PERIL launched the Gendered Violence Portfolio (GVP) in December 2024 to disrupt online misogyny through research, programs, and partnerships. Alongside the recent increase in the quantity of online misogyny, extremism researchers have long connected misogyny and gender-based violence with precursors to mass, public, and targeted violence, suggesting that disrupting online misogyny may have a downstream impact on violence.
“Man Up: Conversations on Gendered Hate in the Digital Age” is an original podcast created and produced by Long Story Short Media featuring leading extremism expert Cynthia Miller-Idriss as she explores the overlooked role of gender in fueling online hate — and creating gateways to violence against women and other communities. The podcast features honest conversations that reveal how misogyny is infecting our feeds and affecting our daily lives — from our games to our social media to across the manosphere — and what we can all do together to counter it.
Advancing Global Programs and Policy (Project Catalyst)
Catalyst is an international research and intervention project led by Christchurch Call Foundation. PERIL, in collaboration with a five-organization consortium, is leading four activities focused on addressing technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) across Canada, Jordan, and Kenya through integrated online and in-person activities. PERIL’s research activities include analyzing harmful online narrative and manipulation tracking via “codebooking” and focus group discussions with youth (ages 18-35) in Canada, Jordan, and Kenya. That research informs two PERIL interventions: video-based pre-bunking and three day in-person training for youth on gender norms, TFGBV, online manipulation, and skills for having productive dialogues to challenge harmful gender norms and misogyny with the outcome of increased ability and willingness to discuss these topics with people in their lives. Within Project Catalyst, PERIL has a leading role within the Policy Champions Programme, which trains and develops 30 worldwide leaders to focus on mitigating TFGBV, as well as the Global Policy Dialogue, a two-day conference hosted by Dame Jacinda Ardern at Oxford University that marked the launch of the Policy Principles from CCF and the Consortium.
Deep-Dive Toolkit: Building Resilient and Inclusive Communities of Knowledge (BRICK) (Gender-Based Harms Addendum)
In 2022, PERIL released the BRICK Toolkit (Building Resilient and Inclusive Communities of Knowledge) with funding from the Lumina Foundation to help higher education communities prevent harms and violence associated with extremism. In 2026, PERIL launched an addendum to BRICK, providing an in-depth framework to understand male supremacy and misogynist harm on college campuses. This addendum on gender-based harms reviews various forms of gender-based violence that university students face, how it affects college campuses, and identifies new and emerging forms of technology-facilitated gender-based violence – illuminating a blueprint for the role colleges and universities can play in preventing online misogyny on campus.
Cultivating Resilient Democracies
PERIL has undertaken a two-year, mixed-methods investigation into how the mainstreaming of gendered grievance narratives and anti-feminist conspiracy theories are driving affective polarization, weakening democratic resilience, and eroding social cohesion in the United States. The project will culminate in a book on how battles over gender and feminism affect American polarization. Research for the book is drawn from social media analysis and focus groups with 150 youth aged 18-24, including both college-enrolled and non-college enrolled.
Male Supremacy Codebook & Prebunking Videos
PERIL conducted a thematic analysis of propaganda, conspiracy theories and toxic digital content focused on the intersections of gender-based bigotry with the following: white supremacy, election conspiracies, anti-immigration attitudes, and antisemitism. Drawing from narratives identified in this research, PERIL is developing and testing pre-bunking videos to inoculate relevant digital communities and thereby combat anti-LGBTQ and anti-trans narratives online.
PERIL worked with Over Zero to track the evolution of online misogynist narratives across three key periods surrounding the 2024 election: the pre-election period; the period between election day and inauguration; and the post-election cycle period, following inauguration. The quantitative analysis of this digital content includes 26,722,977 posts over all three research periods, while the in-depth qualitative analysis examined 1,428 posts, evaluating both fringe platforms like 4chan, Gab, Telegram, Incels.is, as well as mainstream platforms like Instagram, Reddit, and X/Twitter. This analysis illuminated and provided structure to evolving and emerging male supremacist tropes surrounding the election, identifying tropes that carried salience in the post-election period to inform violence prevention work during future tense political moments. PERIL is using these findings to develop and test prebunking videos and is contracting with micro-influencers in male-influential spaces to help young men recognize and develop resilience to male supremacist manipulation techniques. PERIL will prepare these influencers to counter two hateful narratives, producing two videos that will be delivered to approximately 3,000-6,000 viewers, with PERIL examining efficacy and impact.
This resource is intended to raise awareness among administrators, faculty, and staff in higher education about the ways online extremist narratives about gender filter into campus culture, harming students, impeding academic success, and undermining campus cohesion. It supplements PERIL’s Building Resilient & Inclusive Communities of Knowledge (BRICK) toolkit developed in partnership with the Lumina Foundation. The BRICK toolkit identifies a set of tools and resources to help constituents across higher education—from campus leadership, to faculty, staff, and students—build resilience to violent supremacist ideologies, conspiracy theories, mis/dis/mal-information, propaganda, and hate speech.
Not Just a Joke: Understanding & Preventing Gender- & Sexuality-Based Bigotry helps educate and equip adults across caregiving capacities with information and resources that will help them recognize vulnerabilities and intervene safely and effectively. As the third guide in a growing suite of resources developed by SPLC and American University’s Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab (PERIL), the guide delivers the support caregivers need to ensure all young people are safe, healthy and embraced by their communities.
“These conversations are hard, but they’re so important,” said Dr. Pasha Dashtgard, Director of Research at PERIL. “Encouraging a shift in how we think about masculinity, femininity, and gender roles begins with open, ongoing conversations about sex, (social) media and the messages we consume. Understanding the roots of gender-based bigotry means diving into the digital waters that young people are swimming in and learning how to discuss the messages they’re encountering there.”
The Male Supremacy Scale (MSS) is a survey instrument used to define, operationalize, and develop a quantitative measure of contemporary male supremacy (Dashtgard, 2022). While there are a number of scales and instruments to measure sexism, masculinity, lay theories of gender, and attitudes towards women, there has not been a scale to measure the emerging form of male supremacy as articulated by the present-day constellation of sexist and toxic masculine spaces found online.
Constructing the initial scale to measure this emerging form of online male supremacy was a multi-step process, involving qualitative online ethnographic research conducted over many years, thematic coding, a collaborative effort to create and refine items, a pilot test, distilling down the survey instrument, and an iterative process of factor analytic scale construction and validation across four studies (N = 3,116), all culminating in the development of the Male Supremacy Scale (MSS). The MSS is a 15-item instrument is comprised of three subscales: Anti-feminism, Female Dishonesty in Relationships, and “Women Like Alphas”.
The MSS has been used to measure how many male supremacist beliefs 14-30 year olds across the US endorse (N = 4,156), it has been used to scale and categorize male supremacist influencers on YouTube, and has been used to collect data from adults in the US, Germany, and Argentina.
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