Sex differences aren’t inherently good or bad – they just are. This is something you learn very early in evolutionary psychology, and it extends beyond just sex differences. We call them moralistic fallacies and people often fall foul of these, using them as an excuse to discard evolutionary theory. Some examples are “Why should there be sex differences?” and “Why should women have longer maternity leave than men have paternity leave?” People often find it difficult to differentiate fact from ideology, and ideology tends to bring with it a moral judgement. We can have a factual discussion about why sex differences exist, but this isn’t the place - it is important to acknowledge that sex differences aren’t inherently good or bad, they just are. Likewise, the example of parental leave - pregnancy and childbirth are physically and mentally taxing. I am an advocate for offering shared leave to be used in the way that best serves individual families, but we can’t ignore that women may need more time out of work for recovery.  

When we see a sex difference that favours men, it is typically perceived as a wrong to be righted, whereas when a sex difference favours women, it is seen as something we have solved, a victory. You can see this in headlines about boys’ and girls’ school performance - when boys do well it is framed as what can we do to bring girls up? When girls do well, it is seen as a job done well. To me, this presents a fundamental issue - this isn’t equality or even equitability, and it is therefore at odds with a lot of what we see being championed in Western societies like ours.

Science tells us there are just some differences - the moral judgement is assigned by people and it doesn’t change the core fact. When this moral judgement is brought into the teaching of fact, we are creating a divide. When we are considering male issues, ideology risks pushing males away, treating them as something inherently toxic that requires fixing. I proposed an optional module to offer to our final year undergraduate students, Male Psychology. What distinguishes this module is the separation of science from ideology - students spend the first few weeks of the module recapping core evolutionary theory and applying it to understanding sex differences and similarities. Core evolutionary understanding and biological mechanisms are needed to understand these issues.  Omitting them can lead  to misinformation and misconceptions. I felt like this was fundamentally wrong and I didn’t want to be part of inculcating ignorance and misinformation in my students.

The rest of the module takes a much more applied focus and relies on various experts in the field who are happy to share their expertise with students. Over the years we have had guest sessions from Dr John Barry and Martin Seager – people I would consider to be the pioneers of Male Psychology. Other prominent guests supporting the module, when their schedules allow, include Dr Liz Bates from the University of Cumbria, who is currently the external examiner for this module, who teaches students about male victims of domestic violence, and Professor Ben Hine from the University of West London who speaks to students about parental alienation. These are both important but often overlooked areas within men’s health – for example, many assume only women are victims and only men perpetrate, but Dr Bates’s work tells us this isn’t the case. Other topics we may consider are the education system, being a father/father absence/the impact of fathers on developing children, and sex differences in the experience of, and response to, traumatic events.

The module is relatively popular year-on-year with around 40% of the cohort opting to take it. Though psychology is female dominated across the discipline with around 85% of psychology students being female, we tend to see a slightly higher proportion of males opting to take Male Psychology than the wider cohort, anything from 15-30% of students opting to take the module are male. Students often tell me that the module was eye opening and gave them a new perspective on things they already held as true or factual, causing them to re-evaluate what they felt they already knew. This is an important part of the development for psychologists of tomorrow. If we continue to rely on ideologies at the expense of fact, we risk pushing males out of the discipline entirely. I am incredibly lucky that the University of Sunderland allowed me to develop this when they did, and they continue to support us in the research and knowledge exchange activities that we undertake – we need more institutions to be open minded about the value of male psychology.

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