PERIL’s Gendered Violence Division analyzes patterns of gender-based bigotry and violence, including against the LGBTQ+ community, and designs and tests tools to prevent and respond to gendered hate and violence.
Mapping Misogyny
New and disturbing misogynistic memes and trends appear online every single day. PERIL’s researchers study emerging themes so that our lab and its partners can be in the best position to counter these disturbing new trends.
Trainings for Educators: Managing Misogyny in our Schools
There is so much gender-based violence enabled by technology that the field has created an acronym as shorthand: TEGBV (Tech Enabled GBV). In response to unprecedented requests from educational institutions across the country, PERIL offers tailored trainings to help educators and institutions prepare and respond to a range of harms from TEGBV, from undressing apps to the prevalence of revenge porn and the sextortion of teenage boys.
Building a Network of Support for Boys and Men
“The crisis of masculinity does not need to be a crisis of misogyny.” Our boys and men need a place where they can talk openly and honestly about their lives, their experiences, their challenges, and their needs. To this end, PERIL will develop a national network of peer groups that will offer a space for growth, connection, and support for boys and men across the country.
Combating Gender-Based Violence
Just as PERIL has pioneered innovations in the wider field of Preventing Violent Extremism, so too are our researchers and experts ideating new projects that extend our public health approach to countering hate to the specific arenas of misogyny and anti-LGBTQ+ efforts.
Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism
PERIL has long been a thought leader in preventing violent extremism. This is also the case in examining and exposing the connection between misogyny, gender-based violence and extremism. In her forthcoming (September 2025) book, PERIL Founding Director Cynthia Miller Idriss sets the state for understanding The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism.
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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