New Report Examines the Impact of Andrew Tate and Male Supremacy on Classrooms and Teachers

Hazel Woodrow
Canadian Anti-Hate Network

Source: Anything Goes With James English/Illustration by Hazel Woodrow

In their study “‘Trying to talk white male teenagers off the alt-right ledge’ and other impacts of masculinist influencers on teachers,” co-authors Emelia L. Sandau and Luc S. Cousineau found that teachers, and in particular women teachers, are seeing a tremendous rise in male students expressing overt, and often violent, misogyny and male supremacy. In many cases, this misogyny is being directed towards teachers, including by undermining their authority in the classroom. The study, which analyzed teacher’s comments on Reddit, was published this summer in the peer-reviewed journal, Gender and Education.

One teacher shared that they “had a student write a paper in graphic detail about how [sexual assault] victims ‘deserved’ it and ‘all women were asking for it’ and a lot of other extremely alarming sentiments.” They added, “the paper topic was nowhere close to anything like this, but he wrote it anyway.” 

Another described male students making vulgar anatomical comments about their women teachers’ “holes” and “wetwet” — “to roaring laughter” from their peers.

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According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, male supremacy is a “hateful ideology rooted in the belief of the supposedly innate superiority of cisgender men and their right to subjugate women, trans men and nonbinary people.” Male supremacy is the predominant ideology of “the Manosphere”—a loose network of influencers, podcasters, and content creators who co-promote each other’s aggressively misogynistic products.

One of these figures, on whose influence the study focuses, is Andrew Tate, a long-time social media influencer and one-time sports star who, along with his brother Tristan, is facing charges of human trafficking, rape, and forming an organized crime group in Romania and rape, actual bodily harm, and human trafficking in the UK. The Tates are also under investigation in Florida. Despite this, Tate has built an audience of young men and boys across the world. 

The researchers used scripts to extract comments and posts from the r/Teachers subreddit, and filtered them for mentions of Andrew Tate in the title or text. While there is no way to determine where an individual is posting from, “the majority of posts on /r/teachers signal to North American classrooms.” Through this filtering process, the researchers were able to identify and collect 2,364 comments from the teachers about Andrew Tate and his impact in classrooms and schools. 

The study found that teachers are feeling “a variety of impacts from the discourses of misogyny championed by Andrew Tate.” As the study states, “it is clear from our research that Tate and other masculinist grifters are impacting teachers, the classroom, and North American school environments.” 

The most prominent theme that emerged from the analysis of comments and posts in /r/Teachers about Tate’s influence was “the direct impacts on the teachers themselves, especially on women-identifying teachers.” Teachers shared that Tate-influenced male students’ outright refusal to respect their authority has led to increased challenges in classroom management. According to the study, “boys are clearly adopting misogynistic views and bringing them to the classroom.”

Administrators, the study found, are not a consistent source of support for women teachers facing aggressive misogyny from their students. Several teachers reported receiving responses that ostensibly boiled down to “boys will be boys.” 

The study also found that “exposure to Andrew Tate’s rhetoric can have a significant impact on safety in the classroom environment and has caused youth to engage in public misogyny.” The researchers state that this new public misogyny in the classroom “poses a risk to the women and girls who witness it.”

Sandau and Cousineau also analyzed teachers’ responses to Tate’s influence—dividing responses into two main options: disregarding the phenomenon, and confronting the phenomenon. They found that “Some teachers have decided that it is best to simply not respond to Andrew Tate and associated discourse at all, believing that Tate’s views are not explicitly problematic or dangerous on their own,” including examples where teachers described the phenomenon as “not harmful” and that they would not take action to police classroom discussion “unless there is a clear and present problem.”

For other teachers who choose to confront the phenomenon, the researchers found that Reddit “becomes a place where they can find resources and brainstorm ideas for handling misogyny, with discussion of how to go about this seemingly new aspect of the teacher job description.” The teachers reported using strategies including calling out misogynistic behaviour in the classroom, calling home and reporting the behaviour to parents (mothers, specifically), and incorporating the issue into classroom learning through activities like debating “Is Andrew Tate a G.” (The authors note that in this case “G” is a term for someone to be admired).

The study’s findings reflect concerns being raised by teachers all over the world. “Social media influencers are fuelling an increase in misogyny and sexism in schools,” according to a recent poll of 5,800 teachers in the UK. Over a third of 6,000 teachers surveyed by the BBC in April 2025 reported misogynistic behaviour from students in the previous week.

This is not a new problem. In 2022, two women teachers from an all-boys school in New Zealand referred to Tate’s influence as “a new pandemic infecting schools across the country.” A 2023 Australian study found through interviewing women teachers that “the recent infiltration of Tate ideology and the resurgent masculinist supremacy reported by participants affirm that both the occurrences and character of sexual harassment and misogyny in schools has escalated.”
 

Q&A with Researcher Luc Cousineau, PhD
 

Canadian Anti-Hate Network: What recommendations do you have, as an educator and as a researcher of the far-right and male supremacy, for how teachers should navigate these issues in the classroom?

Luc Cousineau, PhD: First and most importantly, this is a significant systemic issue that requires systemic remedies, so while we can discuss what teachers can do in the classroom it is with the knowledge that each classroom, group of students, and each teacher are different. There is no single thing that we can do or implement that will improve this situation at the larger level.    

In some classrooms we are finding that teachers acknowledging the issue and discussing it openly in class, to bring out some of the underlying issues that are involved, can go a long way to reducing the influence and impact within the classroom. By acknowledgement, I certainly mean identifying that the ideas are problematic and unacceptable. This doesn't always get to the root of the issues, but it does open up dialogue in the classroom. This can be especially impactful with younger students that may have less contextual knowledge about the issues they are referencing. 

Some educators, as we referenced in the paper, have allowed other students to conduct the interventions in the classroom. This is certainly not something that will work in every classroom, but there are certainly instances where the peers of those bringing misogyny into the classroom can be effective educational deterrents.

Last, appealing to school administrators and school region/board administrators and trustees to acknowledge the presence, impacts, and effects of this type of rhetoric on classrooms is essential for effective work of any kind in opposition to misogyny and violent misogyny in the classroom. Organizing concerted teacher appeals to union representatives, in addition to their administrators, can have very significant impacts in the classroom. There is mounting evidence that this is impacting teaching and classroom environments in serious ways up to and including real workplace safety concerns.

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CAHN: Are you able to speak more about how Andrew Tate's influence is impacting safety in schools? 

LC: We have evidence in Canada of gender-based violence in educational settings from long before Tate came to prominence. What is different now is the pervasiveness of messaging that promotes and glorifies this type of violence. While there are certainly others who promote similar things, Tate remains at the forefront of this messaging and we see much of that messaging as an entry point to escalating forms of violence. While few of the young male students in classrooms are committing acts of gender-based physical violence, we have good evidence that other forms of violence like the dehumanization of others, or psychological violence done in-person or remotely often preceded acts of egregious physical violence (see Peterson & Densley's, The Violence Project for one example). But this is an answer predicated on the question of safety being about mass shootings/physical violence. The larger question of safety includes actions and acts that prevent the space from feeling welcoming and safe for participants and we can say without doubt that there are teachers, especially women-identified teachers with growing impact as the age of the teacher declines, who do not feel psychologically or physically safe in class. This prevents them from effectively doing the job of teaching that, as we know, extends far beyond simply downloading information to students. Without safe classroom environments, all students suffer.

CAHN: Do you have any other comments about the study or male supremacy in general, that would be helpful for our audience to hear?

LC: Part of why we did this study was to help provide evidence to the idea that these issues are present and significant in the classroom. Work like this provides the groundwork for us to be able to go and speak to teachers directly, as we are currently doing in 5 provinces across Canada, to be able to discuss these issues and begin to develop ways of countering these anti-equity messages. While we are doing a good job in Canada, we can sometimes get lulled into an "at least we aren't them" mentality relative to the United States, but the last 6 months have demonstrated how precarious and rapidly repealed equity gains can be. There are also places in this country where we are already backsliding on the Canadian commitment to equity and personal liberty/security and we should all be taking those as threats to liberties for everyone. Male supremacy and its cousins are ALWAYS part of the hate package, doing the labour of providing hierarchical ordering and default power structures to those who feel entitled.