Why Your EDI Strategy Has a Blind Spot: Online Misogyny at Home

The gap in most EDI strategies

Ask most HR Directors whether their EDI strategy addresses violence against women and girls, and the answer will be yes. Ask whether it addresses the role of online misogyny in shaping the attitudes that their employees bring to work, and the answer will almost certainly be no.

This is a significant gap — and one that is becoming harder to ignore. The manosphere, the ecosystem of misogynistic online content that includes influencers such as Andrew Tate, incel communities and associated ideological networks, is not a youth problem that ends when young men enter the workforce. It is a cultural formation that shapes attitudes, language and behaviour across age groups and employment contexts.

An EDI strategy that addresses gender-based harassment and discrimination in the workplace without addressing the online culture that normalises and amplifies these attitudes is treating symptoms rather than causes.

What the evidence shows

Research from the University of York published in PLOS ONE in February 2025 found a statistical correlation between school-level engagement with online misogyny and increased sexist discrimination against women in that setting. While this research focuses on schools, the mechanism is not institution-specific: environments in which significant numbers of people have been exposed to misogynistic online content exhibit higher rates of gendered discrimination.

The 2024 Girlguiding Girls' Attitudes Survey found that 95% of women aged 17 to 21 had experienced sexism. These are the women entering your workforce. Many will have spent their formative years navigating misogynistic content online, experiencing gendered harassment from male peers, and developing coping strategies that include self-censorship, reduced visibility, and avoidance of male-dominated spaces.

Your EDI data — if you are collecting it — will not show online misogyny as a category. But its effects are visible in your gender pay gap data, your promotion rates, your harassment disclosures, and your staff survey scores on psychological safety.

What good looks like

Organisations that are addressing this gap effectively are taking three interconnected approaches.

Naming it explicitly. Effective VAWG-focused EDI strategies name online misogyny as a contributing factor to workplace gender inequality, not just as an external social problem. This framing matters because it changes what organisations feel entitled to address. Training that builds awareness of how online culture shapes workplace behaviour is a legitimate and increasingly common part of advanced EDI provision.

Building critical media literacy. Employees who can recognise misogynistic content and understand the mechanisms by which it shapes attitudes — algorithmic amplification, social proof, the gradual normalisation of extreme positions — are better equipped to interrogate their own biases. This is not about telling employees what to think. It is about giving them analytical tools.

Addressing it at the institutional level. The most effective organisations do not rely solely on individual education. They review their institutional practices: their promotion and recognition criteria, their approaches to flexible working, their management training, and their response to disclosures. Online misogyny literacy should be embedded in management development, not delivered as a standalone awareness session.

Connecting to the VAWG framework

The government's stated mission to halve violence against women and girls explicitly names employers as part of the solution. The 2025 RSHE statutory guidance names VAWG prevention as a curriculum obligation for schools — a signal that the regulatory direction is towards institutions taking active responsibility for the attitudes their people hold, not simply for the behaviour that occurs on their premises.

Employers who are ahead of this curve — who have built online misogyny literacy into their EDI frameworks, their management training, and their employee education offer — will be better placed to meet emerging regulatory expectations and, more importantly, to build workplaces where women can participate fully and safely.