The Boys and Men Festival brought hundreds of activists and advocates together from all corners of the globe - including Australia - to Brazil's second-largest city, Rio de Janeiro.
Its goal is to stand together for one shared message: gender inequality hurts all and people must unite to end it.
"This should be difficult, these are tough conversations about our power," Equimundo's Gary Barker told the festival opening on Friday.
"We get doors to open for us because we're men. And yet, all the women - who have been carrying the weight for the women's rights work - are not getting into the spaces that sometimes we are."
The event's co-convener, Women of the World founder Jude Kelly, said Brazil was a "profoundly sophisticated" policy-making setting.
South America's most populous country is home to some of the most progressive gender policies in the world, including the pursuit of laws to criminalise misogyny.
But the nation also has one of the highest rates of femicide among major economies.
Four women are killed each day on average and Brazil recorded 399 femicides in the first quarter of 2026, the highest since the nation began tracking the crime 11 years ago.
The nation is also known for extreme racial inequalities as Afro-Brazilians make up about 56 per cent of the population but hold proportionately few positions of power, face higher risks of violence and experience poorer health and education outcomes, and living conditions.
Poetry, music and dance launched the festival and New Zealand-Palestinian writer Sara Qasem delivered a powerful piece about identity and losing her father, who was murdered in the 2019 Christchurch mosque shooting.
Throughout the day, boys and men were taught how to braid their hair, be good fathers and support the women in their lives.
They were also warned about the harms of online extremism and the influence of the so-called "manosphere".
Brisbane-based sociologist and researcher Michael Flood took part in a panel on gender-based violence alongside Wiradjuri-Ngunnawal woman Regan Mitchell, Our Watch's director of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander strategy.
"Violence against women is a men's issue and it gives men a bad name ... it damages our communities," Dr Flood said.
"If we can encourage the idea that violence against women is a men's issue as well as a women's issue, then we can start bringing men on board to talk about it."
Ms Mitchell highlighted Australia's own deep racial inequalities, noting that Aboriginal women were killed at a rate nine times higher than other women.
"In Australia we are all being born into this false narrative, a very dangerous narrative," she said.
"I literally have heard police officers who are very high up at an inquest this year, under oath in a court room, who said that the majority of police do believe First Nations men in Australia are born inherently violent."
An array of LGBTQI dancers helped close the festival with a vibrant mini-Carnival.
Organisers plan to bring a Boys and Men Festival to Melbourne in October 2027.
AAP travelled to the conference with the assistance of the Minderoo Foundation.
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