Hello Boys

Between us, we’ve racked up more than 55 years in human rights – as academics, practitioners and activists.

There have been some huge changes in that time: an explosion in the number of NGOs, the professionalisation of the sector, and now an onslaught of attacks by populist governments against human rights and those who defend them.

One other obvious shift – at least in Western Europe and the United States – is that young men generally don’t see human rights courses or careers as something they want to pursue.  Much of this is anecdotal, based on what we see when we lecture on human rights at various universities.  In a class of 25 or 30 postgraduates studying human rights, there are typically fewer than five identifying as male.

Whereas university-level human rights courses barely existed three or four decades ago, young men did show up – volunteering for human rights causes and filling junior-level jobs in human rights NGOs.

We don’t fully understand why young men are now almost totally absent from university human rights programmes – often the main entry point into work with human rights and humanitarian NGOs.  Perhaps it’s not entirely a bad thing: dozens of aid organizations have been implicated in sexual abuse scandals involving male staff, and not employing men would certainly be one way to safeguard against future abuse.

But we are worried that the human rights movement is increasingly being seen by young men as something that’s not for them – or worse, that human rights just aren’t their responsibility.

Ciara, a postgraduate student studying human rights at the law school at Queen’s University, Belfast, says most students in her programme are women, though there’s a more even gender balance among the staff.

“Maybe human rights is seen as a softer, less prestigious discipline,” she suggests, “and less well paid than something like a commercial law degree - or maybe human rights courses are just seen as being for liberal hippies!”

Maya Fernandez-Powell, studying in a postgraduate human rights programme at Georgetown University in the U.S., says there are only two men in her class of 40.  She notes that entry-level work in human rights NGOs “is heavily skewed toward much higher proportions of women and LGBTQI+ people.” This, she says, “might be an issue of human rights branding, because there are plenty men going into other public service careers that also involve rights.”

She also points to financial pressures, and the fact that “courses focused on issues such as gender rights or health care rights might appeal more to women and LGBTQI+ people, whose experiences are more closely tied to these areas.”

Tellingly, she also notes a global trend of “young men being drawn to anti-human rights and far-right movements.”

Recent voting patterns highlight a widening gap in political views between young men and women.  In last year's UK general election, young women were almost twice as likely to vote Green than young men - who were, conversely, twice as likely to vote for the right-wing populist party Reform.

In the 2024 U.S. presidential elections, 58% of women aged 18-29 voted for Kamala Harris, compared to 40% for Donald Trump.  For men in the same age group, the numbers flipped: 56% voted for Trump, and 42% for Harris.

In South Korea’s 2022 elections and Poland’s 2023 elections, young men were also far more likely to vote for far-right parties.  Last year, the Financial Times suggested this growing ideological divide between young men and women may have been triggered by the 2017 surge in popularity of the #MeToo movement.

So does this political shift among young men explain their disengagement from human rights?  What can be done to bring more of them back into the movement – or does their absence even matter?