by ADAM STANALAND
When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared on a Jan. 10, 2025, episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” he lamented that corporate culture had become too “feminine,” suppressing its “masculine energy” and abandoning supposedly valuable traits such as aggression.
The workplace, he concluded, has been “neutered.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, Zuckerberg has also embraced stereotypically masculine pursuits in his personal life. He’s become a mixed martial arts aficionado and has shared his affinity for smoking meats. On his expansive Hawaii compound, he’s even taken up bow-and-arrow pig hunting.
He’s come a long way from the geeky image of his youth.
But is Zuckerberg right? Do workplaces in the U.S. need to embrace a more diesel-fueled, street-fighting, meat-eating mentality?
As a social psychologist who studies masculinity and aggression, I think it’s important to evaluate what the science says about Zuckerbeg’s claims – and to consider what it means for the future of workplace culture in the U.S.
Show no weakness
In 2018, sociologist Jennifer Berdahl and her colleagues coined the term “masculinity contest culture” to describe workplaces rife with cutthroat competition, toxic leadership, bullying and harassment.
Integrating decades of prior research on masculinity in the workplace, Berdahl and her collaborators were able to map how masculinity contest cultures operate, as well as show how they affect organizations and individual employees.
In her experiments, she had participants agree or disagree with statements such as “expressing any emotion other than anger or pride is seen as weak,” based on their perceptions of their own organization. Using advanced statistical techinques, Berdahl’s team was able to distill masculinity contest cultures down to four components: “showing no weakness,” “strength and stamina,” “putting work first” and “dog eat dog.”
Then they were able to show how these cultures are tied to a host of negative outcomes for workers and companies, such as burnout, turnover and poor well-being. And at the organization level, they can foment a dysfunctional office environment, toxic leadership and even bullying and harassment.
An imagined grievance
Based on this research, then, it seems like promoting rigid masculinity in the workplace is not the best solution for an arguably already struggling Meta.
What, then, led Zuckerberg to claim that the workplace has been neutered and must be infused with masculine energy? Has the American office really gone full “Legally Blonde”?
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