Men's health emerged as a discrete academic and political concern in the 1990s.
A greater understanding of women’s health issues had been one of the successes of the feminist movement, a development that drew attention to the fact that, while men continued to dominate most societies in most fields this did not extend to health and to life-expectancy. By 2006, it was still the case that in the vast majority of countries, rich and poor, women could expect to outlive men.
In the UK, the Men's Health Forum was founded in 1994. In the same year the first National Men’s Health Week was held in the USA. The first UK week took place in 2002 and the event went international the following year. In 2005, the world’s first professor of men’s health, Alan White, was appointed at Leeds Metropolitan University in north-east England.