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

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 3

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 4

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 5

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 6

Why is there no UN Men?

Accepted Answer

As far as this site can document, nobody has ever proposed one. UN Women exists because women organised for it across a century of work that was ridiculed at the time. Nothing comparable has been organised for men and boys, and the route is not secret: one member state, one resolution, which is exactly how Canada carried the Day of the Girl Child from introduction to adoption in six weeks in 2011. The sentences get written and there is nowhere to send them.

Question 7

What is UN for Men Too?

Accepted Answer

A campaign 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.