How ‘positive masculinity’ can bridge gender gaps - and improve both men's and women’s lives

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader Welcome to Meet the Leader, the podcast where top leaders share how they're tackling the world's toughest challenges.

In today's episode, we'll talk to Gary Barker, the CEO of Equimundo, the Center for Masculinities and Social Justice. He'll talk to us about "positive masculinity", what it is, and how it can help us bridge the gender gap.

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I'm Linda Lacina from the World Economic Forum. And this is Meet the Leader.

Gary Barker, Equimundo It is not that you're doing us a favor by stepping into gender equality. Your life gets better. The planet you live in gets better, your workplace gets better.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader Masculinity, it seems, is having a moment. In fact, one of the world's most famous CEOs recently bemoaned the lack of masculine energy at his company. It was a comment that understandably got people talking mostly about what on earth he meant.

When it comes to masculinity - and it's potential for society --Gary Barker can help. His singular organization Equimundo co-created the International Men and Gender Equality Survey. That is the world's largest dataset on men, masculinity and gender equality. And it also publishes the only global report on men's involvement on things like parenting and care work.

Their work and research digs into this idea that is powering the zeitgeist now. What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be masculine?

Is it masculine to be aggressive? In a time of politcal confusion and economic precarity, being a tough guy or even a bully might seem a natural way to get what you want and what you need. That said, Equimundo’s work has found that both men and women really prefer to be in places without that type of energy.

Or is a masculine energy something else? Could it be something powered by connections to others, to what’s equitable and caring?

I talked to Gary about what it means to embrace positive masculinity - and how that won’t just improve men and women’s lives, but how it can lead to tackling bigger issues, like engaging men in carework and equal pay, things that are critical to bridging stubborn gender gaps that our research here at the World Economic Forum says otherwise won’t budge for more than a century.

We'll talk about that, but first, he'll tell us more about positive masculinity.

Gary Barker, Equimundo It's all around us all the time, which is men doing what good humans should do, stand up when they see harassment or violence. Be allies for gender equality broadly. They're our best selves in terms of doing our portion of the care work at home and supporting the care agenda. I would say those all those three. Self-care, I would add to that as well that we as men are not particularly good at. And often others pay the price when we do it. So yeah, self-care, doing the care work, being allies at work and beyond, being part of the gender equality agenda, that's all.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader You said that women's rights and the gender gap and all that can't happen unless we make sure that we sort of engage with men. Tell us a little bit about that and what exactly that means.

Gary Barker, Equimundo Yeah. So what does it mean to engage men in the gender gap? There's a lot of men leaning in. Not a bad thing, not a bad place to start, but kind of. I'm in gender equality for women. I'm okay with that as a starting point. We need that happening in workplaces, houses of parliament or Congress, voting for the stuff that men should do. We need men stepping out, sometimes not being in places of leadership because we need to make equal number of seats for women at the tables.

But going beyond that is to say we want men do feel a stake in this, to say, my country, my workplace, the bottom line, the well-being of, again, my workplace, the planet, my household is made better when men are part of this and men feeling that there's a stake in this for me as well. That's it. Really it's to go from there's a lot of guys ready to the yes, I should do this. It's the right thing. I should say I'd do it. And to go a step further and say, you've got a stake in this world, it is not that you're doing us a favor. By stepping into gender equality, your life gets better. The planet you live in gets better, your workplace gets better. I want men to feel that and to feel the benefit when it happens. And I want them to feel troubled when it doesn't. So it's moving from "I'm doing a favor" to "I'm part of this."

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader Tell us a little bit about Equimundo and what it does.

Gary Barker, Equimundo Our predecessor organization, we started in Latin America. Equimundo has been around now for 12 years with this lofty, but we hope, achievable goal that men and boys need to be part of gender equality and healthier ideas about manhood.

We do research and some global surveys on what's up with men. We engage policymakers, media, others with the results of that. We do programmatic work where we evaluate whether different approaches, whether they're workplace-based trainings or engagement of fathers or work with young people or work with parents, actually lead to better outcomes. And if they do, we work with governments to scale them up. Third, we do advocacy in meaningful evidence-based, large-scale ways. We're about 20 people scattered across ten countries. We do part of our work in the US and we partner in about 20 countries.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader Equimundo -- you talked a little bit about the research -- Equimundo publishes the State of the World's Fathers Report. And that happens to be the world's only global report on men's involvement in parenting and care work. And so that's sort of an interesting thing. We talk about women being half the population, but so are men, especially their role in care, work and fatherhood and others. Why isn't this being tracked elsewhere?

Gary Barker, Equimundo Yeah, good question. So why have we been measuring whether men are actually doing the care work? There have been time use surveys over many years comparing men and women. So there is data collected. It's just not collected really in sort of agile time to say, are we making a difference.

Of the agendas of gender equality, the care quality space? We know it's so crucial. The care inequality probably drives about two thirds of income inequality between men and women. And yet it's taken us a long time to say we obviously need to support more care services for households, even when we have those extra services. In some countries, they've still not achieved care equality.

So we started the State of the World's fathers report to say what's getting in the way and what seems to be working? What changes do we see and where might we find ways to engage men to build on change that's already happening? It's that. It's not quite a dashboard, but It's a light dashboard, let's say, to give a wake up call every couple of years with new data to say, Here's where we are. Here's what we think is in the way. Here's what we think needs to happen. Otherwise, that gap in the gender equality equation kind of just sits there. And we imagine that someday men might just step up and do more instead of saying, "Well, actually we need some strategies" so that men are part of care equality, which is part of the global gender equality push.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader What are some of those strategies?

Gary Barker, Equimundo I mean, one is, you know, kind of the low hanging fruit, is you have leave policies that are equal for men and women, all kinds of caregivers. You make that leave nontransferable. So his leave is his leave. If he doesn't use it, he loses it. That's the Iceland and Norway lesson.

Even when you offer it. There are some countries like Japan and Korea that have amazing leaves and a couple of percent of men take it. So we've also got to do the norm change that says men should take it. We've worked with a couple of workplaces that made it obligatory for men. You are off three months. Good luck. Your job is here. We'll help you with the backfill when you're away. Please don't look at the work for a while. Go and be this parent. Learn how to do it. Feel confident. Come back. We'll find you.

Parent training. Getting men used to this in countries where it's not quite as used, that men should be at prenatal visits and present during birth and from there, you know really engaged in the process itself.

Starting younger, making, you know, kind of helping both our sons and daughters see that if we're going to have children, this should be normal, that it's both men's and women's work. I think, among other things, those we found really do make a difference.

The other is countries and workplaces taking it seriously and saying we're actually putting metrics to it. We put metrics to the things that we tend to care about. Why isn't there a metric that says "by 2035 in country X, we will have achieved full equality in care work?" Obviously each household will have its dynamic. But on aggregate, we should put that as a metric.

Sometimes we know it just helps to have the metric the countries feel like we're holding ourselves accountable for. I think the same holds for workplaces. If you're offering leave, whether it's, you know, government supported, mandated, which we believe should be there, often employers offer more. Some countries where it's not very much, employers offer more. Measure it and say we want to see men take more of their leave. Men have a lot less access to leave, and not just in the first months of a child's life or adoption, but also over the course of a child's life.

More men in the care professions. We talk a lot about women in the STEM professions. We've not had a conversation about care jobs. Nurses to eldercare workers to child care workers. We need to pay those more so that we -- for women's sake, who who are the 80% of those -- but we also need men to aspire for those to be meaningful professions. All of that.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader You talk about a range of things you guys put in place from the advocacy work to to the trainings and things like that. Is there maybe a before and after that you can point to and sort of say, hey, we were able to do this and then when there was this result so people can kind of understand the behavior change and the shift that happens when people maybe have the toolkits, have the right questions to ask or the right mindset. What's a before and after that might be really interesting.

Gary Barker, Equimundo I mean, from different settings in the world, right, Quite vast. But we do a parent training module together with the government of Rwanda. It's a 16-session once a week, not unlike, you know, birth preparation classes that some folks may go through in some parts of the world. It's a bit deeper and a bit longer. Couple negotiation, how to raise your child, basic skills that you need to know about this new life that's about to come. You're recruited during prenatal visits in public clinics. Couples go through it. Half the sessions for men only. Let men deal with their fear. What's this going to mean? What should I do? We measured impact with a randomized controlled trial that we've kept in contact with a control group in the intervention group. Six years later -- 40% reduction in couple violence. That is his violence against her. Increased participation by him in hands-on care work. Increased support by him for the partners' participation in paid work, reduced violence by both partners against children, greater participation by men in planning and thinking about the next child if they want to have one.

So in kind of a more development setting, if you want to think of it like that, other places where we've done training and workplaces we see attitude change. And the biggest thing is kind of coming out of those workshops the vast majority do some policy change. I mean, one where they're looking at you, we are with you, we're guiding you toward what can you put in place in the workplace. So I think it's that policy niche change that they will do about some workplace policy. And then the next stage is to turn that into did you implement it and did you measure it? But in three quarters of the groups that we work with, there is a pretty quick run to do a policy change. Increasingly for dads, some kind of internal campaign increased attention to getting men to take the leave. And a kind of side benefit is those that are consumer facing often want to also do something in their brand that basically indicates or shows to the outside world that we care about men's caregiving. So I think we can count that as an impact as well.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader What are workplaces doing to create incentives for people to take those leaves? What have you seen?

Gary Barker, Equimundo Yeah, what kind of stuff works? I mean, one I think is to show -- it's easy in the gender equality space and including in care equality for men to feel like you are telling me to do something, right? We're coming outside and it's kind of, you know, each of carrots, brush your teeth, do the hands-on care work. You know, a huge piece is just letting men tell the stories of how we benefit from this. We get to be better humans. We are better in the workplace when we feel that we've got an outside life and we're valued for that.

And so I think that is really a key piece of it that men feel we're invested in this and get to say out loud, it's cool to be an involved caregiver. My relationship is better at home. My sex life is better as I've got, you know, able to keep all this stuff in balance. And my partner sees that I'm doing my share as well. We figured out a balance that feels more like it works for us as a couple.

So I think that really does work as an incentive. It's okay to lean into men's self-interest in being caring, connected caregivers, fathers, stepfathers, support to our elderly parents. There's a virtuous cycle. There's a feedback loop that says, I want more of this at the workplace. I'm going to ask for it. I feel happier and more connected to you as a workplace if you give it to me.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader We talked about policies. Are there other things that you talked about, like, Hey, how can I design this? Or what would be equitable, what that even means? What what should they be as a gut check be asking themselves as they sort of design something that might be put into place?

Gary Barker, Equimundo Yeah. I mean, you know, it's it's kind of survey, repeat, survey, focus group, repeat, listen, you know, it's the small scale stuff, right? A corporation that says, "no more meetings after four because most of us need to go pick somebody up in that window." We can join perhaps a little bit later, but we prefer an earlier cycle, try to get the work day to coincide with kind of what seems to be the school drop off and pick up cycle. Post-COVID, more of us are doing that. There's still school busses, etc., etc. In some parts of the world. Of course it can be some things as simple as that.

Thinking about, you know, staff that have to travel for work. What kind of flexibility do you offer? Everything from if you've got a staff who is breastfeeding, what kind of possibilities can you do to offer support for that to continue to happen? Can you provide an airfare that allows, you know, baby to go with or partners to go with?

They sound, you know, kind of at first glance like, we can't afford this. And then you look and say, Well, breathe here. If we really value staff and the way that we're looking at it, there's some of that stuff we've got to be flexible to do. If it's a trip that does require somebody to be present. It's a lot of that micro stuff. The language that senior management uses about care that it doesn't feel like, yeah, so-and-so's having a child or so-and-so's adopting. And we've got to think about that. But to say I don't get to bring the workers that I really want here unless I value that the vast majority of them have care duties. I don't think there's a formula. It seems to be a lot of asking, iterating, repeating, testing, all the above.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader You mentioned a little bit about couple negotiation, you know, and the importance for men to embrace the fear that they might feel in certain situations. Can you talk a little bit more about what are those ways that if somebody wants to be a better partner, what would be the advice or the frameworks that they should be considering?

Gary Barker, Equimundo So, I mean, it's kind of it's both ends, right? There are things that we need men to we need to feel more comfortable doing. Lots of men are doing this right. I mean, it is increasingly normal. More men are doing more of the hands on care work. I think we've got to lean into spaces that make that normal for men. So, whether it's changing tables, you know, just even some of the design around us as a world, if you have male/female bathrooms, you know, do you have a space where there's a changing table in the male restroom. Some of those -- it's as simple as some of those sorts of things.

Do you see other men doing it? Are there enough of you that it doesn't feel like. Well, that's a weird thing that I'm doing. So both seeing ourselves leave the office because we've got care duties and not feeling like we're being delinquent at the workplace.

You know, how we tell stories of caregiving on television? With the Geena Davis Institute we did a study. And to see the normality of men doing care work. So I think there's things that I have to do as the one who wants to step into it, to claim it, to not walk away, to not find it easier that someone else will step in and do it, to learn and become competent at it. Which is why, first weeks after the birth of a child or adoption become really important that men get our own competencies in that. So men have to step into that, but also those around men need to say this is normal. Do it.

Unearned praise. The other thing we often do is like a man carrying a baby. We go, Whoa! Like as if he's done something that no human male has done before. To say that's normal. Like, go for it. And then the spaces where we interact have to see us as we should be there.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader Is there something that you kind of see is like a holy grail? We'd really like to get there. But you think that might be one of the toughest nuts to crack?

Gary Barker, Equimundo I mean, one is just that we pay care workers more, right? I think the valuation of care is probably if I think of in economic terms, that will we as countries, individuals, households. Now many households already spending a third of their income in care. So we've got to think about the subsidies that need to be there. So I do think, you know, as we talk to care systems directors in parts of the world, we've got to have the willingness and that requires the corporate sector as well to say we need a tax base that acknowledges the subsidies that child and elder care require. So that seems to me one of the biggest ones.

Voters want it, workers want it. Are we in corporate sectors and in policy sectors willing to pay for what care services require? I feel less resistance about men doing our part and more are we willing to invest in the return the care services offer. And they do offer returns. ILO, International Labor Organization, has a tracker of what they show up in terms of results. Almost every care policy -- expanding child care, access to child care with subsidies or paying for directly governments or the workplaces or paid leave. It's about a 3 to 1 return on investment, just about any care investment. So I think the biggest question I believe is, is economic.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader If we fix that, if we finally paid care workers enough and people didn't have to worry about, you know, their elderly parent or their child or something or, gosh, someone gets a cold and how do they handle it? They have to leave work. How would the world change?

Gary Barker, Equimundo Well, there's a wonderful thing called workplace equality. So more women in the workplace, salaries that are, that approach equality with men. We've got plenty of data that men live longer. We're healthier and happier when we care for others. There's a cycle where we tend to pay attention to our own health and well-being if we are responsible for caring for somebody else. That's a good win.

Child development. Also all kinds of outcomes. We're looking a lot of boys problems in schools, you know, men doing our share in the hands-on care of children, our children thrive. And I think there's some pretty compelling data, particularly from some parts of Europe, that where men do more of the care work and we achieved gender equality. We can look at the global champions, Iceland and other Scandinavian countries. There tend to be lots of positive knock-ons in terms of reduced violence, better public safety, like creating -- it's kind of a vague one -- but promoting caring ideas about manhood has all kinds of ripples that seems to create public good in addition to those goods for women, children and men themselves.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader You're an academic, but there's a lot of different ways that your life and your path could have gone. What made you feel like, Hey, you had a tipping point where like a. there needs to be group and advocacy work and research done on this, and b. I'm the one who's going to help drive it. I think I've got a calling here. What was that tipping point?

Gary Barker, Equimundo Holding a little baby Nina in my arms when my daughter was born 26 plus years ago.

Went to Chicago to work on my Ph.D. in child development. My partner's Brazilian. Brazil has five months paid maternity leave, 100% wage replacement. She was our main breadwinner, working as a therapist in our community public health clinic. And she said, you know, they only give me 12 weeks of partial pay because you treat you treat childbirth as a disease in this country. Like there's no I don't have guaranteed leave. So she said, "You brought me to this backwards country. Who's going to do the care work here?" As she was the main breadwinner. We needed that income.

As I was doing my Ph.D., we said, I'm going to do part of the care work here. And feeling like, my God, you know, what preparation is there for me to know how to do this? Most of it is stuff that we as men can actually learn. And it's not that difficult. It's just it's acquiring a new skill set. It's kind of being willing that, you know, that small human's needs take precedence over anything else you're doing. That is an amazing reset for men. And they're not ready for me as the man to be there, right. All the either I must be incompetent. So let me help you. That was that stuff to more help given to me as a man than the woman who was carrying a baby next to me. And then how do you juggle that work-life stuff? And so figuring out, you know, women have been doing for this for decades. How do we get men into both the joy and the challenges of that hands on care work?

Wasn't one of those rational "Well, you know, A leads to B leads to C." It was the freight train of a young couple, the beginning of their careers, trying to figure out how to make it happen economically and personally and saying I've got to do something about this.

And also quite aware that in a child development program that looks at what helps children thrive, you know, there's kind of not much mention of fatherhood and saying, well, if we're to have a stake here, we've got to understand why it matters what we can do and how we change the systems around us so that men do it. And I have an amazing relationship with my daughter ever since. And it you know, that's kind of immeasurable to have that.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader Is there a habit or an approach to your advocacy work or to your communication of these issues that would not have occurred to you at the beginning, but was a really, really important shift to getting the message across something that you're like, "Gosh, that's unlocked something."

Gary Barker, Equimundo You know, we go to do PhD programs and we hang out as researchers and we come to massive events with our data. Right, of showing, hey, let me show you the data of why this makes sense or what the gaps are and what can work. But I think it's stepping into the kind of combination of empathy plus evidence, like getting men to tell the stories of why it matters to them. So the narrative shift in the storytelling, I think, becomes really important. Men need to feel a personal stake in this. And getting men to, you know, laugh about it or talk about why didn't I get to do that? That thing I missed because I prioritized work over that.

I think it's that - let men step into the personal about it, which is often not easy. We're kind of socialized and particularly in the kind of workplaces that we often are, we kind of think we don't have time for that. But I think encouraging men to step into this is the other part of my humanity that you don't see here everyday. I'm more interested in being engaged at work if I also embrace that side of my humanity.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader If there was one thing that happened in 2025 to sort of, you know, bridge gender gaps and maybe even move forward, a positive masculinity in all this, what would be one thing that you would like to see.

Gary Barker, Equimundo More heads of state saying, you know, my first thing I'm going to do in office is review our care policies. And everything we're doing, I'm going to multiply it times 1.5 or 2. So to put it at the beginning of a policy agenda, It'd be fabulous to see more heads of state say the first thing we do is it's not caring for us as a nation that's going to be in war against another. It's how do we care for each other as humans. So it yeah, put care policies first.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader You've said that if men read more novels that could have an impact on empathy. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Gary Barker, Equimundo Yeah, we talk a lot about, you know, kind of men exercising their care muscles, right? There's a lot of things that we're amazing at -- playing sports, and games, which is a lot of care for others as well when we're with our teammates and the rest. But, you know, we just need men to deliberately step into what does it take to do the kinds of skills that we need to care for another human?

We will all have in about 30% of our lives, we've got a primary caregiving responsibility, either a child, a partner who perhaps has a health issue or a disability, or an adult elderly parent. That's just part of the human condition. And I think helping boys exercise, how do I think about the care that person needs and how do I get better at it? How do I treat it as a skill and be able to have those basic things of what it takes to be a responsive, nurturing caregiver?

I do think that the kind of what novels and other kinds of storytelling does is you project yourself through the other. What is it that they're about? What do they need and how can I step into that?

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader That was Gary Barker. Thanks so much to him. And thanks so much to you for listening.

To read our recent Global Gender Gap report, go to the shownotes of this episode. We'll make sure to have a link.

And to listen to more podcasts, including my colleagues' podcast, Radio, Davos. Go to wef.ch/podcasts. This episode of Meet the Leader was produced and presented by me with Jere Johansson and Taz Kelleher, as editor with everybody as studio engineer in New York and Gareth Nolan driving the studio production.

That's it for now. I'm Linda Lacina. From the World Economic Forum. Have a great day.