NCFM – Understanding Words About Prejudice Against Men and Women

July 22, 2026

By NCFM

NOTE: This article was inspired by the following comment from AR posted with our article NCFM, UN Women’s Venezuela Statement Highlights Global Gynocentrism and the Empathy Gap: “My whole family used to many years ago, use Livio Dictionary. And it says “Misandry” isn’t even a word! The keyboard app that I use, does highlight my word in red as if I spelled it wrong whenever I write- “Misandry, Misandrist, Androphobic, Misandristic” so I must say the globe not, yet recognize there could be hatred and bias against men. This is the reason data collection & research paper publication which would document the lack of terms defining men’s problems and also tangible proof that it is sexism.” Misandrist was not recognized by the dictionary here either. AR, you are correct, here, anemic lexicon offers tangible proof of bias against men.

Understanding Words About Prejudice Against Men and Women

Most people have heard the word misogyny, which means hatred of women. It appears in news stories, school lessons, and social media. But many people have not heard the matching word for hatred of men: misandry. Some phone keyboards even mark “misandry” as a spelling mistake, which makes people think the word is not real.

This article explains the words used for prejudice against men, the words used for prejudice against women, how they compare, why some words are not widely recognized, how textbooks handle them, and what cultural, social, and political effects this language gap creates.

Words That Describe Prejudice Against Men

The following terms relate to prejudice against men. Unless otherwise noted, these words are found in Merriam-Webster, Oxford, Cambridge, Collins, and Dictionary.com.

Misandrist — A person who hates men.
Found in major dictionaries, though used less often than misogynist.

Misandristic — Showing or expressing hatred of men.
Rare; not listed as a headword in most major dictionaries but occasionally used in writing.

Note: Windows-based computer dictionary does not recognize misandristic.

Androphobic — Fear or strong dislike of men.
Rare; not in major dictionaries. Sometimes confused with androphobia (fear of men), which is recognized in psychological contexts.

Words That Describe Prejudice Against Women

Misogyny – Hatred of women. Very common in media, school, and public discussions.

Misogynist – A person who hates women. A person who hates women.

Misogynistic – Showing or expressing hatred of women. Very common; appears in major dictionaries.

Gynophobic – Fear or strong dislike of women. Rare, but appears more often than “androphobic.”

Dictionary Recognition

Well Recognized – Misandry · Misandrist · Misogyny · Misogynist · Misogynistic

Poorly Recognized or Missing – Misandristic · Androphobic · Gynophobic

Words about prejudice against women are widely accepted and used. Words about prejudice against men exist, but some are not officially recognized.

How Textbooks Use These Words

Most textbooks teach words like misogyny, misogynist, and misogynistic. These appear often in society and academic writing. But textbooks almost never include the matching words for prejudice against men.

Textbooks follow common usage — Misogyny-related words appear everywhere, so they get included. Misandry-related words appear far less often, so they get left out.
Textbooks rely on major dictionaries — If a word is not in a major dictionary, textbook authors skip it.
Focus on prejudice against women — Lessons often center on discrimination against women, not men.
Avoiding uncommon words — Words like misandristic and androphobic are rarely taught.
This creates a language gap — Students learn one side of the vocabulary but not the other.
Why this matters — If students only learn words for prejudice against women, they may think prejudice against men does not exist or does not matter.

Cultural, Social, and Political Outcomes of the Language Gap

The lack of widely recognized words for prejudice against men affects how people think, how society behaves, and how leaders make decisions.

Cultural Outcomes

One-sided awareness: People hear “misogyny” often but rarely hear “misandry.”
Media imbalance: News and entertainment use “misogynist” but almost never “misandrist.”
Social stigma: People who use words like “misandry” may be told it is “not real.”

Social Outcomes

People learn sexism in one direction. Boys and men feel ignored. If their experiences “don’t have a name,” they may feel their problems do not matter.
Harder conversations: Without shared vocabulary, it is harder to talk about male-directed prejudice.

Political Outcomes

One-sided policy discussions: Lawmakers use misogyny-related terms but rarely misandry-related ones.
Funding follows language: Issues that are named get funding. Issues without vocabulary get ignored.
Political frustration: Many people may feel the system is biased or incomplete.

Is the Lexicon Gap Deliberate?

One of the most important questions surrounding the vocabulary gap between misogyny and misandry is whether it happened by accident — or by design. The honest answer is both, depending on where you look.

No single conspiracy. The gap was not the product of one coordinated plan. Language does not change overnight, and no single organization decided that words for prejudice against men should be kept out of the mainstream. Most language shifts happen gradually, through thousands of small decisions made by editors, academics, publishers, educators, and journalists over many decades. These choices accumulate into patterns that can look intentional — even when no single actor planned the outcome.

Historical roots matter. The word misandry originated in the late 19th century, but its early uses were politically loaded. It was frequently deployed as an attack against first-wave feminism — critics used “man-hating” to dismiss women who sought equal rights. That history left a lasting mark. Because the word had been weaponized against women’s movements, mainstream institutions — publishers, universities, and media organizations — became reluctant to treat it as a neutral, legitimate term. Scholars Alice Marwick and Robyn Caplan have documented how this association helped push misandry to the margins of respectable discourse.

Academic framing shaped the vocabulary. Some scholars made deliberate intellectual arguments that misandry was not a valid parallel to misogyny. For example, anthropologist David D. Gilmore argued in 1997 that hatred of men specifically as men was “extremely rare in historical records.” Rather than accept misandry as a working term, he proposed an entirely different word — viriphobia — to describe the phenomenon. When influential academics argue that a word is unnecessary or illegitimate, dictionaries, textbooks, and curricula tend to follow their lead. These scholarly positions directly influenced how the word was treated — or ignored — in educational and reference materials.

Deliberate language reform created an asymmetry. Feminist language reform movements of the 1970s through the 1990s actively and intentionally campaigned to bring terms like misogyny, sexual harassment, and date rape into everyday use. These were organized, sustained efforts — backed by advocacy groups, academic publications, and media allies — and they were largely successful. There was no equivalent organized movement to promote a parallel vocabulary for prejudice against men. That absence was not neutral: it meant that one side of the gender-prejudice lexicon received institutional support, while the other did not. The asymmetry was not purely accidental; it was, in part, the result of who organized and who did not.

Media and editorial choices amplified the gap. Editors, publishers, and journalists make active decisions about which terms to normalize and which to treat as fringe. Because misogyny-related terms had organized cultural momentum, widespread academic support, and clear political relevance, media outlets chose to amplify them. Words like misandry lacked that ecosystem of support and were therefore treated as marginal — regardless of whether they accurately described real experiences.

Some voices deliberately discouraged the word. Research shows that certain scholars and commentators actively worked to keep misandry out of mainstream usage — not just by ignoring it, but by labeling it a political tool of anti-feminist movements and arguing that it had no legitimate place in serious discussion. This deliberate pushback added another layer of suppression on top of the word’s already complicated history.

The outcome: partly organic, partly deliberate. Whether fully planned or not, the result was a language environment in which one side of the prejudiced vocabulary flourished while the other was suppressed. Some of this reflects genuine differences in how gender-based prejudice was studied, experienced, and documented throughout history. But some of it involved deliberate choices by people in positions of linguistic and cultural power — in academia, publishing, media, and advocacy — about which experiences deserved names, and which did not.

What does this mean for readers? The evidence suggests the lexicon gap is partly organic — reflecting real historical differences in how prejudice was studied and discussed — and partly deliberate — shaped by intentional choices in academic publishing, media coverage, and organized advocacy. Understanding both dimensions helps explain why correcting the gap is not simply a matter of adding new words to a dictionary. It requires changing the cultural and institutional habits that kept those words from being used in the first place.

Conclusion

Words like misandry and misandrist are real and recognized, but they are not used as often as their opposites. Other words, like misandristic and androphobic, are barely recognized at all. Textbooks rarely teach these terms, which creates a gap in what students learn and understand.

This language gap leads to cultural, social, and political effects that shape how society talks about fairness and how people understand prejudice.

Knowing both sets of words helps everyone talk more clearly about respect, fairness, and how people treat each other — no matter who they are.

Correcting the language gap is not about taking anything away from women or minimizing misogyny. It is about adding missing words, balancing the vocabulary, and making sure everyone’s experiences can be described clearly and fairly.

Language shapes understanding. Understanding shapes fairness. Fairness should shape society.