False! UN didn’t report a global shortage of men

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Dawda Baldeh

Claim: UN data indicates a global shortage of men, projecting 5.6 billion women and 2.2 billion men by 2025.

Verdict: The widely circulated assertion that the UN’s 2025 demographic report reveals a global shortage of men is false. The UN has not published such a report; recent statistics indicate that more men than women are affected.

Full Text

A widely shared graphic on WhatsApp purported to present statistics from the United Nations’ 1st Quarter Demographic Report for 2025.

The graphic claims the global population is 7.8 billion, comprising 5.6 billion women and 2.2 billion men.

It cautioned both married and single women to treat men with respect and to avoid negative attitudes towards any man, asserting that out of 2.2 billion men, 1 billion are already married, 130 million are incarcerated, and 70 million are mentally ill.

This implies that there are only 1 billion men eligible for marriage, of which 50% are unemployed, 3% are gay, 5% are Catholic priests, 10% are relatives, and 32% are over 66 years old.

This suggests that there are more than 2.5 times as many women as men on the planet.

The graphic claims that the data is sourced from the UN’s “1st Quarter Demography Report 2025.”

Interestingly, the figures imply that the world has no children, only women and men.

Did the UN report that in 2025, there would be 5.6 billion women and 2.2 billion men?

DUBAWA decided to investigate this claim due to its potential to misinform. 

Verification

To verify the accuracy of the claim, DUBAWA conducted an online search and found that the UN has not released such a report. 

According to the UN website, population issues are addressed through the UN Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

The population division generates demographic estimates and projections for all countries and regions, while the UNFPA focuses more on the gender and human rights aspects of population issues.

Neither UNDESA nor UNFPA publishes a first-quarter demography report.

The UN’s Population Division releases a World Population Prospects every three years.

According to the World Population Prospects 2025, the world’s population is projected to be 8.23 billion, up from 8.16 billion in 2024. The population growth rate for 2025 is projected to be 0.84 percent. 

This means that there are 4.14 billion males and 4.09 billion females in the World, representing 50.27% of the male population and 49.73% of the female population. 

This data indicates that as of July 2025, the world has 43.81 million more males than females.

Below are screenshots of the estimated 2025 world population prospects from the UN website.

Further searches also linked to a 2019 article on the website of the Independent, a Nigerian newspaper, with similar wording.

We also encountered the same post across various social media platforms. See here and here.

Further searches by DUBAWA on multiple credible sources confirmed that the UN has not released such a report, and similar posts of the same report can be traced back to 2019 to a report published by a Nigerian fact-checker in 2022.

Conclusion

The widely circulated demographic data claiming that the UN’s 2025 quarterly report shows a global population of 5.6 billion women and 2.2 billion men is false. The UN has not published such statistics.