A Man's World, but a Woman's Planet?
What lifestyle magazines reveal about the eco-gender gap — and why it matters.
There's a trend that has been nagging at me for years. Walk into any supermarket, and the pattern is right there in the toiletries aisle: women's products in curved bottles adorned with flowers and leaves, men's in dark, angular containers that look more like industrial equipment than skincare. Flip open a lifestyle magazine — or scroll through one online — and the same story unfolds. Women are offered recipes for plant-based dinners and guides to sustainable living. Men are sold steak, fast cars and the latest gadgets.
Is this just a reflection of preferences? Or is something deeper going on? And why is nobody talking about it?
Researchers have long documented a so-called "eco-gender gap" — the consistent finding, across countries and cultures, that women tend to show higher levels of environmental concern than men. The outcomes are tangible. Women are more likely to recycle, adopt plant-based diets, purchase sustainable products and support green policy. Men's carbon footprints tend to be heavier, driven in part by greater consumption of meat, private vehicles, and personal electronics.
These patterns are well established. What is less well understood is where they come from — and how they are maintained. Socialisation certainly appears to play a role.
Language shapes the stories we live by
The starting point for my own research was a simple premise: language is a fundamental medium of our lifelong socialisation. The words we use do not simply reflect the world around us. They actively construct it. The discourse we are repeatedly exposed to — the stories, the images, the assumptions embedded in the texts we consume — shapes our mental models of what matters, how we should act and even who we are.
This is a central premise of ecolinguistics, a field that explores the role of language in our relationship with the living world. And it raises an interesting question: if language shapes identity, what are men and women being told about their relationship to nature?
To find out, I applied ecolinguistic content and discourse analysis to six major US and UK lifestyle magazines — Men's Health, GQ and Esquire on one side; Women's Health, Redbook and Marie Claire on the other. Lifestyle magazines are among the only mainstream media forms that remain explicitly and unapologetically gendered. Aspirational in tone, broad in scope, and ostensibly apolitical, they offer a uniquely clear window into how gender identities are shaped and sold in popular culture.
What I found was striking.
Three divergent stories
On consumption, the magazines painted very different pictures of what men and women should eat, drive and own. Men's publications consistently linked high-carbon goods — red meat, petrol vehicles, luxury gadgets — to masculine status and identity. A striking 86% of red meat images across both publication sets appeared in men's magazines. Greener alternatives were dismissed, ridiculed, or tolerated only when they offered some personal benefit. Women's magazines, by contrast, directed readers toward vegetarian recipes, electric cars and sustainable shopping — not as enjoyable choices, but as expressions of care and responsibility.
On social values, the divergence was equally pronounced. Women's publications placed care at the centre of feminine identity — care for family, community, strangers, and by extension, the wider living world. Men's magazines, meanwhile, focused almost exclusively on individual achievement, wealth and accumulation. Role models presented to male readers were billionaires, competitive athletes and celebrities — none celebrated for environmental endeavour.
On nature itself, the contrast was perhaps most revealing. Women's magazines gave the natural world intrinsic value — featuring nature-inspired aesthetics and emotional connection to the living world as regular themes, with sustainability woven throughout as an expected part of everyday life. In men's publications, nature was largely absent. In some cases, it was quite literally erased — outdoor backgrounds digitally removed from product imagery in favour of sleek geometric designs. Where nature did appear, it tended to be framed as an adversary: something to be conquered, endured, or dominated.
Not a single article explicitly focused on sustainability was found across all the men's magazines reviewed.
Why this matters beyond the magazine rack
Most of us don't even read lifestyle magazines, or not outside the airport or dentist's office. So why does all this matter? Because what their pages reveal is a snapshot of a far bigger story. They highlight the ideals of masculinity and femininity that we are all encouraged to aspire to. As it turns out, much of that story is not new.
The association of environmental concern with femininity has a long history. By the early twentieth century, environmental campaigns were largely driven by women — deemed an acceptable extension of their domestic role as caregivers. Male environmentalists, meanwhile, deliberately framed conservation in economic terms to avoid the taint of femininity. A century later, those dynamics have not disappeared. They have simply migrated into new forms: green marketing targeted almost exclusively at women; eco-friendly products coded pink; sustainability positioned as a form of "municipal housekeeping" passed down, once again, to women as an extension of their unpaid labour.
The social consequences of this feminisation of environmentalism are real and measurable. Studies show that men are more sensitive to gender cues when making consumer choices — and more likely to avoid behaviours they perceive as feminine. This extends from individual decisions (recycling, carrying a reusable bag, choosing a plant-based meal) to the political sphere. One study of the European Parliament found that while male and female MEPs expressed almost equal levels of private environmental concern, men were considerably less likely to act on those sentiments when voting on policy.
When sustainability is coded as feminine in a world that still affords higher status to that which is deemed masculine, the social cost of environmental engagement for men becomes real. And the consequences play out in boardrooms and at ballot boxes, not just in supermarket aisles.
New stories to live by
None of this is inevitable. The stories we live by are not genetically determined — they are the product of historical process and lifelong socialisation, in which the media we consume plays a central role.
There are signs that things can shift. Research suggests that men engage more readily with pro-environmental behaviours when their masculinity is affirmed in other ways — and that exposure to male role models who visibly champion environmental causes can counter resistance linked to gender identity. The values associated with hegemonic masculinity are by no means inherently at odds with environmentalism: self-discipline, protecting what you love, solving hard problems. Reframing sustainability as a challenge worthy of masculine energy, rather than a form of domestic virtue, may be one of the most important things communicators, educators and media makers can do.
And it starts with noticing the stories that have become so familiar we no longer see them.
'A Man's World, but a Woman's Planet? Exploring gendered narratives contributing to environmental attitudes and behaviours through US and UK lifestyle magazines' is published in Women & Language, Vol. 48.2, Fall 2025. doi: 10.34036/WL.2025.009
Read the full article here.
