“We’re looking at it as a science,” said Daphne C. Watkins, the president of the American Men’s Studies Association, the first woman to hold that post. “Many men still define masculinity as someone who can provide for his family, who can wrestle a tiger and protect,” Dr. Watkins said. “What I would love to see is for us to broaden those definitions.”

That stance is not without controversy, of course. Like many new fields, masculinities studies brings with it varying degrees of skepticism. Some academics have suggested that it’s too trendy to be of serious academic inquiry. Others fear that it could siphon money away from women’s studies. And a small but vocal group of champions of male studies (not to be confused with “masculinities studies”) views Dr. Kimmel’s work as insufficiently pro-men. “He is waging war against what I say is real men,” said Dr. Edward M. Stephens, a New York City psychiatrist and the chairman of the nonprofit Foundation for Male Studies.

But Dr. Kimmel’s audience is growing. At the Manhattan conference, U.N. Women, the United Nations arm dedicated to gender equality, announced it would work with Dr. Kimmel to develop a series of workshops for men on college campuses beginning this fall on topics ranging from sexual assault to male reproductive health. There was a screening of a documentary, “The Mask You Live In,” which examined what the director, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, had described as the “unintended consequences” of our narrow definition of manhood, from undiagnosed mental illness to rape. In May, the American Men’s Studies Association hosted a three-day workshop on “Teaching Men’s Studies” for the first time, simply because the demand to teach it is suddenly so high, the organization said.

That urgency is the product of a few things, Dr. Kimmel said. For starters, the discussion of women’s equality seems to be everywhere (including the familiar debate about whether women can “have it all”), with new attention being paid to the role men play in helping women achieve equality, and why it’s good for them, too. Over the last 40 years, there’s been a huge shift in gender roles for men and women, and yet most of the academic study has focused solely on its impact on women. A recent survey by the Shriver report found that four in nine men said it was harder to be a man today than it was in their fathers’ generation, with most citing women’s economic rise as the reason.

And then, there’s the sad reality that everywhere we turn, it seems, there is another news story about men in crisis: mental illness, suicide, terrorism, rape, mass shootings, jetliner crashes or young black men being killed by the police.

If we had a better understanding of men, scholars wonder, how many of the world’s ills could we solve — or, at least, attempt to?