NHMRC publishes these data openly on its website in a small table. Obtaining the funding data from the U.S. was more cumbersome, as it required downloading annual reports published by the Office of Research on Women’s Health and extracting and organizing the relevant data. Nevertheless, so long as one was aware of the Office’s reports and where to find them, graphing the data was still possible. Canada is a different story.Canadian Institutes of Health ResearchCanada’s main government funding body for health research is the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. This government agency was established in 2000 and is similar to the NHMRC in Australia and the NIH in the U.S. It consists of 13 institutes that operate separate from Health Canada. One of the institutes is the Institute of Gender and Health. This institute is the Canadian equivalent of the NIH’s Office of Research on Women’s Health in the U.S.Here, my aim was to identify, extract, and summarize data from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to explore whether the sex differences in health research funding that exist in the U.S and Australia also exist in Canada. However, in pursing this aim, I was unable to find annual reports from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research where financial allocations for men’s and women’s health research are itemized. Consequently, I was unable to generate a graph similar to those that I have created for the U.S. and Australia. Instead, to get a general sense of such funding allocations, I had to rely on a hodgepodge of spreadsheets, reports, and press releases scattered across websites of various agencies within the Canadian government.The National Women’s Health Research Initiative (NHWRI)Women and Gender Equality Canada (WAGE) is a department in the Canadian government and is separate from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. However, in 2021, WAGE and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research joined forces to create the National Women's Health Research Initiative (NWHRI).According to the Canadian government, the aim of the Initiative is to “advance a coordinated research program that addresses under-researched and high-priority areas of women's health and to ensure new evidence improves women's, girls’, and gender-diverse people's care and health outcomes.”In 2021, the Canadian government announced it would invest $20 million over five years into the Initiative.The Initiative is composed of two funding streams. The first is the Pan-Canadian Women's Health Coalition, which has been described by the Canadian government as “virtual hubs across Canada linked through an overarching coordinating centre.” In October 2022, the Canadian government announced that $8.4 million was available for 10 grants that would create the Coalition. To receive one of these grants, applicants were required to incorporate the following themes into the hub’s activities: engagement of women with lived or living experience; inclusion of indigenous peoples; inclusion of the concepts equity, diversity, and inclusion; and inclusion of sex- and gender-based analysis. Ten hubs were subsequently created from these grants, and the projects undertaken by each hub are now listed online.In June 2023, another funding opportunity for one grant of up to $1.2 million was announced to create the Coordinating Centre that “together with hubs will work to mobilize new and existing knowledge in women's health into effective, gender-sensitive, and culturally appropriate women's health services across Canada.” This additional funding helped to finish the overall aim of the Coalition, which was to create a central source of scientific and clinical information regarding the latest developments in women’s health (but not men’s health).The second part of the National Women’s Health Research Initiative is the Innovation Fund. The Innovation Fund is split into Discovery Grants and Operating Grants. Discovery Grants support “biomedical research by teams proposing bold and innovative research questions in women's health.” Operating Grants support areas of women’s health such as translational research in healthcare diagnostics, therapeutics, and devices and healthcare implementation research to remove barriers to access to healthcare.Calls for up to 13 Discovery Grants totalling $2 million were announced as were 15 Operating Grants totalling $9 million. A total of 24 projects were awarded at an expense to taxpayers of $13.7 million. General themes of the funded research included reproductive care and pregnancy, polycystic ovary syndrome, endometriosis, cancer and HPV, heart health, mental health, eating disorders, and “gender-based violence.”WAGE as a Solo ActorIn addition to partial funding of the National Women’s Health Research Initiative, WAGE also invests a significant amount of taxpayer money into other initiatives and programs aimed at improving the well-being of girls and women. A spreadsheet on the government’s website lists all the grants funded by WAGE between 2017 and 2024. As shown in the graph below, grants from WAGE amounted to $1.7 billion over this eight-year period, with annual funds ranging from about $1 million in 2017 to nearly $700 million in 2023.Text analysis of WAGE’s spreadsheet reveals that the vast majority of the approximate 2,400 funded projects were designated to either women’s or LGBTQ causes. In the spreadsheet, the words “boy” and “men” appear in project titles 20 and 42 times, respectively (and not necessarily in male-positive ways). In contrast, the words “girl” and “women” appear in project titles 75 and 599 times, respectively, and the word “feminist” appears in 67 project titles, and the phrase “LGBTQ” appears in 153 project titles.The spreadsheet also reveals three broad funding streams that the projects were aligned with. Of the projects that had funding stream information listed, 1,475 projects were associated with the “Women’s Program.” According to WAGE, the purpose of the Women’s Program is to “advance equality for women in Canada by working to address or remove systemic barriers impeding women’s progress and advancement. The [Women’s Program] supports the Government of Canada’s goal of advancing gender equality in Canada. It is consistent with Government of Canada priorities related to economic prosperity, and supports Canada’s international commitments related to gender equality.”The next most popular funding stream, which accounted for 505 projects, was “Equality for Sex, Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Expression Program.” According to WAGE, the purpose of this funding stream is to “advance social, political and economic equality with respect to sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression. Advancement towards a greater understanding of the intersection of sex and gender with other identity factors that include race, national and ethnic origin, Indigenous origin or identity, age, sexual orientation, socio-economic condition, place of residence and disability are encouraged under the Program."Finally, 308 projects were associated with the “Gender-Based Violence Program.” According to WAGE, the purpose of this program is to “strengthen the [gender-based violence] sector to address gaps in supports for two groups of survivors: 1) Indigenous women and their communities, and 2) underserved populations (including women living with a disability, non-status/refugee/immigrant women, LGBTQ2S, gender non-conforming people and ethno-cultural women) in Canada. The Program provides grant and contribution funding to Canadian organizations to improve supports to help create long-term, comprehensive solutions at the national, regional, and local levels.”Women RISE InitiativeAnother component of the Canadian government’s investment into women’s wellbeing is the Women RISE initiative. This initiative, which was established in March 2022, was formed out of partnerships between the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).According to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Women RISE Initiative is a “ground-breaking $24 million partnership to support research to improve the health and socioeconomic well-being of women, particularly those from marginalized communities, as part of supporting the global recovery from COVID-19.”According to the government, the Initiative was created because “[a]round the world, women and girls have disproportionately suffered from the socio-economic impacts of COVID-19. Women have borne the brunt of layoffs and loss of livelihoods, sacrificed their own health at the frontlines of the pandemic response and disproportionately shouldered the burden of the additional caregiving associated with COVID-19.”In November of 2022, the 23 recipients of the Women RISE research initiative were announced at the Canadian Conference on Global Health in Toronto. Themes of the awarded projects included infectious diseases, sexually transmitted and blood-borne infections, and pandemics and other health emergencies. According to the Canadian government, the knowledge generated from these projects will “inform immediate and medium-term solutions for post-COVID-19 recovery that will improve gender equality and health equity outcomes in low- and middle-income communities in Canada and globally.”WAGE’s Menstrual Equity Fund PilotAnother development in the Canadian government’s funding of women’s health in recent years has been the Menstrual Equity Fund Pilot. The Menstrual Equity Fund Pilot was created out of Budget 2022, which was “committed to establishing a national pilot for the Menstrual Equity Fund (MEF) to address the barriers related to affordability and stigma that some Canadians face when accessing menstrual products.” In Budget 2022, $25 million was allocated over two years for this fund, with further commitments to the fund projected into the future. In November 2023, the Standing Committee on the Status of Women released a report titled “Let’s Talk About it, Period: Achieving Menstrual Equity in Canada.” In the report, the Committee provided future recommendations for achieving “menstrual equity” in Canada. One of these recommendations was making the Menstrual Equity Fund Pilot a permanent feature of Canadian society, if the pilot was deemed successful.Budget 2021 and MoreOne challenge in evaluating government spending on health research is where to draw the line on what is considered funding for health versus what is funding for things more indirectly linked to health. Sometimes, as was seen in the Australian federal budget of 2025-26, governments might not classify certain items as health funding, but those items might still have an obvious potential for improving quality of life. Because the Canadian Institutes of Health Research do not provide their own explicit break down of men’s and women’s health research funding, one is then left trying to piece together numbers from various government programs and websites to get some sense of sex differences in health funding. Inevitably, this leads one to include in their analysis programs that are not specifically labelled as health research funding but that are still likely to improve wellbeing.Budget 2021, which appears to have been a critical turning point for gynocentrism in Canadian health funding, contains many such examples. In fact, Budget 2021 was labelled by the Department of Finance as: “Budget 2021: Supporting Women.”Earlier, I mentioned that the National Women's Health Research Initiative stemmed from Budget 2021. But this is not exactly true. What the budget actually proposed was $20 million for a National Institute for Women’s Health Research. This suggests plans for a long-lasting physical presence. However, for reasons that are unclear, the Institute never materialized, and the final result of the $20 million was the National Women’s Health Research Initiative.Budget 2021 also included the following programs for women:* $601.3 million over five years, starting in 2021-22, to advance towards a new National Action Plan to End Gender-Based Violence* $158.5 million over five years to the Department of National Defence and Veteran Affairs, and $29.9 million per year from ongoing funding from existing resources, to expand the Department’s work to eliminate sexual misconduct and “gender-based violence” in the military and to support survivors* $315.4 million through the Canada Housing Benefit, to increase direct financial assistance for low-income women and children fleeing violence to help with their rent payments* $250 million in reallocated funding to support the construction, repair, and operating costs of an estimated 560 units of transitional housing and shelter spaces for women and children fleeing violence* $146.9 million over four years to strengthen the Women Entrepreneurship Strategy, which, since its launch in 2018, has involved $7 billion of “investments and commitments that are helping hundreds of thousands of women access the financing, networks and expertise they need to start up, scale up and expand into international markets.” Notably, the Women Entrepreneurship Strategy is comprised of the Women Entrepreneurship Loan Fund and the Women’s Enterprise Initiative. In Budget 2021, the Canadian Government committed $55 million to establish the Women Entrepreneurship Loan Fund, which provides women entrepreneurs with loans up to $50,000 to help them start or grow their business. In 2022–23, the Women Entrepreneurship Strategy helped women secure over 2,600 loans. Since 2018, the Women Entrepreneurship Strategy has provided over 25,000 total loans or non-repayable grants.Budget 2021 was not the only Canadian federal budget to include stockpiles of cash for women. In fact, in Budget 2022, Chrystia Freeland – the Canadian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance – was quoted as saying: “This is women’s liberation. It will mean more women no longer need to choose between motherhood and a career. And it will make life more affordable for middle class Canadian families.”Budget 2022 included some of the following items for women:* $539.3 million over five years to prevent “gender-based violence”* $180 million for the Generation Equality Forum to support the economic participation and higher education of women around the world* $31.6 million to expand the Canadian Armed Forces’ health services and physical fitness programs to be more responsive to women and gender-diverse military personnel* $25 million for the Menstrual Equity Fund PilotIn Budget 2023, $160 million was allocated over three years for programs that serve women and attempt to advance gender equality in Canada. And in Budget 2024, funding was allocated for leadership on women’s rights and gender equality in association with Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy.Men’s HealthThough a search of sex-specific funding in Canada shows a clear bias in favor of funding women’s health research, the Canadian government, to their credit, has also invested some money specifically into men’s health.In 2021, around the time that Canada was making a sharp gynocentric turn in the direction of its health funding, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research published a report on the well-being of Canadian boys and men titled, “Advancing Boys’ and Men’s Health: Outcomes From 11 Years of CIHR-IGH Funded Research.” According to the report’s introduction, in 2007, the Institute of Gender and Health instigated the Boys’ and Men’s Health Initiative to “address the urgent need to increased attention and research capacity in boys’ and men’s health. With an investment of over $15M, the initiative spanned 11 years…” Thus, the total amount of money invested into the Boys’ and Men’s Health Initiative was similar to the $13.7 million invested into the National Women's Health Research Initiative.The report summarized the following areas of boys’ and men’s health:* Mental health and wellness* Violence, risk taking, and resilience* Fertility and reproductive health* Sport and physical activityThe report included statistics on male life expectancy, suicide, alcohol use, motor vehicle accidents, sexual abuse, HIV/AIDS, cardiovascular health, and physical activity rates. It included summaries of studies and programs that were funded under the Initiative, which were attempting to improve or better understand some of these outcomes.The return on investment of these projects remains to be seen. Nevertheless, an explicit attempt was made by the Canadian government to generate new knowledge and programs pertaining to boys’ and men’s health, and for that, they deserve credit.However, one should also note that, after the Initiative was completed, the Institute of Gender and Health interpreted the findings under the lens of intersectionality and social determinism. This is evident from the final paragraph of the report:“Boys’ and men’s health is rooted in systemic and structural processes like racism, ableism, ageism, classism, discrimination, and stigma, and is shaped by social identities and positions like class, gender, geography, Indigeneity, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, and additional intersecting factors. Projects in the Boys’ and Men’s Health Initiative have demonstrated that these factors are critical determinants of men’s health. Future research which applies an intersectional approach to men’s health research may further illuminate how intersecting social identity factors, positions and processes shape norms, attitudes, and practices in men’s health.”However, one should also note that this concluding statement is largely at odds with another note in the report which states that 30% of a man’s overall health is determined by his genetics, while the other 70% is determined by his lifestyle choices. Thus, the Institute of Gender and Health lacks a clear and consistent message regarding the factors that cause or correlate with a man’s health.ConclusionIn closing, my intention was to complete a simple project that involved extracting men’s and women’s health funding data from tables published by the Canadian government and then present these data in a precise yet basic graph. However, the project turned out to be a convoluted tour across various websites and reports to obtain only a general sense of Canada’s sex-specific research funding. From this convoluted tour, I have concluded that, in recent years, the Canadian government has invested significantly more funds into women’s than men’s health. Other than the 2021 report on the status of boys and men, which stemmed from research conducted between 2007 and 2020, the Canadian government has seemingly focused the vast majority of its sex-specific energy and money on girls and women. This includes, for example, the National Women’s Health Research Initiative, the Women RISE Initiative, the Women Entrepreneurship Strategy, all the programs associated with WAGE including the Menstrual Equity Fund Pilot, and likely a host of other programs and initiatives that I did not discoverer. This gynocentrism in Canadian health funding is perhaps of little surprise given that (a) the same trend exists in other western countries, (b) Justin Trudeau – the Canadian Prime Minister from 2015 to 2025 – is well known for his feminism, and (c) many academic articles thrown into the Rubbish Bin at The Nuzzo Letter over the past couple of years have been written by feminist academics who work at universities in Canada.Finally, to encapsulate the current state of gynocentrism in health funding in Canada and other western countries, I would now like to reveal one additional discovery that I made in this search for information on health funding. This discovery is a document published by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research titled, “The CIHR Institute of Gender and Health Listening Tour: What We Heard Report.”In the report, one learns that in 2023, the Institute of Gender and Health went on a "national listening tour" to "co-create" their new Research Priority Plan for 2024-2029. The tour was comprised of 19 townhall events that were held in Vancouver, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto, and Montréal. A total of 511 Canadian researchers, trainees, and community partners participated in the events.During the listening sessions, the Institute asked attendees questions like:* “How can we best foster research excellence regarding the influence of sex and gender on health?”* “What is your vision for achieving health equity for women and girls, boys and men, and gender-diverse people?”If one scrolls down to the appendix of the Institute’s 10-page report, one will find a finer breakdown of the demographic characteristics of the individuals who participated in the “listening tour.” From the page, we learn that 80% of the 511 attendees were academics, 12% were individuals with disabilities, and 4% were adults over the age of 65 years. In the bottom left of the page, we also see another interesting aspect of the demographic breakdown.Only 19% of the “listening tour’s” demographic were men.The Canadian government cannot hear what it does not want to listen to.Related Content at The Nuzzo LetterSUPPORT THE NUZZO LETTERIf you appreciated this content, please consider supporting The Nuzzo Letter with a one-time or recurring donation. Your support is greatly appreciated. It helps me to continue to work on independent research projects and fight for my evidence-based discourse. To donate, click the DonorBox logo. In two simple steps, you can donate using ApplePay, PayPal, or another service. Thank you.If you prefer to donate to a specific project, please see the Go Fund Me page for my current research on sex differences in muscle strength in children. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jameslnuzzo.substack.com

(*Don’t forget to scroll to the end to see more interesting photographs!)Today, there exists much concern about women’s representation as participants in exercise research. I have covered this topic in essays such as “History Didn’t Start at Title IX,” “Men: The Martyrs of Medicine,” and “Is There a Bias Against Women in Research?”To the extent that women have been less frequent participants in certain types of research published in specific journals in certain years, this does not then necessitate a conclusion of discrimination against potential female participants. For one, participation in research is not always desired. Some research is boring, confronting, discomforting, invasive, or carries health risks. In fact, our survey revealed that men are generally less worried about such things when contemplating whether to participate in a study.Discussions about these aspects of research – the tests and interventions administered and how they are viewed by potential participants – are often lacking from papers that espouse gender bias or discrimination as the sole or primary cause of female participant “underrepresentation.” Yet, discussions about the nuisances of research procedures and processes are critical for understanding men’s participation in certain types of research and what their participation has meant for society, including for women. Counterfactuals, or mental simulations, can be useful for facilitating such an understanding.Consider what would be said today if the historical record were to show that women were 70% of participants in early medical research. Early medical research would have been the riskiest and the most likely to not involve ethics board approval or informed consent. Thus, one can reasonably predict that contemporary gynocentrists would not express glee at this 70% representation, though they should based on their current real-world frustrations about the supposed historical exclusion of women from research. Instead, they would reframe this counterfactual 70% female representation in a way that maintains female disadvantage or victimization. They would state that early researchers, under patriarchal influence, were using women’s bodies for experimentation. In academic papers and books, they would detail this traumatic history and say that these women were brave, heroic, and the martyrs of science.This mental simulation is intended to highlight an issue with the female underrepresentation narrative and to provoke thought about why we do not extend such considerations to the men who were often participants in the earliest and riskiest research. In part, this lack of consideration might stem from a lack of information available on the history of experimentation, particularly within the fields of exercise science, physical education, physical therapy, and applied physiology.I recently filled one of these information gaps with a paper published in the Journal of Men’s Health titled “Bibliometric guide to photographs of male participants in early exercise and physical medicine research.”The purpose of my research was to create a bibliometric list of papers that include photographs of boys and men participating in early exercise science, physical education, physical therapy, and applied physiology research. The list can then serve as a quick reference for educators and researchers who are trying to find photographs to be used in course lectures, university textbooks, and academic papers on the history of research participation. By showing audiences such photographs, educators and researchers can humanize men, showing their contributions to society via participation in early experimental research.MethodsFor the analysis, I searched the entire archives of three of the most historically relevant journals: Research Quarterly (1930-1979), Journal of Applied Physiology (1948-1979), and Medicine and Science in Sports (1969-1979). For these journals, I downloaded their digital archives and opened each individual paper to identify photographs of research participants. I also searched my own personal digital library of articles associated with my previous historical research. My analysis ended in the year 1979, in part, to coincide with my other historical research.ResultsI found a total of 304 papers published before 1980 that included photographs of boys and men participating in early studies on exercise and related topics. Forty-four percent of the papers were published in Research Quarterly. The papers included a total of 733 photographs of 46 boys and 475 men. The earliest paper was authored by Henry Beyer in 1894, and photographs from that paper are shown below.In my paper, I list all 304 papers in tables. The tables include descriptions of the experimental procedures depicted in the photographs and links to where the papers are located online. Often, photographs depicted boys and men performing tests of muscle strength, muscle endurance, and motor learning skills. Men were also frequently photographed having their oxygen consumption measured at rest, during physical exercise, and during exposure to altered environmental conditions. Another common type of photograph was that of male body build and posture. Sometimes, these men were photographed naked.Many of the procedures that men were shown performing or undergoing are similar to those that women of that era also performed or underwent, including being photographed naked. However, there also appear to be sex differences in the types of procedures completed during this era of science. Examples of such procedures can be found at the end of this post, where I show some of the most intriguing and informative photographs from my research. In my paper, I briefly explain the sex difference:“Photographs in the current bibliometric list illustrate what men’s historical participation in exercise physiology has entailed. These photographs show men participating in a range of physiological and medical procedures. It is difficult to imagine women being more likely than men to volunteer to undergo many of these procedures. Some examples include exposure to high gravitational forces or other environmental conditions that cause “blackouts” or increase the risk of losing consciousness [23, 37, 53, 324]; exposure to gasses that cause itchiness and damage to the skin of the face [87]; sitting on an apparatus designed to induce motion sickness [16]; and standing on one’s head while cardiorespiratory outcomes are measured [31, 35, 65]. In another study, men who were deaf or who had trouble hearing were dumped into a swimming pool to try to better understand human proprioception [172]. Finally, two papers on the bibliometric list include photographs of men sitting on moving cars, while holding gas collection bags, which are attached to a man who is running next to the moving car [79, 94].”ConclusionHistorical naivety and ideological bias are clouding interpretations of the history of male and female participation in exercise and physical medicine research. My recent paper in the Journal of Men’s Health is intended to help educators, researchers, and students see through these clouds. The discovered photographs show boys and men partaking in a range of experimental procedures, thus providing a basis for educating students about the nature of the type of research that men frequently participated in.Women also served as participants in much early research. Nevertheless, men completed many experimental procedures that are difficult to envision many women and many other men completing. Thus, the men who did participate in these experiments assumed much of the initial risk of early biological research. Men were often the first exposed to deadly agents, high gravitational forces, or resistance exercise with eccentric overload.Gynocentrists who write about women’s “historical exclusion” and “underrepresentation” as research participants conveniently ignore such historical nuance. They also fail to recognize that although men might have made up more than 50% of participants in specific types of research in certain years, this does not mean that women’s health and performance were completely ignored. Women were participants in much early research, and claims of their historical widespread exclusion have been debunked multiple times. Moreover, the current narrative of female participant “underrepresentation” is further flawed because it does not acknowledge that sex differences exist in interest and willingness to participate in research. Finally, as illustrated in the counterfactual presented earlier, even if women had been more than 50% of early research participants, contemporary gynocentrists would interpret that as representing female discrimination – in the form of the patriarchy’s use and abuse of the female body. There is simply never any winning against subjective feminist epistemology, which always try to squirm and wiggle its way around objective reality to maintain female victimization.My hope is that the promoters of the “historical exclusion” and “underrepresentation” narratives take a moment to come off their public soapboxes, which they were likely elevated to by some gender equity initiative, and print off a copy of my recent paper and read it. Then, assuming they have learned something from the paper, they ought to consider taking a figurative knee at the altar of masculinity, and say to the brothers of the barbell and the blackout: “Thank you.”“Buckle Up, Boys!” Measuring Oxygen Consumption Running OutdoorsSource: Daniels J. Portable respiratory gas collection equipment. Journal of Applied Physiology. 1971; 31: 164–167.Source: Daniels J, Oldridge N. The effects of alternate exposure to altitude and sea level on world-class middle-distance runners. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. 1970; 2: 107–112.Blackouts and Exposure to High Gravitational ForcesSource: Duane TD, Lewis DH. Electroretinogram in man during blackout. Journal of Applied Physiology. 1956; 9: 105–110.Source: Wood EH, Lindberg EF, Code CF, Baldes EJ. Effect of partial immersion in water on response of healthy men to headward acceleration. Journal of Applied Physiology. 1963; 18: 1171–1179. Source: Hoppin FG Jr, York E, Kuhl DE, Hyde RW. Distribution of pulmonary blood flow as affected by transverse (+Gx) acceleration. Journal of Applied Physiology. 1967; 22: 469–474.“I’ve Got the Scars to Prove It!”Source: Lambertsen CJ, Idicula J. A new gas lesion syndrome in man, induced by “isobaric gas counterdiffusion.” Journal of Applied Physiology. 1975; 39: 434–443.Ice Man PlungeSource: Hall JF Jr, Polte JW, Kelley RL, Edwards J Jr. Skin and extremity cooling of clothed humans in cold water immersion. Journal of Applied Physiology. 1954; 7: 188–195.Deaf Man PlungePadden DA. Ability of deaf swimmers to orient themselves when submerged in water. Research Quarterly. 1959; 30: 214–226.Back in the Fight: Rehabilitation for World War I SoldiersMcKenzie RT. The treatment of nerve, muscle and joint injuries in soldiers by physical means. American Physical Education Review. 1918; 23: 355–366.Men at WorkMartin EG. Strength tests in industry. Public Health Reports. 1920; 35: 1895–1926.Just Hangin’ AroundGabbard C, Kirby T, Patterson P. Reliability of the straight-arm hang for testing muscular endurance among children 2 to 5. Research Quarterly. 1979; 50: 735–738.“Nauseous Yet?”: Study on Motion SicknessManning GW, Stewart GW. Effect of body position on incidence of motion sickness. Journal of Applied Physiology. 1949; 1: 619–628“Where Am I?”: Study on ProprioceptionSource: Christina RW. The side arm positional test of kinesthetic sense. Research Quarterly. 1967; 38: 177–183.Boy vs. Polio-induced Strength Loss: Boy WinsSource: Humphrey T, Rubin D. Comparative strength of neck flexor muscles in normal and postpoliomyelitis children: a preliminary study. Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. 1958; 39: 572–576.Upside Down ScienceSource: Rao S. Cardiovascular responses to head-stand posture. Journal of Applied Physiology. 1963; 18: 987–990.AUM: Oxygen Consumption During YogaSource: Miles WR. Oxygen consumption during three yoga-type breathing patterns. Journal of Applied Physiology. 1964; 19: 75–82.“Ouch!”: Pain Tolerance TestingSource: Ellison K, Freischlag J. Pain tolerance, arousal, and personality relationships of athletes and nonathletes.Research Quarterly. 1975; 46: 250–255.“Boys Just Want to Have Fun” and Get Strong Wolbers CP. Development of strength in high school boys by static muscle contractions. Research Quarterly. 1956; 27: 446–450.Naked BlokesSources:Carter JE, Phillips WH. Structural changes in exercising middle-aged males during a 2-year period. Journal of Applied Physiology. 1969; 27: 787–794.Taylor WL, Behnke AR. Anthropometric comparison of muscular and obese men. Journal of Applied Physiology. 1961; 16: 955–959.Ashton TE, Singh M. Relationship between erectores spinae voltage and back-lift strength for isometric, concentric, and eccentric contractions. Research Quarterly. 1975; 46: 282–286.Dempsey JA, Reddan W, Balke B, Rankin J. Work capacity determinants and physiologic cost of weight-supported work in obesity. Journal of Applied Physiology. 1966; 21: 1815–1820.Beast ModeGallagher JR, De Lorme TL. The use of the technique of progressive- resistance exercise in adolescence. The Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery. 1949; 31: 847–858.Belka DE. Comparison of dynamic, static, and combination training on dominant wrist flexor muscles. Research Quarterly. 1968; 39: 244–250.Fisher AG, Ramey JS. Electronic squat monitor. Research Quarterly. 1977; 48: 213–216.Related Content at The Nuzzo LetterSUPPORT THE NUZZO LETTERIf you appreciated this content, please consider supporting The Nuzzo Letter with a one-time or recurring donation. Your support is greatly appreciated. It helps me to continue to work on independent research projects and fight for my evidence-based discourse. To donate, click the DonorBox logo. In two simple steps, you can donate using ApplePay, PayPal, or another service. Thank you.Thanks for reading The Nuzzo Letter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jameslnuzzo.substack.com

A significant amount of data on sex differences exists. Over several decades of research on human psychology and physiology, thousands of studies have been conducted regarding men’s and women’s unique and overlapping preferences, behaviors, and abilities. Moreover, in recent years, government agencies and academic journals have advised that data, when acquired in studies that include both male and female participants, be segregated by sex. Fair enough.Given this long history of sex differences research, and the continued and proper emphasis on segregating future scientific data by sex, I have remained perplexed at the difficulty in tracking down sex-segregated results on one topic in particular: viewership of women’s sports.I say “perplexed” because the world consists of thousands of researchers and data scientists, thousands of academic journals, a vast array of online survey platforms, and millions of people willing to participate in survey research. Yet, with all the focus on women’s sports in recent years, and with university researchers and professors writing about every piece of academic minutia imaginable, one is hard pressed to find a simple survey study, published in an academic journal, that presents data on the proportion of men and women who watch women’s sports.Normally, studies of this type, fall into one’s lap during daily browsing on social media. If such incidental discoveries do not occur, then relevant keyword searches in Google Scholar will almost certainly discover the data that one is looking for. Yet, data on sex differences in viewership of women’s sports has historically escaped me both in terms of casual browsing on social media and in active searching within scholarly databases. However, earlier this week, this changed. I was motivated to have another look for such data after listening to a segment on The Bryan Madigan Show that focused on sports journalist Roz Kelly’s comments about female athletes not being paid enough money. I encourage you to watch Madigan’s segment. Unlike my previous attempts at tracking down sex-segregated data on women’s sports viewership, this time I expanded my search to include any survey online, including those published by data analytics companies or by think tanks or other non-profit organizations.Here is what I found:YouGov PollIn 2023, YouGov published results of a nationally representative online survey in the United States about sports viewership. One of the questions asked to the survey takers was: “In the last month, have you watched any professional women’s sports, either broadcast or in person?” Over 10,000 men and women who were 18 years of age or older responded to that question.The percent of men who responded that they had watched professional women’s sports in the past month was 31%. The percent of women who responded that they had watched professional women’s sports in the past month was 22%. Thus, women were found to be less likely than men to watch women’s sports.Parity PollA second survey, published in 2024 by an organization called Parity, also found that women are less likely than men to watch women’s sports. Survey respondents included 14,000 persons living in Australia, Canada, Germany, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In each of the seven countries, more men than women reported watching women’s sports “at least a few times a year.”In the United States, 73% of men and 70% of women reporting watching women’s sports a few times a year. In Australia, 82% of men and 78% of women reporting watching women’s sports a few times a year. In France, the country with the largest sex difference in women’s sports viewership, 80% of men and 69% of women reported watching women’s sports a few times a year.The Parity poll also included a second question that asked about daily and weekly consumption of women’s sports. Here, the sex difference in women’s sports viewership widens. Across all countries, 23% of men and 15% of women said that they watch women’s sports daily or weekly. The country with the largest sex difference in daily and weekly viewership was Australia, where 28% of men and 15% of women say they watch women’s sports daily or weekly.A Potential Feminist ReframeIf the data from the YouGov and Parity surveys would have shown that fewer men than women watch women’s sports, I have little doubt that feminists would endorse a shaming campaign against men for their lack of appreciation of women’s athletic skills. This shaming campaign would then probably coincide with school programs designed to encourage young boys to like girls’ and women’s sports more.Unfortunately for feminists, and thankfully for the rest of us, the data have simply reflected objective reality: women, not men, are the ones least interested in watching women’s sports.This result puts feminists in an intellectual quagmire. Because they largely believe that women are social constructions of their environments, lacking agency or free will, they must then misconstrue the results in some way to ensure that women are not held accountable for choosing to pass on watching women’s sports.The first way that this might be accomplished is by simply refraining from conducting such research in the future. This strategy would prevent results like those from the YouGov and Parity polls from ever entering the public consciousness, allowing doubt to be cast toward anyone who suggests that there might be a sex difference in viewership of women’s sports.A second strategy might involve aggregating male and female responses to mask sex differences in viewership. This data processing practice would run contrary to recent calls for more sex-segregated data made by the Office of Research on Women’s Health and many other researchers. However, feminism operates from a standpoint of “By whatever means necessary,” and thus does not mind throwing out its own previous recommendations if doing so helps to advance the moment’s female cause and relieve women of responsibility for their actions.That so little data are available on women’s sports viewership, and that even fewer data are available in a sex-segregated format, suggests that these first two strategies of hiding the realities of women’s disinterest in watching women’s sports are already being practiced to some degree.A third way that feminists might attempt to distract from female viewer accountability is to present results in a sex-segregated manner but thenreframethe results to look unfavourably uponmaleviewers. For example, in the YouGov survey, respondents were also asked about their viewership ofmen’ssports. The results showed that 58% of men said that they had watched professional men’s sports in the past month, whereas 31% of men responded this way for viewership of women’s sports. This represents a 46.5% drop in male viewership from men’s to women’s sports. The drop for female viewers from men’s to women’s sports was not as big. For the female survey takers, 33% said that they had watched professional men’s sports in the past month, whereas 22% responded this way for viewership of women’s sports. This represents a 33% drop in viewership from men’s to women’s sports for female viewers. Thus, because the drop in viewership from men’s to women’s sports was greater for male than female viewers, feminists could attempt to hide women’s disinterest in watching women’s sports by presenting sex-segregated data in relative change terms rather than absolute terms.ConclusionIn 2019, a male journalist, Skye Merida, published a piece at CNN titled, “Men who don’t watch women’s sports don’t know what they’re missing.” At the end of the piece, after reflecting on his own endeavour into watching women’s sports, Merida concluded: “So, if you’re one of those guys who hasn’t been interested in women’s athletics, it’s time to reconsider.”What we have learned from the YouGov and Parity polls is that if Mr. Merida is going to call out only one sex for not watching women’s sports, he should call out women.The YouGov and Parity polls show that approximately 10% fewer women than men watch women’s sports on a monthly, weekly, or daily basis. These results are due to men’s greater overall passion for sports, irrespective of the sex of the athlete playing. This great male passion for sports is well known and was confirmed in Merida’s own reflections: “I think the main reason I'm a fan of women's athletics is simple: I love sports so much that I don't really care who's playing -- as long as they're playing well.”For me, the surprise in the surveys was not that women are less likely than men to watch women’s sports. The surprise has always been the odd absence of such research from the academic literature, given the large academic push behind women’s sports and the ease and low costs associated with conducting population surveys. That such research has not been carried out more regularly, with results presented in a sex-segregated way, suggests that some researchers know that the data are likely to show low female viewership of women’s sports, so the researchers conduct qualitative rather than quantitative research.Nevertheless, the data from the YouGov and Parity polls do exist, and they are a godsend for men who have grown tired of implicit assumptions that they are somehow to blame for women’s sports not being more popular or lucrative. The data are a shield against men’s unearned guilt.If women want women’s sports to be a knockout success, the solution is simple. More women should start watching women’s sports.Related Content at The Nuzzo LetterSUPPORT THE NUZZO LETTERIf you appreciated this content, please consider supporting The Nuzzo Letter with a one-time or recurring donation. Your support is greatly appreciated. It helps me to continue to work on independent research projects and fight for my evidence-based discourse. To donate, click the DonorBox logo. In two simple steps, you can donate using ApplePay, PayPal, or another service. Thank you.Thanks for reading The Nuzzo Letter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jameslnuzzo.substack.com

Curtin University is one of 42 universities in Australia. It is a public university located in Perth – the city where I reside. Total student enrolment at Curtin University is approximately 60,000.Earlier this year, Curtin University advertised a job titled STEM Outreach Officer. According to the job advertisement:“The Faculty of Science and Engineering at Curtin University is excited to be expanding the Girls Engineering Tomorrow program, and we are looking for a dedicated and passionate STEM Outreach Officer to join our team and help inspire the next generation of STEM superstars! This role is all about connecting and empowering girls and non-binary students in their early high school years and inspiring them to explore study and career pathways in STEM disciplines, particularly engineering.”In the advertisement, the university listed responsibilities of the prospective STEM Outreach Officer. Some of these responsibilities include:• “Assisting with the delivery of the Girls Engineering Tomorrow program…”• “Mentoring students, advocating for gender equity in STEM and inspiring future STEM superstars.”• “Promoting STEM pathways for school-aged students, particularly girls, through outreach initiatives.”In the advertisement, the university states that to be hired for the position the applicant must have a “strong commitment to gender equity and creating equal opportunities for all students in STEM.” Sex discriminationThe purpose of the STEM Outreach Officer at Curtin University is to increase the number of students of only one sex: females. Curtin University does not appear to have positions or initiatives dedicated to increasing the number of male students in programs where men are fewer in number, such as psychology, education, nursing, and occupational therapy. Therefore, Curtin University is engaging in sex discrimination.When I posted about this discrimination on X, an astute follower responded with a link to the website of Curtin University’s Gender Equity and Inclusion team. According to the team’s website, their mission is to “build and nurture inclusive, socially just, culturally responsive and safe values driven communities within the University.” An additional aim of the team is said to be to “eliminate gender-based discrimination and identify and challenge cultural, social and institutional norms and barriers to achieving gender equity.”According to the website, the leads of the team are Associate Professor Samantha Owen and Ms. Elizabeth Baca, and they are advised by a group of individuals who are shown in the photograph below. This advisory group appears to consist of 10 women and one token male ally. Ironically, the university’s Gender Equity and Inclusion team states that one of its aims is to “eliminate gender-based discrimination.” Yet, the team, and the university more broadly, regularly engages in gender-based discrimination against men. The STEM Outreach Officer embodies such discrimination. What’s more, Curtin University already enrols significantly more female than male students. As shown below in the university’s publicly available data table, there were 34,987 female students enrolled at Curtin University in 2023 compared to 25,910 male students.The data from 2023 are not an aberration. As the data table shows, each year between 2019 and 2023, there were 7,000 – 10,000 fewer men than women enrolled at Curtin University. Over this five-year period, the number of male students enrolled was fairly constant, whereas the number of female students steadily increased. The STEM Outreach Officer will cause the size of this sex difference to widen further. Curtin University’s lack of explicit interest in male students is not new. Followers of The Nuzzo Letter might recall my piece from September 2023 titled, “Australian research grant for equity in higher education ignores men.” In the piece, I discussed a call for grant applications advertised by Curtin University’s National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education. Recipients of the competitive grants could use the funds to “address equity issues across the entire higher education student lifecycle.” However, projects that received funds were to target at least one of six target groups. One of the target groups was “women in non-traditional areas” (code for women in STEM). Neither men in non-traditional areas nor men broadly speaking were considered a target group, though men comprise 42% of the student body at Curtin.So much for “gender equity.”Shaming Curtin University for its selective equityIn 2024, there was a campaign in Australia, organized by the federal government’s gynocentric Workplace Gender Equality Agency, to publicly shame Australian businesses who had the highest “gender pay gaps.” This shaming appeared in pieces published at major news outlets including The Guardian, Australia’s ABC News, and The Western Australian. If, by the gynocentrist’s own standard, shaming is an acceptable strategy for inducing societal change, then perhaps it is time to give them a taste of their own medicine. Perhaps universities that institutionalize discriminatory “gender equity” practices, and express little interest in men, should be publicly shamed for their biases. During this process, Curtin University would be called out for its philosophical inconsistency, when it says that the STEM Outreach Office will be “committed to gender equity and creating equal opportunities for all students.” Equity and equal opportunity are incompatible. They reflect two different beliefs about how humans ought to be treated. Equal opportunity, which is already enshrined in Australian law, says that all persons are to be treated the same under the law. Equity, on the other hand, says that equal opportunity laws and policies should be circumvented to achieve equal results between demographic groups via social engineering.Curtin University clearly does not fully embrace equal opportunity yet saying that is a stalwart of equity is also somewhat misleading. Curtin University is not trying to achieve equity full stop. Curtin University, like many other universities in Australia, is instituting selective equity. Its policies and initiatives are aimed at improving results for specific groups of people, namely any group that is not white heterosexual men. Little evidence exists to suggest that once equity proponents achieve their aims of equal outcomes that they will stop the momentum associated with their unidirectional reshaping of society. If equality of outcome were indeed the true guiding principle of the equity movement, then institutions like Curtin University would take action to increase male enrolments. But the equity and inclusion apparatchik do not do that because their aims are to dismantle laws, rules, and traditions; make themselves look and feel important; and gain as much power as possible. ConclusionIn conclusion, Curtin University is engaging in sex discrimination. It is purposely recruiting female students and not male students, and this is occurring over a consistent backdrop of approximately 10,000 fewer male than female enrolments each year. To my knowledge, no initiatives exist at Curtin University for attempting to increase the size of its male student body.One might think that some man in the Curtin University professoriate or administrative hierarchy – such as the token male on the Gender Equity and Inclusion committee – might say something about the university’s biased and unethical behavior. You might think that such a man would tell the university that they could simply take the excessive $85,000 salary for the STEM Outreach Officer and divvy it out each year in the form of student scholarships, which would incentive enrolment of talented students who are in financial need, including the female students who the University so desperately wants to enrol.You might also think that such a man would speak up on behalf of himself and the boys and men in his life.Unfortunately, this is not happening, nor should we expect it to happen given the trace amounts of masculinity remaining on Australia’s university campuses. Token males on university gender equity committees are not there to say anything meaningful about men’s educational outcomes or to question their universities’ obsessive gynocentric policies. Men like this have already been castrated (figuratively speaking). They are dedicated allies to the matriarchal university.Suggested CitationNuzzo JL. Gender Equity at Curtin University. The Nuzzo Letter. January 21, 2025.Related Content at The Nuzzo LetterSUPPORT THE NUZZO LETTERIf you appreciated this content, please consider supporting The Nuzzo Letter with a one-time or recurring donation. Your support is greatly appreciated. It helps me to continue to work on independent research projects and fight for my evidence-based discourse. To donate, click the DonorBox logo. In two simple steps, you can donate using ApplePay, PayPal, or another service. Thank you!If you prefer to donate to a specific project, please see the Go Fund Me page for my current research on sex differences in muscle strength in children.Thanks for reading The Nuzzo Letter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jameslnuzzo.substack.com