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The red meat on our plates and the cars we drive are doing disproportionate damage to the climate – and this damage is not evenly shared between genders. A new study of 15,000 adults in France finds that women’s combined food‑and‑transport footprint is 26% lower than men’s. Because those two sectors account for roughly half of household emissions, this gender gap matters.

Even after the authors controlled for calorie needs, work‑related travel and differences in income, women still came out with 6.5% lower food‑sector emissions and 9.5% lower transport emissions than men. The culprits were – almost entirely – red meat and cars.

Mathilde Rainard, a PhD researcher exploring how gender intersects with low carbon energy policies in the UK and France and who wasn’t involved in the study, tells me that although this wasn’t the first to explore the gender emissions gap in this way, it is perhaps the most rigorous.

Although the researchers only looked at French data, the authors say that similar results would likely be found in other high income countries. One of the authors, Ondine Berland, Fellow in Environmental Economics at the London School of Economics, told me: “Marketing strategies seem quite similar elsewhere, with adverts targeting men for cars and meat in various countries. So this feels generalisable to other high-income countries”.

Indeed, in Spain, male-dominated households have been found to have a carbon footprint 11% larger than female-dominated households, and in Sweden, men’s spending on goods causes 16% more climate-heating emissions than women’s.

“Our concerns and our consumption habits are gendered from birth,” Rainard says. “One of the reasons women eat less red meat is that society incentivises them to eat more healthily, and to drink less, and to be thinner.”

Yet before we slip into a simple “men versus women” story, we need to widen the lens. The single strongest predictor of a person’s climate impact is still income. And tellingly, the gender emissions gap identified by the study is a similar size to the difference in food and transport footprints between people of high and low incomes.

And yes, those ultra-wealthy emitters at the top of the pyramid are overwhelmingly male.

Why do men emit more?

This raises an obvious chicken‑and‑egg question: do women consume fewer high-carbon products because they care more about the environment (which in industrialised countries, they do, by the way), or do they care more because they already consume less?

Berland leans toward the second explanation. “There is evidence in both directions,” she says. “There is some evidence that climate concerns are higher among women, and a lot of research showing that, for instance, female CEOs implement more environmentally friendly policies. But our results suggest that it’s probably the latter.”

Because men select carbon‑intensive goods, she tells me, it’s more likely for any policy that taxes those goods to  feel like a personal hit to men – so support for climate action drops. One paper she cites shows that the perceived effect of climate policies on people’s own households or own consumption habits is strongly correlated with support for said policies.

A study spanning 60 countries finds no gender gap in climate concern in poorer nations; the divide only appears as national wealth and consumption rise. In richer settings people overall worry less about the climate, but what worry exists is felt far more by women than it is by men. Put bluntly, the people whose carbon‑heavy lifestyles are most exposed – disproportionately wealthier men – see more downsides than upsides to climate action. As the authors put it, “because men benefit most from current economic and social hierarchies, they, on average, perceive greater psychological costs to adjusting to change.”

In other words, the problem is not men; it is high‑consumption masculinity bound up with wealth. The richest 1% now emit more than the poorest two‑thirds of humanity combined. These are the people – often white, male, with inordinate carbon footprints and often heavily invested in fossil‑fuel capital – who have the most to lose from transition (and who therefore often bankroll the loudest backlash).

Rainard worries that the focus on the gender emissions gap risks missing the real culprits. “If you remove the highest earners, the gender gap reduces massively. That seems more important to focus on to me. Rather than individualising the issue and the solutions, we should be looking at this as a collective.”

Soy boys and SUVs

The study’s focus on steaks and carbon-belching cars is striking in the context of the culture wars. Attempts to curb SUV sales or promote plant‑based diets reliably trigger cries of a “war on men”. The term soy boy, flung around by manosphere influencers, is often used to describe progressive men as weak and lands with many because it taps a deeper anxiety around the loss of masculine status – and its symbols.

Outrage over “soy boys” is just the latest twist on a decades‑old playbook perfected by big oil: individualise the problem. It was none other than BP that invented and popularised the concept of the “carbon footprint” in 2004, unveiling a calculator that enabled people to work out their personal impact on the environment – and in so doing, reframing corporate pollution as a matter of consumer virtue. Today’s culture‑war memes do the same. The spotlight stays tuned on lifestyle choices rather than the systemic over‑consumption of the rich.

So how do we talk about behaviour change without fuelling that fire?

Berland advises that we should be focusing on gains, not losses. “We need information campaigns showing that with plant based meals one can be strong or healthy. Or promoting the health benefits of eating less red meat.”

Rainard insists we think harder when we focus on personal consumption. “Overall we approach climate campaigning far too individualistically. It’s counterproductive to  point the finger and tell men, ‘Oh, you can’t eat meat or drive your car anymore’. We could all benefit from these changes, and that is what we should be focusing on, not the individual things we will have to give up.”

“What this really means,” she says, “is taxing the very rich. Who do happen to mostly be men. A tiny proportion of people hold a vast majority of the resources and are the source of most emissions. In that context, it’s not fair to put all the responsibility for change on the middle classes. We’re taxing the wrong thing.”

That means reframing prosperity itself. “It’s all about approaching the issue from a place of care. About stopping our incessant individualisation of these problems, and moving away from that neoliberal idea that happiness is only achieved through consumption and  success. We need to start thinking about it differently – happiness as connection, as care for one another, and for the planet.”

“This isn’t utopian, » Rainard concludes. “It’s the only viable option out there.“