Red Pill Leadership Behaviours and Discourse Ethics

In recent years, the rise of online antifeminist communities, popularly referred to as the manosphere, has created new challenges for ethical leadership and organisational integrity. Groups such as Pick-up Artists (PUA, who promote manipulative strategies for sexual conquest), Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW, a movement advocating male withdrawal from relationships and traditional social roles), Men’s Rights Activists (who frame men as victims of systemic bias in areas such as family law, education, and workplace policies), and Red Pill (groups who promote male dominance, anti-feminism, and evolutionary determinism) promote divergent ideologies, yet share a unifying narrative: the belief that contemporary gender relations have unjustly disempowered men, and that masculine authority must be reasserted (UN Women, 2025). Incels (involuntarily celibate men who blame women for their own failure to form romantic relationships with them), however, reject the self‑improvement ethos of PUA and Red Pill communities, embracing a fatalistic Black‑Pill worldview that frames success as biologically impossible. These groups form what we refer to as the male supremacist ecosystem, a networked, ideologically dense field of discourses that normalise male entitlement to dominance, sex, and recognition. Accordingly, we distinguish incel and Red Pill leadership, the former being an oxymoron, a rhetorical construct that cannot manifest as incels do not demonstrate leadership qualities, and the latter, i.e. Red Pill leadership, an emergent empirical leadership category.

While previous research has addressed toxic or destructive leadership through personality traits or abusive behaviours (Einarsen et al., 2007; Padilla et al., 2007), comparatively little attention has been given to how ideological discourses, particularly those rooted in misogyny, male supremacy, and anti-feminism, legitimate unethical leadership practices. In this paper, we develop the concept of Red Pill leadership as leadership behaviour and ideology that draws upon a discursive repertoire of male supremacist beliefs, especially those rooted in the Red Pill movement, a loosely organised antifeminist ecosystem that promotes male entitlement, evolutionary determinism, and gender hierarchy as natural and desirable (McCarthy & Taylor, 2024). Incels, PUA, and MGTOW adherents each represent branches of this ecology, but Red Pill discourse forms the connective tissue that justifies domination and marginalises deliberative ethics in leadership contexts. By focusing on this common discursive infrastructure, we show through discourse ethics how leadership informed by Red Pill logics undermines inclusive dialogue, delegitimises dissent, and embeds gendered harm in everyday organisational life.

Male supremacy, misogyny, and evolutionary determinism remain deeply embedded in workplaces, sustained by structural gender inequalities at work and home and evolving ideological undercurrents. While initially emerging as a support group for individuals struggling with intimacy, the changing dynamics of power have transformed into a collective ideology centred on male grievance, victimhood, supremacy, and misogyny (Zimmerman, 2024). This transformation reflects broader societal shifts, including the rise of alt-right movements and resistance to equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) initiatives, both of which have amplified the visibility of misogynistic discourses that had previously remained implicit or unchallenged (Ng et al., 2025). Further, these shifts are reflected in the global gender gap in ideology, which illustrates that young men shift towards the right while young women lean towards the left (The Economist, 2024).

Among these male supremacist and misogynistic beliefs, the Red Pill beliefs had the most significant inroads into leadership discourses and behaviours (James, 2024). Unlike incels and MGTOW, which focus on misogynistic grievance, Red Pill individuals aspire for and promote male supremacist leadership behaviours (Dignam & Rohlinger, 2019; Wright et al., 2020). In this paper, we introduce the concept of Red Pill leadership behaviours, referring to a specific configuration of leadership practices informed by misogynistic ideologies and grievance narratives. Red Pill leadership is theorised here not as a clinical category, but as a cultural and discursive configuration that reflects broader ideological currents within and beyond organisations. This conceptualisation draws from the literature on toxic leadership, male grievance and supremacy politics, and reactionary cultures. While sharing certain characteristics with established toxic leadership constructs (Einarsen et al., 2007; Lipman-Blumen, 2005) in terms of harm and dehumanisation, Red Pill leadership behaviours represent a distinctive phenomenon characterised by systematic opposition to gender inclusion, deployment of pseudo-intellectual justifications for inequality, and mobilisation of male victimhood narratives to resist EDI at work (Dignam & Rohlinger, 2019). These behaviours are not limited to individuals who self‑subscribe to Red‑Pill or other male‑supremacist logics but reflect how the underlying ideological elements of the manosphere increasingly influence leadership practices in professional environments. We examine Red Pill leadership behaviours as emerging at the intersection of digital subcultures, reactionary ideological movements, and established workplace hierarchies. The aim of this study is to conceptualise and empirically investigate Red Pill leadership behaviours in corporate settings and to analyse how these behaviours distort ethical deliberation through the lens of discourse ethics. To investigate how Red Pill leadership behaviours manifest in professional environments, we employed netnography and thematic analysis, drawing on a multi-source dataset comprising over 50 executive speeches, 200 social media posts by corporate leaders, and more than 20 corporate case studies from 2018 to 2024, alongside legal documents and business media reports.

Unlike traditional leadership frameworks that focus on formal hierarchical structures, Red Pill leadership behaviours operate with structural fluidity, leveraging both informal digital communities and established organisational roles to gain legitimacy and influence. This structural flexibility enables Red Pill leadership behaviours to remain ideologically consistent while permeating multiple domains, from digital subcultures to corporate leadership, making them particularly resistant to conventional organisational interventions.

While leadership literature has extensively examined various destructive leadership manifestations (Boddy, 2021; Schyns & Schilling, 2013), limited attention has been paid to how emerging ideological movements shape workplace leadership practices. To bridge this gap, this study applies Habermasian discourse ethics as a lens to critically examine how Red Pill leadership behaviours systematically distort the communicative conditions necessary for workplace democracy and ethical deliberation.

Habermas’ discourse ethics posits that moral norms should be justified through rational-critical dialogue and inclusive deliberation, ensuring that all affected individuals participate in decision-making without coercion or manipulation (Habermas, 1990). Ethical leadership, in this framework, requires communicative conditions that enable fair and open debate, allowing different perspectives to be heard and contested. However, Red Pill leadership behaviours subvert these principles, using discourse not to promote rational deliberation but to justify exclusionary narratives that portray workplace inclusivity as a threat to male leadership (Ashcraft, 2022). Red Pill leadership behaviours exploit pseudoscience and pseudo-intellectualism to rationalise gender inequality, leveraging selective data to frame EDI initiatives as biased against men (McCarthy & Taylor, 2024). This discourse fosters grievance-based identity politics that position men as victims of corporate inclusion efforts (Banet-Weiser, 2021), legitimising hostility towards diversity initiatives and reinforcing power asymmetries in leadership structures.

This study makes three key contributions: First, it extends leadership theory by defining Red Pill leadership behaviours as a specific configuration of leadership behaviours that emerge in response to gender inclusion efforts through a netnographic study. Second, it applies discourse ethics to analyse how these behaviours systematically distort workplace communication to obstruct democratic deliberation. Third, it provides a multilevel framework for understanding and countering these behaviours across individual, organisational, and societal domains. Before we move on to describe the origins and ideology of Red Pill leadership, we outline the key terms and their respective definitions in Table 1.

In this study, we employ critical netnography (Bouvier & Rasmussen, 2022; Kozinets, 2010) as a qualitative research method to examine how Red Pill (male supremacist) leadership discourses operate across digital and organisational settings. Critical netnography, an adaptation of ethnography for digital environments, provides a systematic approach to understanding how male supremacist leadership discourses emerge, evolve, and gain legitimacy within corporate settings. This approach is particularly apt for tracing conversations that shuttle between anonymous online forums and the public utterances of high-profile executives. Given the increasing visibility of anti-EDI rhetoric and masculinist leadership styles in business environments, netnography enables a critical examination of how male supremacist narratives shape workplace culture, leadership legitimacy, and corporate decision-making.

Using discourse ethics as an analytical framework, we assess how corporate leaders adopt rationalised argumentation strategies that simultaneously appear neutral or meritocratic while reinforcing exclusionary gender dynamics. Drawing on Habermas’ (1990) theory of discourse ethics, we evaluate how corporate leadership discourse adheres to or violates the principles of fair deliberation, inclusivity, and ethical justification. To address misrecognition (Fraser, 1992), we attend to how neutral merit claims mask gendered asymmetries. By integrating netnographic methods with a discourse ethics perspective, this study explores the communicative mechanisms through which corporate leaders resist workplace inclusion efforts, reframe leadership hierarchies, and position themselves as victims of progressive reforms.

This paper advances the conceptualisation of Red Pill leadership by defining and operationalising its behaviours, structures, and strategies through the lens of discourse ethics. Rather than simply categorising Red Pill leadership within existing leadership frameworks, we argue that it represents a distinct and emerging form of ideological leadership that manipulates discourse to consolidate influence, perpetuate exclusion, and resist ED initiatives (Ng et al., 2025). By situating Red Pill leadership behaviours within broader sociopolitical, organisational, and digital contexts, this study offers a new theoretical lens that examines how exclusionary leadership discourses and behaviours gain legitimacy in contemporary workplaces and online spaces.

Notably, we conceptualise Red Pill leadership as a distinct condition migrating from digital subcultures into the modern workplace. We move beyond generic descriptions of leader behaviours to make several specific contributions to the literature on the dark side of leadership. Our analysis extends character-centric theories like toxic leadership by demonstrating that toxicity can originate not just from a leader’s innate dysfunctional personality, but from the adoption of a coherent, external ideology that provides a pre-packaged and pseudo-intellectual justification for harmful actions. We also enrich systemic models like the destructive leadership by identifying the manosphere as a potent environment that manufactures leaders and susceptible followers, arming them with a specific ideology of hate aimed squarely at violating an organisation's legitimate interest in equity and inclusion. Finally, while prior work links dark triad personality traits to anti-social behaviours, our research provides the missing mechanism: it shows how Red Pill ideology offers a motivational script and discursive playbook that translates these personal dispositions into a systematic, communicable, and politically charged leadership style. Together, these contributions offer a sharper and more contemporary lens for understanding how online grievance politics fuel new challenges to workplace ethics and democratic deliberation.

Another key theoretical contribution of this research is its integration of discourse ethics into leadership studies. From a Habermasian perspective, Red Pill leadership behaviours represent a profound failure of communicative rationality, where leaders distort discourse to reinforce ideological grievances rather than engage in open, ethical deliberation. Instead of facilitating inclusive and rational-critical debate, Red Pill leaders manufacture legitimacy through pseudo-intellectual narratives, grievance-based identity politics, and strategic exclusion, creating closed communicative spaces that suppress dissent. This study extends discourse ethics by demonstrating how digital and organisational discourse can be systematically manipulated to entrench exclusionary leadership behaviours, showing that leadership legitimacy emerges not just from hierarchical authority but also through digital influence, subcultural validation, and resistance to progressive reforms.

Unlike traditional leadership models that rely on formal structures and decision-making processes, Red Pill leadership behaviours thrive in loosely networked, digital-first environments, where leaders gain influence through cultural framing, discursive repetition, and algorithmic amplification. The systemic conditions that enable this leadership behaviour, such as gender inequality, masculine anxieties, and resistance to inclusion, provide fertile ground for its expansion into workplaces, educational institutions, and policymaking spheres. By examining Red Pill leadership behaviours through a discourse ethics framework, we provide new insights into how exclusionary ideologies become embedded within leadership narratives and behaviours, resisting rational critique and ethical accountability.

This study contributes to leadership ethics by theorising Red Pill leadership behaviours as a distinctive form of ideological leadership that systematically distorts communicative conditions to resist EDI. Traditional frameworks in leadership ethics emphasise personal traits such as integrity, fairness, and responsibility, often assuming a normative commitment to inclusive deliberation (Meliou & Özbilgin, 2024). However, our findings reveal how ideological subcultures, specifically the Red Pill movement, undermine these ethical assumptions by manipulating communicative practices. Authority is not only exercised but discursively legitimised through grievance-based identity politics, pseudo-intellectual rationalisations, and moral inversion. This mode of discursive distortion functions similarly to the use of conspiracy theories, which Soytemel and Saglam (2025) identify as communicative tactics that rationalise exclusion and obscure power asymmetries.

By mobilising Habermas’s discourse ethics with Fraser’s critique of misrecognition and communicative inequality, we reconceptualise ethical leadership not solely in terms of moral intent or outcomes, but through the inclusivity and reflexivity of its communicative infrastructure. We argue that ethical leadership must be evaluated by the conditions it creates for dialogue, in terms of who is heard, who is silenced, and how dissent is framed. In doing so, we advance a discursive approach to leadership ethics that accounts for emerging ideological formations and their capacity to erode the normative foundations of deliberative engagement. This theoretical extension calls on scholars and practitioners to attend not only to what leaders say and do, but also to how they configure the terms of recognition, legitimacy, and ethical participation within organisational life.