One of Britain’s most prestigious boys’ schools has introduced teaching on toxic masculinity and online misogyny. Gender sociologist Dr Stephen Whitehead argues that Harrow’s decision reflects a challenge every school will eventually have to confront: the growing influence of the manosphere on young men

Last week, Harrow School — founded in 1572, the alma mater of Winston Churchill and seven British Prime Ministers, and one of the last remaining full-boarding boys’ schools in England — announced a formal structural partnership with Downe House, an elite all-girls boarding school in Berkshire. 

The schools will remain single-sex, but from September 2026 will share joint academic, co-curricular and social programmes, with calendars synchronised by 2028. Simultaneously, Harrow updated its mandatory curriculum to include seminars on emotional intelligence, digital literacy and the rejection of online misogyny. This has been received in some quarters as a cultural provocation. It is an institutional recognition of a structural problem that no serious educator, sociologist or policymaker can now responsibly ignore.

The timing is important as we are living through the most significant reconfiguration of gender relations in recorded history. This reflects the conclusion of two decades of research across five continents, including the 300-plus testimonies that form the evidential core of my forthcoming book on the gender divergence reshaping societies from Seoul to São Paulo to Stockholm. The institutions that fail to adapt — including schools — will produce the human cost of that failure for a generation.

To understand what Harrow is responding to, one must understand the broader context. Western — and increasingly global — societies are experiencing what I have termed ‘gender divergence’: a structural widening in the values, expectations, behaviours and life trajectories of men and women, particularly among those under 40.

Women are outperforming men in education at every level across the OECD. According to Education at a Glance 2025, 55 per cent of women aged 25–34 across OECD countries now hold a tertiary degree, compared to just 42 per cent of men — a gap that has widened since 2019. Women are 28 per cent less likely to repeat a grade in school, and in bachelor’s programmes, 75 per cent of women complete their degree within three years beyond the expected end date, compared to 63 per cent of men. They are forming autonomous identities earlier, with greater confidence and lower dependence on male validation. They are, in the framework I have developed, exercising ‘independent femininity’ — redefining relationships, partnership and social participation on their own terms, in ways that would have been structurally impossible for their grandmothers and merely aspirational for their mothers.

Men, in aggregate, are not keeping pace. The data on male educational attainment, social connectivity, mental health and relational capacity points consistently in the same direction. Gallup data from 2023–24 shows that 25 per cent of American men aged 15–34 feel lonely on any given day — significantly above the national average of 18 per cent, and well above the OECD median of 15 per cent for young men. The American Perspectives Survey records that 15 per cent of men now report having no close friends at all, a five-fold increase since 1990. Men are four times more likely than women to die by suicide, yet ten percentage points less likely to access mental health care. There is a growing ‘semantic gap’ — a failure of mutual comprehension between the emotional and relational worlds that women are increasingly inhabiting and those that many young men have been formed to occupy. This gap is produced through social and institutional processes, and one of the primary sites of that production is the school.

Into this structural gap, the manosphere has moved with ruthless efficiency. A 2023 poll by Hope not Hate found that 80 per cent of 16- and 17-year-old British boys had consumed content created by Andrew Tate — a higher recognition rate than that of the British Prime Minister. A 2025 study published in Cultural Sociology by Monash University researchers found that Tate’s content follows radicalisation pathways structurally similar to those used by terrorist and religious extremist recruiters — beginning with ‘self-improvement’ content and progressing toward misogynistic and anti-social ideology. A 2024 UCL study of boys aged 13–14 in London found that Tate’s content ‘mainstreams misogynistic manosphere ideologies’ by playing on boys’ economic anxieties and need for identity and belonging.

The digital ecosystem of influencers and podcasters promoting regressive gender ideology — dominance, emotional unavailability, contempt for female autonomy — has become a mass-market counter-educational institution, reaching adolescent boys at the precise developmental moment when identity is most malleable and the hunger for community is most acute. Research published in Gender and Education in October 2025 examined schools in Ontario, Canada, and found that boys routinely shape their sense of masculine identity by emulating manfluencers, with narratives of male victimhood manifesting in sexist remarks and acts of violence against female peers and educators. The manosphere offers young men something that many of their schools do not: a clear, confident, emotionally simple answer to the question of what kind of man they should be. The answer is toxic, to use the relevant technical term, and it fills a vacuum that formal education has largely declined to occupy. Harrow has recognised that this abdication is no longer sustainable.

It is worth being precise about the concept I co-created, since it is now so frequently misused by both advocates and critics. Toxic masculinity does not describe men as toxic, nor masculinity as inherently pathological. It describes a specific cluster of learned, culturally reinforced behaviours — compulsive dominance-seeking, the systematic suppression of emotional experience, the inability to tolerate rejection or vulnerability — that cause harm to the individuals who perform them and to those around them.

The critical word is ‘learned’. These behaviours are transmitted through peer culture, media and, critically, through the institutional norms of schools that have historically rewarded stoic toughness and punished emotional expressiveness in boys. Harrow itself acknowledges this in its own public FAQs on character education: ‘We seek to inculcate in boys the right skills, responses and attitudes in a societal context where expectations surrounding the place of men and privilege are changing. We aspire to promote a progressive, empathetic, emotionally intelligent and inclusive outlook.’ The corollary is equally important: what is learned can be unlearned. What is transmitted institutionally can be interrupted institutionally. This is precisely what Harrow is attempting to do.

Harrow’s partnership with Downe House addresses a second structural problem specific to single-sex education: the developmental cost of extended male-only socialisation during adolescence. Educational psychologists have long documented that boys educated without regular, structured and reciprocal contact with female peers develop deficits in the very capacities — empathy, mutual comprehension and collaborative emotional engagement — that are now the primary determinants of relational and professional success in adult life.

The move reflects a wider industry reckoning. Several of England’s most prestigious boys’ schools — Magdalen College School, Tonbridge and Abingdon — have recently announced transitions to co-education. As School Management Plus reported, the pressures are multiple: demographic change, VAT on fees and parental demand for holistic formation. The gender formation argument is increasingly central to the conversation. As the OECD’s Trends Shaping Education 2025 notes, discriminatory views toward women persist and, in some cases, are gaining traction among younger cohorts, with nearly a quarter of adults in 31 countries agreeing that a man who stays home to care for his children is ‘less of a man’. Structured socialisation between adolescent boys and girls is developmentally necessary.

There is a further dimension that deserves emphasis in a publication focused on leadership and organisational culture. The boys currently passing through the schools that refuse to address this agenda will become the managers, executives, politicians and institutional leaders of the 2040s. The emotional intelligence deficits, relational incapacity and implicit gender contempt produced by a manosphere-saturated, unreformed education follow boys into boardrooms, parliaments, marriages and households.

The organisations — and the societies — that will thrive in the mid-21st century will be those whose leaders can navigate the full complexity of human relationship: across gender, across culture and across the emotional spectrum. The schools that are still producing emotionally stunted, dominance-oriented men in 2026 are producing future liabilities rather than effective leaders.

Let me state the conclusion plainly. The gender divergence is real, it is deepening, and its social costs — in loneliness, in relational breakdown and in the political radicalisation of isolated young men — are already being counted. No school, elite or otherwise, urban or rural, single-sex or co-educational, exists outside this reality.

Harrow has made a serious institutional decision to acknowledge the problem and act on it. Its approach — curriculum reform, emotional intelligence development and structured inter-gender socialisation — is evidence-based and proportionate. The schools that dismiss this as ideology will discover, in time, that they were protecting an institutional status quo at the expense of their pupils’ formation as full human beings.

Every school will eventually have to follow Harrow’s example. The only variable is whether they do so proactively — because they understand what is at stake — or reactively, when the consequences of inaction become impossible to ignore.

Educators in 2026 must decide whether to lead the formation of boys in a society undergoing profound gender transformation, or be dragged into the process too late by the damage it leaves behind.

Dr Stephen Whitehead is a gender sociologist and author recognised for his work on gender, leadership and organisational culture. Formerly at Keele University, he has lived in Asia since 2009 and has written 20 books translated into 17 languages. He is based in Thailand and is co-founder of Cerafyna Technologies. His forthcoming book, co-authored with Constanza Fernández Arce, is Where Have All the Good Men Gone?

READ MORE: ‘Why Sting’s Last Ship theory on masculinity runs aground‘. Pop star Sting has suggested that the decline of manual labour may be fuelling toxic masculinity in the UK. But, according to gender sociologist Dr Stephen Whitehead, the problem runs far deeper, rooted not in deindustrialisation but in centuries-old cultural ideas about what it means to be a man.

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