“The opportunity to live in a country where violence has no place demands that a different and inclusive masculinity be built for peace, making victories and mistakes that allow the transformation of who we are and to make peace. One man at a time."

-Sebastián Molano, founder of DGR

Defying Gender Roles aims to create change at the individual level as a way to affect society. 

Our VISION

We seek to:

1. Empower men to question what it means to be a man today and to reflect on how gender roles inform our actions and affect our lives. 

2. Expose practices, behaviors and attitudes that justify and perpetuate gender inequality.

3. Denormalize practices that perpetuate gender inequality and reinforce traditional gender roles. 

4. Contribute to deconstructing harmful male gender roles in society. 

5. Engage women and non-binary people actively in this conversation, as gender equality is about recognizing how men and women experience life differently and take actions that allow them both to fully exercise their rights and live the life they wish to live.

6. Promote the full exercise of human rights for all and their enjoyment.

   
   

OUR MISSION

We strive to promote dialogue on the concrete use of actions and practices that openly challenge harmful gender roles, seeking to empower and include men and women.

Defying Gender Roles (DGR) seeks to expose alternative ways of understanding masculinity in men, as well as by openly questioning attitudes, behaviors, and actions that are directed against gender equality.

Through this, DGR strives to break down antagonistic relationships, such as the good man versus the bad man, the alpha male versus the beta male. It is an effort to recognize the nuances of masculinity, the complexities and contradictions of being a man today. In addition, it is an opportunity to build bridges of understanding between men and women, and among ourselves, regardless of age, sexual orientation, race, religion, or nationality.

Our Values

Humans are much more complex than what traditional gender roles have assigned us.

The cornerstone of this process of liberation is critical reflection. This means a purposeful introspective process that invite us to review what informs our actions, attitudes, and beliefs around gender. We understand gender as a structural power relation. As such, the way in which each of us experience gender is deeply personal.  Gender is one of the fundamental pieces of who we are, how we see the world, and how the world perceives us. However, it is not the only factor that shape our experience in life. As result, in DGR we strongly believe that we need to take into consideration other key factors such as race, sex, religion, ability, age and class.