Men are less likely to wear face masks because they’re ‘a sign of weakness’ and imagine how tired we are
Vice President Mike Pence failed to wear a mask while speaking with coronavirus patients.
Men are less likely to wear face masks amid the coronavirus pandemic, researchers have found.
Fellas, is it gay to help curb the spread of a devastating viral pandemic and protect vulnerable people from literally dying?
From recycling to sunsets to even comfortable chairs, some men struggle with seemingly everyday concepts that are apparently threats to their masculinity.
The newest addition to the list? One of the bare minimum things people need to do to help contain the spread of the deadly coronavirus – wearing a face mask.
With the economy pad-locked, livelihoods vanishing and a death toll ticking upwards each day, a report published Monday (May 11) has suggested that men are more likely to leave their face coverings at home.
Why? The men sampled by researched cited a belief not grounded by science, that men are less impacted by COVID-19, as well as how wearing a mask just is “not cool”.
You know what’s not cool? People dying.
Men less likely to wear face masks as they believe ‘they will be relatively unaffected by coronavirus’.
Researchers from Middlesex University London in England and the Mathematical Science Research Institute in California, US found that enforcing face maks has a “larger effect on men than on women”.
There are two main reasons for this, the researchers said.
“The fact that men less than women intend to wear a face-covering can be partly explained by the fact that men more than women believe that they will be relatively unaffected by the disease,” co-authors Valerio Capraro and Hélène Barcelo wrote.”
This apparent impunity to the virus, the researchers found, was seeded by men not believing the overwhelming stacks of evidence, reports and data that suggests they are more likely to be impacted by COVID-19.
Moreover, a need to wear a face mask also collided with the men’s sense of social status.
“Men more than women agree that wearing a face-covering is shameful, not cool, a sign of weakness and a stigma,” Capraro and Barcelo wrote, “and these gender differences also mediate gender differences intentions to wear a face covering”.
Researchers sampled 2,459 Amazon Mechanical Turk recruits for the study.
