The Nuzzo Letter

Many readers of The Nuzzo Letter have probably heard of academic peer review, but few are likely to have ever participated in the process or have viewed it from the inside. Here, my aim is to show readers what a journal’s submission portal looks like and explain how authors are often left in the dark regarding the status of their paper submissions.

Below, I have posted a screenshot of a submission portal for a journal where I currently have a paper under review. The journal is associated with one of the major academic publishers. The title of my paper, which can be seen in the screenshot, is “Sex Differences in Sit-and-Reach Flexibility in Children and Adolescents: A Meta-Analysis.” I have made a pre-print of this paper available at SportRxiv, and I have written a blog about the results at The Nuzzo Letter. (It is one of the papers associated with my GoFundMe drive for research on childhood sex differences in physical performance.)

Not all publishers or journals use the same software for their submission portals. Nevertheless, many of the indicators in the portals are similar across journals, and these indicators give authors imprecise information about the status of their paper.

In the screenshot below, one can see the title of my paper and the identification number that the journal has assigned to it. Likely “25” in the identification number represents the year 2025, and “00200” in the identification number likely indicates that my paper was the 200th paper submitted to the journal in 2025. We can also see that the initial date that I submitted the paper to the journal was March 4, 2025. Thus, my paper has been under review at the journal for over 10 months! Importantly, the 10-month wait is only for the initial round of reviews. Because papers often undergo two or three rounds of reviews, and each round takes a few months, the final version of this paper is a long way away from appearing on the internet.

In the screenshot, one can also see columns labelled “status date” and “current status.” The “current status” of my paper is labelled as “under review.” Yet, my paper has had this status designation for many months, and I have no idea how far along the paper is in the review process. The label “under review” could mean four things:

1. The paper is still with the editor and has yet to be sent out for review.

2. The editor has decided that the paper is suitable for review at the journal and is now searching for other academics to review the paper.

3. Reviewers have been identified by the editor, and the reviewers are currently reading and evaluating the paper.

4. The reviewers have returned their comments to the editor, but those comments are sitting unread in the editor’s inbox.

The “status date” of September 7, 2025, suggests that some action occurred on the paper on that date, but I have no idea what action that was, and I have no idea why no further action has occurred on the paper in the past five months. Was September 7th, the date that the editor started contacting potential reviewers? Was it the date that one of the reviewers decided to review the paper? Was it the date that Reviewer 1 returned their comments to the editor? Was it the date that Reviewer 2 returned their comments to the editor?

My colleagues and I have submitted dozens of papers to dozens of different journals over the years, and I can attest that many of us operate in a state of confusion and uncertainty regarding the status of our papers. Consequently, we often end up sending semi-regular emails to editorial offices, requesting status updates. We often receive copied and pasted replies, which are largely uninformative. The responses that we receive are often along the lines of: “As you know, peer review is a voluntary system, and sometimes, it can take time to identify willing reviewers.”

Many of the email replies that we receive from editorial offices also give off a tone that suggests no one in the editorial office is particularly concerned about how long the review process is taking. For my current paper, I have emailed the editorial office multiple times. In these emails, I have requested updates on the status of my paper, and, in one email, I even went out of my way to send the editorial office the names and email addresses of approximately 20 individuals who I thought might be interested in reviewing my paper. The response I received from office staff amounted to: “Thank you. I will pass this along to the editor, but we do have our own process of selecting reviewers.”

Well, clearly that process is not working!

Problems with Peer Review

Academic peer review is a mess, and the current model is not serving the best interests of academia or the public. A full examination of the many problems in academic peer review is not my purpose here, but a few of these problems do warrant mention.

First, review times are too slow. I have had papers under review for 1.5 and 2 years. My current paper has already been under review for 10 months, which means that it is on similar timeline for publication as these previous papers. Moreover, this only accounts for the review time at a given journal. Sometimes, papers go through review at multiple journals before they are published. For example, my current paper was previously rejected by a different journal after undergoing review at that journal for several months. Ultimately, these long reviews delay the time from the when the researcher has new results from the time that the public is made aware of the new results. Pre-prints were developed to address this issue, but the underlying issue of slow review times remains.

Second, some reviewers are unqualified, biased, or otherwise incompetent. Based on reviewer comments that I have received over the years, it is clear to me that some reviewers struggle with reading comprehension. This can entail not understanding specific comments made in papers but it can also include not understanding the larger context surrounding a paper’s theme. Yet, this lack of understanding does not prevent reviewers from outright “rejecting” papers or making longs lists of suggested edits that do not make sense given the aim of the paper. Ideological bias among reviewers can also be a problem. Crazily, one reviewer once commented on one of my papers: “data be damned…perceptions trump data.” Moreover, bias and incompetence among peer reviewers is likely to only get worse in the coming years due the emphasis placed on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in academic hiring and in outfitting editorial boards at academic journals.

Finally, some other problems that exist in peer review include crazy papers getting through peer review; reviewers taking too long to return their reviews after they agree to provide them; and reviewers not getting paid by for-profit publishers for their time and labor in reviewing papers.

Reform

Reform in academic peer review is necessary. What that reform should be is a matter of debate, but I am in favor of a system in which authors do not submit their papers to journals but instead publish their papers on publicly-accessible platforms. On these platforms, people who have profiles can comment on papers (i.e., provide reviews). This would be like Amazon reviews or any other public forum where people comment on things. The authors can then engage with the commenters, if they wish. If major errors are found, updated versions of the paper can be uploaded to the platform. After a certain amount of time passes, a “final” version of the paper can be made available to the public via the same platform. Academic papers that are funded by taxpayers should not be published in for-profit journals who place the papers behind subscription paywalls.

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United Nations (UN) Women is the entity within the UN that is said to be dedicated to “gender equality” and the empowerment of women. However, many problems exist with UN Women. Fundamental to these problems is UN Women’s ideological bias, which stems from an adherence to intersectional feminist philosophy. This adherence has led UN Women to continuously push feminist propaganda at taxpayer expense. In 2025, I published a report that detailed UN Women’s use of feminist propaganda on X, and I concluded the following:

“UN Women’s tweets are often inaccurate, biased, contradictory, unprofessional, overly emotional, and lacking in common decency and empathy for boys and men. At minimum, member state representatives should insist on reform at UN Women. If UN Women refuses to rid itself of its problematic feminist ideology, member states should stop funding UN Women at the earliest possible instance. Taxpayers should not be forced to fund feminist propaganda.”

With that said, I am happy to report the recent news that the United States (U.S.) will no longer fund UN Women.

No More U.S. Funds

On January 7, 2026, the Trump White House issued Executive Order 14199: Withdrawing the United States from International Organizations, Conventions, and Treaties that Are Contrary to the Interests of the United States.

According to the Executive Order, the U.S. Secretary of State and the U.S. Representative to the UN conducted a review of international intergovernmental organizations that the U.S. is a member of and provides funding or other support for to determine which organizations operate in conflict with U.S. interests. In total, 66 organizations or entities were identified as operating in conflict with U.S. interests. Thirty-one of those entities are part of the UN, and one of the UN entities on the list is UN Women. UN Women appears on the list under the name “UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women,” which is a name sometimes used to refer to UN Women.

In the Executive Order, Trump issued a directive to all executive departments and agencies to “take immediate steps to effectuate the withdrawal of the United States from the organizations listed…as soon as possible. For United Nations entities, withdrawal means ceasing participation in or funding to those entities to the extent permitted by law.”

UN Women Getting What It Deserves

Funding cuts at UN Women have been long-deserved, given UN Women’s ideological bias and unwillingness to reform. In 2020, I published an academic paper documenting widespread bias against boys and men at the UN, including at UN Women. In 2025, I tallied the number of days of observance that the UN recognizes for girls and women and compared it to the number of days observance that it recognizes for boys and men. In total, the UN recognizes 13 days of observance for girls and women and zero days for boys and men (see diagram below). Finally, in November of 2025, I published a report detailing the propaganda techniques that UN Women uses on X to deceive its audience.

Importantly, I am not the only one who has highlighted issues at UN Women. The Domestic Abuse and Violence International Alliance (DAVIA) has published numerous press releases over the past five years highlighting problems at UN Women and the UN more broadly. Examples press releases are listed below:

· Dec. 2025 - ‘Online Violence’ Campaign Reveals Rampant Dishonesty at United Nations

· Dec. 2025 - UN Launches ‘Online Violence’ Campaign to Smear Men and Frighten Women

· Nov. 2025 - UN Women Pushes Gender Propaganda

· Sep. 2025 - World Leaders Scold United Nations for Embracing Marxist-Feminist Ideology

· May 2025 - UN Women Must Condemn Wave of Feminist Violence on International Women’s Day

· Mar. 2025 - UN Women’s Conference Ends in Disarray as Global Criticism of Feminism Mounts

· Jan. 2024 - UN Women Report Falsifies the Truth about Civilian Deaths in Gaza

· Dec. 2022 - UN Women’s Denial of Female-Perpetrated Abuse is a Threat to Women

· Nov. 2022 - UN Women Media Post about Journalists Killed in Duty — Offensive to Decency and Fairness

· Dec. 2021 - UN Women’s Abuse Campaign Mocks the Message of International Human Rights Day

· Dec. 2020 - UN Women Pushes COVID Abuse Myths, Exploits Women’s Fears

· Jun. 2020 - UN Women’s Coronavirus Propaganda Campaign

How Much Money Will UN Women Lose?

Historically, the U.S. has sent about $15M directly to UN Women each year (see graph below). One outlier year was 2022 when the U.S. sent about $45M directly to UN Women.

Between 2011 and 2023, the U.S. sent about $200M directly to UN Women. Over that time, U.S. contributions accounted for 4.8% of funds that UN Women received from member states. This made the U.S. the 9th leading member state funder of UN Women over that time. Importantly, this total does not account for the fact that 15% of UN Women’s financial contributions come from other UN entities, and those other entities are presumably also highly funded by the U.S.

Each year, UN Women receives about $540M across all financial contributors. About 80% of those funds come from UN member states. The funds from the U.S. that will no longer go directly to UN Women represent only a drop in the bucket of UN Women’s coffers. UN Women is still likely to receive significant funds from other member states and other sources such as private companies and non-governmental organizations. The member states who contribute the most funds directly to UN Women are Sweden (13.5% of member state contributions to UN Women), Norway (8.2%), European Commission (8.5%), Finland (6.8%), United Kingdom (6.2%), Australia (5.7%), and Canada (4.5%).

Conclusion

Over the past several years, UN Women has continually demonstrated ideological bias and an unwillingness to reform. Thus, the U.S. is correct to defund UN Women, and presumably the funding cuts will happen immediately assuming there are no legal issues associated with the Executive Order. The total funds that will no longer go from the U.S. direct to UN Women are only a drop in the bucket of UN Women’s coffers. Nevertheless, the funds are not unsubstantial, and the decision is symbolic and might make it easier for other countries to follow suit.

In the coming days, one can expect feminists and the mainstream media to frame the U.S. funding cuts to UN Women as “an attack on women” or “an attack on gender equality.” In fact, in 2025, the UN appeared to be preparing for such a moment. On social media, they regularly catastrophised about impending funding cuts, as approximately 9% of their tweets included content about funding of women’s issues (see section 4.3.2. of this report). One example tweet from May 16, 2025 said: “Women’s rights are under threat. Funding cuts are pushing women’s organizations in crises settings to a breaking point. Half may shut down in 6 months. Women and girls can’t afford to lose these lifelines.”

Girls and women are unlikely to lose their lifelines from funding cuts to UN Women. To the extent there is a smidgen of truth to such a claim, the blame rests on UN Women. All UN Women had to do was give up its ideological bias and be fair and objective. It refused to do that, and now it will experience the consequences.

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STEM and Women

The seemingly never-ending campaign to recruit more women into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) continues in Australia. On November 26, 2025, the federal government’s Department of Industry, Science and Resources announced that it would invest another $9.77 million into the Women in STEM and Entrepreneurship program. According to the Department, the program supports “investment in gender equity initiatives that aim for lasting systemic change by eliminating barriers for women’s participation in STEM education and careers, and entrepreneurship.”

More specifically, the program will fund projects that:

(a) reduce and/or mitigate systemic and cultural barriers to participation in STEM education, careers, innovation and entrepreneurship by girls and women;

(b) reduce the multiplier effect of intersectional barriers to participation, development and leadership of girls and women in STEM education, careers, innovation and entrepreneurship;

(c) address inequality or discrimination against girls and women in STEM education, careers, innovation and/or entrepreneurship.

Psychology and …

Interestingly, a couple of weeks later, on December 15, 2025, the Australian Department of Health, Disability and Ageing announced funding of $16 million for its Postgraduate Psychology Incentive Program. This program is part of the government’s larger grant scheme called Addressing Critical Psychology Shortages. The scheme is intended to resolve current bottlenecks in the psychology training pipeline that are apparently impacting workforce availability and service delivery.

If one traces back the various rounds of funding associated with this scheme, one finds that a purpose of Round 1 of funding in 2024 was to support universities who create “additional postgraduate psychology places in courses which lead to general registration and can lead to relevant areas of practice endorsement.” Importantly, this round of funding was contingent upon universities demonstrating the ability to grow postgraduate student enrolments by at least 8.7%. However, unlike the STEM grants, no mention was made of student sex. Instead, the government stated that half the internship and supervisor trainings associated with the programs will be offered to “people in First Nations communities, culturally and linguistically diverse communities and people living in regional, rural and remote areas of Australia.”

Sex Bias in the “Underrepresentation” Argument

The main aim of the psychology workforce grants is to increase the number of student placements. Secondary aims appear to be to increase student enrolments in psychology and to create an overall more efficient psychology training pathway to meet society’s mental health needs. Thus, given that sex differences in proportional representations are the bases for other Australian education and career development grants, such as those aimed at increasing women’s representation in STEM, it is odd that sex differences in proportional representations were not considered in the desire to create an overall more robust and efficient psychology workforce.

In Australia, the proportion of university psychology students who are men (presumably ~20%) is significantly less than the proportion of university STEM students who are women (37%). Moreover, the proportion of registered psychologists in Australia who are men (19.6%) is not too drastically different than the proportion of persons employed in STEM jobs who are women (15%). Thus, Australian bureaucrats exhibit sex bias when they use “underrepresentation” as a basis for sex-specific education and career development grants in STEM but not in psychology.

The criticisms of the government’s philosophy do not end there.

Need vs. Luxury Grants

The “needs” put forward by the government in the STEM and psychology grants are not the same. In the psychology grants, the government has stated that a workforce shortage in the mental health sector exists, and the purpose of the grants is to resolve this societal need. For the Women in STEM grants, the government did not state that the purpose of the investment was to resolve a workforce shortage. Therefore, the Women in STEM grants appear to be luxury grants, influenced by gender ideology. Their motivation is political not practical.

This illustrates the depth of gynocentrism in the government. Even when there is a societal need that could be helped by using the “underrepresentation” philosophy, which the government uses regularly when it argues for women’s education and career development, it still will not adopt the philosophy. Doing so would show an explicit interest in men’s education and career development, and that is something that bureaucrats and academics are not willing to do.

Contradictory Aims

Another issue with these two grant schemes is that their aims somewhat contradict each other in terms of women’s workforce participation. By not framing the psychology grants in a male-specific way, the Australian government presumably believes that the psychology grants will incentive more women to enter and stay in the field of psychology. In fact, one media report implied that “a flood of female graduates” could be the solution to the psychology workforce shortage. Yet, resolving the psychology workforce shortage by increasing the number of female workers conflicts with the idea of getting more women into STEM fields. There are only so many women around, and most of them prefer psychology over STEM when given a choice.

Men in Psychology

In terms of overall bodies that could be recruited to enter psychology to resolve a workforce shortage, many male bodies in the community are available. Fewer men than women are enrolled at Australian universities, with men comprising 43%of students. Thus, there is a larger pool of non-university men than women to incentivize to enrol in university to study psychology. Also, of the men who are already enrolled in universities, many of them are studying topics other than psychology. Thus, the Australian government could incentivize male university students to switch fields to psychology. Such incentives might appeal to male students who are “on the fence” about different career options or who have equal interest in psychology and another field.

Nevertheless, sex differences in vocational interests and preferences exist, and they are rooted in biology. Consequently, incentives and other social engineering schemes will only go so far in changing proportional representations in vocations. In one survey of more than 45,000 high school students in Australia, males ranked psychology as their 17th most popular career choice, whereas females ranked psychology as their top choice. Moreover, males rated six different engineering fields in their top 20 careers, whereas females did not rate a single engineering field in their top 20. Thus, neither STEM nor psychology should be expected to exhibit equal male and female representations.

Still, if the government is going to use workforce “diversity” as a reason for recruiting more women into STEM, then the same rationale ought to apply to the field of psychology, and patient preferences support doing so. One study of approximately 2,000 men in Australia found that 19.1% of the men prefer a male psychologist. In a different study, 17% of men and 5% of women indicated that they prefer a male psychologist. In both studies, approximately 60% of individuals did not have a preference for the sex of their psychologist, meaning that they would happily talk to either a male or female psychologist, whereas approximately 20% of men and 34% of women said that they would prefer to talk to a female psychologist. Thus, unlike the Women in STEM grants, which are luxury grants, there is a practical reason that might justify the psychology workforce grants being sex-specific: consumer demand for male psychologists.

Nevertheless, government incentives alone will not be enou…

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.

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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 Academies

In 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 eviden…

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 physical

fitness 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.

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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 Men

The 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 Carers

Another 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-Offs

Ferrara 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 Care

Ferrara 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 …

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…

“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 Research

Canada’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 Actor

In 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 …

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 administration

One 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 communities

However, 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 decision

Each 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 equality

Many 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 t…