Engaging Men in Gender Equality Movements: how the Reframing of Gender Inequality Affects Italian Men’s Collective Action Intentions

Literature on men’s collective action for gender equality has often viewed men as the privileged group acting in solidarity with women as the disadvantaged group to improve women’s condition. However, conceiving gender equality as only addressing women’s issues and portraying men as the overall privileged group could foster a backlash posture, preventing men from feeling a sense of common cause with women (e.g., Connel, 2005). Conversely, emerging evidence suggests that adopting an inclusive approach by reframing gender equality as a common cause that benefits men as well as women can enhance men’s engagement in actions for gender equality (Farrell et al., 2021; Subašić et al., 2018). Parallelly, across several Western countries, qualitative research has identified among men a pervasive dualistic construction of feminism as good and reasonable versus bad and extreme which might affect men’s willingness to engage with the movement. Far less is known about how men’s constructions of feminism intertwine with their positioning as feminists and their development of a feminist identity. This PhD project aimed to explore Italian men’s constructions of feminism and feminist identity development (Study 1) and to investigate how the reframing of gender inequality in social media messages might affect Italian men’s collective action intentions for gender equality (Study 2 and 3). In Study 1 we conducted individual semi-structured interviews with thirty-one Italian cisgender men. A binary construction of bad vs good feminism and the narrative “feminism is about women” were shared among participants, regardless of feminist identification. Participants drew on these constructions to justify their positions either as outsiders to feminism or as allies. Feminist participants undertook a complex process of negotiation of the space allowed to them within feminism, which influenced their level of engagement in feminist movements. The pathway to feminist identification was described as an ongoing journey toward awareness, catalyzed by past and present experiences. In this process, developing a feminist consciousness becomes crucial in questioning the norms of traditional masculinity. In Study 2 (N = 250) and 3 (N = 275), we employed experimental designs to examine whether men’s willingness to engage in collective action for gender equality could be fostered by reading Instagram posts framing both women and men (Study 2) or men (Study 3) as negatively impacted by the current gender system, compared to a condition framing women as the only disadvantaged group and a control condition. Across the two studies, reading a post that includes men’s disadvantages leads to higher positive impressions of the post compared to a post only about women’s issues. The condition had an indirect effect on collective action intentions which was fully mediated by positive impressions of the post (Study 2 and 3), the effect of which was in turn mediated by the sense of inclusion elicited by the post (Study 3). Importantly, feminist identification moderated the effect of the condition on the sense of inclusion, so that at low-medium levels of feminist identification, participants reading about men’s disadvantages reported a higher sense of inclusion compared to participants reading about women’s disadvantages.