Dr Angelica Puzio Ferrara

Dr Angelica Ferrara is a developmental and social psychologist whose work investigates how gender norms shape our capacity for closeness. A British Academy Early Career Fellow at the LSE, she examines the social forces that govern how we experience connection and relationships, tracing how expectations about masculinity and femininity influence the shape of our social networks stretching from childhood friendships to adult romantic intimacy — particularly within the context of the Global North.

Before joining LSE, Ferrara completed her doctorate at New York University and was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University from 2022 to 2025 where she remains an Affiliate Scholar. Ferrara’s forthcoming book, Men Without Men, explores how cultural conceptions of manhood became incongruent with men’s needs for close, intimate bonds, leading many men in the UK, US, and Western Europe to report that they have very few or no close friends. Drawing on the voices of men and boys interviewed during her time as a postdoctoral fellow at The Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford, Ferrara uncovers how the state of men’s friendships became so fractured and what society — and women — stand to gain from solving the problem of male isolation.

Ferrara’s research paper in 'Psychology of Men and Masculinities' with research assistant Dylan Vergara coined the term mankeeping: the labour that some women take on to sustain men’s social lives and emotional wellbeing, often by compensating for the relative thinness of men’s social networks. Ferrara’s research has covered a wide array of topics related to how gender norms shape the world, from why boys lose interest in jobs society codes as “feminine” to the factors that shape men’s intentions to engage in gender equality work. A complete list of her publications can be found at angelicaferrara.com.