Piloting the Barbershop Toolkit 2.0: NYU Stern Students Advancing Safer Digital Spaces

Photo: Hanan Bedru, Riya Patel, Nathan Phillips, Sthu Noel-Zungu, Lekhya Kantheti, Jennifer Lin and Megan Ortwein at the final presentations for the 2025 NYU Stern Social Impact Business class.

December 2025 - Each year, HeForShe partners with NYU Stern’s Social Impact Business class to advance research on issues central to gender equality. Through this collaboration, we work with two student research groups on specific priority topics, generating fresh insights that inform programme design and delivery. In 2025, both groups focused on challenges emerging in online spaces and digital violence, aligning with the International Women’s Day theme of Ending Digital Violence for All Women and Girls.

One student group piloted Barbershop Toolkit 2.0 – Module 3: Digital Masculinities & Online Behavior, exploring how young people engage with digital norms, online masculinities, and peer influence. Their work offered a unique perspective on the relevance and impact of the toolkit with university-aged audiences. This engagement is particularly urgent given growing evidence of harmful online norms shaping youth attitudes: research by HeForShe Champion Movember (2025) shows that 63% of young men in the US, UK, and Australia follow online masculinity influencers, with nearly one in four reporting negative mental health impacts, while Team Lewis research in support of HeForShe finds that 80% of Gen Z and 76% of Millennials are concerned about sexist rhetoric online. Alarmingly, the Unstereotype Alliance’s Gender Equality Study (2022)also found that nearly one in four young men believe violence against a partner can be acceptable in certain situations, reinforcing the need for early, constructive intervention. Piloting the Barbershop Toolkit with university-aged audiences helps ensure HeForShe is offering credible, positive alternatives that challenge harmful digital narratives and contribute to broader efforts to curb online violence. 

The Barbershop Toolkit uses facilitated dialogue, structured reflection, and participatory exercises to create supportive spaces for examining masculinity, power, and behaviour constructively. Module 3 applies this methodology to online environments, where anonymity and platform culture shape how masculinity is expressed and reinforced. The NYU Stern students led the pilot with the goal of engaging men and boys as active allies while equipping participants with tools to recognise online harm, intervene when necessary, and adopt more equitable digital behaviours.

Over eight workshops, the students worked with 39 college students aged 18–23 (22 male, 17 female) in groups of four to six, both virtually and in person. Sessions included mixed-gender, all-male, and all-female formats, each featuring a core exercise from Module 3. Participants consistently engaged deeply with the exercises. Activities such as the digital self-portrait and online pressure tools were particularly impactful, with nearly 70% of facilitators highlighting them as the most engaging components. Students observed that the exercises helped participants reflect on how influencers, platform culture, and peer expectations shape digital masculinities.

“I learned that digital masculinities can appear in many forms from influencers, even if their content isn’t explicitly about masculinity.” – Male participant (18–20), Online Persona Mapping

The student-led pilot surfaced valuable recommendations for enhancing Module 3. For example, discussion prompts should be more platform-specific, integrating current digital trends to deepen participant reflection. Facilitators also suggested guidance for navigating sensitive conversations in larger or mixed-gender groups, ensuring discussions remain safe and constructive. Overall, the students’ research confirmed that Module 3 of the Barbershop Toolkit 2.0 is highly relevant, engaging, and well-positioned for adaptation across diverse contexts. 92% of facilitators rated the module as highly effective, reinforcing its potential to spark meaningful conversations about digital masculinities and online behaviour.

As HeForShe continues to pilot and refine modules of the Barbershop Toolkit across different contexts and audiences, early testing plays a critical role in ensuring relevance and impact. Engaging NYU Stern students as the first group to pilot Module 3 of the toolkit was particularly meaningful as young people are among those most shaped by digital cultures and most exposed to online harm, given the central role social media, influencers, and platform norms play in their daily lives, identities, and relationships. Their proximity to these realities brought immediacy, credibility, and depth to the pilot, allowing the module to be tested by those who navigate these digital spaces most intensely.

For the students, the project offered more than an academic exercise. Facilitating conversations with their peers challenged them to reflect on their own digital behaviours, assumptions, and responsibilities, while contributing to a global initiative aimed at standing up for gender equality in online and offline spaces.

“Our work reaffirms the central belief of the Barbershop Toolkit that meaningful change begins when people are invited into conversation. By placing digital masculinities at the center of that conversation, Module 3 equips young people with greater awareness, accountability, and confidence in their ability to support gender equality both online and offline.” – NYU Stern Project 1 Team

This project highlights the strength of the HeForShe–NYU Stern collaboration: bringing the creativity, curiosity, and fresh perspectives of the next generation together with practical, real-world piloting to strengthen evidence-based programming in response to evolving digital challenges. 

The NYU Stern - UN Women HeforShe collaboration has been a true win-win partnership. The students have the unique opportunity to work on a real-world problem, making real impact and gaining valuable experience in the process, while HeforShe gets the benefits of fresh and creative insights from the next generation of business leaders. And this year our focus was a particularly relevant issue for students who have essentially grown up online -- countering digital violence and the manosphere. We at NYU Stern look forward to continuing to build this partnership and driving impact together. – Mara van Loggerenberg, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Business & Society at the NYU Stern School of Business

Explore Module 3 and see the exercises piloted by NYU Stern students to address online norms and influence here:  https://www.heforshe.org/sites/default/files/2025-09/HeForShe_Barbershop_Toolkit_2.0_Module_3.pdf

Access the full Barbershop Toolkit 2.0 here: https://www.heforshe.org/en/resources