Mark Zuckerberg wrapped up a very busy week of policy shifts — from scrapping DEI initiatives at Facebook to introducing recommendations for political content on Threads and Instagram — by appearing on Joe Rogan's podcast for three grueling hours and claiming that the corporate world needs more "masculine energy" akin to the discipline of martial arts.
"A lot of our society has become very...neutered or emasculated," Zuckerberg said before noting that he does, indeed, have sisters and daughters, removing any questions that what he is about to say might be rooted in sexism.
"Masculine energy is good, and obviously, society has plenty of that, but I think corporate culture was really trying to get away from it," Zuckerberg continued. "I think having a culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive."
It should go without saying that framing masculinity as inherently tied to aggression is harmful and normalizes violent stereotypes — but apparently, it needs to be said. Zuckerberg went on to claim that corporate America "used to be very masculine" and "hyper-aggressive," acknowledging that this might have made women feel the systems were biased against them, which he conceded was "not good either."
"It's one thing to say we want to be welcoming and make a good environment for everyone, and I think it's another to basically say that masculinity is bad," Zuckerberg told Rogan. "And I think we swung, culturally, to that part of the spectrum where [people think] masculinity is toxic [and] we have to get rid of it completely. It's like, no. Both of these things are good."
Zuckerberg's claim that masculinity in corporate America is a thing of the past is demonstrably false. Men currently hold about 90 percent of CEO positions in Fortune 500 companies — the highest number of female representation we've ever seen, yet still overwhelmingly male-dominated. His remarks come across as a transparent gender-based dog whistle, conveying the idea of masculinity as a cultural value under threat.
The concepts of masculinity and femininity have been used to keep women out of the workplace for centuries, and, as Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, the author of Seven Steps to Leading a Gender-Balanced Business wrote in the Harvard Business Review in 2016, "perpetuate the rigid strictures of masculinity."
"While gender biases and inflexible systems still hold back working mothers, research has found that fathers who take time off to care for their families may be even more harshly penalized at work," Wittenberg-Cox wrote. "Even a short absence results in lower performance evaluations and fewer awards, something that doesn’t happen when men take time off for other, more 'macho' reasons (such as taking a vacation or training for a marathon)."
These biases reinforce oppressive systems that disadvantage women, nonbinary, and trans people — compounding challenges like the widening gender pay gap, the erosion of reproductive rights, and the resurgence of traditional gender roles via the tradwife trend. Corporate views on masculinity and femininity continue to undermine progress, with their harmful effects playing out in real-time.
Zuckerberg’s rhetoric also ignores decades of scholarship on the social construction of gender. Judith Butler, for instance, argues that gender is a construct and a verb more than a noun. You aren't ruled by some essence of a man or a woman inside you, but the expression itself is what constitutes your gender. If Zuckerberg were following this logic — which he is not — he might acknowledge that corporate environments perpetuate rigid and harmful power structures under the guise of gender binaries.
But lest we forget, Facebook began as a platform created to rate women based on their looks.
Butler's exploration of gender performance isn't just a matter of communication: It is explicitly used as a mechanism of oppressive power dynamics. They argue that sex and gender are socially constructed, and they are ultimately just different facets of the same arbitrary demand system leveraged against us all.
Moreover, what does "masculine energy" or "feminine energy" even mean? One of the most glaring problems with Zuckerberg's duality is that he fails to account for the diversity of experiences among men and women across different identities. As Elizabeth Spelman, a philosopher and professor at Smith College, pointed out nearly 40 years ago (when Zuckerberg was just two years old), such unitary gender notions assume gender is constructed independently of race, class, ethnicity, and nationality. If gender were separate from race and class, for example, all men would experience manhood in the same way, and all women would experience womanhood in the same way.
Zuckerberg’s framing erases these nuances, reducing complex dynamics to simplistic stereotypes.
It's no coincidence that Zuckerberg feels comfortable saying this now. President-elect Donald Trump, a notorious sexist, is about to take office, something the Meta CEO no doubt took notice of as he went on a tirade of removing safety protocols for protected people this past week.
When Zuckerberg, one of the richest and most powerful people in the world, tells Joe Rogen, one of the most popular and influential podcast hosts in the world, that companies need more "masculine energy," he is saying they need more men. He says this as he lifts prohibitions on Meta platforms against some hate speech, including allowing users to post content that calls women property. He says this as he gets rid of fact-checkers on Meta platforms in favor of Community Notes, a decision faced with incredible backlash from civil and human rights organizations. He says this as Meta ends its diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, which studies show have had a positive impact on women in the workforce overall. He says this as he instructs facilities managers to remove tampons from men's bathrooms in Meta’s offices in California, Texas, and New York. He says this as Meta deletes trans and nonbinary themes on its Messenger app.
His remarks — and the actions backing them — serve as a reminder that power, unchecked, will always seek to maintain itself, even, and especially, at the expense of progress.
