WHAT DID THE SSF SEE? | A Through the SSF Lens Retrospective
Gender bias misogyny Six Stages Framework: Revisiting four years of thinking about gender bias, movement and change.
Sometimes the value of a framework is not only in what it helps us understand today.
It is what happens when we return to it several years later and ask:
What happened next?
In 2022, I developed an adaptation of the Six Stages Framework for understanding and responding to gender discrimination.
At the time, I was interested in something that continues to occupy my thinking today: discrimination does not exist only in its most obvious or extreme manifestations.
There are quieter behaviours.
Silence. Denial. Avoidance. Dismissal.
There are more visible responses.
Attacking. Rejecting. Blaming. Stereotyping.
And there are circumstances in which beliefs can become increasingly entrenched, reinforced and actively promoted to others.
The 2022 gender formulation described a negative direction of travel from being unaware of or silent about gender inequity, through dismissal and avoidance, attacking and rejecting gender equality, anger and blame, entrenched gender bias and, at its extreme, the active propagation of discriminatory gender ideologies.
At Stage –6, I was already concerned with false narratives and harmful gender stereotypes and their potential contribution to gender-based violence and inequality.
Four years later, I find myself returning to that work.
Not because I want to claim that the Six Stages Framework “predicted” what would happen.
That would be too simple.
Instead, I want to ask:
What did the SSF help us see?
What appears to have stood up?
What became more complicated?
What do we understand better now?
And what has the framework itself learned?
Gender bias in 2022: looking before the endpoint
One of the important features of the original gender adaptation was that the endpoint was never the only place of concern.
At –2, someone might be aware that gender inequality was being discussed but dismiss its significance, avoid the conversation or rationalise discriminatory behaviour.
At –3, the response became more actively oppositional: denying discrimination, resenting discussions about gender equality, stereotyping and attacking those who spoke out.
At –4, anger and blame became more prominent.
At –5, the formulation described increasingly entrenched beliefs and attempts to persuade others to adopt similar positions.
And at –6, the concern extended beyond private prejudice to the active promotion of discriminatory narratives and ideology.
The important question underneath this was:
What happens before we arrive at the behaviour everybody finally agrees is serious?
And gender was not the only context in which I was asking it.
Warning signs were already part of the wider SSF conversation
In 2022, following the shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, I was also writing about warning signs, escalation and extreme behaviour.
I was asking about the interaction between internal and environmental factors — including anger, pain, social media, misinformation, group influence, failures of intervention, leadership and accountability.
But even then, I was cautious about reducing extreme behaviour to one characteristic or one warning sign.
Lots of people experience anger.
Lots of people experience bullying.
Lots of people experience mental-health difficulties.
That does not mean they will become violent.
In the Uvalde/Buffalo reflection, I argued instead that we need to look at an interaction of signs and symptoms, understood by people skilled in interpreting behaviour and context.
Later that year, when writing about increasing hate crime, I returned to the need to look at root causes rather than simply effects.
I was writing about economic pressure, anger, blame, social media, political influence, polarisation and backlash — and about the importance of preventative work before attitudes and behaviours become increasingly entrenched and extreme.
The wider proposition was already becoming clear:
Harmful behaviour has a history.
That does not mean every early sign inevitably leads to an extreme endpoint.
It means there may be opportunities to understand and influence the direction of travel before we reach it.
The SSF Was Never Linear
This is an important point to establish when revisiting the early framework.
Although the SSF has often been represented visually along a –6 to +6 axis, the underlying model was never conceived as a linear staircase.
In my 2022 book, Understanding and Dealing with Everyday Racism: The Six Stages Framework, I explicitly described it as:
“a dynamic and fluid developmental model – it is not linear.”
I also explained that individuals and organisations can be at different stages in different areas of their functioning, describing the framework as closer to a developmental matrix.
That distinction matters.
A person is not simply “a –3 person” or “a +5 person”.
Someone may be highly reflective around one form of difference and comparatively dismissive around another.
They may move forward.
They may move backwards.
Different experiences may activate different responses.
Relationships matter.
Culture matters.
Emotion matters.
Environment matters.
Power matters.
And movement in one area may affect movement elsewhere.
So the more useful SSF question has never simply been:
What stage are you?
It is closer to:
Where are you in relation to this issue, in this context, at this moment — and in which direction are you moving?
The later Identity Jigsaw/Rubik Cube work gave me another visual language for complexity, but the underlying fluidity and multidimensionality were already explicit in the 2022 framework.
Today, I find myself adding another question:
What is influencing that movement?
Or, borrowing the cube metaphor:
What is turning the cube?
The gender lens continued to develop
By November 2023, I was using the gender formulation in workshops alongside racism, organisational behaviour and leadership.
The gender scale still distinguished silence and denial, dismissal, attack and rejection, anger and blame, entrenchment and extreme advocacy.
But I was also asking participants to think about what constructed and maintained someone’s “cave”, what might cause them to retreat deeper into it, and what might help them inch out.
The same materials asked people to consider different inclusion profiles across racism, disability, gender, harassment, LGBTQ and classism.
In January 2024, I publicly described the gender adaptation as a way of exploring the developmental journey people may undergo in their understanding of and response to gender-related equity and justice. (InclusionPsychSep22)
Read the 2024 gender SSF article
The framework itself has continued to develop too.
The positive axis I use today is clearer than some of those early formulations:
+1 Emerging Awareness
+2 Discomfort and Awakening
+3 Developing Understanding
+4 Engaged and Reflective
+5 Systems Thinker and Advocate
+6 Transformational Leader
A framework concerned with reflection and movement should itself remain capable of both.
And now, 2026
The contemporary context makes returning to this early work particularly timely.
On 1 September 2026, revised statutory Relationships, Sex and Health Education guidance came into effect in England. (GOV.UK)
The Government’s current Violence Against Women and Girls strategy places considerable emphasis on prevention and early intervention: addressing harmful attitudes, stopping behaviours escalating and helping young people navigate misogynistic online influences. It specifically includes teaching about incels and misogynistic influencers without stigmatising boys. (GOV.UK)
And on 7 September 2026, Parliament is due to debate a petition signed by 114,927 people calling for crimes motivated by misogyny to be recorded as hate crimes. The petition also asks government to tackle anti-feminist groups that target and radicalise young people online. (House of Commons Library)
These developments do not “prove” the SSF.
But they make one of its earlier questions increasingly difficult to ignore:
Should we wait until harmful attitudes reach their most extreme manifestations before taking them seriously?
Extremism does not appear from nowhere — but neither is there one route towards it
This distinction is essential.
The SSF does not mean:
sexist joke → misogyny → extremism → violence.
Not every sexist comment indicates a radicalisation trajectory.
Not every angry young man is becoming an extremist.
Not every disagreement about gender equality is misogyny.
And holding prejudicial beliefs does not mean somebody will become violent.
The point of a dynamic and fluid model is precisely that movement is not predetermined.
What interests me is direction.
Is dismissal becoming hostility?
Is disagreement becoming grievance?
Is grievance increasingly organised around blame?
Are explanations becoming more rigid?
Is responsibility repeatedly being projected onto another group?
Is dehumanising language becoming easier to use?
Are beliefs being increasingly reinforced by others?
And:
What is making movement in one direction more likely than movement in another?
The environment was always part of the formulation. What has changed is its architecture.
Looking back at my 2022 writing, I was already concerned about environmental influence, social media, misinformation and groups reinforcing destructive behaviour.
So I would not now say that I somehow “discovered” the importance of environment later.
What has become much clearer is the scale, speed and technological architecture through which these environmental influences can now operate.
Algorithms.
Recommendation systems.
Influencers.
Personalised feeds.
Rapid repetition.
Online communities.
Digital belonging.
The environment does not simply provide information.
It can shape what repeatedly comes into view.
What attracts attention.
What becomes familiar.
Which explanations receive reinforcement.
And which communities become easiest to find.
In July 2026, London’s Violence Reduction Unit announced a £5 million city-wide response to algorithm-fuelled online harms. The associated research identified an association between increased misogynistic content online and increased police-recorded violence against women and girls, but importantly did not establish that one caused the other. (London City Hall)
That distinction matters.
The psychological question is not simply:
Did an algorithm cause this belief?
It is:
How is this person interacting with an environment that may repeatedly amplify, reward or normalise particular interpretations of the world?
What is turning the cube?
Belonging belongs in the formulation
There is another factor I would give greater emphasis to today.
Belonging.
When we encounter a harmful belief, we naturally concentrate on its content.
What does this person believe?
Is it discriminatory?
Should it be challenged?
Those questions matter.
But psychology also asks us to consider function.
What might the worldview provide?
Certainty?
Identity?
Status?
An explanation for rejection or failure?
Someone to blame?
Recognition?
Community?
A place where somebody finally feels understood?
Understanding those functions does not excuse misogyny.
It does not minimise harm to women and girls.
But if our purpose is genuinely to help somebody change direction, we may need to understand what they believe they stand to lose by changing.
If leaving a harmful community also means losing friendship, identity, certainty and belonging, challenging the ideology may be only part of the intervention.
Which leads to another question:
What will replace what we are asking the person to relinquish?
Boys and young men must not become objects of collective blame
This is an area in which psychology has an important contribution to make.
Concern about misogyny can itself become simplified into another binary:
girls are the victims; boys are the problem.
That is neither sufficiently nuanced nor especially useful if the objective is prevention.
The current VAWG strategy deliberately combines challenging misogyny with supporting positive conceptions of masculinity and femininity and explicitly warns against stigmatising boys. (GOV.UK)
Its accompanying work on men and boys also recognises that men and boys can themselves be victims of violence and abuse and warns about algorithmically amplified misogynistic and violent material affecting boys’ wellbeing, sense of self and relationships. (GOV.UK)
We therefore need to be capable of holding two positions simultaneously:
Misogyny must be challenged.
And:
Boys and young men must not themselves become subjects of stereotyping and collective blame.
If our purpose is movement, we should also ask what our interventions produce.
Reflection?
Curiosity?
Understanding?
Or humiliation, rejection, grievance and deeper retreat into communities that confirm a person’s perception that they are under attack?
This is not an argument for avoiding challenge.
It is an argument for becoming more psychologically sophisticated about how change happens.
Progress and backlash can happen at the same time
This may be one of the most important things I see when I place 2022 alongside 2026.
It would be easy to tell a story entirely about growing misogyny.
But that would ignore half of the SSF.
We are simultaneously seeing greater recognition of misogyny, stronger preventative education, more attention to healthy relationships, concern about digital influences and significant policy responses. (GOV.UK)
At the same time, misogynistic narratives, anti-feminist grievance and highly polarised gender discourse remain visible.
Both can be true.
Because:
A society does not occupy one SSF stage.
Different people, communities, organisations and systems can move in different directions in response to exactly the same social change.
Some encounter change and become curious.
Others experience threat.
Some move towards understanding.
Others towards blame.
Some use discomfort as an invitation to reconsider what they thought they knew.
Others encounter communities that tell them their discomfort proves something is being taken away from them.
Which raises one of the questions I keep returning to:
What happens to the discomfort next?
Discomfort is not necessarily the danger
The current positive SSF deliberately places Discomfort and Awakening at +2.
Discomfort can accompany learning.
It can arise when something unsettles a long-held belief.
When we are asked to question privilege.
When changing gender roles challenge expectations.
Or when we encounter a difference between who we believe ourselves to be and how somebody else experiences us.
The critical issue may therefore not be the existence of discomfort.
It may be what happens afterwards.
Does discomfort move towards:
curiosity → understanding → reflection → engagement?
Or towards:
dismissal → hostility → blame → entrenchment?
Direction matters.
And because the SSF is dynamic and fluid, direction can change.
So what did the SSF see?
Returning to this selected body of work, I think several ideas have stood up well.
The importance of looking upstream rather than concentrating only on extreme endpoints.
The significance of quieter forms of normalisation.
The distinction between dismissal and active hostility.
The role of grievance and blame.
The importance of environmental influence and social reinforcement.
The need to consider interacting signs rather than searching for one predictive indicator.
The importance of prevention.
And crucially, the understanding that human movement is dynamic and fluid rather than linear or predetermined.
What has developed is our capacity to formulate the forces acting upon that movement in greater detail.
I would now give even greater attention to:
belonging;
technological architecture;
speed and acceleration;
social and organisational systems;
and the effect our own interventions have upon direction of travel.
The SSF has learned too
This reflection would be incomplete if I subjected society to scrutiny while leaving the framework itself untouched.
The SSF has changed since 2022.
Its positive axis has become clearer.
Its application across different forms of human difference has developed.
My thinking about systems, belonging, psychological safety, normalisation and escalation has continued to deepen.
But one thing has not changed:
the SSF was never intended to place people into fixed boxes.
It was described in 2022 as a dynamic and fluid developmental model.
Perhaps what technology now allows us to do is represent that original idea more faithfully.
Not merely as a line.
Perhaps as a sphere.
Perhaps as a matrix.
Perhaps something closer to a Rubik’s Cube.
A representation capable of showing that people may occupy different positions simultaneously, that different contexts reveal different aspects of our thinking and behaviour, and that many forces can act upon our direction of travel.
The core idea remains:
People move.
The challenge is understanding what moves them.
Four years later
So, did the Six Stages Framework foresee today’s debates about misogyny?
That is not quite the question I want to answer.
What I can say is that by 2022 I was already using the SSF to look beyond extreme manifestations of discrimination and behaviour and ask about:
warning signs;
environment;
escalation;
prevention;
and direction of travel.
The gender adaptation formed part of that wider inquiry.
Four years later, those questions still seem useful.
But I would now ask more.
What is reinforcing the belief?
Where does the person belong?
What psychological function does the worldview serve?
What is accelerating movement?
What might interrupt it?
What could make another direction possible?
And:
What is happening around the person that we may fail to see if we look only at the person?
What should we watch next?
On 7 September, Parliament will debate the petition relating to misogyny and hate-crime law. (House of Commons Library)
That debate matters.
But through the SSF lens, I also want us to look further upstream.
What happens before hostility becomes entrenched?
Before grievance becomes identity?
Before dehumanising ideas become normal within a group?
What happens when someone first experiences the discomfort of having their assumptions challenged?
What happens when warning signs are visible but nobody yet considers them serious enough to warrant intervention?
And what happens when someone begins moving in the opposite direction?
Perhaps the question we should carry forward from this earlier SSF work is:
If harmful attitudes and extreme behaviours do not simply appear from nowhere, how early are we prepared to notice the direction of travel — and what might help change it?
Four years later, I think that question matters more than ever.
Dr Shungu Hilda M’gadzah
Chartered Educational Psychologist | Founder of the Six Stages Framework
About this retrospective
This reflection forms part of the emerging What Did the SSF See? strand — returning to selected earlier Six Stages Framework writing to ask what happened next, what stood up, what became more complicated, what was missed, and what the framework itself has learned.
