Why are men less likely than women to wear face masks? It’s ‘not cool,’ study finds

Men are less likely than women to wear face coverings in public because they feel more invincible and have negative attitudes toward face masks, according to the results of a new study.

Researchers from Middlesex University London and the Mathematical Science Research Institute in Berkeley, California, released a paper that analyzes gender differences in wearing face masks. Authors Valerio Capraro and Hélène Barcelo wrote that the differences were strongest in counties where face masks weren’t mandatory.

Men also were more likely than woman to think that they wouldn’t be affected by the coronavirus.

“The fact that men less than women intend to wear a face covering can be partly explained by the fact that men more than women believe that they will be relatively unaffected by the disease,” Capraro and Barcelo wrote.

The study found that men were more likely to self-report feeling negative emotions while wearing face masks and think that it’s “shameful, not cool, a sign of weakness and a stigma; and these mediate gender differences intentions to wear a face covering,” Capraro and Barcelo wrote.

Being left-leaning, older, and female was associated with a higher intention to wear face masks, according to the study.

The experiment was conducted on April 28 and May 4 with a sample size of 2,459 people recruited by Amazon Mechanical Turk. The sample size was “quite heterogeneous” and didn’t represent the population overall but was representative of urban populations, according to the authors of the study.

Men were “slightly overrepresented” with 51% of the sample being men and 48% being women.

Men are 2.5 times more likely to have severe symptoms of coronavirus and are therefore more likely to die from the disease than women, Forbes reported, citing an analysis by researchers in Shenzhen, China.

Some health experts say women have stronger immune systems than men.

“This is a pattern we’ve seen with many viral infections of the respiratory tract — men can have worse outcomes,” Sabra Klein, a scientist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told The New York Times. “We’ve seen this with other viruses. Women fight them off better.

This story was originally published May 14, 2020 at 2:57 PM with the headline "Why are men less likely than women to wear face masks? It’s ‘not cool,’ study finds."