The Nuzzo Letter

On July 10, 2025, the Pew Research Center published results from its poll of 5,085 American men and women titled, “Americans’ Views on Who Influences Health Policy and Which Health Issues to Prioritize.”In one part of the poll, participants were presented with a list of eight health issues and asked to indicate which issues they believe are a “major problem,” “minor problem,” or “not a problem at all.” The results can be seen in the figure below.Roughly 80-85% of poll participants reported a belief that cancer, overweight and obesity, heart disease, and opioid addiction are “major problems.” Alzheimer’s disease came in fifth on the list with 64% of Americans saying it is a “major problem,” followed by loneliness at 55%, bird flu at 26%, and measles at 25%.The Pew Research Center also split the results by political affiliation of poll participants. On average, the same proportions of Democrats and Republicans agreed that cancer, overweight and obesity, heart disease, and opioid addiction are “major problems.” This consensus across party lines is encouraging to see. However, for loneliness, bird flu, and measles, more Democrats than Republicans reported a belief that these are “major problems.”Later in the poll, the Pew Research Center asked participants about the importance of the federal government in overseeing certain areas of healthcare. Six areas were presented, including testing drug safety, tracking the spread of contagious diseases, investigating health insurance fraud, making rules about food labels, and developing programs that place doctors and nurses in rural communities.The other healthcare area that the Pew Research Center asked about was women’s health. Specifically, Pew asked participants how important they thought it was for the federal government to “study health issues that affect women and girls.”The results to this question, which can be seen in the figure below, were as follows:* 45% of Americans said it is extremely important for the federal government to study health issues that affect women and girls.* 32% of Americans said it is very important for the federal government to study health issues that affect women and girls.* 18% of Americans said it is somewhat important for the federal government to study health issues that affect women and girls.* 5% of Americans say it is not at all important for the federal government to study health issues that affect women and girls.In the text of the report, the Pew Research Center also revealed a sex difference in belief about the federal government studying girls’ and women’s health. Fifty percent of women and 41% of men said that they believe it is extremely important for the federal government to study health issues that affect women and girls – a 9% difference between the sexes.The difference between Democrats and Republicans was even larger. Fifty-nine percent of Democrats and 32% of Republicans said that they believe it is extremely important for the federal government to study health issues that affect women and girls – a 27% difference between the political parties.Curious minds are likely to wonder how poll participants’ views on the federal government studying women’s health compare to their views on the federal government studying men’s health. For example, did the male and female participants demonstrate the same 9% sex differential as they did when asked about women’s health? Was the 27% differential between Democrats and Republicans also replicated when the poll participants were asked about men’s health?Unfortunately, we do not know the answers to these questions, because the Pew Research Center did not ask poll participants about their opinions on the role of the federal government in studying boys’ and men’s health issues. This omission was particularly strange considering that more males than females die from four of the top five health problems that Pew asked about earlier in their poll. These four health problems are cancer, diseases of the heart, obesity, and opioid and other drug-related overdoses. As shown in the graph below, males comprise 52.7% of all deaths from cancer, 55.3% of deaths from disease of the heart, 53.8% of deaths from obesity, and 69.6% of deaths from drug overdoses.When one also considers, for example, the greater number of male than female suicides, homicides, fatal occupational injuries, unintentional drownings, and alcohol-induced deaths, which culminate in a significantly shorter life expectancyfor American males than females, Pew’s omission of men’s health from the poll is even more perplexing.Pew’s omission of men’s health from the poll might have been purposeful. However, their omission might also reflect a genuine lack of awareness that coincides with an inability to connect specific epidemiological results, which, together, build the broader concept of men’s health. Within public health and biomedical research circles, this lack of conceptualization of men’s health as a broad healthcare area can be seen in the graph below, which I published in a paperin 2020. The graph shows the number of times the phrases “men’s health” and “women’s health” appear in the titles or abstracts of research articles indexed in PubMed. Between 1970 and 2018, the phrase “men’s health” appeared in the titles or abstracts of 1,555 articles indexed in PubMed, whereas the phrase “women’s health” appeared in the titles or abstracts of 14,501 articles indexed in PubMed – an approximate 10-fold difference.Moving forward, polling organizations who survey public opinion about health issues affecting Americans ought to ask about women’s and men’s health. Both areas are important and warrant attention. In terms of broad healthcare policy, giving asymmetrical attention to one sex over the other is neither just nor is it a healthy long-term strategy for a flourishing society. As Dr. Warren Farrell says, “When only one sex wins, both sexes lose.”Let us hope that in future polls we will finally learn where the general public stands regarding their views on the broad area of men’s health. Remarkably, after all the billions of dollars poured into health research and polling over the years, we still do not have clear answers to such simple questions.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. 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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 Ins

On May 31, 2024, I published an essay titled, “History Didn’t Start at Title IX.” In the essay, I challenged the common assumption that women were historically excluded from early research about physical exercise. I explained that a reasonable degree of female participation can be expected in early physical exercise research because much early research on exercise would have been conducted in the fields of physical therapy and physical education. Those two fields pre-dated exercise science, had their own journals, and had large representations of female professors and students.In the essay, I included photographs from papers published in these journals that showed girls and women participating in this early research. Thus, the essay provided some initial evidence that girls and women were participants in early research studies that pertained to physical exercise. More recently, I made this analysis more formal, and I expanded upon it. The results were recently published in the journal Advances in Physiology Education in a paper titled “Bibliometric guides to early physical exercise, education, and rehabilitation research on girls and women.Here, my purpose is to briefly explain the methods and results of this new research and reiterate why the findings are important.My paper had two aims. The first aim was to create a bibliometric list of papers that included photographs of girls and women participating in physical exercise, education, and rehabilitation research prior to 1980. The second aim was to create a bibliometric list of papers that included data or commentary on the menstrual cycle within physical exercise, education, and rehabilitation contexts.To identify photographs of female participants, I searched the entire archives of three of the most important journals in exercise research history: Research Quarterly (from 1930 to 1979), Journal of Applied Physiology (from 1948 to 1979), and Medicine and Science in Sports (from 1969 to 1979). I then searched my own personal digital archives, which included papers published in other journals. These other journals were not searched entirely because their full archives were not accessible to me.The search for papers about the menstrual cycle and exercise was more lenient. These papers were noted and filed during the search for photographs and while conducting research for other historical projects.Both of these historical analyses are to be considered exploratory because not all journal archives were fully searched. Thus, more historical photographs and more data and commentary on the menstrual cycle and physical exercise exist beyond what I published in the two bibliometric lists.The first bibliometric list consists of 95 papers, published between 1907 and 1979, that included 306 photographs of girls and women participating in physical exercise research. These photographs depicted girls and women performing various tests, and descriptions of the photographs are provided in the paper. The girls and women were most commonly photographed performing or undergoing tests of muscle strength, motor skill learning, body composition, or posture. Example photographs can be seen in my previous post. A sample of the first 15 papers on the list is shown below.This list parallels the bibliometric list that I published in the Journal of Men’s Health regarding papers published before 1980 that included photographs of male research participants.The second bibliometric list consists of 77 papers, published between 1876 and 1979, that included data or commentary on the menstrual cycle or menstrual symptoms within physical exercise, education, and rehabilitation contexts. Of the 77 papers, 22 papers were “either reviews or commentaries about the menstrual cycle, consensus statements about women and exercise that included a comment or section about the menstrual cycle, or original papers or review papers that included brief ancillary comments about the menstrual cycle.” The other 55 papers were original research with new data related to the menstrual cycle. This included the following:1) menstrual symptoms in high school and university students as identified in physical examinations conducted as part of physical education class;2) menstrual symptoms in athletes and nonathletes as identified by questionnaires;3) relationships of menstrual symptoms and abdominal strength and other aspects of physicalfitness as measured by laboratory techniques;4) the impact of oral contraceptives on physical activity and physiological responses to exercise as measured via ecological or laboratory tests.A sample of the first 17 papers on this list is shown below.The two bibliometric lists further disprove claims that women were historically excluded from research and that early researchers were not interested in women’s health. Contemporary researchers who conduct audits of female representation typically do not examine journals that are historically linked to exercise science and published in the early- and mid-1900s. Consequently, the exact percentages of male and female participants in early research on exercise, health, and medicine is not known. Moreover, when papers published before 1980 are omitted from audits, and thus studies in the two bibliometric lists are not identified, this gives readers an impression that early researchers, many of whom were femalephysical educators and therapists, were disinterested in women’s health, including in the menstrual cycle. But this assumed disinterest is a myth.My latest pre-printed paper further challenges this myth. In the paper, I tallied the number of male and female participants in all studies published in Research Quarterly between 1930 and 1979. The results revealed that after two large military studies of male participants were excluded as outliers, girls and women comprised 40% of all research participants. That is hardly evidence “widespread exclusion” of women from research trials, disinterest in women’s health, or bias or discrimination against women.My hope is that these new historical analyses will be used by educators to teach themselves and their students about the history of male and female participation in early exercise and exercise-related research. This history is nuanced and is not explained by false blanket assertions such as women being historically excluded from research, or that early researchers were disinterested in women’s health issues. In fact, one interesting aspect of this nuanced history, which my latest pre-printed paper confirms, is that participant sex correlates with researcher sex. Thus, one reason why studies within some areas might show greater male than female participation is because of greater male than female researcher productivity. Consequently, if contemporary female exercise scientists are unhappy with the amount of data this is available on women, then they can resolve this by spending hours in the laboratory collecting and analysing data and then publishing the results, as that is what many men have been doing throughout the history of science.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 Ve

In September of 2023, actor Kevin Sorbo, famous for his starring role in the 1990s television show “Hercules,” wrote an article for Fox News titled, “Let’s make Hollywood manly again.”In his article, Sorbo argued that modern Hollywood poorly portrays men and masculinity and thus does not give boys positive role models to look up to.In addition to critiquing Hollywood for frequently portraying fathers as “bumbling, useless idiots,” who do not contribute to their families or communities in positive ways, and who are “the butt of every woke Hollywood jab,” Sorbo also criticized Hollywood for exposing audiences to a continuous stream of bold and confident women who “upstage passive men who recede quietly into the background.”I welcomed Sorbo’s article. Like many other movie watchers, I have grown tired of Hollywood’s trends over the past 5 to 10 years. Such trends include the push for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in casts and crews, the forced Woke messaging, the glorification of nihilism, the moral ambiguity in story lines, and the seemingly endless numbers of remakes of movies whose original versions were perfectly fine.Thus, I commend Kevin Sorbo for his article. It was a timely, thoughtful, and largely accurate critique of one of society’s most influential institutions.Nevertheless, I disagree with part of Sorbo’s position. In two sentences, Sorbo included the concept “sacrifice” as part of his definition of masculinity. Thus, Sorbo believes that Hollywood needs to show more male sacrifice.“America today needs warriors; protectors; responsible and committed fathers…We need men who will raise their kids, defend their homes, provide for their families, and serve self-sacrificially…”Then, Sorbo concluded his article by stating the following:“It’s time for the world’s entertainment capital to reintroduce good men: men who love their wives and children, protect them, fight for what’s right, and speak up for the powerless. Men who, above all, have overcome their own selfish desires and are free to put others first. After all, that’s the most masculine thing any man can do.”My purpose here is to highlight why Sorbo’s definition of masculinity based on the concept of “sacrifice” is flawed.Sorbo suggested that sacrifice and the ridding one’s selfish desires is peak masculinity. Sorbo implied that raising one’s kids, defending one’s home, and providing for one’s family are sacrifices. But why view fatherhood and masculinity in this way? Why frame these responsibilities and commitments as “sacrifices”? Does a man not receive any personal boost to his ego or self-esteem when he completes these acts successfully?To “sacrifice” something, according to novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand, means “the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don't” or “the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one or of a nonvalue.”Thus, Sorbo’s view – that “sacrifice” is fundamental to masculinity and that selfishness is counter to masculinity – is problematic. It teaches boys and men not to value their own needs – i.e., themselves. It tells them that their lives hold no intrinsic worth, and that their value is predicated on serving the needs and desires of others. The male sex is mere cannon fodder.The alternative to Sorbo’s framing of masculinity through the collectivist framework and the ethics of altruism is to frame it through the ethics of rational selfishness, which simply means to pursue one’s values in accordance with one’s long-term interests.Unfortunately, through much of history, the word “selfishness” has been battered and mischaracterized by writers, including Sorbo, who conflate the concept with disregard of others or narcissism, which is a sort of pathological version of selfishness.Ayn Rand explained this problematic framing of selfishness in her book, “The Virtue of Selfishness”:“The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word "selfishness" is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual "package-deal," which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.In popular usage, the word "selfishness" is a synonym of evil; the image it conjures is of a murderous brute who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends, who cares for no living being and pursues nothing but the gratification of the mindless whims of any immediate moment.Yet the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word "selfishness" is: concern with one's own interests.This concept does not include a moral evaluation; it does not tell us whether concern with one's own interests is good or evil; nor does it tell us what constitutes man's actual interests. It is the task of ethics to answer such questions.”Thus, acting selfishly simply means pursing one’s own rational values. These values can certainly include loving one’s family, as Rand also explained:“Concern for the welfare of those one loves is a rational part of one's selfish interests. If a man who is passionately in love with his wife spends a fortune to cure her of a dangerous illness, it would be absurd to claim that he does it as a "sacrifice" for her sake, not his own, and that it makes no difference to him, personally and selfishly, whether she lives or dies. Any action that a man undertakes for the benefit of those he loves is not a sacrifice.”In other words, Sorbo was incorrect to add “sacrifice” to his definition of masculinity, because all the other features of masculinity that he described generally constitute a man acting in his own selfish interest. For example, part of becoming a warrior and protector involves continually training one’s body and mind to take on life’s challenges. Such training is a selfish act because it aids in one’s own survival. Also, raising one’s kids is not a sacrifice if a father feels joy watching his sons or daughters develop into good citizens and pursue and achieve their own selfish values.Sorbo seems to have in mind the sort of man who consumes copious amounts of drugs or alcohol to feel momentary pleasure. Yet, such men are not selfish. They are not acting in their own rational, long-term interests. Truly selfish men value their lives too much to damage their health in such ways. In fact, part of what drives some men to participates in these problematic behaviors and short-term “solutions” to their problems is their own lack of self-esteem and self-worth.To understand that selfishness does not conflict with the healthy manifestation of masculinity, Sorbo might consider watching the movie Taken, starring Liam Neeson.In Taken, Neeson plays Bryan Mills – a former Green Beret and retired agent of the CIA. Mills is divorced from his wife, and he is trying to work on his relationship with his only child, Kim, who is 17 years old. Kim decides that she wants to visit Paris with one of her girlfriends. Mills, based on his years of knowledge and experience working in the military and CIA, expresses concerns about Kim going to Paris without supervision. Reluctantly, and after being pressured by both Kim and his ex-wife, Bryan agrees to let Kim travel overseas.Interestingly, this part of the movie depicts a father’s love through his protectiveness. However, this protectiveness was ridiculed by both the ex-wife and the daughter, and both characters suffered as a result of not listening to dad, because on the day that Kim and her friend arrive in Paris, they are kidnapped and sold into an Albanian sex trafficking ring. Upon learning of this devasting news, Bryan flies to Paris to search for his daughter, her friend, and the thugs who kidnapped them.During the search, Bryan risks his life many times, and Bryan took these risks because of his profound and selfish love of his daughter. Bryan knew that his life would be happy and more fulfilled if Kim were part of it. Thus, Saving Kim’s life was not only in Kim’s best interest, it was in Bryan’s best interest, too.Per romantic art, Bryan overcame many physical and mental challenges in warding off evil to save Kim. In doing so, Bryan reaffirmed his distinct role as Kim’s father, and we are led to believe that seeing her grow and flourish will bring Bryan many years of joy. As Ayn Rand said, “[c]oncern for the welfare of those one loves is a rational part of one's selfish interests.”To conclude, Kevin Sorbo deserves credit for writing an article that argues for the healthy and entertaining portrayal of men and masculinity. His concern that contemporary movies lack in positive role models for boys is correct, and if Hollywood adopted even a morsel of Sorbo’s suggested characterizations of men in films, we all would have more engaging and emotional-moving movies to watch.Nevertheless, Sorbo’s view that “sacrifice” is fundamental to masculinity is problematic. Perhaps this is a problem of semantics. Perhaps Sorbo agrees that boys should be taught to value their own lives and pursue their own values and interests. Perhaps Sorbo simply misused the term “sacrifice.” Either way, semantics are important, and Sorbo’s sloppy use of this language illustrates the ongoing confusion about “selfishness” and “sacrifice” that Ayn Rand highlighted decades ago.One reason why misuse of the term “sacrifice” is concerning is because it leads to the mislabelling of rationally selfish acts as sacrificial ones. The danger then is concept creep or concept realignment, wherein actual sacrifices – things that are detrimental to a man’s wellbeing – become justified, because they have been conceptually lumped together with things that are in a man’s best interest. In such cases, the concept “sacrifice” is given underserved credit, as it was in Sorbo’s article. Moreover, framing a man’s role in a relationship as a continuous stream of “sacrifice” probably does not sit well with many men when labelled as such, and use of this nomenclature coupled with the expectation of actual male sacrifice may in fact, underlie some of today’s relational and fa

“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-b

On Tuesday, March 25th, the Australian Labor Party handed down the country’s federal budget for the 2025-26 financial year. Men’s health was not part of the budget. However, women’s health received its usual smorgasbord of government goodies, with Treasurer Jim Chalmers stating that women's health is a “national priority."According to government documents and Nine News, $793 million has been budgeted for women’s health. This money has been labelled “critical” and entails the following, according to Nine News:* $134.3 million for insertion and removal of long-acting reversible contraceptives by nurse practitioners* $109.1 million to fund two national trials related women’s access to contraceptives and treatment for urinary tract infections* $20.9 million to create 11 new clinics for treating endometriosis, pelvic pain, perimenopause, and menopause* $26.3 million for Medicare rebates for menopause health assessments* $277.7 million for 500 new community sector and frontline worker jobs in domestic violence* $70 million for existing services and for trialling new measures to support women and children experiencing violence* $21.4 million to improve victim and survivor engagement within the justice system* $21.8 million for First Nations women, children and communities for family, domestic and sexual violence services* $16.7 million to fund innovative approaches to address perpetrator behaviour* $606.3 million to deliver more doctors and nurses* $28 million to support the construction of the Nursing and Midwifery Academy in Victoria* $10.5 million to expand the Primary Care Nursing and Midwifery Scholarship program* $1.3 million to extend the Obstetrics and Gynaecology Education and Training Program by 12 months* $3.4 million for mentoring and coaching programs for First Nations women in business* $3.2 million to the Australian Sports Commission to help increase women and girls' participation in sports leadership through coaching, officiating and sports administrationOne might notice that these figures add up to significantly more than $793 million. This occurred, because, in an effort to show the Labor Party’s affection for its female voting bloc, Nine News revealed aspects of the federal budget that most people would consider beneficial for female wellbeing, but were not categorized by the government as “women’s health” funds. Information about these additional investments can be found in the government’s 64-page budget overview titled, “Building Australia’s Future,” and in the government’s 80-page “Women’s Budget Statement.”In the budget overview, the $793 million for women’s health is mentioned under “Strengthening Medicare” and “Better healthcare for women.” This is the part of the budget that includes funds allocated for contraceptive pills, menopause treatments, and the 11 clinics for treating endometriosis, pelvic pain, perimenopause, and menopause.Further down the budget overview, one finds a section titled “Progressing equality, supporting women.” This section describes some of the other goodies for women that were mentioned or alluded to in the Nine News report, including:* $2.6 billion for a further pay rise for aged care nurses* $3.9 billion to enhance access to legal services, including for people experiencing gender-based violence* $21.4 million to improve engagement with the justice system of victims of gender-based violence* $21.8 million to provide family, domestic and sexual violence services to First Nations women, children and communitiesHowever, for the most complete understanding of the federal budget’s allocation of funds for improving the lives of women, but not men, one needs to consult with the 80-page Women’s Budget Statement.This Statement is divided into five themes:* Gender-based violence* Unpaid and paid care* Economic equality and security* Health (i.e., the “women’s health” section)* Leadership, representation and decisionEach major theme is made of various subthemes that serve as targets of the new budget. These subthemes include but are not limited to:* Ending gender-based violence* Ensuring safe education and workplaces for women* Providing cost-of-living relief to women and families* Increasing women’s workforce participation* Narrowing the gender pay gap* Enhancing long-term economic equality and security for women* Women in leadership and decision-making* Women’s and girl’s representation and participation in sport* Building gender equality capability across government* Global leadership on gender equalityMany of the details of these subthemes were not described in the Nine News report or the budget overview, and they reveal the extent to which the budget has been underpinned by feminist ideology and a bias against men.On page 11, under the theme of “gender-based violence,” one learns that some portion of $534.5 million will go toward “break[ing] the cycle of violence and prevent[ing] further harm by developing national standards for men’s behaviour change…” [italics added]Neither the budget nor the Women’s Budget Statement mentioned funds for developing national standards for women’s behaviour change.On page 18, one learns of $925.2 million for the “Leaving Violence Program,” and on page 24 one learns of the development of the National Student Ombudsman whose function will be to allow university students to “escalate complaints about the actions of their higher education provider, including complaints about sexual harassment, assault and violence.” Regarding the Leaving Violence Program, the Women’s Budget Statement states that its purpose is to “empower people to leave violent relationships through financial support packages.” The program will provide financial support packages of up to $5,000 and be open to migrants regardless of visa status. The program is expected to support approximately 36,000 people each year.Neither the budget nor the Women’s Budget Statement mentioned the possibility that the Leaving Violence Program might incentive false allegations of intimate partner violence (likely against men). The extent to which the National Student Ombudsman might also increase false allegations, specifically of sexual violence among university students, is something else to keep an eye on in the coming months.On page 37, one learns of the budget goal of “building a stronger workforce pipeline” for unpaid and paid care work. Here, the Labor government seeks to pour money into the care sector to make care work “more attractive by supporting fair numeration.” They also state that they want to increase men’s participation in the care sector by “break[ing] down stereotypes that care is ‘women’s work.’”Yet, the Labor government reinforces this stereotype when it admits that the reason that it will provide the Commonwealth Prac Payment of $331 per week for education, social work, nursing, and midwifery students while they undertake their practicums is because most of those students are women. The Women’s Budget Statement states: “Many of these students will likely be women. In 2022, women made up 81 per cent of enrolments in teaching, nursing, midwifery, and social work higher education courses, and 84 per cent of 2022 commencements in the Diploma of Nursing.” The Statement continues: “Given women represent almost 90 per cent of the nursing and midwifery sector professions, women stand to benefit the most from this measure.”Thus, by examining the Women’s Budget Statement, one see that reports of $793 million for women’s health are somewhat misleading. Many of the items in the Women’s Budget Statement that were not designated as “women’s health” will undoubtedly still improve the quality of life for many women. Where to the draw the line on what is “health” funding versus other funding is a matter of debate, but that such a debate is possible is something to be aware of when reading government reports, press releases, and data tables, even from men’s health groups or researchers. For example, in my previous examinations of sex differences in funding, I have explored only the narrow topic of investment into men’s and women’s health research (see graph below).Similarly, in their response to the federal budget, the Australian Men’s Health Forum published a table (shown below) that lists annual budgeting for men’s and women’s health since 2022-23. The table clearly shows a consistent bias in investing millions more dollars into women’s than men’s health. Over the four-year period, the Australian government invested $1.3 billion into women’s health and $22.5 million into men’s health. Yet, in the table, the value listed for women’s health in 2025-26 is $793 million. Thus, as lopsided as the numbers in the table are, they do not reflect the full extent of bias in funding, as they do not account for all the other women’s programs that have been funded over the years and are more indirectly linked to health.Interestingly, had the Labor government wanted to talk about token funding for male wellbeing, they could have. For example, the budget includes $47.6 million for the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, with suggestions that the money be used for veteran suicide prevention and veteran compensation and rehabilitation claims. Men make up 79.4% of current members of the Australian Defence Forces and 86.6% of individuals who have previously served in the Australian Defence Forces. Thus, men stand to benefit the most from this budget item.The budget also includes $9.3 billion for homelessness. Men make up a 56% of the homeless population in Australia. Thus, many men also stand to benefit from this budget item.Why the Labor government chose not to frame such budget items in a male-supportive way is unclear. Doing so would have required explicit acknowledgment of male suffering and disadvantage, and this would be at odds with many other aspects of their feminist-influenced budget. That the budget was influenced by feminist ideology is evident from the following observations:* First, the budget

(*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 Physiolog

Recently, in a piece titled, Men Putting the Brakes on Exercise Science Degrees, I explained the results from my research on numbers of exercise physiology degrees earned in the United States (U.S.).For the research, I collated data on degrees earned in exercise science since 2002. I presented the data in a sex-segregated way such that separate trend lines are shown for male and female degree earners. The analysis revealed that the field has experienced substantial growth over the past 20 years and that the number of women earning bachelor’s degrees in the field has exceeded the number of men earning bachelor’s degrees every year since 2002. In the 2021-22 academic year, which was the last year from which data were available, women earned 59% of all bachelor’s degree in exercise science. Interestingly, across all academic majors in the U.S., the proportion of female degree earners is also 59%.One the most unique findings from the analysis was that around the 2016-17 academic year, the number of male exercise science graduates started to plateau and has remained the same since. On the other hand, the number of female graduates has continued to rise, such that the continued growth in the field is due to increased numbers of female not male graduates.In the Discussion of my paper, I put forward potential explanations for the significant difference in numbers of male and female graduates at U.S. universities. This list of explanations included males having lower high school grade point averages than females, males having higher high school dropout rates than females, males having poorer reading and writing skills than females, males having less access to financial aid and scholarships than females, and fewer initiatives designed to increase male enrolment in areas of study where they are less represented than females.I also mentioned that men might believe that they are better off financially by entering the workforce directly after high school and that perhaps they do not want to enter a feminized academic culture where they are bombarded with messages about gender identity, “male privilege,” and “toxic masculinity.”My paper was well-received by the two reviewers who assessed it. However, after the paper was published, a group of four authors wrote a letter to the journal’s editor challenging the conclusions that I reached about men and education. The four authors were Nisha Charkoudian of the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, Jill Barnes of the University of Wisconsin, Sandra Hunter of Marquette University, and Michael Joyner of the Mayo Clinic. The full-text of their letter is shared below, and I encourage everyone to read it.Before I continue with my reply to the authors, I want to first say some positive things about two of the authors.In the current climate of academic cowardice, both Michael Joyner and Sandra Hunter deserve praise for many of the papers that they have published – often together. This includes reviews on the biological basis of sex differences in performance published in the Journal of Applied Physiology and Exercise and Sports Science Reviews. This also includes an important case study, which showed that after two years of taking feminizing hormones, a male swimmer’s relative ranking in the female category of sport was still higher than his previous relative ranking in the male category of sport.Michael Joyner also deserves credit for his legal battle against his employer, the Mayo Clinic, who suspended the doctor without pay based, apparently, on comments he made about transgender athletes and COVID-19. According to the Mayo Clinic, Joyner “failed to communicate in accordance with prescribed messaging,” which the institute said, “reflect[ed] poorly on Mayo Clinic’s brand and reputation.”Sandra Hunter, whose research interests significantly overlap with mine, also deserves kudos for her impressive scientific resume over many years, particularly her research on the neurophysiology of muscle strength and fatigue. Hunter has been one of only a handful of female exercise scientists who have had the courage to publish on the biological basis of sex differences in performance and their implications for men competing in women’s sports. For that, Hunter deserves a tip of the cap. However, Hunter has also been a part of the “female underrepresentation” movement in exercise science, whereby she and others suggest that the primary driver of fewer female than male participants in exercise studies is bias or discrimination against women. This view is problematic on a few different fronts, and I have rebutted it in academic papers and in essays on Substack.Regarding Charkoudian and Barnes, I had not heard of them prior to receiving their letter. So, I will not comment on them or their research.Before the letter from the four authors was published in the journal, I was sent a copy of it and invited by the editor to write a 500-word response. This is standard practice in academic publishing. A researcher whose ideas are challenged is given the opportunity to defend his work. The letter and letter reply are then published together, which allows readers to easily see the intellectual exchange of ideas.I accepted the editor’s invitation, and I submitted a letter reply titled “Anti-Male Bias in Contemporary Academia: A Reply to Charkoudian et al.”I was then surprised to receive an email from the editor a few weeks later informing me that my letter reply had been sent out for peer review, and based on the reviewers’ comments, would not be published.“What?!” I said to myself. “Are you joking? You invited me to submit a reply, then sent my reply out for peer review, and then rejected it? What the hell are you thinking?”So, that everyone can make their own judgments on this exchange, I have attached a copy of the editor’s and reviewer’s comments below.There are multiple reasons why the decision to reject my letter reply was inappropriate.First, I was invited to submit the reply.Second, there is no reason to send letters, particularly letter replies, out for peer review. Both letters and letter replies are addressed specifically to the editor (not peer reviewers), and a letter reply is an author’s only chance to defend their work. So long as the author’s reply is at least somewhat coherent and does not involve repeated cursing or personal attacks, then it should be accepted for publication.Third, letters and letter replies are largely opinion pieces. Thus, why is the reviewer’s opinion (of my work) given priority over my opinion? The fact that letters and letter replies are brief opinion pieces is why the threshold for accepting them for publication should always be lower than for original research articles.Fourth, even if a reviewer and editor identify issues with the opinions expressed in a letter reply, this does not necessitate a decision of rejection. By virtue of the context that letter reply was invited and is an opinion piece, the author should, at minimum, be given the opportunity to edit their work or tell the reviewers why their opinion is incorrect. I was afforded no such opportunity.Importantly, my views on letters – how they should be handled by editors and what their role is in science communication – is not simply the result of one bad experience at a journal. I have been involved in many letter exchanges over the years, including others on sex and gender issues that were handled poorly. I have also published four papers on the topic of letter exchanges and their importance in science. These papers have included examinations of sex differences in letter writing, assessments of the types of arguments made in letters, assignments for students to learn about letters, and an overview of the importance of letters in scientific communication and how letters should be indexed more consistently in PubMed.So, given this background, what did I say in my letter reply that made the editor decide, against editorial norms, to reject my reply?Here, I present the full text of my unpublished reply. You can be the judge.Anti-Male Bias in Contemporary Academia: A Reply to Charkoudian et al.Dear Editor,Each year, about 300,000 fewer men than women graduate from United States (U.S.) postsecondary institutions (see Figure 1). I previously discussed factors that might be contributing to this potentially concerning trend in men’s educational attainment (8). Oddly, Charkoudian et al. (3) shifted the focus to women, who already comprise over 50% of graduates, professors, and administrative staff (6-8). Here, I address three of their problematic comments.1. “…the author appeared to suggest that the increase in women’s participation represents a negative impact on young men...”I suggested little discussion has occurred regarding the reasons underlying men’s lower educational attainment. Men’s well-being warrants attention.2. “Many academic faculties in exercise physiology departments (and in departments across STEM fields) are still made up of mostly men”The authors prejudicially imply that greater male than female representation is problematic qua men/maleness. They also make no equivalent statements about departments comprised mostly of women (e.g., education, nursing, occupational therapy). Therefore, their application of representation importance based on faculty member sex is asymmetrical and insinuates gamma bias (12) or sexism (i.e., misandry).3. “Both men and women suffer negative physical and mental health consequences from the existence of a set of behaviors that have been labeled toxic masculinity (10). To suggest that these behaviors don’t exist is to promote continued harm to all the people who are affected by them (10).”First, I never said that problematic behaviors do not exist among some men.Second, the “toxic masculinity” movement within academia is disreputable. The American Psychological Association revised its original guidelines on male psychotherapy after receiving criticism that th

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. T

In December of last year, I wrote a paper titled, “Exercise physiology degrees in the United States: an update on secular trends.” The paper, which is an update of my previous analysis from 2020, was published in the journal Advances in Physiology Education. Advances in Physiology Education is the education journal associated with American Physiological Society.The reason I examined the number of degrees earned in exercise science is because such information is not monitored by professional exercise science organizations in the U.S. Consequently, whether the exercise science field is growing, stagnating, or retracting remains unclear.For the research, I acquired data on degrees earned from spreadsheets published annually by the National Center for Education Statistics. The spreadsheets contain data on degrees earned for all academic majors. Two of the majors listed in the spreadsheets are “exercise physiology” and “kinesiology and exercise science.” Little difference exists between these two majors, so I summed them to represent the field of exercise science or exercise physiology. I examined the data by student sex and by academic school year. Relevant data were available from the 2002 to 2021 academic school years.The data show that the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in exercise science plateaued starting in 2017 before increasing again in 2020. In the 2021-22 school year, over 31,000 bachelor’s degrees were awarded in exercise science, representing the highest yearly total on record. In 2021, exercise science degrees amounted to 1.5% of all bachelor’s degrees awarded in the U.S.The data also show that the increase in the number of degrees awarded in exercise science has been driven by increased numbers of female graduates. In the 2021-22 school year, women were 59% of bachelor’s degree earners in exercise science. The number of male graduates plateaued starting in 2016.For master’s degrees, the number of degrees awarded in exercise science has increased fairly linearly over the past 20 years. Record highs in numbers of master’s degrees earned in the field were established in 2020 and 2021. In the 2021-22 school year, women made up 51.6% of master’s degree earners in the U.S.For doctorate degrees, the number of degrees awarded started to plateau in 2013. The annual numbers of doctorate degrees earned in exercise science since 2013 has ranged between 245 to 300. In the 2021-22 school year, women made up 52% of doctorate degrees earners in exercise science in the U.S.The results of greater percentages of female than male degree earners in exercise science are roughly consistent with sex differences in degrees earned across all academic fields combined. In the U.S., across all academic majors combined, women make up a greater proportion of degree earners at all levels. In the 2021-22 school year, women earned 59% of all bachelor’s degrees, 63% of all master’s degrees, and 57% of all doctorate degrees.Men’s educationIn the original version of the paper that I submitted to the journal, I provided minimal interpretation of the reasons whysubstantially fewer men than women are now earning university degrees, including in exercise science. In my minimal interpretation, I wrote one sentence about men potentially distancing themselves from higher education because university staff sometimes depict men in inaccurate and demeaning ways, such as when they teach or publish on topics such as “male privilege” or “toxic masculinity.”One of the peer reviewers of my paper found my interpretation interesting, stating that they believed such factors might be “fairly important.” However, the reviewer felt that my comment “came out of nowhere.” They wanted more information.So, in the revised and final version of my paper, I expanded on this point. I mentioned that concepts like “male privilege” and “toxic masculinity” are largely inaccurate and do not reflect the lives that most men live. I also explained that the field of exercise science is not immune to these misguided ideas. For example, followers of The Nuzzo Letter might recall that last year, we challenged a group of academics in Australia who claimed that “men’s socially determined privilege” is a cause of violence against women and that exercise science students should be taught about this supposed “gender-based violence” in their courses. In our letter exchange with the Australian authors, we summarized results from numerous studies on violence in intimate partner relationships and in sporting environments. We showed that not only was the Australian authors’ story full of holes, it was missing an entire half of the abuse and violence pie. In sports environments, for example, results across 12 studies have shown that men and women are roughly equally likely to be victims of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. What man would want to sit through an exercise science course where his professor lies about such realities and attempts to indoctrinate him into the idea of the original sin of being born male?Thus, the point that I made in the discussion of my paper was that some men are likely rejecting the zeitgeist of the contemporary Woke, therapeutic, and feminised university system.Nevertheless, this is not the only reason why fewer men than women are now entering higher education and completing university degrees. In my paper, I listed some of the other potential reasons that might help to explain this societal trend:1. Males have lower high school grade point averages than do females, and this will negatively impact the ability of males to get admitted into a university2. Males have higher high school dropout rates than do females, and this will negatively impact the ability of males to get admitted into a university3. Males have poorer readings skills than females4. Males have poorer writing abilities than females5. Fewer initiatives exist for increasing male university enrolment. For example, “women in STEM” initiatives are common, but initiatives for “men in psychology,” “men in nursing,” “men in occupational therapy,” and “men in early childhood education” are practically non-existent6. Less financial aid and sex-specific scholarships are offered to men than women7. Men might believe that they are better off financially by entering the workforce directly after high school rather than spending money on a postsecondary educationTo summarize, the primary aim of my research was to update information on degrees earned in exercise science in the U.S. over the past few years. Embarrassingly, professional exercise science organizations in the U.S. do not monitor degrees earned in the field nor do they generate large-scale graduate destination reports. There is also currently little understanding of whether the thousands of exercise science students churned out by universities each year aligns with market demand for the services they can provide with their knowledge and skills. My hope is that my research in this area will motivate professional exercise science organizations to monitor and report such information in the future.Along the way of describing the number of degrees earned in the field, I also discovered that men are putting the brakes on exercise science degrees while women pushing the accelerator. These findings in exercise science are broadly similar to those observed across higher education, whereby women now constitute a substantially larger percentage of degree earners. Remarkably, university officials and policymakers continue to express little concern about the trend of men’s relative disengagement from the universities.Many factors likely contribute to fewer male than female degree earners in the U.S. If one of these factors is that young men are choosing not to participate in the university system because they would rather invest their time and money where their lives are better understood and appreciated, then good on those men. Their self-esteem will be better for it.In closing, I would like to inform everyone that I had finished writing this post several weeks ago. However, I did not publish the post, because as I was completing the final edits, I received an email from the editor of Advances in Physiology Education. The editor informed that a group of researchers – some of whom are big names in the study of sex differences in human physiology – submitted a letter to the journal challenging the comments that I had made about men’s education in my paper. The details of their comments, and my response to them, will be the subject a future post at The Nuzzo Letter.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. 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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

On December 19, 2024, the United States (U.S.) Bureau of Labor Statistics published their annual press release on fatal occupational injuries. The release, which amounts to a brief report, is 10 pages long.In the first sentence of the report, the Bureau states that there were 5,283 fatal work injuries in the U.S. in 2023. The Bureau then displays the results in a bar graph, labelled “Chart 1.” Chart 1 shows the number of fatal work injuries in the U.S. each year from 2014 to 2023. From the graph, one learns that the average number of work fatalities per year since 2014 has been about 5,000.On subsequent pages of the report, the Bureau discusses the results in various contexts. One context is “Worker Characteristics.” In this section, the Bureau informs readers of the race and age of the individuals who sustained fatal work injuries. Via two bullet points, the Bureau also discusses the sex of the fatally injured workers. In one bullet point, the Bureau states that “[w]omen accounted for 8.5 percent (447) of all fatalities, but accounted for 18.3 percent (84) of homicides in 2023.” In a second bullet point, the Bureau says that “[w]omen had the highest number of fatalities in the private health care and social assistance industry sector (63) followed by the retail trade sector (59).”In this section of the report, the Bureau said nothing about male workers. In fact, a word search of all 10 pages of the report produces only one hit for the words “male” or “men.” The one hit occurs toward the end of the report in Table 1.In Table 1, the Bureau presents the number of men and women who died in 2023 due to occupational injuries. The number of male fatalities is listed as 4,832. The number of female fatalities is listed as 447.In Table 1, the Bureau also lists the number of men and women who were fatally injured at work in 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022. Each year, the number of male deaths is 10-12 times higher than the number of female deaths, with roughly 4,500 to 5,000 men dying each year from injuries sustained at work compared to approximately 440 women per year. Yet, nowhere in the text or graphs of the Bureau’s report are male deaths emphasized or reported separately.Here, my purpose is to highlight the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ report on fatal occupational injuries as an example of gamma bias and to discuss some implications of this bias.Gamma bias is a cognitive distortion that involves magnifying or minimizing a story or result based on the sex of the individual(s) involved in the story or result. One part of the gamma bias matrix predicts that women are more likely than men to be seen as victims, even when the surrounding circumstances of the victimization are equal between the sexes or favour greater male victimization.The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ report represents gamma bias because it emphasizes the fatal occupational injuries of women, and it minimizes the substantially higher number of fatal occupational injuries of men. This biased or opaque presentation of data on fatal occupational injuries is problematic for a few reasons.First, when these data are presented in a sex-segregated way, they instantly reveal a key difference between the lives of the average man and woman: the average man’s work is more dangerous than the average woman’s work. Understanding this reality then helps to combat misguided ideas like “male privilege,” which suggest that male loggers, male construction workers, and male taxi and truck drivers are more privileged and advantaged than female English professors.An appreciation of the average man’s work also helps to facilitate a broader understanding of what men contribute to society. By filling most jobs that are hazardous, men inadvertently safeguard women from being exposed to the same risk of death. This is one reason why, for example, the observance of International Women’s Day but not International Men’s Day is misguided and prejudicial. Both sexes contribute to society in mutually beneficial ways.Moreover, in his book, “Why Men Earn More,” Warren Farrell has argued that men’s more frequent employment in dangerous occupations is one reason why men earn higher salaries than women. Consequently, when the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics does not present fatal occupational injury data in a sex-segregated way, this prevents readers from being able to see occupational risk as a possible contributor to the “gender pay gap.”Second, some workplace deaths can probably be prevented through worker education, advancements in technology, and modifications in work protocols and environments. Though focusing on the occupation is more likely to bring about positive results in reducing fatal occupational injuries than is focusing on worker sex, worker sex and occupation are not mutually exclusive in terms of common approaches to resolve health issues. For example, if the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were to call for grant applications for projects intended to extend male life expectancy, a project that focuses on worker safety in hazardous occupations, or a project that advances the use of technologies to reduce common causes of occupational death, such as self-driving vehicles to reduce work transportation deaths, would be one indirect pathway by which men’s health could be addressed.Gamma bias impedes awareness of men’s health issues because qua cognitive bias it makes those issues harder to see. According to a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that focused exclusively on female deaths from intimate partner homicide there were 3,991 women in the U.S. who were victims of intimate partner homicide between 2018-2021. Intimate partner violence and homicide are serious issues. Consequently, they receive large sums of government funding, and they are given a great deal of attention among activists, academics, the media, and public health officials. Often, these groups frame (incorrectly) intimate partner violence as a “gendered” issue that primarily impacts women. Even if this were true, why then are fatal occupational injuries also not explicitly declared a “gendered” issue? In fact, the number of women killed by their intimate partners in the 4-year period from 2018-2021 was not even equal to the number of men who succumbed to fatal occupational injuries in 2023 or in any other year between 2019 and 2023. According to Table 1 in the Bureau’s report, a total of 23,887 men and 2,164 women died from fatal occupational injuries between 2019 and 2023.Accidental injuries sustained at work are not the same as intentional homicides of intimate partners. Nevertheless, given the sizeable difference in numbers of deaths from these two causes, why is one framed as a “gendered” issue and promoted extensively by academics and public officials, while the other is not widely discussed as a sex-specific health issue? If the data were reversed, and women were the ones primarily dying as a result of fatal work injuries, we would almost certainly see a heightened focus on the sex of the fatalities, which would then cause activists, academics, and public health officials to call for immediate action on labour laws and occupational health and safety polices. Yet, when the dead are primarily men, no one blinks an eye, including the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.In closing, fatal occupational injuries are never going to be zero unless people stop working. Men and women should continue to work and have the freedom to self-select into whatever every occupation they want, assuming someone is willing to hire them based on their knowledge and abilities. Moreover, given both the biological basis for sex differences in work preferences and skills, and the diverse risk profiles for various jobs, one should not expect the same number of occupational deaths among men and women.Nevertheless, government agencies can do better when it comes to men’s health. Moving forward, the Bureau of Labor Statistics ought to present data on fatal occupational injuries in their news releases and reports in a sex-segregated way that makes the results obvious to readers. The number of male and female deaths ought to be stated clearly in text and then displayed separately in graphs that supplement the text. Such a practice of data presentation would be consistent with policies established by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and, ironically, its Office of Research on Women’s Health (ORWH).To do otherwise would be to continue to cloud the realities of men’s lives and to impede the awareness of facts that could help men to live and flourish.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

On December 4th, Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare (UHC), was purposely gunned down in Manhattan outside the New York Midtown hotel. The alleged assassin, who is now in custody, is Luigi Mangione. Taylor Lorenz is a former Washington Post journalist, who is known for making various irrational and unhinged remarks about social and political issues. A few days after the murder of Thompson, Lorenz participated in a panel discussion about the case on Piers Morgan Uncensored. During the discussion, Lorenz said that she felt “joy” and “certainly not empathy” after hearing the news of Thompson’s death. Lorenz was not alone in showing a lack of empathy toward the father of two. Others within the media-academia nexus commented favourably or in strangely non-empathic ways regarding Thompson’s death. For example, a skit on the Jimmy Kimmel Show made light of the incident by focusing on the good looks of Thompson’s assassin.Many commentators have already highlighted the immoral nature of Lorenz’s comment and Kimmel’s skit, as well as, the broader problematic thinking about capitalism and healthcare adopted by Lorenz, Kimmel, and Mangione.Here, using a counterfactual example, I want to highlight one aspect of the Thompson murder that has received little attention: the gender bias underlying the joyful reactions of Lorenz and her ilk. Of the 11 companies listed on the widely circulated graph showing the percentage of claims denied by each company, three of those companies have female CEOs. Would Lorenz have felt and then articulated the feeling of joy if the individual murdered by Mangione would have been Sarah London (CEO of Ambetter), Kim Keck (CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield), or Gail Boudreaux (CEO of Anthem)?I doubt it, and scientific evidence supports this supposition.For many years, researchers have repeatedly shown that men are less likely than women to be seen as victims, that male victims of various types of violence and abuse receive less empathy than female victims, and that male victims of violence are viewed more negatively than female victims of violence. This lack of empathy has sometimes been referred to as the “male gender empathy gap,” and it is part of a gender bias matrix known as gamma bias. One aspect of the definition of gamma bias is the minimization of the concept of gender in situations when men are victims, and an amplification of the concept of gender when women are victims.Gamma bias and the male gender empathy gap explain, in part, the response of Lorenz and others to Thompson’s death. These concepts, or psychological states, also help to explain why social commentators typically do not think to encourage people to put on their “gendered lenses” when examining such crimes. To do so, would reveal circumstances that do not align with common feminist narrative. These “gendered lenses” would reveal that men, not women, are more often the victims of homicide, and that Thompson’s death is another example of this. These “gendered lenses” would reveal that in 2019, for example, 4,716 men were victims of homicide in the U.S. compared to 1,857 women. They would also reveal that 89% of male homicides are perpetrated by other men and that perhaps health officials and policymakers might want to start paying more attention men’s mental health.Yet, whereas recommendations for considering gender were not made in Thompson’s murder, such recommendations would have almost certainly occurred had the counterfactual case of a female CEO assassination occurred. Such a murder would have been used by feminists to propel narratives about “gender-based violence.” UN Women would have declared the assassination an act of femicide and used it to support its narrative that “nowhere is safe” for women. Feminist commentators would have told us that the murder was motivated by misogyny and men’s supposed hatred for strong, career-minded women and their entrepreneurial successes. Academic journals would have published editorials and commentaries calling for millions more dollars being put into initiatives to address “toxic masculinity” and violence against women. Governments, particularly those that lean to the left, would have likely followed these recommendations, as has been the case in Australia in recent years.Healthcare systems in all countries need continued re-examination. But irrespective of one’s views on healthcare in the U.S., the murder of Thompson was an immoral act. The reactions of Lorenz and her ilk were themselves immoral. They were also irrational and reminders of the strength and pervasiveness of gamma bias, misandry, and the de-humanization of men.Such reactions should be called out publicly for their shocking lack of empathy. Counterfactual scenarios in which the sex of the victim is reversed can be useful for highlighting this anti-male bias.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

On October 13, I received an email from a master’s student of exercise science at the Shanghai University of Sport in China. The student’s name was Mingyue Yin. Mr. Yin invited me to co-author a consensus paper about minimal dose exercise training. Minimal dose exercise training, which I have discussed previously at The Nuzzo Letter, is an amount of exercise that does not meet recommended exercise guidelines but that still has the potential to improve health and function. I was likely asked be a part of the consensus paper because of a review that colleagues and I published on minimal dose resistance exercise earlier this year.I was not the only other researcher invited by Mr. Yin to co-author the consensus paper. The email was sent out to approximately 40 researchers. A couple of the names on the list were familiar to me. They were exercise researchers in Australia and the United States. However, most of the names, particularly the Asian and presumably Chinese names, were unfamiliar to me.Mr. Yin’s invitation was collegial. His email provided clear instructions on what would be expected from invited authors to allow them to be co-authors on the paper. Mr. Yin’s email included attachments of the completed paper and a graphical abstract for the paper. The paper, including all tables, figures, and references, was 158 pages. Clearly, Mr. Yin had already done all the heavy lifting. He was merely asking invited authors to provide ratings of agreement with the summarised results and to review the paper more broadly. In the minds of most researchers, irrespective of their academic rank, saying yes to Mr. Yin’s invitation is a no-brainer. Being an author on a consensus paper has many benefits. First, to be asked to part of a consensus paper is itself an achievement. It means that the invited author is being asked, based on their expertise, to help set the foundation for future thinking and practice related to the paper’s topic – in this case, minimal dose exercise training. Second, being part of a large consensus with many international authors shows that the invited author has the potential or capacity for international collaboration – something that is highly valued by grant giving agencies and university employment committees. Third, the consensus paper will be published in a leading journal. As Mr. Yin also stated in his email, he intends to submit the paper to Sports Medicine or the British Journal of Sports Medicine – two of the highest ranked journals in exercise and sports science. Publishing the paper in one of these leading journals will result in media attention and will also look good on the invited author’s CV and grant applications. Fourth, because the paper is a consensus statement that will be published in a high-ranking journal, this means that the paper will be cited frequently. Frequent citation will then increase the invited author’s h-index, and the h-index is often included in job and grant applications.Finally, the amount work and time that is required from the invited author, particularly in light of all the benefits just mentioned, is minimal. In fact, the tasks requested of co-authors by Mr. Yin can probably be completed within one day.So, I accepted Mr. Yin’s invitation, right?Having A Moral CompassChina, where Mr. Yin and his colleagues reside, is governed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Communism is a sociopolitical system that rejects individual liberty, including freedom of speech and assembly. In addition to its lack of recognition of basic human rights, such as in Hong Kong, the Chinese government has been accused of stealing intellectual property from other countries for many years, and it has not been transparent about the origins of COVID-19.As an advocate for individual liberty, I do not want to be associated with communism, the CCP, or its members, nor do I want the Chinese government to benefit from use of my name or expertise or to try to win influence over me or my employer in some way. Consequently, my willingness to accept the invitation that Mr. Yin extended to me hinged upon his research team’s affiliation with the CCP. As you will see in the screenshots provided, I responded to Mr. Yin’s invitation by asking him if he or his labmates were members of the CCP.Initially, Mr. Yin tried to avoid my question, or perhaps he did not fully understand it. He asked if his answer would impact my willingness to be part of the paper. I told him, yes, though I did not tell him in what direction my decision would go. I asked Mr. Yin a second time if he was a member of the CCP. In broken English, Yin eventually replied: “I am a glorious Chinese Communist Party. I joined the glorious Communist Party of China in the third year of undergraduate, and I am very proud of it. Thank you!”Decision BackgroundI rejected Mr. Yin’s invitation because he is a communist, and I do not want to collaborate on research with communists. My decision was also influenced by observations that I have made of China in the academic publishing space, including China’s unclear relationship with the Journal of Sport and Health Science and with MDPI journals. My decision was also influenced by a recent conversation that I had with a Taiwanese researcher about China and also by Salvatore Babones’ chapter on China’s influence in Australian higher education in his book, “Australia’s Universities: Can They Reform?”Let us start with Babones.China’s Influence at Australian UniversitiesSalvatore Babones is an American. He is an Associate Professor of Sociology who lives in Australia and works at the University of Sydney. In 2021, Babones wrote a book titled, “Australia’s Universities: Can They Reform?” The book, which I highly recommend, is a critique of Australian higher education and how it can be reformed to better serve the Australian public interest.One of the chapters in Babones’ book is titled, “Have Australia’s universities been corrupted by China?” In the chapter, Babones argues that Australia’s interests and values are at-risk by the current relationship between Aussie universities and China. Babones says that the relationships themselves do not imply “misbehavior on the part of the scientists involved” or “malpractice on the part of their universities.” Instead, Babones believes that the current relations between Chinese and Australian researchers create “structural risks” for Australian universities and thus the broader Australian community. More specifically, Babones argues that these relationships generate “strong incentives for Australian universities to acquiesce in Chinese practices and comply with Chinese demands.” Babones continues, “The real risk isn’t that China will steal Australian science. It’s that Australian universities will compromise their values in order to retain access to Chinese science.”In his interview with John Anderson, Babones also explained that he believes that Australian universities will continue to police themselves as to not upset China. What might this mean in practical terms? Perhaps it means a university will be less likely to hire a professor who is critical of China or perhaps it will mean that a university will be quick to squash any campus activities that are critical of China.Babones’ argument is intriguing and compelling. In recent years, I have also made observations that have caused me to be sceptical toward China in academia, particularly in the space of academic publishing. One of these observations involves the Journal of Sport and Health Science.Journal of Sport and Health Science The Journal of Sport and Health Science is becoming a prominent journal in the field of exercise and sports science. It was founded in 2012, and it is published by Elsevier – a major publisher of academic articles.I discovered the Journal of Sport and Health Science several years ago when looking for a home for one of my research articles. At that time, I noticed something unusual about the journal. On its website, the journal stated that all its papers are published open access, but that authors do not have to pay an associated article processing fee. Normally, if an author wants to make their article free to the public, and retain the copyright to the article, the author (or the author’s institution) has to pay the publisher between $2,000 - $5,000 USD. I wondered – who was footing the bill to Elsevier? Who was making it possible for authors to have their articles published at the Journal of Sport and Health Science without charge?Then, I noticed on the journal’s website that Shanghai University of Sport – the university where Mr. Yin is based – is listed as the entity responsible for the journal’s peer review process. Apparently, Elsevier is responsible for producing and hosting the journal on behalf of the university. Thus, it seems that the Chinese government is paying Elsevier to cover all open access costs at the journal. But why? And what are the implications of this? Another odd aspect of the Journal of Sport and Health Science, which is likely tied to the fact that its papers are published open access by a major publisher at no cost to the author, is its rapid ascension in the journal rankings over its brief 10-year history. Currently, the journal boasts an impressive 9.7 impact factor. It is the third highest ranked journal in Physical Therapy and Sports Therapy and the fourth highest ranked journal in Orthopedics and Sports Medicine. The journal’s editorial board is another point of interest. It is made up of Chinese researchers and prominent researchers from North America, including editor-in-chief Walter Herzog. Moreover, one of the journal’s Deputy Editors is Barbara Ainsworth. Followers of The Nuzzo Letter might remember Ainsworth, who I have discussed previously. Ainsworth was a co-author on a paper that made a false claim about women not being participants in early exercise research – a claim that I later corrected. Ainsworth was also a co-author on the American Colle

On October 28, I shared data at The Nuzzo Letter showing that substantially fewer men than women vote in elections for United States (U.S.) president. This has been the case dating back to at least 1964. Each election, women make up roughly 53.5% of those who vote, while men make up the other 46.5%. In 2020, 68.4% of the adult female population voted compared to 65% of the adult male population.Nevertheless, I did not previously discuss why fewer men than women vote in U.S. elections. In fact, that fewer men than women vote in elections seems somewhat contradictory at the surface given that men are more likely than women to report being interested in politics, read Washington news, work as political journalists, and study political science and government at university, though that specific trend has changed in the past couple of years. Here, I present six factors or reasons that help explain why fewer men than women vote in U.S. elections. Note, this list is not necessarily exhaustive nor is it necessarily presented in order of importance. Reason #1. Fewer men than women are registered to voteBeing registered to vote is the first step in being able to fill out an election ballot. As can be seen in the graph, fewer men than women have been registered to vote since at least 1980. During the 2020 presidential election, 79.3 million men were registered to vote compared to 89 million women – a sex difference of nearly 10 million voters.Source: Center for American Women and Politics. Gender Differences in Voter Turnout. 2024.Reason #2. Men are more likely than women to work full-time jobsEven when men are registered to vote, additional factors will make it more difficult for them to cast their ballot. One of these factors is employment status. Men are more likely than women to work full-time jobs, whereas women are more likely than men to work part-time jobs. In 2020, 67.9% of men worked full-time year-round compared to 57.8% of women. By contrast, 22.4% of women worked part-time compared to 11.5% of men who worked part-time. Consequently, the average man will have less time than the average woman to visit a voting centre on election day. Moreover, a man who works full-time will also have less time to register to vote in the first place.Reason #3. More men than women commit felonies and are in jailCommitting a crime can impact a citizen’s ability to vote. If a man or woman is convicted of a felony, their right to vote will be restricted for at least some period in most states. The extent of this restriction depends on the state. Some states, such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, automatically restore voting rights after release from prison. Other states, like Colorado and New York, automatically restore voting rights after prison and parole. For states like North Carolina and Texas, voting rights are automatically restored after prison, parole, and probation. Yet, in other states, restoration of voting rights depends on the type of conviction and/or if an individual petition or application to the government is approved. Maine and Vermont are the only states whose resident-citizens retain their right to vote while incarcerated for a felony.These laws are more likely to impact the male than female electorate because more men than women are charged of serious offences and then later convicted of felonies.Source: U.S. Department of Justice. Federal Justice Statistics, 2022. 2024.Moreover, putting aside the type of crime committed, being physically in jail makes voting more difficult. This scenario applies to men more than women because men account for 92% of the U.S. prison population. In 2022, 1.6 million men were serving time in prisons or local jails compared to 174,000 women. When considering the total population supervised by the corrections system via incarceration, parole, and probation, 4.4 million men are supervised by this system compared to 947,000 women.Source: U.S. Department of Justice. Correctional Populations in the United States, 2022 – Statistical Tables (NCJ 308699). 2024.Reason #4. Men are more likely than women to be overseas in militaryAccording to the U.S. Department of Defense, 82.5% of activity-duty members of the U.S. military are men. Some of these members will be serving overseas. According to USA Facts, approximately 220,000 U.S. military personnel were stationed in foreign countries as of September 2023, with roughly 168,000 listed as active-duty troops. Thus, even if a man is registered to vote, getting his ballot sent to and from Japan, Germany, South Korea, Italy, and the United Kingdom will be a barrier to his voting participation.Reason #5. The Lifespan Gender GapIn 2021, male life expectancy in the U.S. was 5.8 years shorter than female life expectancy. Some people call this the “lifespan gender gap.” The lifespan gender gap is due to earlier male than female death due to a myriad of causes such as suicide, drug overdose, occupational injury, and drowning.Source: Arias E, Xu JQ, Kochanek KD. United States life tables, 2021. National Vital Statistics Reports; vol 72 no 12. Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics. 2023.Shorter male than female life expectancy then leads to fewer males than females being alive to vote. This is confirmed by data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The Bureau provides data of the percentage of males and females in the U.S. at each age, though not all these individuals will be citizens eligible to vote. Between 1 day to 17 years old, males make up a slightly greater percentage of the population than do females (11.12% versus 10.64%, respectively). However, when considering individuals who are of voting age (i.e., 18 years of age or older), there are fewer males than females in the population. More specifically, women who are 18 years of age or older make up 39.92% of the U.S. population compared to 38.37% of men. If we estimate that the U.S. has a population 250 million persons over the age of 18, then these percentages amount to an adult female population of about 100 million and adult male population of about 96 million. Thus, there are approximately 4 million less men of voting age alive to even cast a ballot.Reason #6. Men have lower education levels than womenWomen have been earning more university degrees than men in the U.S. for many years. In the 2021-22 academic year, women made up 58.5% of bachelor’s degree earners (graph).Education level correlates with voting participation. According to a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, individuals with at least some college education are more likely to vote than individuals with a high school degree or less. For example, in the 2022 midterm elections, individuals who did not have any university education made up 43% of non-voters and only 25% of voters.Various factors are likely to correlate with why someone with a university education is more likely to vote than someone without a university education. For example, someone with a higher level of education is likely to be more engaged with political news and ideas, more likely to know the steps necessary to register to vote, and less likely to have a felony conviction.ConclusionIn the past couple of months, in the lead up to the 2024 U.S. presidential race, much attention has been given to the role of sex and gender in the election. However, these discussions have mostly centred around the topic about how men and women tend to vote differently, with men leaning more to the political right and women leaning more to the political left. I am unaware of discussions about the consistent phenomenon of fewer male than female voters. The lack of media attention given to this phenomenon is likely linked to the lack of acknowledgement of the sex-specific nature of the phenomenon’s underlying causes.As I have just shown, the phenomenon of fewer men than women voters can be linked to factors such as the lifespan gender gap, men’s criminal behavior, men’s military service, and men’s education levels. All these things fall within the field of men’s health – a broad area of inquiry that continues to receive relatively little attention from academia, the media, and policymakers.Moreover, as average sex differences in political beliefs exist, men who are unable or unwilling to vote likely perpetuate the root problems that lead to their lower political engagement, and this is because men will be allowing for people who do not represent their views to be elected into office. For example, if the consequence of low male voter turnout leads to the election of a politician who approves of millions more dollars into government-subsidized women’s health research and more efforts to increase women’s educational attainment in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, then this will likely detract attention from men’s lower life expectancy and educational attainment. This lack of attention will then circle back to lower male voter turnout and the cycle will continue.Thus, the continued lack of attention paid to men’s health is bad not just for men’s well-being, but for politics as well.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

“I would not want to be president and would not vote for a woman president. A woman cannot reasonably want to be a commander-in-chief. I prefer to answer the question by outlining what a rational man would do if he were president.”That was Ayn Rand’s answer to an article-interview question that asked her and 15 other prominent women in 1968 about what they would do if they were President of the United States (U.S.).Ayn Rand moved from Russia to the U.S. in 1926. She was the founder Objectivism – a philosophy that integrated reason and logic as the cognitive tools necessary for understanding the world, rational selfishness as the basis for ethics, individual rights and laissez-faire capitalism as the most moral and humanly beneficial approach to politics, and romantic realism as the type of art best suited to fuel man’s need to survive.Rand is perhaps best known for her novels, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), but she also authored numerous works of non-fiction, including a 1969 essay titled, “About a Woman President.” The essay was later published as part of a small collection of Rand’s writing called, The Voice of Reason.Rand said many things over her career that were misunderstood and mischaracterized. Her essay on a woman president is one example. In fact, in her opening remarks in her essay, Rand said that she decided to write it because she received letters from students of Objectivism, who wanted her to clarify her answer from the1968 article-interview.Other than when Hillary Clinton ran for the office of U.S. President in 2016, the topic of a woman president has never been more relevant. In the coming weeks, most U.S. voters will choose between two candidates for the country’s highest and most important office: former president Donald Trump and current Vice President Kamala Harris.Here, we will revisit Rand’s 1969 essay to clarify her views on a woman president.Rand said that she would not want to be president and that she would not vote for a woman president. However, Rand’s view was not based on a belief that women are inferior to men or that a woman could not do the job. “It is not an issue of feminine ‘inferiority,’ intellectually or morally; women are not inferior to men in ability or intelligence; besides, it would not take much to do a better job than some our recent presidents have done.”Instead, Rand’s view was based on what she believed to be the basic psychological need of rational women – “hero worship.”“I do not think that a rational woman can want to be president. Observe that I did not say she would be unable to do the job; I said that she could not want it. It is not a matter of her ability, but of her values…The issue is primarily psychological. It involves a woman’s fundamental view of life, of herself and of her basic values. For a woman qua woman, the essence of femininity is hero worship – the desire to look up to man. ‘To look up’ does not mean dependence, obedience or anything implying inferiority. It means an intense kind of admiration…the object of her hero worship is specifically his masculinity…”The specific nature of the duties of U.S. president were integral to Rand’s view. Rand believed that serving as the country’s highest authority and as commander-in-chief of the military would be a psychological nightmare for a woman qua woman.“This, for a rational woman, would be an unbearable situation…To act as the superior, the leader, virtually the ruler of all the men she deals with, would be an excruciating psychological torture. It would require a total depersonalization, an utter selflessness, and an incommunicable loneliness; she would have to supress (or repress) every personal aspect of her own character and attitude; she could not be herself, i.e., a woman.”Rand then projected what she believed would become of a woman exposed to this inner torture:“By the nature of her duties and daily activities, she would become the most unfeminine, sexless, metaphysically inappropriate, and rationally revolting figure of all: a matriarch.”Some readers might interpret Rand’s position as implying that a woman should not want to hold any leadership roles. However, this was not Rand’s belief. Rand was clear that her view was specific to the job of U.S president. Her view was based on the specific nature of that job and the psychological harm that she believed carrying out that job’s daily activities would do to a woman qua woman. Rand was not a sexist. She was not against impressive women. She was an impressive woman herself, and she depicted impressive women in her novels. In fact, at the beginning of her 1969 essay, Rand mentioned that she thought her earlier comments would have been understood based on the female characters that she depicted in her novels – for example, Dagny Taggart, who, in Atlas Shrugged, was Vice President in Charge of Operation at Taggart Transcontinental.For Rand, a key difference between the position of country president and other leadership roles was that the president is superior to all individuals he interacts with, whereas a business leader continually deals with people who are not inferiors but instead are customers, suppliers, competitors, and so on.“Women may properly rise as high as their ability and ambition will carry them; in politics, they may reach the ranks of congresswomen, senators, judges, or any similar rank they choose. But when it comes to the post of president…do not ask, ‘Could she do the job and would it be good for the country?’ Conceivably, she could and it would – but what would it do to her?”Rand conceded that there might be exceptions to voting for a woman president. Combinations of factors like laws, policies, natural disasters, pandemics, wars, and assassinations can all potentially impact the pool of individuals who are available as political candidates at a given time. Rand recognized such possibilities, and she stated that there might be certain historical contexts or national emergencies when a woman might temporarily assume the role of president if there were no men willing or able to assume the position. Here, however, Rand posited a rhetorical question that has much contemporary relevance:“But what would this imply about the character of the men at that time?”Rand then referenced the U.S. founding fathers – a group of men who were broadly virtuous, brilliant, and talented, and led the country when circumstance required it:“Normally, the best and ablest among men do not necessarily have to seek the presidency, but in an extreme emergency, they would have to – as did the founding fathers.”Phil Donahue Show in 1979Confusion about Rand’s position on a woman president was not limited to the students of Objectivism who read her 1968 article-interview. In 1979, 10 years after Rand wrote her follow-up essay, she appeared on the Phil Donahue Show. During the question-and-answer period, a woman in the audience, who presumably had never read Rand’s essay, asked Rand how she would feel about a woman being the head of the White House one day. Rand responded bluntly, “I wouldn’t vote for her.”A combination of shock and laughter rained down from the audience. Rand’s reply had been so quick and assertive that audience members were left cognitively scrambling, trying to make sense of what they had just heard: “Did she really just say that in this era of women’s empowerment?”Donahue, who laughed at Rand’s response in a friendly way, asked her to clarify her position. Rand, perhaps knowing that she would not have enough time to fully explain her position, answered by encouraging the audience to read her 1969 essay. But moments later, a second woman in the audience asked Rand a more specific and hypothetical question. The woman asked Rand if she would you still not vote for a woman president even if the female candidate was better qualified than the male candidate?To Rand’s detriment, she paused before answering. Her hesitation made her seem somewhat naïve, as if she had never contemplated such a question before. However, we know from Rand’s 1969 essay that she had already considered such scenarios. Rand eventually answered the woman’s question by stating that if society had fallen so low as to not have a male candidate who was better qualified than a female candidate then she might consider voting for the female candidate. Rand’s response caused the woman in the audience to accuse Rand of holding low views of women. Rand knew that she did not hold low views of women, and she knew that the audience, just like the students who sent her letters in the late 1960s, did not understand the nuance of her position. Rand then clarified to the audience that she believed it was not in a woman’s “personal interest to rule man” and that doing so would put a woman in an unhappy position. Rand then stated that she did not think that “any good woman would want that position.”Again, Rand’s comments were met with shrills and shrieks from the audience. Donahue then followed up. He asked Rand if she was against women in leadership positions. With a commercial break looming, Rand quickly stated, as she had 10 years earlier, that she was not against women in leadership positions and that she would vote for women in other offices. But a woman as commander-in-chief of the military, Rand concluded was “unspeakable.”Contemporary Political ViewsNow, 55 years after publication of Rand’s essay, and 45 years after her appearance on the Phil Donahue Show, we find ourselves considering, for only the second time in U.S. history, the possibility of electing a woman to the nation’s highest office. Rand’s view on a woman president, albeit misunderstood, was controversial in the 1960s and 1970s. This then begs the question of what people today might think of Rand’s view? Moreover, how do Rand’s views on the idea of a woman president fit within or outside of contemporary political beliefs and the current presidential race. In 2023, the Pew Research Center, conducted

In June, the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance published a survey study on the history of exercise science. The survey, titled “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Essential Papers in Sports and Exercise Physiology,” was conducted by two accomplished exercise scientists – Jos de Koning and Carl Foster. de Koning and Foster asked 52 male and female exercise science academics, who varied in subdiscipline expertise and who had been journal editors at some point in their careers, to each nominate 25 papers that they thought were “essential readings” for exercise science students. de Koning and Foster conducted the survey because they observed that “many students [are] generally ill-prepared in terms of their understanding of the ‘deep history’ in exercise physiology.” The authors also stated that exercise science students seem to “do well with contemporary literature related to current research projects” but that student understanding of older literature is “deficient.”de Koning and Foster’s study was much needed. Little information is available on the history of exercise science research, and this might partly explain why exercise science degree programs generally do not include courses or lectures on the history of the field. Moreover, exercise science has been one of the fastest growing academic majors in the United States over the past 20 years. Thus, thousands of exercise science students are graduating from universities each year without understanding where the knowledge in their field came from – who produced and how it evolved over time. The 52 academics who were surveyed by de Koning and Foster nominated a total of 396 papers as “essential reading.” This list of 396 papers was then sent back to the survey respondents. The respondents were then asked to vote on the papers, and the 100 papers out of the list of 396 that received the highest number of votes were then considered the “100 essential papers in sports and exercise physiology.”The top 100 papers, which ranged in publication date from 1923 to 2018, covered many topics within exercise and sports science. Consequently, de Koning and Foster organized the 100 papers by general theme – for example, “altitude,” “thermophysiology,” and “resistance training.” The themes with the greatest representations on the list were “muscle energetics/metabolism,” “aerobic work/VO2max,” and “performance.” Importantly, de Koning and Foster admitted that the list is somewhat biased toward sports physiology and performance, given the editors who were surveyed.Nevertheless, the list of 100 essential papers will be a useful resource for exercise science educators moving forward, and de Koning and Foster deserve recognition for their contribution to the field. However, there was one aspect of the survey’s results that de Koning and Foster either overlooked, found too uninteresting to mention, or purposely ignored. That aspect was the sex of the authors of the top 100 papers.The surnames of many of the “giants” on the reference list, and their sex, were already known to me. “Komi, P” is Pavo Komi, the Finnish biomechanist who was known for his research on the stretch-shortening cycle, and who passed away in 2018. “Hakkinen, K” is Keijo Häkkinen, another Finn, known for decades of research on resistance exercise for improved health and performance. And then there is “Costill, D.” – David Costill, emeritus professor at Ball State University, known for his research on muscle fiber types in athletes and the impact of microgravity on muscle physiology and function. However, as the reference list for the top 100 papers included only the first initial of the author’s name, and because the survey covered subdisciplines whose researchers are less familiar to me, I was not certain exactly how many of the top 100 papers were written by men. To find out, I downloaded the reference list and conducted the relevant searches online to determine the sex of the authors of the top 100 papers in exercise and sports science history.As shown in the graph below, only three of the top 100 papers in exercise and sports science history were written by women. Ninety-five papers were written by men, with author sex not applicable or indeterminable for two of the 100 papers. Thus, men authored 97% of the top 100 papers in exercise and sports science history. Nice work, boys!Pointing out the supplemental fact that the giants of exercise science have been overwhelmingly male is not something I particularly enjoy. I do not to wish to emphasize sex or gender in places where one’s ideas and intellectual contributions are what is most important. de Koning and Foster might have omitted information on author sex for similar reasons. That said, gynocentrism and misandry are running amok (see the archives of The Nuzzo Letter for examples). Consequently, in such an antagonistic environment toward men, men have a right, and a responsibility to their families, their communities, and most importantly, to their own self-esteem, to defend their purpose and existence in life. If gynocentrists in academia, politics, and the media are going to use sex as a sword directed toward the torso of men, then men have the right to counter by using sex as a shield. In contemporary exercise science, there exist pockets of female researchers who fill journal pages with lists of grievances about how bad women have it in the field, portraying themselves as perpetual victims. Examples include papers published on “manels” at academic conferences and female underrepresentation in professorships and research study participation.Reading between the lines written in these papers, one gets the sense that men are being blamed for the supposedly problematic current state of things. Reading the actual lines written in these papers, one also notices the inabilities of the authors to grasp the realities of sex differences in male and female psychology. Moreover, these types of papers – in both their content and tone – signify a lack of appreciation for what men – in their ambitious drives for knowledge, status, and the betterment of humanity – have done for everyone. This includes the female academics who now leverage off the knowledge founded by these male giants. Thus, men have every right to throw up their shields and highlight their role in leading the way in discovering of how the human body responds to physical exercise. Women have also contributed to this exercise science knowledge base, and their work, just like anyone else’s work, deserves a level of recognition commensurate with the work’s impact on the field. Frances Hellebrandt, who I have discussed previously at The Nuzzo Letter, is an example of a female researcher who deserves such accolades, given the originality of her ideas and the substantial number of research outputs that she generated over her career. Interestingly, though Hellebrandt was conducting her research in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s – a time that should, according to contemporary authors, be associated with higher levels of misogyny, patriarchy, discrimination against women, and female underrepresentation, I have not found a single comment by Hellebrandt in her dozens of papers about such topics. I suspect she was too busy collecting data in the laboratory and writing papers to give a damn!So, the first reason for men to bring sex into this discussion is because their sex is under attack. A second reason to highlight de Koning and Foster’s omission of author sex in the top 100 papers is that it might represent gamma bias. Gamma bias occurs when sex or gender is omitted from discussions about achievements, when those achievements are made by men, but includes sex or gender when those achievements are made by women. Gamma bias theory also posits that sex or gender is included in discussions about negative acts, when those acts are committed by men, but sex or gender is omitted from discussions of negative acts when those acts are committed by women. Importantly, one reason for exploring gamma bias in various fields, including achievements made in exercise science, is because gamma bias is thought play a role in the “male gender empathy gap.” To quote Seager and Barry:“Such cognitive distortions, we believe, are leading to a systematic exaggeration of the negative aspects of men and masculinity within mainstream culture, and a minimisation of positive aspects. These embedded distortions could be having a significantly harmful impact on the psychological health of boys and men and therefore on our society as a whole, including the psychology profession.”From the list of the top 100 papers in exercise and sports science history, and from my own research on the history of exercise research and the history of technological innovation in exercise equipment, we have clear evidence that men have stood as the giants of exercise science. They have acted like the Greek god Atlas, holding the weight of exercise knowledge on his shoulders. Consequently, advocates of “gender equity” and related narratives and initiatives in the field of exercise and sports science should be careful with what they wish and push for. They should take a moment to contemplate, “What will happen if Atlas shrugs?”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

Previously, at The Nuzzo Letter, I explained that the White House’s Initiative on Women’s Health Research would be allocating 100 million dollars to work being done by women’s health researchers and startup companies. Now, we know more details of where that money will go.The Office for Research on Women’s Health, in coordination with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), issued a Notice of Special Interest to inform researchers of the organization’s interest in receiving applications for research studies that are focused on diseases and health conditions that predominantly impact women, including, but not limited to, autoimmune diseases, depressive disorders, Alzheimer’s disease, and “gender-based violence.” The organization also announced its interest in receiving applications for diseases and conditions that are specific to women, such as endometriosis and menopause, as well as diseases and conditions that present or progress differently in women, including, but not limited to, cardiovascular disease, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and reproductive aging. Addressing women’s health is important. However, as explained previously at The Nuzzo Letter, the NIH already shells out more money for research trials that enrol only female participants compared to research trials that enrol only male participants. In financial year 2020, the NIH invested 4.47 billion dollars into women’s health research (see Table 1 below). Interestingly, unlike reports from the Office for Research on Women’s Health in previous years, this latest report does not include a comparison of how much the NIH invested into men’s health in 2020, 2021, or 2022. However, a previous report from the Office of Research on Women’s Health reveals that the NIH invests about 2 billion dollars per year in men’s health – less than half of what it invests into women’s health (see Table 8 below).With approximately 4.5 billion dollars per year already dedicated to women’s health, you might be thinking that it seems strange that the health conditions to be targeted by the White Houses’ Women’s Health Research Initiative were not already within the purview of the 4.5 billion dollars already being spent. I wondered the same thing and consequently did some digging around. What I found will probably not surprise you. The NIH has been investing hundreds of millions of dollars into these areas of women’s health for many years. The table below shows the NIH’s research budget for women’s health for the 2020, 2021, and 2022 financial years. In 2022, the NIH spent 55 million dollars on research into violence against women, 27 million dollars on research into endometriosis, 189 million dollars on research into sexually transmitted infections, which will include HIV, 298 million dollars on research into autoimmune conditions, 954 million dollars on research into mental health conditions, which will include depressive disorders, and 586 million dollars into research on cardiovascular disease. As I have discussed before, the greater funding into women’s health research than men’s health research then helps to explain why women make up a greater proportion of participants NIH-funded research trials. Between 1995 and 2022, women made up 58% of participants in NIH-funded trials (figure below). All other things held constant, the new lot of 100 million dollars can only cause an increase in women’s representation as research participants and a decrease in men’s representation as participants – odd outcomes to have considering that male life expectancy is 5.4 years shorter than female life expectancy in the United States.Given that the extra 100 million dollars into women’s health research will inevitably increase female participant representation beyond its current levels, here, I pose the question as to how the NIH and the Office for Research on Women’s Health will present and discuss these data in future reports. I see two possibilities. The first possibility is that these national health offices report the data in a way that makes it hard to know the exact percentages of male and female participants. This could involve reporting the data in an ambiguous way or simply not including it, similar to how the overall budget for men’s health research was oddly absent from the latest report from the Office for Research on Women’s Health. A second possibility – the one that I think is more likely – is that the NIH and the Office for Research on Women’s Health simply will not give a damn. They will not care that male participant representation decreases to 35-40%, while female representation increases to 60-65%. In this scenario, the data would be publicly available, and the agencies would celebrate their achievements in women’s health research. They would justify their celebration by rehashing the same old talking points such as the supposed historical exclusion of women from research trials, suggesting that current disproportions in representations are merely recompense for years of lost knowledge about women’s health. And, of course, any celebration would be coupled with imprecise phrases that would rationalize the continued existence of the Office for Research on Women’s Health, such as, “more research is necessary on women’s unique health needs” and that there is “still a long way to go until gender equality is achieved.”Sceptics might question whether the NIH and the Office for Research on Women’s Health would be so brazened as to increase the number of female participants as high as possible, particularly with the sex difference in life expectancy looming in the background. The answer is: probably. In other domains, we see the goal is never 50/50 representation. In the academic world, when outcomes, such as numbers of degrees earned or numbers of staff positions filled in certain fields, surpass 50% female representation, there are no subsequent initiatives to try to increase male representation, such that the ratio stabilizes at 50/50. I have personally been on the receiving end of university emails that brag about the fact that over 70% of winners of internal research grants are women. The goal, therefore, does not seem to be parity. It seems to be something akin to matriarchy. So, if government research funding does indeed improve health outcomes, and the NIH already invests more money into women’s health than men’s health, and the health conditions to be targeted by the 100 million dollars from Jill Biden and the White House are conditions already being funded under the NIH’s 4.5 billion dollar budget for women’s health, then perhaps Jill should have considered directing the money toward men’s health. One might think that Jill Biden would have a personal interest in seeing more funds directed toward certain areas of boys’ and men’s health. Topics such as cocaine-use disorder, dementia, and falls risk prevention should hit close to home for the First Lady. Or, if Biden were to have a moment of deep and solemn reflection, she might encourage investment into research that explores mental health outcomes in boys who lose their mothers and husbands who lose their wives and daughters via tragic circumstances. But in my opinion, the best place for the 100 million dollars is back in the hands of American taxpayers. With it, each individual man and woman, in consultation with friends, family, and health professionals, can determine how they might best spend the few extra bucks in their pockets to optimize their health. Perhaps they could use the money to help pay for a health screening, more nutritious food, or a gym membership. The decision should be up to them not to the gynocentrists in government.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

On November 13th of 2023, the Biden White House and its Gender Policy Council announced the creation of the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research. On February 23rd of 2024, the White House revealed the initiative would start with an investment of $100 million dollars into work being done by women’s health researchers and startup companies.The $100 million dollars adds to the oodles of money already poured into women’s health research through government bureaus such as the Office for Research on Women’s Health (ORWH) within the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Nevertheless, this did not stop First Lady Jill Biden from saying that the reason taxpayers need to fund the White House’s new initiative is because we do not know enough about women’s health as a result of women’s health research supposedly being historically underfunded, or altogether lacking. Jill Biden also suggested that women’s health has not been a primary concern of society. The Associated Press quoted Biden as saying, “We will build a health care system that puts women and their lived experiences at its center…Where no woman or girl has to hear that ‘it’s all in your head,’ or, ‘it’s just stress… Where women aren’t just an after-thought, but a first-thought.”In Australia, similar narratives about women’s health have recently emerged as part of the political and biomedical milieu. In announcing the Queensland state government’s $46 million dollar plan to build four free walk-in health clinics for girls and women, Health Minister, Shannon Fentiman said, “We know that historically, there has been a lack of investment in health services tailored to the unique needs of Queensland women and girls.” Moreover, in announcing a state inquiry into women’s experience with pain and the healthcare system, Victoria’s Premier, Jacinta Allan, stated, “For too long, women’s health has been seen as a niche issue and it has not had the attention or the support that it deserves.”The claim that women’s health has been an “after-thought,” residing underfunded and understudied in the periphery of health research, has been made for many years. However, this claim has been untrue for much of its history. Gynoncentrism – the preoccupation with the needs, desires, and wellbeing of women – is rampant in biomedical and public health research. And here is some of the evidence to prove it.Underfunded and underrepresented?The NIH’s own data refute the claim that women’s health is underfunded. The table below was published in a report by the NIH’s Office for Research on Women’s Health in 2021. It shows that 11-14% of the NIH’s research budget funds studies that include only female participants, whereas 6% of the budget funds projects that include only male participants. The remaining 80% of the budget funds studies that include both male and female participants. This funding of women’s health research then helps to explain why women are, in fact, not underrepresented as participants in medical research trials. This claim of female participant underrepresentation was first questioned by researchers in the 1990s, around the time the Office for Research on Women’s Health was created. The claim was then again debunked in 2001 in a three-page ripper of a paper by Ed Bartlett. What’s more, annual reports show that girls and women are not underrepresented as participants in federally funded research projects. And the publisher of these reports is the NIH and the Office for Research on Women’s Health! The figure below, which is an update of a previous graph published at The Nuzzo Letter, shows that for all but one year between 1995 and 2022, women made up a greater proportion of participants in NIH-funded research than did men. Averaged across all years, women made up 58% of participants in NIH-funded research between 1995 and 2022.Just like the data from the NIH show major investments into women’s health research in the United States, data from Australia’s federal health bureau, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), show the same. The table below, published on the NHMRC’s website, shows that for every year between 2013 and 2002, the NHMRC invested approximately five times more money into women’s health than men’s health research – all the while, the average Aussie bloke has a life expectancy four years shorter than his female counterpart. PubMed search: “men’s health” and “women’s health”Another way to get a sense of how much attention men’s health and women’s health receive in research is to conduct keyword searches in PubMed. PubMed is a digital database of biomedical research articles. It is maintained by the NIH and the U.S. National Library of Medicine. PubMed indexes millions of research articles from around the world. PubMed does not index papers from every academic journal, particularly journals from the humanities, but it indexes most biomedical and public health journals. Thus, PubMed is an appropriate place to examine the amount of attention given to specific research topics. Based on the claim that women are understudied, one would expect to find substantially fewer articles on “women’s health” than “men’s health,” when searching PubMed. But this is not the case. In fact, the opposite is true. The bar graph below shows how many articles indexed in PubMed contain the phrases “women’s health” and “men’s health” in their titles or abstracts. Between 1973 and 2023, the phrase “women’s health” appeared in the titles or abstracts of 24,148 articles. Over that same 50-year period, the phrase “men’s health” appeared in the titles or abstracts of 2,804 articles. Thus, in contemporary biomedical and public health research, for every one article on “men’s health” that is published, there are 8-10 articles on “women’s health” that are published. This ratio is shown in the line graph below. The results from the search of PubMed suggest that the phrase used to refer to the physical and mental wellbeing of men, “men’s health,” is not communicated as a broad abstract concept in the same way that “women’s health” is communicated as an abstract concept. Thus, to the extent that researchers, clinicians, and health officials want to move forward with men’s health as a broad area of interest, the term “men’s health” should be used more frequently. Lack of use of the phrase perpetuates the problem of relative lack of attention to men’s health because it signals that there are few health problems that are patterned among boys and men. On the other hand, frequent use of the phrase “women’s health” continues the ongoing (and often appropriate) attention to health problems that are patterned among girls and women.Importantly, more frequent use of the phrase “women’s health” than “men’s health” is not the result of a reaction to decades of a supposed lack of interest in women’s issues or from the supposed exclusion of women from research trials. As I have explained, there is a lack of evidence of a disinterest in women’s health issues or of women’s exclusion from research trials. Less frequent use of the phrase “men’s health” than “women’s health” is also not due to a lack of research on men. Males make up about 42% of participants in NIH-funded research trials, and searches for the words “male” and “female” and “boy” and “girl” in the titles and abstracts of articles indexed in PubMed reveal roughly equal numbers of articles for both sexes. Thus, researchers who study boys and men do not appear to be labelling their research as “men’s health” as often as researchers who label their research on girls and women as “women’s health.” This then begs the question - why have scientists not framed their work on boys and men as “men’s health” research? Or conversely, why have so many researchers who study girls and women framed their studies as being about “women’s health”?One explanation is gamma bias or a similar cognitive process that results in greater empathy for women than men and thus increased attention and funds directed toward something that is labelled as “women’s health.” Another, more practical explanation, is that researchers are incentivized to frame their research to be explicitly about “women’s health.” For example, research on “women’s health” might be more likely to garner media attention, because journalists who cover health news are more likely to be women, and women have a more pronounced in-group bias than do men. Also, government bodies are currently funding women’s health more than men’s health. Thus, academics are incentivised to frame their work as being about “women’s health” for purposes of acquiring future research funds. ConclusionIn summary, I have provided evidence that women’s health is not, as Jill Biden claims, an “after-thought.” Significant attention has been paid to women’s health for many years. Continuing to deny this reality is determinantal to men’s health because it implies that there are relatively few issues affecting the lives of boys and men. However, this is not the case. Males have significantly lower life expectancies than females around the globe, and many factors that cause this lower life expectancy are preventable. So, how can one help to straighten the gynocentric bent of contemporary biomedical research and its institutionalized funders? Many methods for correction exist. But perhaps one of the easiest methods is simply to write and orate the phrase “men’s health” – always truthfully, never apologetically, and much more frequently. 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 f