In January 2025, Mark Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan that the corporate world needed more “masculine energy” and a culture that “celebrates the aggression a bit more.” Twenty months later, the political movement he was courting looks much weaker. Donald Trump’s average approval rating fell to 38% in September, the lowest of his second term. But the ideal Zuckerberg praised remains omnipresent in corporate America. Women lead 56 Fortune 500 companies this year, a record that still only amounts to 11.2% of the list. They hold 29% of C-suite roles, the same share as in 2024, according to McKinsey and LeanIn.org’s “Women in the Workplace” report. Bragging, shows of strength, and risk-taking get rewarded far beyond the military, while cooperation and caution continue to be seen as weakness.
The labor market is moving in the opposite direction. In 2025, private education and healthcare, where women hold 77% of jobs, added around 800,000 positions while all other sectors combined lost about 500,000, according to this analysis of BLS data. Many of the jobs created are badly paid. In my book En finir avec la productivité (“Against Productivity” is how I would translate the title), I argued that economists label care work “low productivity” mostly because the workers earn low wages. The true economic contribution of essentially female workers is seen as negligible even though it actually sustains the productivity of everybody else (you can’t work in finance or accounting if there’s nobody to look after your toddlers, for example).
The same logic applies inside companies. The work that helps the team—such as mentoring, organizing and defusing conflicts—falls disproportionately to women and goes unrewarded, as Linda Babcock and her coauthors show in The No Club, while self-promotion gets rewarded as leadership. Companies that build their culture on dominance will eventually face the bill. Two French authors, Lucile Peytavin and Élise Fabing, recently tried to price what they call “the cost of virility at work.” Their book made me want to look at the American situation, and it’s at least as scary.
Risk as a badge of honor
Men accounted for 4,657 of the 5,070 fatal work injuries recorded in the United States in 2024 (about 92%), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The first explanation is the type of jobs men hold (in construction or transportation). But a lot of deaths are also attributable to the norm that tells men to ignore fear, skip precautions, never admit they don’t know how to do something, and avoid getting help.
That norm can change, as two researchers discovered when they studied two offshore oil platforms (“Manly Men, Oil Platforms, and Breaking Stereotypes”) in the Gulf of Mexico. Their owner decided to transform the culture by focusing on safety and continuous learning. Workers then stopped putting on a show of fearlessness and accepted that it made sense to report mistakes and problems. The company’s accident rate fell by 84%. Its productivity increased spectacularly.
Rules are for other people and the masculinity contest
The second cost comes from people who believe they are above the rules and from peer groups that protect them. In the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners’ 2024 global study of occupational fraud, men committed 75% of cases and caused higher losses: a median of $158,000 per case, versus $100,000 for women. This has dramatic consequences for every other rule-abiding employee: When you see that rule-breakers are rewarded, you lose all motivation and stop trusting your employer.
The third cost is also very heavy. In 2018, a Harvard Kennedy School study described work as a “masculinity contest” governed by four implicit norms: show no weakness, display strength and stamina, put work first, and treat colleagues as rivals. These researchers then created a survey to measure how strongly a workplace follows these norms. When scores were high, they found more toxic leadership, less psychological safety, more bullying and harassment, and more burnout and intention to quit.
The “put work first” norm means being busy is a status symbol. A 70-hour workweek is a source of pride. An inbox with thousands of unread emails means you matter. And people who sacrifice their entire lives to their jobs are convinced they don’t owe anyone anything, which can make them blind to the suffering around them. If they endure, everyone else should endure too.
The damage shows up in harassment settlements, legal fees, and workers’ compensation claims. The higher costs come months or years later in the form of absenteeism, ill health, and turnover. Every lost employee must be replaced, and the people who stay are less productive.
The mirage of the top performer
Our metrics don’t show the real cost because they focus on individuals and ignore the consequences of individuals’ behavior on the people around them. Productivity measures ignore externalities. A factory that dumps waste in a river looks highly productive because the community pays for the cleanup. The numbers of a toxic star look great because colleagues, managers, and HR absorb the damage. Productivity is a collective achievement, built on cooperation, trust, and a lot of invisible work, yet we keep crediting it to individuals.
Stanford University’s Robert Sutton urged companies to calculate this “total cost of assholes” in The No Asshole Rule almost 20 years ago. One company did the math for a star salesman Sutton calls Ethan. After adding up the assistants who quit on him, his anger management training, legal costs, and the overtime he imposed on others, it concluded that he cost $160,000 in a single year. Later research confirmed Sutton’s intuition. Harvard Business School researchers analyzed data on some 50,000 workers and found that avoiding a toxic hire is worth $12,489 to a company, more than twice the amount that a top-1% performer brings in.
Overvaluing stars produces exhausting productivity theater, with meetings dominated by a few silverback gorillas who claim their company owes them every success. Meanwhile, the people who listen, mentor, defuse conflicts, and keep teams together remain invisible. Wouldn’t companies be wise to send all their future leaders to humility training? Do we really need more assertiveness?
Measure it now
There will be more scandals in the years to come. But we shouldn’t need to wait for one. You can start tracking what dominance culture costs your company: turnover and sick leave by team, harassment complaints, safety incidents, and team performance alongside individual results. When sick leave climbs in one department, the data already tells you a lot about the person running it.
Researchers have been documenting these costs for years, but it seems we have to make the case all over again. The current enthusiasm for “masculine energy” will leave burned-out teams, lawsuits, and lost talent behind. If we manage to put numbers on these costs, the bill is likely to be smaller. Men have as much to gain from that accounting as women do.
