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A comprehensive review of 65 psychological questionnaires published between 1974 and 2021 indicates that the tools scientists use to measure masculinity focus overwhelmingly on negative traits and harmful outcomes. The study, published in Men and Masculinities, also provides evidence that most of these survey instruments were tested on homogeneous groups of participants and often fail to account for how cultural background or social relationships shape men’s behavior. Together, the findings suggest that psychology’s standard measurement tools may offer an incomplete picture of how gender identity functions in men’s everyday lives.
To study how beliefs about manhood relate to health and behavior, psychologists rely on masculinity scales, which are standardized questionnaires where respondents rate their agreement with statements about how men should think, feel, or act. Early questionnaires from the 1970s treated masculinity and femininity as sets of personality traits, such as ambition or warmth, that anyone could possess in varying amounts. By the 1990s and early 2000s, new scales shifted toward measuring adherence to rigid social rules, asking how strongly people endorse expectations like emotional toughness, self-reliance, and dominance.
Many of these modern questionnaires grew out of the theory of gender-role strain, the idea that trying to live up to narrow or contradictory expectations of manhood causes psychological distress for men and harms the people around them. Because researchers designed these scales to identify social and health problems, higher masculinity scores were almost always expected to predict worse outcomes. For instance, a 2017 meta-analysis combining dozens of earlier studies found that men who strictly conform to traditional masculine norms tend to experience poorer mental health and are less likely to seek psychological help.
Focusing on the harms of rigid gender norms has helped researchers study issues like depression, substance misuse, and interpersonal violence, yet some scholars have questioned whether relying solely on this negative lens overlooks positive or adaptive sides of men’s lives. Supporting that concern, a 2020 content analysis of studies published over an 18-year period in the journal Psychology of Men & Masculinities found that only 15 percent focused on positive aspects of men’s functioning.
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Separately, a survey of more than 15,000 heterosexual men in New Zealand that sorted men by their personal attitudes found that most men held low-to-moderate levels of problematic attitudes, with 35.4 percent falling into a non-toxic group and only 3.2 percent fitting a hostile toxic profile.
Beyond the focus on negative traits, the authors of a 2015 critical review of masculinity questionnaires argued that items built around statements of what a “real man” should do make it hard to tell whether a respondent is acknowledging that a norm exists, judging it desirable, or holding it as a personal value. Critics have also questioned whether scales developed primarily with white college students in the United States work accurately for men from different racial, cultural, or socioeconomic backgrounds.
To evaluate how the field’s measurement tools have evolved and where blind spots remain, Peter Fisher of the Movember Institute of Men’s Health in Santa Monica, California, and his colleagues conducted a systematic scoping review, a type of analysis that maps what measurement tools exist across a field rather than pooling results statistically.
The researchers preregistered their search strategy, eligibility rules, and coding framework on the Open Science Framework before analyzing the literature. In August 2024, the team searched two academic databases and a repository of gender-related measures, and traced citations from earlier reviews, to locate English-language, peer-reviewed papers published between 1974 and 2024 that developed or validated a quantitative measure of masculinity. To focus on the tools most commonly used with general populations, the authors excluded scales designed solely for niche clinical or cultural groups and required each paper to have been cited at least 10 times by other scholars.
From an initial pool of 4,784 references, the team narrowed the sample to 65 scales, consisting of 59 original questionnaires and 6 widely used revised or shortened versions, with a median of 124 citations per paper. Trained reviewers evaluated the full text and survey items of each scale across five dimensions, resolving any scoring disagreements through group discussion. First, they coded whether each scale took a deficit-based approach, where items consistently framed masculinity around negative behaviors and harmful outcomes, or a strengths-based approach, which required only that the scale include at least some positive or health-promoting aspects of manhood.
Second, the authors rated each scale’s relational focus as low, moderate, or high depending on whether the instructions and questions specified the social context respondents should think about, such as close friends, family, or society at large. Third and fourth, they rated cultural attunement based on whether the scale’s creators accounted for cultural norms during development, and coded sample diversity based on whether the validation study went beyond white university students to include varied ages, races, and social classes.
Fifth, the team rated each scale’s statistical quality across three foundational metrics: internal validity (how accurately a survey measures the specific concept it targets), reliability (how consistently it produces repeatable scores), and external validity (how well its findings generalize to broader populations outside the original study sample).
Across the 65 reviewed instruments, 78 percent relied on a deficit-based approach, while the remaining 22 percent incorporated at least some strengths-based elements. This imbalance appeared even though the researchers set an intentionally low bar for the strengths-based category, counting any scale that included even partial positive framing. Among the 12 most heavily cited questionnaires in the dataset, three-quarters took a deficit-based approach.
The researchers found that the deficit-based scales shared similar theoretical foundations, generally treating conformity to traditional male norms as a source of psychological strain or unequal social power. By contrast, the strengths-based scales were split between two competing ideas of how to measure positive outcomes. Some instruments sought to reconstruct masculinity by measuring how men draw meaning from traits like responsibility, service, emotional openness, or caring for family, whereas others aimed to deconstruct traditional gender roles altogether by measuring whether respondents support equality between men and women.
When examining how questionnaires accounted for social relationships and context, the team found that 43 percent of the scales had a low relational focus, presenting statements without specifying whose expectations or which social setting the respondent should consider. Only 35 percent of the measures demonstrated a high relational focus, such as explicitly asking participants to think about how often their male friends or teammates teased them over the past month. Among the 12 most-cited scales, half lacked any relational focus.
Attention to culture and demographic representation was similarly limited across the reviewed catalog. More than half of the scales (58 percent) did not discuss or account for cultural norms at all, implicitly treating Western standards of manhood as universal, while only 15 percent showed high cultural attunement. In addition, 66 percent of the scales were tested on homogeneous participant samples, and among the most-cited scales, none accounted for cultural norms and only one used a demographically diverse sample.
The statistical evaluations indicated that most scales met standard benchmarks for internal accuracy and consistency, with 59 percent of the quantitative scales showing high reliability and 77 percent showing moderate or high internal validity. However, only 9 percent of the questionnaires provided strong evidence of external validity, while nearly half offered little evidence that their results could be applied to populations beyond their initial test group.
To see whether measurement practices have changed over the past five decades, the researchers compared scale ratings from the 1970s through the 2020s, though the 2020s category includes only scales published in 2020 and 2021. External validity ratings improved over that span, rising from an average of 1.00 out of 3 in the 1970s to 2.50 in the 2020s, and cultural attunement rose from 1.00 to 2.25 over the same period, although one of the two statistical tests for cultural attunement was not statistically significant.
Differences across decades for the remaining five categories, including deficit versus strengths focus, relational focus, and sample diversity, were not statistically significant. Even with recent improvements in some areas, scales published before the year 2000 made up less than a third of the reviewed measures but accounted for nearly 77 percent of all citations.
In their discussion of the findings, Fisher and his colleagues suggest that the lack of social context in many questionnaires makes it difficult for scientists to interpret what men’s scores actually mean. The authors also propose that while deficit-based scales remain important for studying health risks and violence prevention, relying exclusively on narratives of harm in public health messaging may put some men on the defensive.
At the same time, the researchers note an ongoing debate among scholars over whether strengths-based scales can engage men constructively or whether labeling general human virtues like bravery and responsibility as “masculine” risks reinforcing binary gender stereotypes. The authors write that their aim is to inform the debate over how masculinity should be measured rather than to settle it.
“The most important takeaway is that most of those tools were designed to identify negative aspects or the problems associated with masculinity,” Dr. Christian Blötner and Sören Michallek, M.Sc., researchers in the Department of Psychology at FernUniversität in Hagen who were not involved in the study, told PsyPost. “There is a dearth of assessment tools, however, that emphasize the potential strengths concomitant with masculinity.”
“This reflects an open question among masculinity researchers and men in society more generally: If we know that adherence to traditional masculinity is harmful, how (if at all) should masculinity change?” Blötner and Michallek continued. “The two main options are what Morgenroth and Ryan (2021) referred to as ‘degendering’ (i.e., reducing the relevance of gender) and ‘multigendering’ (i.e., expanding the diversity within the genders that are present in society). Simply put: Should we abolish ‘masculinity’ or redefine its meaning?”
Calls to look beyond negative traits in gender research date back at least to a 1992 paper on reconstructing masculinity. Even so, Blötner and Michallek argued, comparatively little research has asked whether masculine norms might also support traits like courage, resilience, or a sense of responsibility.
“Focusing only on the problems within a research area is like rating the quality of a restaurant only by means of its poor parking opportunities,” Blötner and Michallek said. “Of course, these positive qualities are not uniquely masculine, nor are the authors claiming that ‘positive masculinity’ has already been proven scientifically. Instead, the field has not developed enough tools to study those questions properly.”
In a 2026 PsyArXiv preprint that has not yet been peer reviewed, Blötner, Michallek, and a colleague examined how traditional academic measures of masculinity overlap with popular labels like “toxic masculinity.”
“The way researchers ask questions arguably influences the answers they receive,” Blötner and Michallek explained. “If a questionnaire only asks about harmful attitudes and behaviors, it will mainly reveal harmful attitudes and behaviors. As a consequence, colloquial, pseudo-scientific terms such as toxic masculinity can be mistaken as scientific, accurate, or meaningful. Instead, toxic masculinity essentially reflects a sensationalistic, stigmatizing, vague, and derogatory re-labeling of the deficit-oriented tradition devoted to masculinity research during the past 50 years.”
“Hence, if researchers never ask about strengths, they cannot determine whether strengths exist, how common they are, or how they affect people’s lives,” they continued. “The review therefore raises a broader concern, namely that our understanding of masculinity may be shaped as much by the questions we ask as by the reality that we are trying to study.”
Regarding the lack of social context in many scales, they added that ambiguous prompts could lead to mistaken conclusions when a respondent’s score simply reflects awareness of a stereotype. “If a person consistently provided high scores, despite only intending to emphasize that they know such a norm, they could be falsely identified as in need of professional health counseling,” Blötner and Michallek said.
There are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting the results of this review. The work was funded by the Movember Foundation, a men’s health charity, and four of the eight authors are Movember employees. In addition, the authors restricted their selection to general-population scales published in English with at least 10 citations. That rule intentionally excluded questionnaires developed for specific minority groups (such as scales designed for Black men in the United States), scholarship in other languages, and new strengths-based scales that have not yet accumulated 10 citations.
Because older scales have had more time to collect citations, the selection rules may make the field’s toolkit look more deficit-focused than current practice. The researchers also evaluated each questionnaire as a whole rather than scoring individual survey items. Coders initially had low agreement on cultural attunement, external validity, and the deficit-versus-strengths category behind the review’s main finding, which the authors suggest may reflect genuine ambiguity in how those concepts are defined.
For future research, the authors recommend developing and testing measures with diverse communities, specifying social contexts in survey instructions, and empirically testing how different ways of framing masculinity affect men’s willingness to engage with health and relationship programs.
“The review is persuasive because it examines a large body of research spanning five decades and uses a convincing, systematic method rather than relying on selected examples,” Blötner and Michallek noted. “At the same time, some of its conclusions involve careful interpretation. Deciding whether a measure is ‘deficit-focused’ or ‘strengths-based’ is not always straightforward, and researchers might occasionally disagree. The broader pattern, however, appears difficult to dismiss. The authors use the results to argue for ‘multigendering’ masculinity, which is a common position in masculinity research, but it is certainly debatable.”
“Consistent with the authors, we would like to see more research focusing on what men see as positive aspects of masculinity, specifically, which of these traits are truly unique to men and masculinity,” Blötner and Michallek concluded. “Of course, this is a really ambitious claim, since it is hard to imagine such features that would uniquely characterize men but not women. Moreover, such an endeavor could be mistaken as prescriptive, such that it imposes certain pressure on men to behave in a certain way—a problem that is already known from gender role expectations in general or portrayals of alpha, beta, and sigma males.”
The study, “What Is the Measure of a Man? A Systematic Scoping Review of 50 Years of Masculinities Scales,” was authored by Peter Fisher, Brian Heilman, Ryon C. McDermott, Jasleen Chhabra, Ruben Benakovic, Kieran O’Gorman, Simon Rice, and Zac Seidler.
