We all benefit from a more gender-equal society. Even men

International Women’s Day, on 8 March, is like an annual progress report on women’s rights, asking how far we have come. The findings of the UN Development Forum gender index, published on Thursday, provide a bleak answer: 90% of the population in 75 countries is biased against women. Meanwhile men’s rights activists, living in a parallel universe they deem “gynocentric”, believe “the efforts to enhance the rights of women have become toxic efforts to undermine the rights of men”.

This kind of narrative has been around for more than 30 years. Starting with fathers angry about custody rights, it mutated into a rabid men’s rights movement with distinctive male supremacist characteristics. More recently it entered the mainstream, overlapping with white supremacists, incels and the far right, and embodied in the person of Jordan Peterson.

They see rights as a zero-sum game, as if there existed only a limited pool of them, and if women gain more then men must inevitably have fewer. If women are now entering higher education in greater numbers than men, it must be because they’ve elbowed out the men. The shift from manufacturing to service jobs isn’t a macroeconomic and transnational trend but a plot by women – a “war on masculinity”. There’s even an International Men’s Day (and you thought there were already 365 of them?).

What makes this even more dispiriting is that there really is a lot wrong with men’s lives – the higher rates of male suicide attest to that. Yet the cause isn’t women’s rights but the very way that masculinity has been constituted in profit-obsessed, patriarchal cultures: as feminists have been saying for a long time, the patriachy damages not just women but also men.

The idea that women’s rights are gained at the expense of men’s is actually the opposite of the truth: there’s now a stack of evidence that men benefit from living in more gender-equal societies and that policies promoting gender equality improve the quality of life of everyone, not just for women. A recent WHO report comparing 41 European countries found that men’s health was poorer in more gender-unequal societies – the sexual division of labour harms men as well as women. When the sexes are more equal, men say they’re more satisfied with life. In more gender-equal societies such as the Nordic countries, apparently both men and women sleep better. The latter, a finding from a recent European study, suggests that this isn’t just because waking obligations and stresses affect our sleep but also because men in more equal societies take better care of themselves.

In more gender-equal societies men are half as likely to be depressed, less likely to commit suicide, have around a 40% smaller risk of dying a violent death and even suffer less from chronic back pain. Adolescent boys in those countries have fewer psychosomatic complaints and are more likely to use contraceptives. And sex? Contrary to the stereotypes, one study found that men with feminist partners reported greater sexual satisfaction, as did women with partners who supported feminism.

Related: Difficult Women by Helen Lewis review – a history of feminism in 11 fights

Before we hurtle into a gender-equal sexual nirvana, though, we need to factor in some other truths. Like the fact that most men benefit from male privilege and are unlikely to relinquish it voluntarily for some promised future gain. What’s more, just as women don’t form a single homogeneous group, neither do men: it’s hard to see what privileges an unemployed BME man with a disability could trade in for a good night’s sleep.

Some women will also respond to all this with a dismissive “who cares?”. Why should change only get enacted if it benefits men? Isn’t improving the lives of women a good enough reason for gender equality? We spend so much of our lives thinking about men’s needs, can’t we get time off for good behaviour? I have some sympathy for this view, and the one that voices concern that men will muscle their way into gender equality and make it all about them.

What gives me a smidgen of hope, though, are those men’s organisations and groups that, instead of blaming women, examine the ways in which traditional masculinities often harm men and women and try to develop alternatives. Bodies like White Ribbon (working with men to end violence against women), MenEngage Alliance and Promundo focus on changing the social norms of male behaviour, supporting men’s mental health and advancing gender equality.

So how far have we come? While today’s public debates around gender fluidity and #MeToo would have astounded us back in the 1980s, today’s realities would have shocked us: the conviction rate of (reported) rapes plummeted from 24% in 1985 to 2% in 2018 , yet the reporting of rapes in this period soared from 1,842 to 67,600. Around the world women’s reproductive rights are under attack and being rolled back. I look at current attempts to severely restrict abortion in Louisiana and weep.

Perhaps we should all move to Iceland. As it happens, Icelandic men have the highest life expectancy in Europe – and that’s not just down to the bracingly cold air and herring with everything: Iceland has a smaller economic and social gender gap than any other country.

Or perhaps more men need to join campaigns for gender equality – not only to signal that they’re the good guys or because it’s morally just, but also through enlightened self-interest.

• Anne Karpf is a writer and sociologist. She is the author of How to Age