Finding direction
Career choices, personal goals and a clearer sense of purpose.
MENTORING MEN · RESEARCH 2025
Men do talk.
Are we listening?
We asked 2,000 men about life, connection and mentoring. Here’s what they told us, and how we can make mentoring easier to find.
Men aged 35–50 · NSW, Victoria & ACT
Survey conducted February–March 2025
THE REPORT IN CONVERSATION
Men Do Talk.
On The Morning Show.
Watch Mentoring Men discuss the report on Channel Seven’s The Morning Show.
Select play to load the YouTube player.
01 / THE OPPORTUNITY
When men know what’s on offer,
many are open to mentoring.
When asked about free, local, one-to-one support from a man who had been through similar challenges, around two-thirds of respondents were open to a mentor.
What did respondents say?
- Yes66.1%
- No19.2%
- I don’t know14.7%
Saying yes in a survey doesn’t mean someone has applied or taken part in mentoring.
Results for the men surveyed, pages 11 and 32. They don’t tell us what every Australian man thinks.
02 / EVERYDAY LIFE
There’s no single reason
to want someone in your corner.
Men spoke about work, confidence, relationships and finding direction. Often, they wanted practical support with the things happening in everyday life.
Building confidence
Feeling more able to handle challenges and work through what comes next.
Staying connected
Relationships, loneliness and finding space for a conversation.
Themes from pages 6–10. Every man brings his own reasons for considering mentoring; these themes aren’t diagnoses.
03 / THE FIRST STEP
What makes mentoring
feel worth a try?
Some men were unsure about mentoring or weren’t interested at first. Hearing from someone they could relate to, getting clear information and knowing what to expect could help them reconsider.
RECOGNITION
A connection I can picture.
Hearing from someone with a similar experience, or getting a recommendation from a mate, could help men who were hesitant give mentoring another look.
What this means for our work
Source: pages 12 and 15 ↗Share real stories, with permission, so men can picture what a mentorship could be like.
These themes help shape our approach; they haven’t been tested as a way to increase applications. The percentages differ between the report’s main text and appendix, so we’ve left those figures out here. See the source note.
04 / EXPLORE THE FINDINGS
Different questions.
A fuller picture.
What gets in the way of mentoring? How often do men feel lonely? Who do they turn to? Choose a question, then explore the answers by age or location.
Each bar uses the same 0–100% scale. Differences between groups aren’t necessarily statistically meaningful.
Read the source table ↗View these figures as a table
05 / FROM RESEARCH TO ACTION
Make the next
conversation easier to find.
Our response is to make mentoring visible, explain it clearly and help people picture a connection that could work for them.
Start with what matters to you.
Explore what you’re looking for and how a regular conversation with a trained volunteer mentor might help.
Explore mentoring ↗Back the work that connects men.
See how you can support Mentoring Men through a donation or a conversation about funding our work.
Support our work ↗Mentoring Men provides non-clinical mentoring. Our Model of Care explains the service, matching process and scope.
06 / ABOUT THE RESEARCH
The context
behind the findings.
Explore selected findings here, or read the full report for all the questions, tables and references.
- Who took part
- 2,000 men aged 35–50
- Where
- New South Wales, Victoria and the ACT
- When
- 20 February–10 March 2025
- How
- Online survey conducted by Censuswide
Methodology and interpretation
The survey sample was structured by age, state or territory, remoteness and cultural identity. We asked about sources of stress, mental health, isolation and views on mentoring. Censuswide conducted the survey; Mentoring Men interpreted the findings and wrote the report.
These findings reflect what the men surveyed told us about their own experiences. They don’t represent every Australian man, provide a clinical assessment or show that mentoring caused an outcome. Interest in mentoring also doesn’t necessarily lead to taking part.
Methodology: page 4 ↗A note about the published figures
There are inconsistencies in the published report. Some percentages and answer labels in the main text differ from the appendix, especially around barriers, reasons to try mentoring and information men wanted. Some appendix headings also don’t appear to match the answers beneath them.
We’ve used the openness figures from page 32, which agree with the main report’s 66.1% result, and the mentor preferences from page 17. The data explorer uses the named source table for each question. For barriers and reasons to reconsider mentoring, it shows the appendix figures and flags where the summary differs. We haven’t combined conflicting tables. Checking the original survey data would be needed to resolve those differences.
THE COMPLETE REPORT
Men Do Talk 2025
Read the full findings, survey tables and references.