Which young men support women’s empowerment and why? A positive deviance study of supportive men from north-west Tanzania

Promoting gender equality is a long-standing global health priority, with growing emphasis on engaging men as allies and agents of change. Accordingly, several studies have used attitudinal surveys to document variability in men’s support for women’s empowerment. However, understanding has been limited by a tendency to explore only a narrow range of socio-demographic measures, and much uncertainty remains about the causal pathways driving observed associations. In effort to move this literature forward, we take a mixed methods ‘positive deviance’ approach to understanding variability in men’s support for women’s empowerment, drawing on data from a single urbanizing community in north-west Tanzania. We surveyed young men ( N = 335) to first assess socio-demographic correlates of support, then conducted follow-up in-depth interviews with exceptionally supportive outliers to explore formative influences ( n = 18). Supporting past research, quantitative analysis suggests that education and media exposure play important roles, but demographic factors such as age and marital status were not associated with men’s attitudes. Outlier interviews indicate that interaction with capable schoolgirls and women teachers rather than course content alone drives education effects, and exposure to globalized cultural influences is diffuse rather than curtailed by direct ownership of media technology. Furthermore, while lacking obvious proxies in our quantitative survey, a family history of cooperation between genders and contemporary observations of the economic benefits of supporting women’s empowerment were viewed as pivotal in shaping men’s views. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for both survey and intervention design.