Is there a UN for men?

Question 1

Accepted Answer

No. The United Nations has UN Women. There is no UN Men, and no global UN entity whose subject is men and boys. Men and boys are covered by the universal agencies. The World Health Organization runs global suicide prevention, the International Labour Organization exists for workplace deaths, UN-Habitat for homelessness. Being covered by a universal body is not the same as having one whose job you are. Two exceptions are worth knowing and are set out here rather than left for a critic to find. The WHO Regional Committee for Europe adopted a Strategy on the health and well-being of men by resolution EUR/RC68/R4 in September 2018, two years after adopting a women's strategy; it named an owning programme, required reporting, and that reporting closed with a final report in 2023. And Security Council resolution 2467 of 2019, at paragraph 32, recognises men and boys as targets of sexual violence in conflict and urges states to protect male survivors. Neither is a standing global entity comparable to UN Women. The regional one is the better argument for this campaign rather than against it: it shows the thing can be adopted, and it was, once, and then it ended.

Question 2

Why not a UN for men?

Accepted Answer

Because nobody has asked for one through the process that creates UN bodies. The route is ordinary and it is not closed. UN Women was created in 2010 by a General Assembly resolution. So was the UN Office of Counter-Terrorism in 2017, and the UN Youth Office in 2022. All three went straight to the Assembly floor rather than through a committee. The Youth Office is the closest precedent and the most recent: a dedicated office for a demographic group, four years ago, tabled by the President of the General Assembly. Nothing comparable has been proposed for men and boys. The obstacle this campaign documents is not a refusal. It is that the sentences about male life expectancy and male suicide get written and then have no body to go to.

Question 3

What issues affecting men and boys has the UN written down?

Accepted Answer

Several, in its own documents, over two decades. None of them has an entity, a focal point or an indicator attached. The UN's own reporting records that 94 per cent of all detained children are boys in the administration of justice and in conflict and national-security settings; that almost 93 per cent of the world's prison population is male; that men and boys are targets of sexual violence in conflict, including in detention; that pressures on men “even reduce men's life expectancies” and that men are “significantly more likely to die by suicide than women”; and that in 73 countries the upper secondary enrolment gap runs against boys, against 48 where it runs against girls. Every one of those is a UN or UN-agency document. The finding of this site is not that the UN fails to notice. It is that noticing is where it stops.

Question 4

Do any UN resolutions name men and boys?

Accepted Answer

Not in the title. Across every General Assembly resolution from 1995 to 2025, not one is titled for men, boys, males or fathers. 171 are titled for women. The clearest single test is the resolution that created UN Women. A/RES/64/289, adopted 2 July 2010, uses the word women 43 times. It uses the words men, boys, male and girls zero times. That is checkable in about thirty seconds and the PDF is held in this site's archive. Men and boys do appear inside other resolutions, and one goes further than recognition. A/RES/76/304 of 2022 calls on the UN system to strengthen policies offering “access to justice, remedies and assistance to male victims and survivors”, to challenge “cultural assumptions about male invulnerability”, and requests the Secretary-General to report on implementation. It is stated here because it is the strongest thing anyone could put against this campaign's argument, and it should be found here first rather than used against us later. It creates no entity, no focal point and no indicator. It is a clause inside a resolution about violence against women and girls, which is what almost every mention of men and boys at the UN is.

Question 5

Has the UN ever set up anything for men's health?

Accepted Answer

Once. The WHO Regional Committee for Europe adopted a men's health strategy by resolution in 2018. Its reporting cycle closed in 2023 and nothing replaced it. Resolution EUR/RC68/R4, adopted in Rome on 19 September 2018 by the 53 member states of the WHO European Region, “ADOPTS the strategy on the health and well-being of men in the WHO European Region”, then urges member states and requests the Regional Director to report. It carried a named owning programme and a five-year costing. Two progress reports were delivered as required, and the second was final. In the framework that succeeded it, the word men appears once, in a footnote. This is the strongest single answer to anyone who says the ask is impossible: it has been done, at regional level, and then allowed to lapse.

Question 6

Is International Men's Day a UN day?

Accepted Answer

No. International Men's Day, 19 November, is not on the United Nations list of international days. On the UN calendar, 19 November is World Toilet Day, established by General Assembly resolution A/RES/67/291. The list carries around thirteen observances for women and girls and none for men and boys. A day on that list is not decoration: it is how the system decides what gets reported on, and budgeted for, in the year that follows.

Question 7

Has the UN ever written anything about men and boys?

Accepted Answer

Yes, twice that this site can document, twenty years apart. Neither sentence was given to any body to act on. In March 2004 the Commission on the Status of Women adopted agreed conclusions at its forty-eighth session recognising that men and boys sometimes face discriminatory barriers and practices. The Economic and Social Council endorsed them. In September 2024 UN Women published an explainer stating that pressures on men “even reduce men's life expectancies” and that men are “significantly more likely to die by suicide than women”. Both are quoted in full, with the documents, in the two articles on this site.

Question 8

Does UN Women work on men and boys?

Accepted Answer

Yes. HeForShe, and the approach it calls transforming patriarchal masculinities, are aimed at men. UN Women states that this work aligns with broader gender equality objectives and remains accountable to feminist principles. That is an organisation saying plainly what its men-and-boys work answers to, and it is what UN Women was created for. Its mandate is women and girls. So a sentence about male life expectancy, written on its own site, has no owner inside it. This is not a complaint about UN Women. Asking it to carry men's outcomes is asking the wrong body.

Question 9

Are men and boys counted in the Sustainable Development Goals?

Accepted Answer

Partly, and not by name. Father and paternity appear zero times across the 234 indicators, and so do mother and maternity. SDG 5 is the gender goal. Its text is “all women and girls”, and it carries nine targets and fourteen indicators. The framework has no vocabulary for parents at all: father, paternity, mother and maternity are each zero, and maternal appears twice, both in maternal mortality. Where the difference does show is in who is named as a group: women 37 times to men 8, every one of the eight inside a pair such as “men, women and children”, and girls 11 to boys 2. Universal targets do cover men by construction, and that is worth saying first. But what gets named is what gets a target, and what gets a target is what gets measured.

Question 10

Why is there no UN Men?

Accepted Answer

Because nobody organised for one. UN Women exists because women did, across a century of work that was ridiculed at the time. The comparison people reach for is unfair to the women who did the work. UN Women was not granted; it was won, over decades of organising, by people who were mocked for it. Nothing comparable has been organised for men and boys. That is the honest answer to this question, and it is uncomfortable in both directions: it means the gap is not something done to men, and it means the remedy is not a complaint but the same slow work. See the question above for the procedural route, which is short and open.

Question 11

What is UN for Men Too?

Accepted Answer

Independent research by Mikal Steen Monslaup, supported by Manderådet in Denmark and MannsForum in Norway. It is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, the United Nations. It asks for men and boys to be named in the machinery that already exists: a body with them in its mandate, a focal point so that a member state asking who handles this is told a name, and an indicator so the direction can be reported every year rather than mentioned once every twenty. It does not propose reducing UN Women's budget, and says so in those words. Every figure it publishes carries a primary source, and every correction to those figures is published, numbered and dated.