Totally valid question. I can respect that.
Let me share a few examples.
I’ll also add that individual men are not to blame for these shitty circumstances, just like individual white people are not to blame for historical atrocities like slavery.
There are systemic issues put in place by a gender biased culture that simply sees women as less important, and dare I say less human than men.
Ok - here is the data:
1. Men do not like to listen to women, regardless of the data we show to validate our perspectives:
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-20/ty-article-magazine/.premium/the-women-soldiers-who-warned-of-a-pending-hamas-attack-and-were-ignored/0000018b-ed76-d4f0-affb-eff740150000
2. The economy continues to lay the burden of unpaid care work on women’s shoulders globally.
“From cooking and cleaning, to fetching water and firewood or taking care of children and the elderly, women bear a disproportionate burden of unpaid work across the world.
Unpaid work supports the economy and often fills in for lack of public expenditures on social services and infrastructure. In fact, unpaid care and domestic work is valued to be 10 and 39 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product.”
https://interactive.unwomen.org/multimedia/infographic/changingworldofwork/en/index.html
3. Medical studies often do not include women. This gender gap leaves women experiencing adverse drug reactions nearly twice as often as men, study shows.
2022 was the very first time a female-anatomy crash test dummy was created, though its use is still quite rare. This puts women who drive cars at a much higher risk for serious injury in vehicles essentially designed around a male anatomy.
Surgical training textbooks omit female anatomical details. Still.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200812161318.htm
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a41871618/crash-test-dummies-female/
https://jessica86.medium.com/the-needless-omission-of-clitoral-anatomy-from-medical-textbooks-87756656e8a6
4. Unequal pay for the same work. Although the pay gap is slowly, but surely narrowing, the progress made in the last two decades has nearly stalled. According to the Pew Research Center, American women working full- and part-time in 2022 make 82 cents for every dollar earned by men. To put that number in perspective, women made 80 cents to the dollar in 2002 and 65 cents to each dollar in 1982.
https://www.marieclaire.com/politics/news/a15652/gender-inequality-stats/
5. Some (not all) men fully expect women to stay out of the world of policy, law, money & power, and instead expect women to confine themselves to caretaking and other unpaid labor. In a patriarchal society, women are usually excluded from fully participating in political and economic life, instead restricted to the home where they raise their children.
https://simplysociology.com/patriarchal-society-feminism-definition.html
6. Values like caring, collaboration, and compassion are coded as weak, feminine, and therefore less valuable than masculine values like strength, logic, and leadership.
https://www.bustle.com/p/7-ways-our-culture-devalues-femininity-40400
7. Women are still not afforded equal rights under the law.
Fifty one and a half years ago, the U.S. Senate passed the Equal Rights Amendment, following the lead of the House of Representatives and paving the way for it to become the 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Yet the ERA was never added to the Constitution - because Congress also set a deadline. It said 38, or 3/4 of the states, had to ratify the proposed amendment by 1979. It later extended the deadline to 1982. So when in 2020 Virginia became the final state needed to ratify the ERA, it was almost 40 years too late.
The ERA simply says -
Section 1: Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.
Section 2: The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
Section 3: This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification. As of 2023, this law has still not been ratified.
https://www.npr.org/2022/03/22/1086978928/50-years-ago-sex-equality-seemed-destined-for-the-constitution-what-happened
8. Patriarchal authoritarians promote increased state control over women’s bodies; the subordination of women in public office and the workforce; permissiveness toward sexual assault, harassment or abuse; hypermasculine ideals; the criminalization of LGBTQ+ people; tolerance of violence toward women and girls; and an emphasis on the “traditional family,” in which the role of women is primarily domestic.
There is NO legislation that seeks to control a man’s body - aside from a war draft which most thinking feminists ALSO oppose. Yet a pregnant woman in Texas has to leave the state for an abortion to protect her own health, just a few weeks ago.
https://msmagazine.com/2023/05/15/patriarchy-war-on-women-lgbtq-reproductive-rights/
I could go on, but this should serve to highlight the fact that under the domination hierarchy known as the patriarchy, women continue to struggle. Even in 2023.
The thing that baffles me here, is that these systems hurt tons of men too. But when women bring this up - most men are willing to defend the systems, regardless of how well they work for those men.
