We Keep Asking Women to Be Kinder. Who Is Asking Why Men Are Not Kinder?

If I read one more article in a mainstream media publication askingAre women inclusive enough?Are women compassionate enough?Are women making oth

If I read one more article in a mainstream media publication asking

Are women inclusive enough?
Are women compassionate enough?
Are women making other people feel welcome? Even in spaces where they are mother-naked?
Are women using the “right” language?

Are women being judgmental?
Are women giving him a chance?
Are women being supportive enough?

Are you women shedding those boundaries, ambitions, independent thoughts, and plans like we keep hounding you to do?

Meanwhile, in the real world.

1. Eight children in Shreveport

In April, eight children between the ages of 3 and 11 were killed in Shreveport, Louisiana. Seven were the gunman’s children; the eighth was their cousin. Two mothers were also shot and survived. Authorities identified the children as Jayla Elkins, 3; Braylon Snow, 5; Shayla Elkins, 5; Kayla Pugh, 6; Khedarrion Snow, 6; Layla Pugh, 7; Mar’Kaydon Pugh, 10; and Sariahh Snow, 11.

Mar’Kaydon’s father remembered his 10-year-old son as an active little boy who loved running outside and having Nerf-gun fights. His 12-year-old sister survived. She had tried to save her brother and held his hand after he was shot.

Eight children.

There should have been enough national grief to make their names difficult to forget.

2. A mother and five of her children in Iowa

On June 1, police say Ryan McFarland killed his wife, Lisa McFarland, 51, and five of their children and then died by suicide.

Their children were adults and teenagers: Dakota Whitlow, 32; Austin Harris, 29; Ryle McFarland, 20; Mark McFarland, 16; and Ryan McFarland Jr., 13.

One son survived.

The next evening, Johnathan McFarland stood before his community at a vigil. He was grieving his mother, his sister, his brothers and his father at the same time. A woman who had planned a future with one of his murdered brothers stood there too, grieving the life they were supposed to have.

Six members of one family were gone in a day.

The surviving relatives inherited the rest of the calendar.

3. Two little boys in New York

The same week, police in upstate New York entered another home.

Inside were a mother and two little boys, ages 3 and 4. Authorities say their father, Saleh Mohamed, killed his wife and sons before killing himself.

The Washington Post reported that police had not established a motive.

That uncertainty deserves respect. It also deserves investigation.

Three and four years old.

At those ages, children are still learning the names of colors, asking impossible questions, losing socks, requesting the same bedtime story and believing grown people can make frightening things safe.

Their lives belonged to them.

Whatever was happening in an adult’s life, their lives belonged to them.

4. A mother and two daughters in Florida

Then came Doral, Florida.

Investigators say Ryan Charles Whiten stabbed his former partner, Melanie Lauren Hyer, 46, and their daughters, ages 11 and 8, before killing himself.

People who knew Melanie remembered an outgoing woman who was deeply involved with her children’s school.

There is something important in that small detail.

She attended school activities. She worked. She mothered. Her daughters had classrooms, friends, routines and futures developing around them.

A family killing does not eliminate a statistic.

It tears holes through classrooms, workplaces, neighborhoods, grandparents, cousins, friendships and all the ordinary places where the victims were expected tomorrow.

5. Mandy and her six children in Michigan

In July, firefighters were called to a burning house in Grand Haven Township, Michigan.

Inside they found eight people.

Investigators later determined that Kristopher Karolkiewicz had fatally shot his wife, Amanda, and their six children before killing himself. Authorities said fires appeared to have been intentionally set in several areas of the home.

Amanda was 39. She went by Mandy. She worked as an elementary-school substitute teacher.

Her six children were between 5 and 15 years old.

Her mother and stepfather said they treasured every moment they had with Mandy and the children.

Six children who should be returning to school this fall will not return.

A substitute teacher who should be walking into somebody else’s child’s classroom will not walk through the door.

When Thanksgiving comes, eight members of that household will be gone.

That is what family annihilation means after the breaking-news banner disappears.

6. On February 16, 2026, 56-year-old Robert Dorgan, who also used the names Roberta Esposito and Roberta Dorgano, opened fire on members of his own family during a high-school hockey game at the Dennis M. Lynch Arena in Pawtucket. It was Senior Night, and the family had gathered to watch Dorgan’s younger son play.

Dorgan killed his former wife, Rhonda Dorgan, 52, and their son Aidan Dorgan, 23. Rhonda’s father, Gerald Dorgan, 75, was critically wounded and died days later. Rhonda’s mother Linda and family friend Thomas Geruso were also wounded. Dorgan died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound after bystanders intervened.

Their younger son was actually on the ice playing hockey while members of his family were being shot in the stands. Think about what that means beyond the crime statistics. A young person walked into an arena for Senior Night with a mother, brother and grandparents watching him play. He left that day having lost his mother and brother, with his grandparents critically wounded. His grandfather would die days later.

His mother and older brother had come there to watch him play. That family will have to try to get through the holidays this year.

But yeah. These are the questions keeping mainstream media up at night:

Are women inclusive enough?
Are women compassionate enough?
Are women making other people feel welcome? Even in spaces where they are mother-naked?
Are women using the “right” language?

Are women being judgmental?
Are women giving him a chance?
Are women being supportive enough?

Are you women shedding those boundaries, ambitions, independent thoughts, and plans like we keep hounding you to do?

Researchers have spent decades documenting the expectation that women should be warm, caring, understanding, and nice, including the penalties women can encounter when they violate those expectations.

Nearly 43.5 million American women report experiencing sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner. More than half of female homicide victims are killed by current or former male intimate partners. An investigation found a family annihilation occurring about every five days, with 94% committed by a male acting alone. Researchers have documented 573 Black women and girls killed during police encounters over a 20-year period.

We have accumulated an extraordinary number of questions about whether women are treating everybody else properly. The numbers give us reason to devote considerably more attention to whether women and children are making it home alive.

More than 1 in 3 U.S. women have experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner during their lifetime. That represents nearly 43.5 million women.
Nearly 1 in 4 women have experienced physical violence by an intimate partner, while about 1 in 5 have experienced contact sexual violence by an intimate partner.
About 1 in 8 women have been stalked by an intimate partner. Stalking is particularly important for a safety-centered article because it can be treated culturally as annoying or obsessive behavior rather than a potential danger signal.
More than half of female homicide victims are killed by a current or former male intimate partner, according to U.S. crime-report data cited by the CDC. That belongs very close to the question, “Are women safe?”
About 16 million U.S. women report that their first experience of intimate-partner violence occurred before age 18. Women’s safety and children’s safety cannot be neatly separated. For millions of females, intimate-partner violence begins during girlhood.
At least 227 family annihilations were identified in the United States between January 2020 and April 2023. They killed 754 people. The Indianapolis Star investigation calculated an average of one family annihilation every five days.
The overwhelming majority of those family annihilators were male. The Indianapolis Star investigation reported that a male acting alone was the perpetrator in 94% of the cases it examined. This is precisely why asking serious questions about male violence is warranted. It isn’t an accusation against every man. It is following the pattern in the evidence.
There isn’t even a comprehensive public U.S. repository tracking family annihilation. Researchers also lack a universally accepted definition of the crime. Think about that alongside the “every five days” finding: we are discussing the destruction of entire families while still lacking a national system that comprehensively counts the phenomenon.
Black women and girls also face a documented danger from police violence. A 2024 study using the Fatal Encounters database identified 573 Black women and girls killed in encounters with law enforcement between 2000 and 2019. The researchers specifically concluded that Black women and girls face elevated risk of fatal police violence.
Another study found an especially striking disparity involving off-duty police-perpetrated killings. Black women had the highest proportion of off-duty killings relative to total police-perpetrated killings among the groups studied, with a rate 8.32 times that of white men.
And then there is the cultural expectation placed upon women themselves. Six preregistered studies involving 2,094 participants examined gendered expectations of women to be caring and understanding. Researchers found these communal expectations conflict more strongly with women’s autonomy than stereotypically masculine expectations of confidence and assertiveness conflict with men’s autonomy.
We also have decades of experimental evidence showing a female “niceness” penalty. Rudman and Glick found that assertive women could suffer hiring discrimination because they were perceived as insufficiently nice. Their conclusion was striking: women can be penalized unless they temper agency with niceness.
A newer 2026 study describes the same larger phenomenon: women are stereotypically expected to be warm, kind, caring and supportive, while women who violate communal expectations can face social and economic backlash.

Women are expected to be warm, communal, and socially accommodating. Research on gender stereotypes has long found prescriptive expectations about how women should behave, not simply beliefs about how women behave. Rudman and colleagues describe a “backlash effect” when women violate gender expectations.
Read the Rudman backlash research on PubMed
Assertiveness can carry an additional social cost for women. A meta-analysis of 63 studies found that explicit dominance harmed women’s likability relative to men’s, with downstream consequences including judgments about hireability. That gives empirical weight to your questions about women being judged as insufficiently agreeable or accommodating.
Read the meta-analysis on women’s dominance and backlash
Women can be judged by different standards. A major review of double-standard research describes how gender and other status characteristics can lead evaluators to apply different standards when judging competence and other valued qualities.
Read the Annual Review of Sociology research on double standards
Emotional caretaking has historically been disproportionately expected of women. Research on emotion work finds persistent gendered expectations that women maintain relationships, nurture others, manage feelings, and provide emotional support. One review notes that this labor can become so normalized that it is practically invisible.
Read the research on gendered emotional labor
Race changes these expectations rather than erasing them. Sociologist Adia Harvey Wingfield’s review specifically examines the racial dimensions of gendered emotional labor. That is useful for We Survive Abuse because we should not write as though every woman encounters femininity expectations in exactly the same way.
Read Wingfield’s review on race, gender and emotion work
The 2026 global media analysis examined 1.14 billion online news articles from 2017–2025 and found that coverage using terms associated with violence against women and misogynistic abuse dropped to 1.3% in 2025, its lowest level during the study period. The researchers also found male voices were 1.5 times as likely as female voices to be quoted in reporting about misogyny.
Read the Guardian report on the 1.14-billion-story study