patriarchy and gender inequality essay

We are all victims of a patriarchal society: some just suffer more than others

I am not a gender expert. What and how I learned about inequality emerged from pure existential needs. But what I clearly see is that both men and women are victims of the patriarchal society we live in. The sooner we see that the better.

This is a blog by Mahamuda Rahman, former communication officer at Cordaid. 

Even enlightened people sometimes come with the most surprising answers if you ask them about gender equality. Like ‘men and women are not the same’. Or ‘they can get equity but they are not equal.’ Apart from being vague answers, they are also proof of ignorance. And show exactly why we need to expose gender inequality and patriarchism.

Men cannot cry, women must look pretty

From our childhood, we are imposed with a lot of stereotyping like these. Boys don’t cry. Girls have to look pretty. We are continuously exposed to uncountable numbers of normalized sexism.  Like ‘girls run like a girl’. Meaning we cannot run.

From childhood onwards, we are all given certain burdens to carry. Boys and girls, men and women. Like the social burdens of oppression, the humiliation of being ‘poor’, or ‘fat’, or ‘unsuccessful’ or ‘colored’. I have heard a woman with perfect body shape calling herself fat. And a rather wealthy middle-class man calling himself poor. Because she did not fit into a particular dress and he could not buy the luxury car he longed for.

We live in a society where a few strong systems of oppression are at play – class, race, imperialism. Gender inequality is also one of them. People of all genders, colours, and backgrounds are victims. And definitely, some more than others.

Once upon a time

Maybe we all know this. But still, sometimes it’s good to look back. Long story short, our prehistoric, nomadic fore-parents lived in a more or less equal society. With the advent of agriculture and the idea of property, men wanted to keep track of their progenies. Therefore, women were locked inside the house. Also, having more hands to work in the field was very helpful. So, women were forced to keep childbearing. Their contribution was forced to be confined within the premises of a household for centuries. Their roles varied depending on the class and context. But the chain around their ankle was never longer than the threshold of the house.

The truth behind this propaganda is that some people just love to keep their power and they invent these convenient dichotomies. There is nothing natural about it.

If you do not use a machine for a very long time, it becomes rusty. The body and brain of women went through centuries of deprivation, repression, malnutrition. The heavy toll of childbearing every year took on their bodies, just like the cruel dictatorship of ‘beauty’ or the trinity of being soft, pale, and frail. There’s physical, but also intellectual deprivation. Just remember when women weren’t even allowed to learn how to read and write. Millions of girls are still kept away from schools. Or from pursuing their dreams and exploring their talents. Which is also social deprivation.  Women were and are continuously reminded of their inferiority. Simply by ‘nature’, by being a woman.

‘It’s by nature’: an all- invasive propaganda

Throughout history, when some people wanted others to be submissive, they played the nature card. For poor people life is hard and that is natural. They accept it the way it is. For the people lowest in the caste system, this categorization and privilege enjoyed by the upper casts were also presented as something god-given and natural. At some point, a certain number of people believed people with blue eyes and blond hair were a superior race, destined to rule the world. Gender inequality works in a similar way. In patriarchal societies and systems, men have been claiming for centuries that women are inferior to them. By nature.

The truth behind this propaganda is that some people just love to keep their power and they invent these convenient dichotomies. There is nothing natural about it. This is all made-up, socially constructed, conveniently practiced, and nurtured. We are being fed with these constructs every day. Through books, movies, stories, norms, and media. We live and breathe it. And we start to believe this nonsense.

It’s not just women

It works so systematically that millions of women starve themselves to look thin and pretty. Traits like aggression, power, stubbornness, and even greed are glorified whereas empathy, care, and foresight are vilified. Men say they try to carry all the burdens on their shoulders. To be ‘manly’ and ‘strong’ and that they suffer immensely when they do not meet those social expectations.

And because of these nonsensical stereotypes, uncountable numbers of women in many countries are going through horrors. From genital mutilation, malnutrition, sexual and domestic violence, online bullying, to everyday casual sexism.

We all suffer from these oppressive systems of injustice in our own ways. But because they feed on differences and vulnerabilities, not all humans suffer equally.

Systems of oppression are hierarchical and the higher up you are on the ladder the more privilege you enjoy. A white rich European male is highest on the ladder. A coloured, poor, woman from a low-income country stands can only look at the ladder and stands on the ground.

We all suffer from these oppressive systems of injustice in our own ways. But because they feed on differences and vulnerabilities, not all humans suffer equally. These systems thrive on inequality. And in the end, sexism, racism, and structural poverty have the same root cause: organised inequality.

Equality is an attitude

Equality will never happen unless we all believe that we are equal. Everyone can be equal despite their differences – race, gender, sexuality, background, mental and physical abilities. Differences do not mean someone is better than someone else. Especially when criteria for comparisons are themselves highly biased, subjective, flawed, and purposefully manufactured.

There are still reasons for celebration

Despite centuries of oppression and deprivation, women are running fast and catching up. They are showing that they can shine in a man’s world. The thing is, they don’t need a man’s world. We don’t need a man’s world. We need a world. Where women do things their way and grab the stage. With men equal to them. A place where all suffer less. And where some – more deeply deprived and repressed than others – can heal more than others need to heal.

We are doing that. We are creating that world. High fives to the men who are lending a hand. Cheers especially for poor women of colour, the lowest of the low in today’s patriarchal and western hierarchy. Despite the violence, the brutalities, the burden of climate change, and poverty, they keep on fighting for a better world. Better for all women and men.

Header image: Masuma Jami, Herat, Afghanistan, 2020. Image: Elaha Sahel, Oxfam.

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Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender

Feminism is said to be the movement to end women’s oppression (hooks 2000, 26). One possible way to understand ‘woman’ in this claim is to take it as a sex term: ‘woman’ picks out human females and being a human female depends on various biological and anatomical features (like genitalia). Historically many feminists have understood ‘woman’ differently: not as a sex term, but as a gender term that depends on social and cultural factors (like social position). In so doing, they distinguished sex (being female or male) from gender (being a woman or a man), although most ordinary language users appear to treat the two interchangeably. In feminist philosophy, this distinction has generated a lively debate. Central questions include: What does it mean for gender to be distinct from sex, if anything at all? How should we understand the claim that gender depends on social and/or cultural factors? What does it mean to be gendered woman, man, or genderqueer? This entry outlines and discusses distinctly feminist debates on sex and gender considering both historical and more contemporary positions.

1.1 Biological determinism

1.2 gender terminology, 2.1 gender socialisation, 2.2 gender as feminine and masculine personality, 2.3 gender as feminine and masculine sexuality, 3.1.1 particularity argument, 3.1.2 normativity argument, 3.2 is sex classification solely a matter of biology, 3.3 are sex and gender distinct, 3.4 is the sex/gender distinction useful, 4.1.1 gendered social series, 4.1.2 resemblance nominalism, 4.2.1 social subordination and gender, 4.2.2 gender uniessentialism, 4.2.3 gender as positionality, 5. beyond the binary, 6. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the sex/gender distinction..

The terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ mean different things to different feminist theorists and neither are easy or straightforward to characterise. Sketching out some feminist history of the terms provides a helpful starting point.

Most people ordinarily seem to think that sex and gender are coextensive: women are human females, men are human males. Many feminists have historically disagreed and have endorsed the sex/ gender distinction. Provisionally: ‘sex’ denotes human females and males depending on biological features (chromosomes, sex organs, hormones and other physical features); ‘gender’ denotes women and men depending on social factors (social role, position, behaviour or identity). The main feminist motivation for making this distinction was to counter biological determinism or the view that biology is destiny.

A typical example of a biological determinist view is that of Geddes and Thompson who, in 1889, argued that social, psychological and behavioural traits were caused by metabolic state. Women supposedly conserve energy (being ‘anabolic’) and this makes them passive, conservative, sluggish, stable and uninterested in politics. Men expend their surplus energy (being ‘katabolic’) and this makes them eager, energetic, passionate, variable and, thereby, interested in political and social matters. These biological ‘facts’ about metabolic states were used not only to explain behavioural differences between women and men but also to justify what our social and political arrangements ought to be. More specifically, they were used to argue for withholding from women political rights accorded to men because (according to Geddes and Thompson) “what was decided among the prehistoric Protozoa cannot be annulled by Act of Parliament” (quoted from Moi 1999, 18). It would be inappropriate to grant women political rights, as they are simply not suited to have those rights; it would also be futile since women (due to their biology) would simply not be interested in exercising their political rights. To counter this kind of biological determinism, feminists have argued that behavioural and psychological differences have social, rather than biological, causes. For instance, Simone de Beauvoir famously claimed that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman, and that “social discrimination produces in women moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to be caused by nature” (Beauvoir 1972 [original 1949], 18; for more, see the entry on Simone de Beauvoir ). Commonly observed behavioural traits associated with women and men, then, are not caused by anatomy or chromosomes. Rather, they are culturally learned or acquired.

Although biological determinism of the kind endorsed by Geddes and Thompson is nowadays uncommon, the idea that behavioural and psychological differences between women and men have biological causes has not disappeared. In the 1970s, sex differences were used to argue that women should not become airline pilots since they will be hormonally unstable once a month and, therefore, unable to perform their duties as well as men (Rogers 1999, 11). More recently, differences in male and female brains have been said to explain behavioural differences; in particular, the anatomy of corpus callosum, a bundle of nerves that connects the right and left cerebral hemispheres, is thought to be responsible for various psychological and behavioural differences. For instance, in 1992, a Time magazine article surveyed then prominent biological explanations of differences between women and men claiming that women’s thicker corpus callosums could explain what ‘women’s intuition’ is based on and impair women’s ability to perform some specialised visual-spatial skills, like reading maps (Gorman 1992). Anne Fausto-Sterling has questioned the idea that differences in corpus callosums cause behavioural and psychological differences. First, the corpus callosum is a highly variable piece of anatomy; as a result, generalisations about its size, shape and thickness that hold for women and men in general should be viewed with caution. Second, differences in adult human corpus callosums are not found in infants; this may suggest that physical brain differences actually develop as responses to differential treatment. Third, given that visual-spatial skills (like map reading) can be improved by practice, even if women and men’s corpus callosums differ, this does not make the resulting behavioural differences immutable. (Fausto-Sterling 2000b, chapter 5).

In order to distinguish biological differences from social/psychological ones and to talk about the latter, feminists appropriated the term ‘gender’. Psychologists writing on transsexuality were the first to employ gender terminology in this sense. Until the 1960s, ‘gender’ was often used to refer to masculine and feminine words, like le and la in French. However, in order to explain why some people felt that they were ‘trapped in the wrong bodies’, the psychologist Robert Stoller (1968) began using the terms ‘sex’ to pick out biological traits and ‘gender’ to pick out the amount of femininity and masculinity a person exhibited. Although (by and large) a person’s sex and gender complemented each other, separating out these terms seemed to make theoretical sense allowing Stoller to explain the phenomenon of transsexuality: transsexuals’ sex and gender simply don’t match.

Along with psychologists like Stoller, feminists found it useful to distinguish sex and gender. This enabled them to argue that many differences between women and men were socially produced and, therefore, changeable. Gayle Rubin (for instance) uses the phrase ‘sex/gender system’ in order to describe “a set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human, social intervention” (1975, 165). Rubin employed this system to articulate that “part of social life which is the locus of the oppression of women” (1975, 159) describing gender as the “socially imposed division of the sexes” (1975, 179). Rubin’s thought was that although biological differences are fixed, gender differences are the oppressive results of social interventions that dictate how women and men should behave. Women are oppressed as women and “by having to be women” (Rubin 1975, 204). However, since gender is social, it is thought to be mutable and alterable by political and social reform that would ultimately bring an end to women’s subordination. Feminism should aim to create a “genderless (though not sexless) society, in which one’s sexual anatomy is irrelevant to who one is, what one does, and with whom one makes love” (Rubin 1975, 204).

In some earlier interpretations, like Rubin’s, sex and gender were thought to complement one another. The slogan ‘Gender is the social interpretation of sex’ captures this view. Nicholson calls this ‘the coat-rack view’ of gender: our sexed bodies are like coat racks and “provide the site upon which gender [is] constructed” (1994, 81). Gender conceived of as masculinity and femininity is superimposed upon the ‘coat-rack’ of sex as each society imposes on sexed bodies their cultural conceptions of how males and females should behave. This socially constructs gender differences – or the amount of femininity/masculinity of a person – upon our sexed bodies. That is, according to this interpretation, all humans are either male or female; their sex is fixed. But cultures interpret sexed bodies differently and project different norms on those bodies thereby creating feminine and masculine persons. Distinguishing sex and gender, however, also enables the two to come apart: they are separable in that one can be sexed male and yet be gendered a woman, or vice versa (Haslanger 2000b; Stoljar 1995).

So, this group of feminist arguments against biological determinism suggested that gender differences result from cultural practices and social expectations. Nowadays it is more common to denote this by saying that gender is socially constructed. This means that genders (women and men) and gendered traits (like being nurturing or ambitious) are the “intended or unintended product[s] of a social practice” (Haslanger 1995, 97). But which social practices construct gender, what social construction is and what being of a certain gender amounts to are major feminist controversies. There is no consensus on these issues. (See the entry on intersections between analytic and continental feminism for more on different ways to understand gender.)

2. Gender as socially constructed

One way to interpret Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born but rather becomes a woman is to take it as a claim about gender socialisation: females become women through a process whereby they acquire feminine traits and learn feminine behaviour. Masculinity and femininity are thought to be products of nurture or how individuals are brought up. They are causally constructed (Haslanger 1995, 98): social forces either have a causal role in bringing gendered individuals into existence or (to some substantial sense) shape the way we are qua women and men. And the mechanism of construction is social learning. For instance, Kate Millett takes gender differences to have “essentially cultural, rather than biological bases” that result from differential treatment (1971, 28–9). For her, gender is “the sum total of the parents’, the peers’, and the culture’s notions of what is appropriate to each gender by way of temperament, character, interests, status, worth, gesture, and expression” (Millett 1971, 31). Feminine and masculine gender-norms, however, are problematic in that gendered behaviour conveniently fits with and reinforces women’s subordination so that women are socialised into subordinate social roles: they learn to be passive, ignorant, docile, emotional helpmeets for men (Millett 1971, 26). However, since these roles are simply learned, we can create more equal societies by ‘unlearning’ social roles. That is, feminists should aim to diminish the influence of socialisation.

Social learning theorists hold that a huge array of different influences socialise us as women and men. This being the case, it is extremely difficult to counter gender socialisation. For instance, parents often unconsciously treat their female and male children differently. When parents have been asked to describe their 24- hour old infants, they have done so using gender-stereotypic language: boys are describes as strong, alert and coordinated and girls as tiny, soft and delicate. Parents’ treatment of their infants further reflects these descriptions whether they are aware of this or not (Renzetti & Curran 1992, 32). Some socialisation is more overt: children are often dressed in gender stereotypical clothes and colours (boys are dressed in blue, girls in pink) and parents tend to buy their children gender stereotypical toys. They also (intentionally or not) tend to reinforce certain ‘appropriate’ behaviours. While the precise form of gender socialization has changed since the onset of second-wave feminism, even today girls are discouraged from playing sports like football or from playing ‘rough and tumble’ games and are more likely than boys to be given dolls or cooking toys to play with; boys are told not to ‘cry like a baby’ and are more likely to be given masculine toys like trucks and guns (for more, see Kimmel 2000, 122–126). [ 1 ]

According to social learning theorists, children are also influenced by what they observe in the world around them. This, again, makes countering gender socialisation difficult. For one, children’s books have portrayed males and females in blatantly stereotypical ways: for instance, males as adventurers and leaders, and females as helpers and followers. One way to address gender stereotyping in children’s books has been to portray females in independent roles and males as non-aggressive and nurturing (Renzetti & Curran 1992, 35). Some publishers have attempted an alternative approach by making their characters, for instance, gender-neutral animals or genderless imaginary creatures (like TV’s Teletubbies). However, parents reading books with gender-neutral or genderless characters often undermine the publishers’ efforts by reading them to their children in ways that depict the characters as either feminine or masculine. According to Renzetti and Curran, parents labelled the overwhelming majority of gender-neutral characters masculine whereas those characters that fit feminine gender stereotypes (for instance, by being helpful and caring) were labelled feminine (1992, 35). Socialising influences like these are still thought to send implicit messages regarding how females and males should act and are expected to act shaping us into feminine and masculine persons.

Nancy Chodorow (1978; 1995) has criticised social learning theory as too simplistic to explain gender differences (see also Deaux & Major 1990; Gatens 1996). Instead, she holds that gender is a matter of having feminine and masculine personalities that develop in early infancy as responses to prevalent parenting practices. In particular, gendered personalities develop because women tend to be the primary caretakers of small children. Chodorow holds that because mothers (or other prominent females) tend to care for infants, infant male and female psychic development differs. Crudely put: the mother-daughter relationship differs from the mother-son relationship because mothers are more likely to identify with their daughters than their sons. This unconsciously prompts the mother to encourage her son to psychologically individuate himself from her thereby prompting him to develop well defined and rigid ego boundaries. However, the mother unconsciously discourages the daughter from individuating herself thereby prompting the daughter to develop flexible and blurry ego boundaries. Childhood gender socialisation further builds on and reinforces these unconsciously developed ego boundaries finally producing feminine and masculine persons (1995, 202–206). This perspective has its roots in Freudian psychoanalytic theory, although Chodorow’s approach differs in many ways from Freud’s.

Gendered personalities are supposedly manifested in common gender stereotypical behaviour. Take emotional dependency. Women are stereotypically more emotional and emotionally dependent upon others around them, supposedly finding it difficult to distinguish their own interests and wellbeing from the interests and wellbeing of their children and partners. This is said to be because of their blurry and (somewhat) confused ego boundaries: women find it hard to distinguish their own needs from the needs of those around them because they cannot sufficiently individuate themselves from those close to them. By contrast, men are stereotypically emotionally detached, preferring a career where dispassionate and distanced thinking are virtues. These traits are said to result from men’s well-defined ego boundaries that enable them to prioritise their own needs and interests sometimes at the expense of others’ needs and interests.

Chodorow thinks that these gender differences should and can be changed. Feminine and masculine personalities play a crucial role in women’s oppression since they make females overly attentive to the needs of others and males emotionally deficient. In order to correct the situation, both male and female parents should be equally involved in parenting (Chodorow 1995, 214). This would help in ensuring that children develop sufficiently individuated senses of selves without becoming overly detached, which in turn helps to eradicate common gender stereotypical behaviours.

Catharine MacKinnon develops her theory of gender as a theory of sexuality. Very roughly: the social meaning of sex (gender) is created by sexual objectification of women whereby women are viewed and treated as objects for satisfying men’s desires (MacKinnon 1989). Masculinity is defined as sexual dominance, femininity as sexual submissiveness: genders are “created through the eroticization of dominance and submission. The man/woman difference and the dominance/submission dynamic define each other. This is the social meaning of sex” (MacKinnon 1989, 113). For MacKinnon, gender is constitutively constructed : in defining genders (or masculinity and femininity) we must make reference to social factors (see Haslanger 1995, 98). In particular, we must make reference to the position one occupies in the sexualised dominance/submission dynamic: men occupy the sexually dominant position, women the sexually submissive one. As a result, genders are by definition hierarchical and this hierarchy is fundamentally tied to sexualised power relations. The notion of ‘gender equality’, then, does not make sense to MacKinnon. If sexuality ceased to be a manifestation of dominance, hierarchical genders (that are defined in terms of sexuality) would cease to exist.

So, gender difference for MacKinnon is not a matter of having a particular psychological orientation or behavioural pattern; rather, it is a function of sexuality that is hierarchal in patriarchal societies. This is not to say that men are naturally disposed to sexually objectify women or that women are naturally submissive. Instead, male and female sexualities are socially conditioned: men have been conditioned to find women’s subordination sexy and women have been conditioned to find a particular male version of female sexuality as erotic – one in which it is erotic to be sexually submissive. For MacKinnon, both female and male sexual desires are defined from a male point of view that is conditioned by pornography (MacKinnon 1989, chapter 7). Bluntly put: pornography portrays a false picture of ‘what women want’ suggesting that women in actual fact are and want to be submissive. This conditions men’s sexuality so that they view women’s submission as sexy. And male dominance enforces this male version of sexuality onto women, sometimes by force. MacKinnon’s thought is not that male dominance is a result of social learning (see 2.1.); rather, socialization is an expression of power. That is, socialized differences in masculine and feminine traits, behaviour, and roles are not responsible for power inequalities. Females and males (roughly put) are socialised differently because there are underlying power inequalities. As MacKinnon puts it, ‘dominance’ (power relations) is prior to ‘difference’ (traits, behaviour and roles) (see, MacKinnon 1989, chapter 12). MacKinnon, then, sees legal restrictions on pornography as paramount to ending women’s subordinate status that stems from their gender.

3. Problems with the sex/gender distinction

3.1 is gender uniform.

The positions outlined above share an underlying metaphysical perspective on gender: gender realism . [ 2 ] That is, women as a group are assumed to share some characteristic feature, experience, common condition or criterion that defines their gender and the possession of which makes some individuals women (as opposed to, say, men). All women are thought to differ from all men in this respect (or respects). For example, MacKinnon thought that being treated in sexually objectifying ways is the common condition that defines women’s gender and what women as women share. All women differ from all men in this respect. Further, pointing out females who are not sexually objectified does not provide a counterexample to MacKinnon’s view. Being sexually objectified is constitutive of being a woman; a female who escapes sexual objectification, then, would not count as a woman.

One may want to critique the three accounts outlined by rejecting the particular details of each account. (For instance, see Spelman [1988, chapter 4] for a critique of the details of Chodorow’s view.) A more thoroughgoing critique has been levelled at the general metaphysical perspective of gender realism that underlies these positions. It has come under sustained attack on two grounds: first, that it fails to take into account racial, cultural and class differences between women (particularity argument); second, that it posits a normative ideal of womanhood (normativity argument).

Elizabeth Spelman (1988) has influentially argued against gender realism with her particularity argument. Roughly: gender realists mistakenly assume that gender is constructed independently of race, class, ethnicity and nationality. If gender were separable from, for example, race and class in this manner, all women would experience womanhood in the same way. And this is clearly false. For instance, Harris (1993) and Stone (2007) criticise MacKinnon’s view, that sexual objectification is the common condition that defines women’s gender, for failing to take into account differences in women’s backgrounds that shape their sexuality. The history of racist oppression illustrates that during slavery black women were ‘hypersexualised’ and thought to be always sexually available whereas white women were thought to be pure and sexually virtuous. In fact, the rape of a black woman was thought to be impossible (Harris 1993). So, (the argument goes) sexual objectification cannot serve as the common condition for womanhood since it varies considerably depending on one’s race and class. [ 3 ]

For Spelman, the perspective of ‘white solipsism’ underlies gender realists’ mistake. They assumed that all women share some “golden nugget of womanness” (Spelman 1988, 159) and that the features constitutive of such a nugget are the same for all women regardless of their particular cultural backgrounds. Next, white Western middle-class feminists accounted for the shared features simply by reflecting on the cultural features that condition their gender as women thus supposing that “the womanness underneath the Black woman’s skin is a white woman’s, and deep down inside the Latina woman is an Anglo woman waiting to burst through an obscuring cultural shroud” (Spelman 1988, 13). In so doing, Spelman claims, white middle-class Western feminists passed off their particular view of gender as “a metaphysical truth” (1988, 180) thereby privileging some women while marginalising others. In failing to see the importance of race and class in gender construction, white middle-class Western feminists conflated “the condition of one group of women with the condition of all” (Spelman 1988, 3).

Betty Friedan’s (1963) well-known work is a case in point of white solipsism. [ 4 ] Friedan saw domesticity as the main vehicle of gender oppression and called upon women in general to find jobs outside the home. But she failed to realize that women from less privileged backgrounds, often poor and non-white, already worked outside the home to support their families. Friedan’s suggestion, then, was applicable only to a particular sub-group of women (white middle-class Western housewives). But it was mistakenly taken to apply to all women’s lives — a mistake that was generated by Friedan’s failure to take women’s racial and class differences into account (hooks 2000, 1–3).

Spelman further holds that since social conditioning creates femininity and societies (and sub-groups) that condition it differ from one another, femininity must be differently conditioned in different societies. For her, “females become not simply women but particular kinds of women” (Spelman 1988, 113): white working-class women, black middle-class women, poor Jewish women, wealthy aristocratic European women, and so on.

This line of thought has been extremely influential in feminist philosophy. For instance, Young holds that Spelman has definitively shown that gender realism is untenable (1997, 13). Mikkola (2006) argues that this isn’t so. The arguments Spelman makes do not undermine the idea that there is some characteristic feature, experience, common condition or criterion that defines women’s gender; they simply point out that some particular ways of cashing out what defines womanhood are misguided. So, although Spelman is right to reject those accounts that falsely take the feature that conditions white middle-class Western feminists’ gender to condition women’s gender in general, this leaves open the possibility that women qua women do share something that defines their gender. (See also Haslanger [2000a] for a discussion of why gender realism is not necessarily untenable, and Stoljar [2011] for a discussion of Mikkola’s critique of Spelman.)

Judith Butler critiques the sex/gender distinction on two grounds. They critique gender realism with their normativity argument (1999 [original 1990], chapter 1); they also hold that the sex/gender distinction is unintelligible (this will be discussed in section 3.3.). Butler’s normativity argument is not straightforwardly directed at the metaphysical perspective of gender realism, but rather at its political counterpart: identity politics. This is a form of political mobilization based on membership in some group (e.g. racial, ethnic, cultural, gender) and group membership is thought to be delimited by some common experiences, conditions or features that define the group (Heyes 2000, 58; see also the entry on Identity Politics ). Feminist identity politics, then, presupposes gender realism in that feminist politics is said to be mobilized around women as a group (or category) where membership in this group is fixed by some condition, experience or feature that women supposedly share and that defines their gender.

Butler’s normativity argument makes two claims. The first is akin to Spelman’s particularity argument: unitary gender notions fail to take differences amongst women into account thus failing to recognise “the multiplicity of cultural, social, and political intersections in which the concrete array of ‘women’ are constructed” (Butler 1999, 19–20). In their attempt to undercut biologically deterministic ways of defining what it means to be a woman, feminists inadvertently created new socially constructed accounts of supposedly shared femininity. Butler’s second claim is that such false gender realist accounts are normative. That is, in their attempt to fix feminism’s subject matter, feminists unwittingly defined the term ‘woman’ in a way that implies there is some correct way to be gendered a woman (Butler 1999, 5). That the definition of the term ‘woman’ is fixed supposedly “operates as a policing force which generates and legitimizes certain practices, experiences, etc., and curtails and delegitimizes others” (Nicholson 1998, 293). Following this line of thought, one could say that, for instance, Chodorow’s view of gender suggests that ‘real’ women have feminine personalities and that these are the women feminism should be concerned about. If one does not exhibit a distinctly feminine personality, the implication is that one is not ‘really’ a member of women’s category nor does one properly qualify for feminist political representation.

Butler’s second claim is based on their view that“[i]dentity categories [like that of women] are never merely descriptive, but always normative, and as such, exclusionary” (Butler 1991, 160). That is, the mistake of those feminists Butler critiques was not that they provided the incorrect definition of ‘woman’. Rather, (the argument goes) their mistake was to attempt to define the term ‘woman’ at all. Butler’s view is that ‘woman’ can never be defined in a way that does not prescribe some “unspoken normative requirements” (like having a feminine personality) that women should conform to (Butler 1999, 9). Butler takes this to be a feature of terms like ‘woman’ that purport to pick out (what they call) ‘identity categories’. They seem to assume that ‘woman’ can never be used in a non-ideological way (Moi 1999, 43) and that it will always encode conditions that are not satisfied by everyone we think of as women. Some explanation for this comes from Butler’s view that all processes of drawing categorical distinctions involve evaluative and normative commitments; these in turn involve the exercise of power and reflect the conditions of those who are socially powerful (Witt 1995).

In order to better understand Butler’s critique, consider their account of gender performativity. For them, standard feminist accounts take gendered individuals to have some essential properties qua gendered individuals or a gender core by virtue of which one is either a man or a woman. This view assumes that women and men, qua women and men, are bearers of various essential and accidental attributes where the former secure gendered persons’ persistence through time as so gendered. But according to Butler this view is false: (i) there are no such essential properties, and (ii) gender is an illusion maintained by prevalent power structures. First, feminists are said to think that genders are socially constructed in that they have the following essential attributes (Butler 1999, 24): women are females with feminine behavioural traits, being heterosexuals whose desire is directed at men; men are males with masculine behavioural traits, being heterosexuals whose desire is directed at women. These are the attributes necessary for gendered individuals and those that enable women and men to persist through time as women and men. Individuals have “intelligible genders” (Butler 1999, 23) if they exhibit this sequence of traits in a coherent manner (where sexual desire follows from sexual orientation that in turn follows from feminine/ masculine behaviours thought to follow from biological sex). Social forces in general deem individuals who exhibit in coherent gender sequences (like lesbians) to be doing their gender ‘wrong’ and they actively discourage such sequencing of traits, for instance, via name-calling and overt homophobic discrimination. Think back to what was said above: having a certain conception of what women are like that mirrors the conditions of socially powerful (white, middle-class, heterosexual, Western) women functions to marginalize and police those who do not fit this conception.

These gender cores, supposedly encoding the above traits, however, are nothing more than illusions created by ideals and practices that seek to render gender uniform through heterosexism, the view that heterosexuality is natural and homosexuality is deviant (Butler 1999, 42). Gender cores are constructed as if they somehow naturally belong to women and men thereby creating gender dimorphism or the belief that one must be either a masculine male or a feminine female. But gender dimorphism only serves a heterosexist social order by implying that since women and men are sharply opposed, it is natural to sexually desire the opposite sex or gender.

Further, being feminine and desiring men (for instance) are standardly assumed to be expressions of one’s gender as a woman. Butler denies this and holds that gender is really performative. It is not “a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is … instituted … through a stylized repetition of [habitual] acts ” (Butler 1999, 179): through wearing certain gender-coded clothing, walking and sitting in certain gender-coded ways, styling one’s hair in gender-coded manner and so on. Gender is not something one is, it is something one does; it is a sequence of acts, a doing rather than a being. And repeatedly engaging in ‘feminising’ and ‘masculinising’ acts congeals gender thereby making people falsely think of gender as something they naturally are . Gender only comes into being through these gendering acts: a female who has sex with men does not express her gender as a woman. This activity (amongst others) makes her gendered a woman.

The constitutive acts that gender individuals create genders as “compelling illusion[s]” (Butler 1990, 271). Our gendered classification scheme is a strong pragmatic construction : social factors wholly determine our use of the scheme and the scheme fails to represent accurately any ‘facts of the matter’ (Haslanger 1995, 100). People think that there are true and real genders, and those deemed to be doing their gender ‘wrong’ are not socially sanctioned. But, genders are true and real only to the extent that they are performed (Butler 1990, 278–9). It does not make sense, then, to say of a male-to-female trans person that s/he is really a man who only appears to be a woman. Instead, males dressing up and acting in ways that are associated with femininity “show that [as Butler suggests] ‘being’ feminine is just a matter of doing certain activities” (Stone 2007, 64). As a result, the trans person’s gender is just as real or true as anyone else’s who is a ‘traditionally’ feminine female or masculine male (Butler 1990, 278). [ 5 ] Without heterosexism that compels people to engage in certain gendering acts, there would not be any genders at all. And ultimately the aim should be to abolish norms that compel people to act in these gendering ways.

For Butler, given that gender is performative, the appropriate response to feminist identity politics involves two things. First, feminists should understand ‘woman’ as open-ended and “a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or end … it is open to intervention and resignification” (Butler 1999, 43). That is, feminists should not try to define ‘woman’ at all. Second, the category of women “ought not to be the foundation of feminist politics” (Butler 1999, 9). Rather, feminists should focus on providing an account of how power functions and shapes our understandings of womanhood not only in the society at large but also within the feminist movement.

Many people, including many feminists, have ordinarily taken sex ascriptions to be solely a matter of biology with no social or cultural dimension. It is commonplace to think that there are only two sexes and that biological sex classifications are utterly unproblematic. By contrast, some feminists have argued that sex classifications are not unproblematic and that they are not solely a matter of biology. In order to make sense of this, it is helpful to distinguish object- and idea-construction (see Haslanger 2003b for more): social forces can be said to construct certain kinds of objects (e.g. sexed bodies or gendered individuals) and certain kinds of ideas (e.g. sex or gender concepts). First, take the object-construction of sexed bodies. Secondary sex characteristics, or the physiological and biological features commonly associated with males and females, are affected by social practices. In some societies, females’ lower social status has meant that they have been fed less and so, the lack of nutrition has had the effect of making them smaller in size (Jaggar 1983, 37). Uniformity in muscular shape, size and strength within sex categories is not caused entirely by biological factors, but depends heavily on exercise opportunities: if males and females were allowed the same exercise opportunities and equal encouragement to exercise, it is thought that bodily dimorphism would diminish (Fausto-Sterling 1993a, 218). A number of medical phenomena involving bones (like osteoporosis) have social causes directly related to expectations about gender, women’s diet and their exercise opportunities (Fausto-Sterling 2005). These examples suggest that physiological features thought to be sex-specific traits not affected by social and cultural factors are, after all, to some extent products of social conditioning. Social conditioning, then, shapes our biology.

Second, take the idea-construction of sex concepts. Our concept of sex is said to be a product of social forces in the sense that what counts as sex is shaped by social meanings. Standardly, those with XX-chromosomes, ovaries that produce large egg cells, female genitalia, a relatively high proportion of ‘female’ hormones, and other secondary sex characteristics (relatively small body size, less body hair) count as biologically female. Those with XY-chromosomes, testes that produce small sperm cells, male genitalia, a relatively high proportion of ‘male’ hormones and other secondary sex traits (relatively large body size, significant amounts of body hair) count as male. This understanding is fairly recent. The prevalent scientific view from Ancient Greeks until the late 18 th century, did not consider female and male sexes to be distinct categories with specific traits; instead, a ‘one-sex model’ held that males and females were members of the same sex category. Females’ genitals were thought to be the same as males’ but simply directed inside the body; ovaries and testes (for instance) were referred to by the same term and whether the term referred to the former or the latter was made clear by the context (Laqueur 1990, 4). It was not until the late 1700s that scientists began to think of female and male anatomies as radically different moving away from the ‘one-sex model’ of a single sex spectrum to the (nowadays prevalent) ‘two-sex model’ of sexual dimorphism. (For an alternative view, see King 2013.)

Fausto-Sterling has argued that this ‘two-sex model’ isn’t straightforward either (1993b; 2000a; 2000b). Based on a meta-study of empirical medical research, she estimates that 1.7% of population fail to neatly fall within the usual sex classifications possessing various combinations of different sex characteristics (Fausto-Sterling 2000a, 20). In her earlier work, she claimed that intersex individuals make up (at least) three further sex classes: ‘herms’ who possess one testis and one ovary; ‘merms’ who possess testes, some aspects of female genitalia but no ovaries; and ‘ferms’ who have ovaries, some aspects of male genitalia but no testes (Fausto-Sterling 1993b, 21). (In her [2000a], Fausto-Sterling notes that these labels were put forward tongue–in–cheek.) Recognition of intersex people suggests that feminists (and society at large) are wrong to think that humans are either female or male.

To illustrate further the idea-construction of sex, consider the case of the athlete Maria Patiño. Patiño has female genitalia, has always considered herself to be female and was considered so by others. However, she was discovered to have XY chromosomes and was barred from competing in women’s sports (Fausto-Sterling 2000b, 1–3). Patiño’s genitalia were at odds with her chromosomes and the latter were taken to determine her sex. Patiño successfully fought to be recognised as a female athlete arguing that her chromosomes alone were not sufficient to not make her female. Intersex people, like Patiño, illustrate that our understandings of sex differ and suggest that there is no immediately obvious way to settle what sex amounts to purely biologically or scientifically. Deciding what sex is involves evaluative judgements that are influenced by social factors.

Insofar as our cultural conceptions affect our understandings of sex, feminists must be much more careful about sex classifications and rethink what sex amounts to (Stone 2007, chapter 1). More specifically, intersex people illustrate that sex traits associated with females and males need not always go together and that individuals can have some mixture of these traits. This suggests to Stone that sex is a cluster concept: it is sufficient to satisfy enough of the sex features that tend to cluster together in order to count as being of a particular sex. But, one need not satisfy all of those features or some arbitrarily chosen supposedly necessary sex feature, like chromosomes (Stone 2007, 44). This makes sex a matter of degree and sex classifications should take place on a spectrum: one can be more or less female/male but there is no sharp distinction between the two. Further, intersex people (along with trans people) are located at the centre of the sex spectrum and in many cases their sex will be indeterminate (Stone 2007).

More recently, Ayala and Vasilyeva (2015) have argued for an inclusive and extended conception of sex: just as certain tools can be seen to extend our minds beyond the limits of our brains (e.g. white canes), other tools (like dildos) can extend our sex beyond our bodily boundaries. This view aims to motivate the idea that what counts as sex should not be determined by looking inwards at genitalia or other anatomical features. In a different vein, Ásta (2018) argues that sex is a conferred social property. This follows her more general conferralist framework to analyse all social properties: properties that are conferred by others thereby generating a social status that consists in contextually specific constraints and enablements on individual behaviour. The general schema for conferred properties is as follows (Ásta 2018, 8):

Conferred property: what property is conferred. Who: who the subjects are. What: what attitude, state, or action of the subjects matter. When: under what conditions the conferral takes place. Base property: what the subjects are attempting to track (consciously or not), if anything.

With being of a certain sex (e.g. male, female) in mind, Ásta holds that it is a conferred property that merely aims to track physical features. Hence sex is a social – or in fact, an institutional – property rather than a natural one. The schema for sex goes as follows (72):

Conferred property: being female, male. Who: legal authorities, drawing on the expert opinion of doctors, other medical personnel. What: “the recording of a sex in official documents ... The judgment of the doctors (and others) as to what sex role might be the most fitting, given the biological characteristics present.” When: at birth or after surgery/ hormonal treatment. Base property: “the aim is to track as many sex-stereotypical characteristics as possible, and doctors perform surgery in cases where that might help bring the physical characteristics more in line with the stereotype of male and female.”

This (among other things) offers a debunking analysis of sex: it may appear to be a natural property, but on the conferralist analysis is better understood as a conferred legal status. Ásta holds that gender too is a conferred property, but contra the discussion in the following section, she does not think that this collapses the distinction between sex and gender: sex and gender are differently conferred albeit both satisfying the general schema noted above. Nonetheless, on the conferralist framework what underlies both sex and gender is the idea of social construction as social significance: sex-stereotypical characteristics are taken to be socially significant context specifically, whereby they become the basis for conferring sex onto individuals and this brings with it various constraints and enablements on individuals and their behaviour. This fits object- and idea-constructions introduced above, although offers a different general framework to analyse the matter at hand.

In addition to arguing against identity politics and for gender performativity, Butler holds that distinguishing biological sex from social gender is unintelligible. For them, both are socially constructed:

If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all. (Butler 1999, 10–11)

(Butler is not alone in claiming that there are no tenable distinctions between nature/culture, biology/construction and sex/gender. See also: Antony 1998; Gatens 1996; Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999.) Butler makes two different claims in the passage cited: that sex is a social construction, and that sex is gender. To unpack their view, consider the two claims in turn. First, the idea that sex is a social construct, for Butler, boils down to the view that our sexed bodies are also performative and, so, they have “no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute [their] reality” (1999, 173). Prima facie , this implausibly implies that female and male bodies do not have independent existence and that if gendering activities ceased, so would physical bodies. This is not Butler’s claim; rather, their position is that bodies viewed as the material foundations on which gender is constructed, are themselves constructed as if they provide such material foundations (Butler 1993). Cultural conceptions about gender figure in “the very apparatus of production whereby sexes themselves are established” (Butler 1999, 11).

For Butler, sexed bodies never exist outside social meanings and how we understand gender shapes how we understand sex (1999, 139). Sexed bodies are not empty matter on which gender is constructed and sex categories are not picked out on the basis of objective features of the world. Instead, our sexed bodies are themselves discursively constructed : they are the way they are, at least to a substantial extent, because of what is attributed to sexed bodies and how they are classified (for discursive construction, see Haslanger 1995, 99). Sex assignment (calling someone female or male) is normative (Butler 1993, 1). [ 6 ] When the doctor calls a newly born infant a girl or a boy, s/he is not making a descriptive claim, but a normative one. In fact, the doctor is performing an illocutionary speech act (see the entry on Speech Acts ). In effect, the doctor’s utterance makes infants into girls or boys. We, then, engage in activities that make it seem as if sexes naturally come in two and that being female or male is an objective feature of the world, rather than being a consequence of certain constitutive acts (that is, rather than being performative). And this is what Butler means in saying that physical bodies never exist outside cultural and social meanings, and that sex is as socially constructed as gender. They do not deny that physical bodies exist. But, they take our understanding of this existence to be a product of social conditioning: social conditioning makes the existence of physical bodies intelligible to us by discursively constructing sexed bodies through certain constitutive acts. (For a helpful introduction to Butler’s views, see Salih 2002.)

For Butler, sex assignment is always in some sense oppressive. Again, this appears to be because of Butler’s general suspicion of classification: sex classification can never be merely descriptive but always has a normative element reflecting evaluative claims of those who are powerful. Conducting a feminist genealogy of the body (or examining why sexed bodies are thought to come naturally as female and male), then, should ground feminist practice (Butler 1993, 28–9). Feminists should examine and uncover ways in which social construction and certain acts that constitute sex shape our understandings of sexed bodies, what kinds of meanings bodies acquire and which practices and illocutionary speech acts ‘make’ our bodies into sexes. Doing so enables feminists to identity how sexed bodies are socially constructed in order to resist such construction.

However, given what was said above, it is far from obvious what we should make of Butler’s claim that sex “was always already gender” (1999, 11). Stone (2007) takes this to mean that sex is gender but goes on to question it arguing that the social construction of both sex and gender does not make sex identical to gender. According to Stone, it would be more accurate for Butler to say that claims about sex imply gender norms. That is, many claims about sex traits (like ‘females are physically weaker than males’) actually carry implications about how women and men are expected to behave. To some extent the claim describes certain facts. But, it also implies that females are not expected to do much heavy lifting and that they would probably not be good at it. So, claims about sex are not identical to claims about gender; rather, they imply claims about gender norms (Stone 2007, 70).

Some feminists hold that the sex/gender distinction is not useful. For a start, it is thought to reflect politically problematic dualistic thinking that undercuts feminist aims: the distinction is taken to reflect and replicate androcentric oppositions between (for instance) mind/body, culture/nature and reason/emotion that have been used to justify women’s oppression (e.g. Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999). The thought is that in oppositions like these, one term is always superior to the other and that the devalued term is usually associated with women (Lloyd 1993). For instance, human subjectivity and agency are identified with the mind but since women are usually identified with their bodies, they are devalued as human subjects and agents. The opposition between mind and body is said to further map on to other distinctions, like reason/emotion, culture/nature, rational/irrational, where one side of each distinction is devalued (one’s bodily features are usually valued less that one’s mind, rationality is usually valued more than irrationality) and women are associated with the devalued terms: they are thought to be closer to bodily features and nature than men, to be irrational, emotional and so on. This is said to be evident (for instance) in job interviews. Men are treated as gender-neutral persons and not asked whether they are planning to take time off to have a family. By contrast, that women face such queries illustrates that they are associated more closely than men with bodily features to do with procreation (Prokhovnik 1999, 126). The opposition between mind and body, then, is thought to map onto the opposition between men and women.

Now, the mind/body dualism is also said to map onto the sex/gender distinction (Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999). The idea is that gender maps onto mind, sex onto body. Although not used by those endorsing this view, the basic idea can be summed by the slogan ‘Gender is between the ears, sex is between the legs’: the implication is that, while sex is immutable, gender is something individuals have control over – it is something we can alter and change through individual choices. However, since women are said to be more closely associated with biological features (and so, to map onto the body side of the mind/body distinction) and men are treated as gender-neutral persons (mapping onto the mind side), the implication is that “man equals gender, which is associated with mind and choice, freedom from body, autonomy, and with the public real; while woman equals sex, associated with the body, reproduction, ‘natural’ rhythms and the private realm” (Prokhovnik 1999, 103). This is said to render the sex/gender distinction inherently repressive and to drain it of any potential for emancipation: rather than facilitating gender role choice for women, it “actually functions to reinforce their association with body, sex, and involuntary ‘natural’ rhythms” (Prokhovnik 1999, 103). Contrary to what feminists like Rubin argued, the sex/gender distinction cannot be used as a theoretical tool that dissociates conceptions of womanhood from biological and reproductive features.

Moi has further argued that the sex/gender distinction is useless given certain theoretical goals (1999, chapter 1). This is not to say that it is utterly worthless; according to Moi, the sex/gender distinction worked well to show that the historically prevalent biological determinism was false. However, for her, the distinction does no useful work “when it comes to producing a good theory of subjectivity” (1999, 6) and “a concrete, historical understanding of what it means to be a woman (or a man) in a given society” (1999, 4–5). That is, the 1960s distinction understood sex as fixed by biology without any cultural or historical dimensions. This understanding, however, ignores lived experiences and embodiment as aspects of womanhood (and manhood) by separating sex from gender and insisting that womanhood is to do with the latter. Rather, embodiment must be included in one’s theory that tries to figure out what it is to be a woman (or a man).

Mikkola (2011) argues that the sex/gender distinction, which underlies views like Rubin’s and MacKinnon’s, has certain unintuitive and undesirable ontological commitments that render the distinction politically unhelpful. First, claiming that gender is socially constructed implies that the existence of women and men is a mind-dependent matter. This suggests that we can do away with women and men simply by altering some social practices, conventions or conditions on which gender depends (whatever those are). However, ordinary social agents find this unintuitive given that (ordinarily) sex and gender are not distinguished. Second, claiming that gender is a product of oppressive social forces suggests that doing away with women and men should be feminism’s political goal. But this harbours ontologically undesirable commitments since many ordinary social agents view their gender to be a source of positive value. So, feminism seems to want to do away with something that should not be done away with, which is unlikely to motivate social agents to act in ways that aim at gender justice. Given these problems, Mikkola argues that feminists should give up the distinction on practical political grounds.

Tomas Bogardus (2020) has argued in an even more radical sense against the sex/gender distinction: as things stand, he holds, feminist philosophers have merely assumed and asserted that the distinction exists, instead of having offered good arguments for the distinction. In other words, feminist philosophers allegedly have yet to offer good reasons to think that ‘woman’ does not simply pick out adult human females. Alex Byrne (2020) argues in a similar vein: the term ‘woman’ does not pick out a social kind as feminist philosophers have “assumed”. Instead, “women are adult human females–nothing more, and nothing less” (2020, 3801). Byrne offers six considerations to ground this AHF (adult, human, female) conception.

• It reproduces the dictionary definition of ‘woman’.
• One would expect English to have a word that picks out the category adult human female, and ‘woman’ is the only candidate.
• AHF explains how we sometimes know that an individual is a woman, despite knowing nothing else relevant about her other than the fact that she is an adult human female.
• AHF stands or falls with the analogous thesis for girls, which can be supported independently.
• AHF predicts the correct verdict in cases of gender role reversal.
• AHF is supported by the fact that ‘woman’ and ‘female’ are often appropriately used as stylistic variants of each other, even in hyperintensional contexts.

Robin Dembroff (2021) responds to Byrne and highlights various problems with Byrne’s argument. First, framing: Byrne assumes from the start that gender terms like ‘woman’ have a single invariant meaning thereby failing to discuss the possibility of terms like ‘woman’ having multiple meanings – something that is a familiar claim made by feminist theorists from various disciplines. Moreover, Byrne (according to Dembroff) assumes without argument that there is a single, universal category of woman – again, something that has been extensively discussed and critiqued by feminist philosophers and theorists. Second, Byrne’s conception of the ‘dominant’ meaning of woman is said to be cherry-picked and it ignores a wealth of contexts outside of philosophy (like the media and the law) where ‘woman’ has a meaning other than AHF . Third, Byrne’s own distinction between biological and social categories fails to establish what he intended to establish: namely, that ‘woman’ picks out a biological rather than a social kind. Hence, Dembroff holds, Byrne’s case fails by its own lights. Byrne (2021) responds to Dembroff’s critique.

Others such as ‘gender critical feminists’ also hold views about the sex/gender distinction in a spirit similar to Bogardus and Byrne. For example, Holly Lawford-Smith (2021) takes the prevalent sex/gender distinction, where ‘female’/‘male’ are used as sex terms and ‘woman’/’man’ as gender terms, not to be helpful. Instead, she takes all of these to be sex terms and holds that (the norms of) femininity/masculinity refer to gender normativity. Because much of the gender critical feminists’ discussion that philosophers have engaged in has taken place in social media, public fora, and other sources outside academic philosophy, this entry will not focus on these discussions.

4. Women as a group

The various critiques of the sex/gender distinction have called into question the viability of the category women . Feminism is the movement to end the oppression women as a group face. But, how should the category of women be understood if feminists accept the above arguments that gender construction is not uniform, that a sharp distinction between biological sex and social gender is false or (at least) not useful, and that various features associated with women play a role in what it is to be a woman, none of which are individually necessary and jointly sufficient (like a variety of social roles, positions, behaviours, traits, bodily features and experiences)? Feminists must be able to address cultural and social differences in gender construction if feminism is to be a genuinely inclusive movement and be careful not to posit commonalities that mask important ways in which women qua women differ. These concerns (among others) have generated a situation where (as Linda Alcoff puts it) feminists aim to speak and make political demands in the name of women, at the same time rejecting the idea that there is a unified category of women (2006, 152). If feminist critiques of the category women are successful, then what (if anything) binds women together, what is it to be a woman, and what kinds of demands can feminists make on behalf of women?

Many have found the fragmentation of the category of women problematic for political reasons (e.g. Alcoff 2006; Bach 2012; Benhabib 1992; Frye 1996; Haslanger 2000b; Heyes 2000; Martin 1994; Mikkola 2007; Stoljar 1995; Stone 2004; Tanesini 1996; Young 1997; Zack 2005). For instance, Young holds that accounts like Spelman’s reduce the category of women to a gerrymandered collection of individuals with nothing to bind them together (1997, 20). Black women differ from white women but members of both groups also differ from one another with respect to nationality, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation and economic position; that is, wealthy white women differ from working-class white women due to their economic and class positions. These sub-groups are themselves diverse: for instance, some working-class white women in Northern Ireland are starkly divided along religious lines. So if we accept Spelman’s position, we risk ending up with individual women and nothing to bind them together. And this is problematic: in order to respond to oppression of women in general, feminists must understand them as a category in some sense. Young writes that without doing so “it is not possible to conceptualize oppression as a systematic, structured, institutional process” (1997, 17). Some, then, take the articulation of an inclusive category of women to be the prerequisite for effective feminist politics and a rich literature has emerged that aims to conceptualise women as a group or a collective (e.g. Alcoff 2006; Ásta 2011; Frye 1996; 2011; Haslanger 2000b; Heyes 2000; Stoljar 1995, 2011; Young 1997; Zack 2005). Articulations of this category can be divided into those that are: (a) gender nominalist — positions that deny there is something women qua women share and that seek to unify women’s social kind by appealing to something external to women; and (b) gender realist — positions that take there to be something women qua women share (although these realist positions differ significantly from those outlined in Section 2). Below we will review some influential gender nominalist and gender realist positions. Before doing so, it is worth noting that not everyone is convinced that attempts to articulate an inclusive category of women can succeed or that worries about what it is to be a woman are in need of being resolved. Mikkola (2016) argues that feminist politics need not rely on overcoming (what she calls) the ‘gender controversy’: that feminists must settle the meaning of gender concepts and articulate a way to ground women’s social kind membership. As she sees it, disputes about ‘what it is to be a woman’ have become theoretically bankrupt and intractable, which has generated an analytical impasse that looks unsurpassable. Instead, Mikkola argues for giving up the quest, which in any case in her view poses no serious political obstacles.

Elizabeth Barnes (2020) responds to the need to offer an inclusive conception of gender somewhat differently, although she endorses the need for feminism to be inclusive particularly of trans people. Barnes holds that typically philosophical theories of gender aim to offer an account of what it is to be a woman (or man, genderqueer, etc.), where such an account is presumed to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for being a woman or an account of our gender terms’ extensions. But, she holds, it is a mistake to expect our theories of gender to do so. For Barnes, a project that offers a metaphysics of gender “should be understood as the project of theorizing what it is —if anything— about the social world that ultimately explains gender” (2020, 706). This project is not equivalent to one that aims to define gender terms or elucidate the application conditions for natural language gender terms though.

4.1 Gender nominalism

Iris Young argues that unless there is “some sense in which ‘woman’ is the name of a social collective [that feminism represents], there is nothing specific to feminist politics” (1997, 13). In order to make the category women intelligible, she argues that women make up a series: a particular kind of social collective “whose members are unified passively by the objects their actions are oriented around and/or by the objectified results of the material effects of the actions of the other” (Young 1997, 23). A series is distinct from a group in that, whereas members of groups are thought to self-consciously share certain goals, projects, traits and/ or self-conceptions, members of series pursue their own individual ends without necessarily having anything at all in common. Young holds that women are not bound together by a shared feature or experience (or set of features and experiences) since she takes Spelman’s particularity argument to have established definitely that no such feature exists (1997, 13; see also: Frye 1996; Heyes 2000). Instead, women’s category is unified by certain practico-inert realities or the ways in which women’s lives and their actions are oriented around certain objects and everyday realities (Young 1997, 23–4). For example, bus commuters make up a series unified through their individual actions being organised around the same practico-inert objects of the bus and the practice of public transport. Women make up a series unified through women’s lives and actions being organised around certain practico-inert objects and realities that position them as women .

Young identifies two broad groups of such practico-inert objects and realities. First, phenomena associated with female bodies (physical facts), biological processes that take place in female bodies (menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth) and social rules associated with these biological processes (social rules of menstruation, for instance). Second, gender-coded objects and practices: pronouns, verbal and visual representations of gender, gender-coded artefacts and social spaces, clothes, cosmetics, tools and furniture. So, women make up a series since their lives and actions are organised around female bodies and certain gender-coded objects. Their series is bound together passively and the unity is “not one that arises from the individuals called women” (Young 1997, 32).

Although Young’s proposal purports to be a response to Spelman’s worries, Stone has questioned whether it is, after all, susceptible to the particularity argument: ultimately, on Young’s view, something women as women share (their practico-inert realities) binds them together (Stone 2004).

Natalie Stoljar holds that unless the category of women is unified, feminist action on behalf of women cannot be justified (1995, 282). Stoljar too is persuaded by the thought that women qua women do not share anything unitary. This prompts her to argue for resemblance nominalism. This is the view that a certain kind of resemblance relation holds between entities of a particular type (for more on resemblance nominalism, see Armstrong 1989, 39–58). Stoljar is not alone in arguing for resemblance relations to make sense of women as a category; others have also done so, usually appealing to Wittgenstein’s ‘family resemblance’ relations (Alcoff 1988; Green & Radford Curry 1991; Heyes 2000; Munro 2006). Stoljar relies more on Price’s resemblance nominalism whereby x is a member of some type F only if x resembles some paradigm or exemplar of F sufficiently closely (Price 1953, 20). For instance, the type of red entities is unified by some chosen red paradigms so that only those entities that sufficiently resemble the paradigms count as red. The type (or category) of women, then, is unified by some chosen woman paradigms so that those who sufficiently resemble the woman paradigms count as women (Stoljar 1995, 284).

Semantic considerations about the concept woman suggest to Stoljar that resemblance nominalism should be endorsed (Stoljar 2000, 28). It seems unlikely that the concept is applied on the basis of some single social feature all and only women possess. By contrast, woman is a cluster concept and our attributions of womanhood pick out “different arrangements of features in different individuals” (Stoljar 2000, 27). More specifically, they pick out the following clusters of features: (a) Female sex; (b) Phenomenological features: menstruation, female sexual experience, child-birth, breast-feeding, fear of walking on the streets at night or fear of rape; (c) Certain roles: wearing typically female clothing, being oppressed on the basis of one’s sex or undertaking care-work; (d) Gender attribution: “calling oneself a woman, being called a woman” (Stoljar 1995, 283–4). For Stoljar, attributions of womanhood are to do with a variety of traits and experiences: those that feminists have historically termed ‘gender traits’ (like social, behavioural, psychological traits) and those termed ‘sex traits’. Nonetheless, she holds that since the concept woman applies to (at least some) trans persons, one can be a woman without being female (Stoljar 1995, 282).

The cluster concept woman does not, however, straightforwardly provide the criterion for picking out the category of women. Rather, the four clusters of features that the concept picks out help single out woman paradigms that in turn help single out the category of women. First, any individual who possesses a feature from at least three of the four clusters mentioned will count as an exemplar of the category. For instance, an African-American with primary and secondary female sex characteristics, who describes herself as a woman and is oppressed on the basis of her sex, along with a white European hermaphrodite brought up ‘as a girl’, who engages in female roles and has female phenomenological features despite lacking female sex characteristics, will count as woman paradigms (Stoljar 1995, 284). [ 7 ] Second, any individual who resembles “any of the paradigms sufficiently closely (on Price’s account, as closely as [the paradigms] resemble each other) will be a member of the resemblance class ‘woman’” (Stoljar 1995, 284). That is, what delimits membership in the category of women is that one resembles sufficiently a woman paradigm.

4.2 Neo-gender realism

In a series of articles collected in her 2012 book, Sally Haslanger argues for a way to define the concept woman that is politically useful, serving as a tool in feminist fights against sexism, and that shows woman to be a social (not a biological) notion. More specifically, Haslanger argues that gender is a matter of occupying either a subordinate or a privileged social position. In some articles, Haslanger is arguing for a revisionary analysis of the concept woman (2000b; 2003a; 2003b). Elsewhere she suggests that her analysis may not be that revisionary after all (2005; 2006). Consider the former argument first. Haslanger’s analysis is, in her terms, ameliorative: it aims to elucidate which gender concepts best help feminists achieve their legitimate purposes thereby elucidating those concepts feminists should be using (Haslanger 2000b, 33). [ 8 ] Now, feminists need gender terminology in order to fight sexist injustices (Haslanger 2000b, 36). In particular, they need gender terms to identify, explain and talk about persistent social inequalities between males and females. Haslanger’s analysis of gender begins with the recognition that females and males differ in two respects: physically and in their social positions. Societies in general tend to “privilege individuals with male bodies” (Haslanger 2000b, 38) so that the social positions they subsequently occupy are better than the social positions of those with female bodies. And this generates persistent sexist injustices. With this in mind, Haslanger specifies how she understands genders:

S is a woman iff [by definition] S is systematically subordinated along some dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.), and S is ‘marked’ as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a female’s biological role in reproduction.

S is a man iff [by definition] S is systematically privileged along some dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.), and S is ‘marked’ as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a male’s biological role in reproduction. (2003a, 6–7)

These are constitutive of being a woman and a man: what makes calling S a woman apt, is that S is oppressed on sex-marked grounds; what makes calling S a man apt, is that S is privileged on sex-marked grounds.

Haslanger’s ameliorative analysis is counterintuitive in that females who are not sex-marked for oppression, do not count as women. At least arguably, the Queen of England is not oppressed on sex-marked grounds and so, would not count as a woman on Haslanger’s definition. And, similarly, all males who are not privileged would not count as men. This might suggest that Haslanger’s analysis should be rejected in that it does not capture what language users have in mind when applying gender terms. However, Haslanger argues that this is not a reason to reject the definitions, which she takes to be revisionary: they are not meant to capture our intuitive gender terms. In response, Mikkola (2009) has argued that revisionary analyses of gender concepts, like Haslanger’s, are both politically unhelpful and philosophically unnecessary.

Note also that Haslanger’s proposal is eliminativist: gender justice would eradicate gender, since it would abolish those sexist social structures responsible for sex-marked oppression and privilege. If sexist oppression were to cease, women and men would no longer exist (although there would still be males and females). Not all feminists endorse such an eliminativist view though. Stone holds that Haslanger does not leave any room for positively revaluing what it is to be a woman: since Haslanger defines woman in terms of subordination,

any woman who challenges her subordinate status must by definition be challenging her status as a woman, even if she does not intend to … positive change to our gender norms would involve getting rid of the (necessarily subordinate) feminine gender. (Stone 2007, 160)

But according to Stone this is not only undesirable – one should be able to challenge subordination without having to challenge one’s status as a woman. It is also false: “because norms of femininity can be and constantly are being revised, women can be women without thereby being subordinate” (Stone 2007, 162; Mikkola [2016] too argues that Haslanger’s eliminativism is troublesome).

Theodore Bach holds that Haslanger’s eliminativism is undesirable on other grounds, and that Haslanger’s position faces another more serious problem. Feminism faces the following worries (among others):

Representation problem : “if there is no real group of ‘women’, then it is incoherent to make moral claims and advance political policies on behalf of women” (Bach 2012, 234). Commonality problems : (1) There is no feature that all women cross-culturally and transhistorically share. (2) Delimiting women’s social kind with the help of some essential property privileges those who possess it, and marginalizes those who do not (Bach 2012, 235).

According to Bach, Haslanger’s strategy to resolve these problems appeals to ‘social objectivism’. First, we define women “according to a suitably abstract relational property” (Bach 2012, 236), which avoids the commonality problems. Second, Haslanger employs “an ontologically thin notion of ‘objectivity’” (Bach 2012, 236) that answers the representation problem. Haslanger’s solution (Bach holds) is specifically to argue that women make up an objective type because women are objectively similar to one another, and not simply classified together given our background conceptual schemes. Bach claims though that Haslanger’s account is not objective enough, and we should on political grounds “provide a stronger ontological characterization of the genders men and women according to which they are natural kinds with explanatory essences” (Bach 2012, 238). He thus proposes that women make up a natural kind with a historical essence:

The essential property of women, in virtue of which an individual is a member of the kind ‘women,’ is participation in a lineage of women. In order to exemplify this relational property, an individual must be a reproduction of ancestral women, in which case she must have undergone the ontogenetic processes through which a historical gender system replicates women. (Bach 2012, 271)

In short, one is not a woman due to shared surface properties with other women (like occupying a subordinate social position). Rather, one is a woman because one has the right history: one has undergone the ubiquitous ontogenetic process of gender socialization. Thinking about gender in this way supposedly provides a stronger kind unity than Haslanger’s that simply appeals to shared surface properties.

Not everyone agrees; Mikkola (2020) argues that Bach’s metaphysical picture has internal tensions that render it puzzling and that Bach’s metaphysics does not provide good responses to the commonality and presentation problems. The historically essentialist view also has anti-trans implications. After all, trans women who have not undergone female gender socialization won’t count as women on his view (Mikkola [2016, 2020] develops this line of critique in more detail). More worryingly, trans women will count as men contrary to their self-identification. Both Bettcher (2013) and Jenkins (2016) consider the importance of gender self-identification. Bettcher argues that there is more than one ‘correct’ way to understand womanhood: at the very least, the dominant (mainstream), and the resistant (trans) conceptions. Dominant views like that of Bach’s tend to erase trans people’s experiences and to marginalize trans women within feminist movements. Rather than trans women having to defend their self-identifying claims, these claims should be taken at face value right from the start. And so, Bettcher holds, “in analyzing the meaning of terms such as ‘woman,’ it is inappropriate to dismiss alternative ways in which those terms are actually used in trans subcultures; such usage needs to be taken into consideration as part of the analysis” (2013, 235).

Specifically with Haslanger in mind and in a similar vein, Jenkins (2016) discusses how Haslanger’s revisionary approach unduly excludes some trans women from women’s social kind. On Jenkins’s view, Haslanger’s ameliorative methodology in fact yields more than one satisfying target concept: one that “corresponds to Haslanger’s proposed concept and captures the sense of gender as an imposed social class”; another that “captures the sense of gender as a lived identity” (Jenkins 2016, 397). The latter of these allows us to include trans women into women’s social kind, who on Haslanger’s social class approach to gender would inappropriately have been excluded. (See Andler 2017 for the view that Jenkins’s purportedly inclusive conception of gender is still not fully inclusive. Jenkins 2018 responds to this charge and develops the notion of gender identity still further.)

In addition to her revisionary argument, Haslanger has suggested that her ameliorative analysis of woman may not be as revisionary as it first seems (2005, 2006). Although successful in their reference fixing, ordinary language users do not always know precisely what they are talking about. Our language use may be skewed by oppressive ideologies that can “mislead us about the content of our own thoughts” (Haslanger 2005, 12). Although her gender terminology is not intuitive, this could simply be because oppressive ideologies mislead us about the meanings of our gender terms. Our everyday gender terminology might mean something utterly different from what we think it means; and we could be entirely ignorant of this. Perhaps Haslanger’s analysis, then, has captured our everyday gender vocabulary revealing to us the terms that we actually employ: we may be applying ‘woman’ in our everyday language on the basis of sex-marked subordination whether we take ourselves to be doing so or not. If this is so, Haslanger’s gender terminology is not radically revisionist.

Saul (2006) argues that, despite it being possible that we unknowingly apply ‘woman’ on the basis of social subordination, it is extremely difficult to show that this is the case. This would require showing that the gender terminology we in fact employ is Haslanger’s proposed gender terminology. But discovering the grounds on which we apply everyday gender terms is extremely difficult precisely because they are applied in various and idiosyncratic ways (Saul 2006, 129). Haslanger, then, needs to do more in order to show that her analysis is non-revisionary.

Charlotte Witt (2011a; 2011b) argues for a particular sort of gender essentialism, which Witt terms ‘uniessentialism’. Her motivation and starting point is the following: many ordinary social agents report gender being essential to them and claim that they would be a different person were they of a different sex/gender. Uniessentialism attempts to understand and articulate this. However, Witt’s work departs in important respects from the earlier (so-called) essentialist or gender realist positions discussed in Section 2: Witt does not posit some essential property of womanhood of the kind discussed above, which failed to take women’s differences into account. Further, uniessentialism differs significantly from those position developed in response to the problem of how we should conceive of women’s social kind. It is not about solving the standard dispute between gender nominalists and gender realists, or about articulating some supposedly shared property that binds women together and provides a theoretical ground for feminist political solidarity. Rather, uniessentialism aims to make good the widely held belief that gender is constitutive of who we are. [ 9 ]

Uniessentialism is a sort of individual essentialism. Traditionally philosophers distinguish between kind and individual essentialisms: the former examines what binds members of a kind together and what do all members of some kind have in common qua members of that kind. The latter asks: what makes an individual the individual it is. We can further distinguish two sorts of individual essentialisms: Kripkean identity essentialism and Aristotelian uniessentialism. The former asks: what makes an individual that individual? The latter, however, asks a slightly different question: what explains the unity of individuals? What explains that an individual entity exists over and above the sum total of its constituent parts? (The standard feminist debate over gender nominalism and gender realism has largely been about kind essentialism. Being about individual essentialism, Witt’s uniessentialism departs in an important way from the standard debate.) From the two individual essentialisms, Witt endorses the Aristotelian one. On this view, certain functional essences have a unifying role: these essences are responsible for the fact that material parts constitute a new individual, rather than just a lump of stuff or a collection of particles. Witt’s example is of a house: the essential house-functional property (what the entity is for, what its purpose is) unifies the different material parts of a house so that there is a house, and not just a collection of house-constituting particles (2011a, 6). Gender (being a woman/a man) functions in a similar fashion and provides “the principle of normative unity” that organizes, unifies and determines the roles of social individuals (Witt 2011a, 73). Due to this, gender is a uniessential property of social individuals.

It is important to clarify the notions of gender and social individuality that Witt employs. First, gender is a social position that “cluster[s] around the engendering function … women conceive and bear … men beget” (Witt 2011a, 40). These are women and men’s socially mediated reproductive functions (Witt 2011a, 29) and they differ from the biological function of reproduction, which roughly corresponds to sex on the standard sex/gender distinction. Witt writes: “to be a woman is to be recognized to have a particular function in engendering, to be a man is to be recognized to have a different function in engendering” (2011a, 39). Second, Witt distinguishes persons (those who possess self-consciousness), human beings (those who are biologically human) and social individuals (those who occupy social positions synchronically and diachronically). These ontological categories are not equivalent in that they possess different persistence and identity conditions. Social individuals are bound by social normativity, human beings by biological normativity. These normativities differ in two respects: first, social norms differ from one culture to the next whereas biological norms do not; second, unlike biological normativity, social normativity requires “the recognition by others that an agent is both responsive to and evaluable under a social norm” (Witt 2011a, 19). Thus, being a social individual is not equivalent to being a human being. Further, Witt takes personhood to be defined in terms of intrinsic psychological states of self-awareness and self-consciousness. However, social individuality is defined in terms of the extrinsic feature of occupying a social position, which depends for its existence on a social world. So, the two are not equivalent: personhood is essentially about intrinsic features and could exist without a social world, whereas social individuality is essentially about extrinsic features that could not exist without a social world.

Witt’s gender essentialist argument crucially pertains to social individuals , not to persons or human beings: saying that persons or human beings are gendered would be a category mistake. But why is gender essential to social individuals? For Witt, social individuals are those who occupy positions in social reality. Further, “social positions have norms or social roles associated with them; a social role is what an individual who occupies a given social position is responsive to and evaluable under” (Witt 2011a, 59). However, qua social individuals, we occupy multiple social positions at once and over time: we can be women, mothers, immigrants, sisters, academics, wives, community organisers and team-sport coaches synchronically and diachronically. Now, the issue for Witt is what unifies these positions so that a social individual is constituted. After all, a bundle of social position occupancies does not make for an individual (just as a bundle of properties like being white , cube-shaped and sweet do not make for a sugar cube). For Witt, this unifying role is undertaken by gender (being a woman or a man): it is

a pervasive and fundamental social position that unifies and determines all other social positions both synchronically and diachronically. It unifies them not physically, but by providing a principle of normative unity. (2011a, 19–20)

By ‘normative unity’, Witt means the following: given our social roles and social position occupancies, we are responsive to various sets of social norms. These norms are “complex patterns of behaviour and practices that constitute what one ought to do in a situation given one’s social position(s) and one’s social context” (Witt 2011a, 82). The sets of norms can conflict: the norms of motherhood can (and do) conflict with the norms of being an academic philosopher. However, in order for this conflict to exist, the norms must be binding on a single social individual. Witt, then, asks: what explains the existence and unity of the social individual who is subject to conflicting social norms? The answer is gender.

Gender is not just a social role that unifies social individuals. Witt takes it to be the social role — as she puts it, it is the mega social role that unifies social agents. First, gender is a mega social role if it satisfies two conditions (and Witt claims that it does): (1) if it provides the principle of synchronic and diachronic unity of social individuals, and (2) if it inflects and defines a broad range of other social roles. Gender satisfies the first in usually being a life-long social position: a social individual persists just as long as their gendered social position persists. Further, Witt maintains, trans people are not counterexamples to this claim: transitioning entails that the old social individual has ceased to exist and a new one has come into being. And this is consistent with the same person persisting and undergoing social individual change via transitioning. Gender satisfies the second condition too. It inflects other social roles, like being a parent or a professional. The expectations attached to these social roles differ depending on the agent’s gender, since gender imposes different social norms to govern the execution of the further social roles. Now, gender — as opposed to some other social category, like race — is not just a mega social role; it is the unifying mega social role. Cross-cultural and trans-historical considerations support this view. Witt claims that patriarchy is a social universal (2011a, 98). By contrast, racial categorisation varies historically and cross-culturally, and racial oppression is not a universal feature of human cultures. Thus, gender has a better claim to being the social role that is uniessential to social individuals. This account of gender essentialism not only explains social agents’ connectedness to their gender, but it also provides a helpful way to conceive of women’s agency — something that is central to feminist politics.

Linda Alcoff holds that feminism faces an identity crisis: the category of women is feminism’s starting point, but various critiques about gender have fragmented the category and it is not clear how feminists should understand what it is to be a woman (2006, chapter 5). In response, Alcoff develops an account of gender as positionality whereby “gender is, among other things, a position one occupies and from which one can act politically” (2006, 148). In particular, she takes one’s social position to foster the development of specifically gendered identities (or self-conceptions): “The very subjectivity (or subjective experience of being a woman) and the very identity of women are constituted by women’s position” (Alcoff 2006, 148). Alcoff holds that there is an objective basis for distinguishing individuals on the grounds of (actual or expected) reproductive roles:

Women and men are differentiated by virtue of their different relationship of possibility to biological reproduction, with biological reproduction referring to conceiving, giving birth, and breast-feeding, involving one’s body . (Alcoff 2006, 172, italics in original)

The thought is that those standardly classified as biologically female, although they may not actually be able to reproduce, will encounter “a different set of practices, expectations, and feelings in regard to reproduction” than those standardly classified as male (Alcoff 2006, 172). Further, this differential relation to the possibility of reproduction is used as the basis for many cultural and social phenomena that position women and men: it can be

the basis of a variety of social segregations, it can engender the development of differential forms of embodiment experienced throughout life, and it can generate a wide variety of affective responses, from pride, delight, shame, guilt, regret, or great relief from having successfully avoided reproduction. (Alcoff 2006, 172)

Reproduction, then, is an objective basis for distinguishing individuals that takes on a cultural dimension in that it positions women and men differently: depending on the kind of body one has, one’s lived experience will differ. And this fosters the construction of gendered social identities: one’s role in reproduction helps configure how one is socially positioned and this conditions the development of specifically gendered social identities.

Since women are socially positioned in various different contexts, “there is no gender essence all women share” (Alcoff 2006, 147–8). Nonetheless, Alcoff acknowledges that her account is akin to the original 1960s sex/gender distinction insofar as sex difference (understood in terms of the objective division of reproductive labour) provides the foundation for certain cultural arrangements (the development of a gendered social identity). But, with the benefit of hindsight

we can see that maintaining a distinction between the objective category of sexed identity and the varied and culturally contingent practices of gender does not presume an absolute distinction of the old-fashioned sort between culture and a reified nature. (Alcoff 2006, 175)

That is, her view avoids the implausible claim that sex is exclusively to do with nature and gender with culture. Rather, the distinction on the basis of reproductive possibilities shapes and is shaped by the sorts of cultural and social phenomena (like varieties of social segregation) these possibilities gives rise to. For instance, technological interventions can alter sex differences illustrating that this is the case (Alcoff 2006, 175). Women’s specifically gendered social identities that are constituted by their context dependent positions, then, provide the starting point for feminist politics.

Recently Robin Dembroff (2020) has argued that existing metaphysical accounts of gender fail to address non-binary gender identities. This generates two concerns. First, metaphysical accounts of gender (like the ones outlined in previous sections) are insufficient for capturing those who reject binary gender categorisation where people are either men or women. In so doing, these accounts are not satisfying as explanations of gender understood in a more expansive sense that goes beyond the binary. Second, the failure to understand non-binary gender identities contributes to a form of epistemic injustice called ‘hermeneutical injustice’: it feeds into a collective failure to comprehend and analyse concepts and practices that undergird non-binary classification schemes, thereby impeding on one’s ability to fully understand themselves. To overcome these problems, Dembroff suggests an account of genderqueer that they call ‘critical gender kind’:

a kind whose members collectively destabilize one or more elements of dominant gender ideology. Genderqueer, on my proposed model, is a category whose members collectively destabilize the binary axis, or the idea that the only possible genders are the exclusive and exhaustive kinds men and women. (2020, 2)

Note that Dembroff’s position is not to be confused with ‘gender critical feminist’ positions like those noted above, which are critical of the prevalent feminist focus on gender, as opposed to sex, kinds. Dembroff understands genderqueer as a gender kind, but one that is critical of dominant binary understandings of gender.

Dembroff identifies two modes of destabilising the gender binary: principled and existential. Principled destabilising “stems from or otherwise expresses individuals’ social or political commitments regarding gender norms, practices, and structures”, while existential destabilising “stems from or otherwise expresses individuals’ felt or desired gender roles, embodiment, and/or categorization” (2020, 13). These modes are not mutually exclusive, and they can help us understand the difference between allies and members of genderqueer kinds: “While both resist dominant gender ideology, members of [genderqueer] kinds resist (at least in part) due to felt or desired gender categorization that deviates from dominant expectations, norms, and assumptions” (2020, 14). These modes of destabilisation also enable us to formulate an understanding of non-critical gender kinds that binary understandings of women and men’s kinds exemplify. Dembroff defines these kinds as follows:

For a given kind X , X is a non-critical gender kind relative to a given society iff X ’s members collectively restabilize one or more elements of the dominant gender ideology in that society. (2020, 14)

Dembroff’s understanding of critical and non-critical gender kinds importantly makes gender kind membership something more and other than a mere psychological phenomenon. To engage in collectively destabilising or restabilising dominant gender normativity and ideology, we need more than mere attitudes or mental states – resisting or maintaining such normativity requires action as well. In so doing, Dembroff puts their position forward as an alternative to two existing internalist positions about gender. First, to Jennifer McKitrick’s (2015) view whereby gender is dispositional: in a context where someone is disposed to behave in ways that would be taken by others to be indicative of (e.g.) womanhood, the person has a woman’s gender identity. Second, to Jenkin’s (2016, 2018) position that takes an individual’s gender identity to be dependent on which gender-specific norms the person experiences as being relevant to them. On this view, someone is a woman if the person experiences norms associated with women to be relevant to the person in the particular social context that they are in. Neither of these positions well-captures non-binary identities, Dembroff argues, which motivates the account of genderqueer identities as critical gender kinds.

As Dembroff acknowledges, substantive philosophical work on non-binary gender identities is still developing. However, it is important to note that analytic philosophers are beginning to engage in gender metaphysics that goes beyond the binary.

This entry first looked at feminist objections to biological determinism and the claim that gender is socially constructed. Next, it examined feminist critiques of prevalent understandings of gender and sex, and the distinction itself. In response to these concerns, the entry looked at how a unified women’s category could be articulated for feminist political purposes. This illustrated that gender metaphysics — or what it is to be a woman or a man or a genderqueer person — is still very much a live issue. And although contemporary feminist philosophical debates have questioned some of the tenets and details of the original 1960s sex/gender distinction, most still hold onto the view that gender is about social factors and that it is (in some sense) distinct from biological sex. The jury is still out on what the best, the most useful, or (even) the correct definition of gender is.

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Beauvoir, Simone de | feminist philosophy, approaches: intersections between analytic and continental philosophy | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on reproduction and the family | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on the self | homosexuality | identity politics | speech acts

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Tuukka Asplund, Jenny Saul, Alison Stone and Nancy Tuana for their extremely helpful and detailed comments when writing this entry.

Copyright © 2022 by Mari Mikkola < m . mikkola @ uva . nl >

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• PMC10332384

Critical Overview of Patriarchy, Its Interferences With Psychological Development, and Risks for Mental Health

Mayank gupta.

1 Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Southwood Psychiatric Hospital, Pittsburgh, USA

Jayakrishna S Madabushi

2 Psychiatry, Alabama College of Osteopathic Medicine, Birmingham, USA

Nihit Gupta

3 Psychiatry, Dayton Children’s Hospital, Dayton, USA

The systemic oppression of women and gender-based discrimination has deep roots in human civilization. As evident in both written texts and widespread practices, conscious and unconscious biases associated with patriarchy have been and continue to be interlaced with power struggles, control, and conformity enforced by the male-dominant cultures of the time. Brought into bold relief in this pandemic, recent dramatic events (the tragic murder of George Floyd and the overturning of Roe v. Wade, for example) have heightened social outrage against bias, racism, and bigotry and have also brought us to an inflection point demanding our better understanding of the pernicious and long-term mental health effects of patriarchy. There are compelling grounds to further expand their construct, but efforts to do so in psychiatric phenomenology have, until now, failed to gain momentum and substantive attention. The resistance may in part lie in misconceptions that patriarchy is supported by archetypal endowments of the collective unconscious constitutive of shared societal beliefs. While many continue to live with the adverse experiences associated with patriarchy within the current times, critics have argued that our concepts about patriarchy are not empirical enough. Empirically supported deconstruction is necessary to debunk misinformed notions that undermine women’s equality.

Introduction and background

In the last few decades, transformational technological advances have rapidly ushered in newer human behaviors, and we have witnessed paradigmatic shifts in the socio-cultural landscape of human civilizations. Renaissance and empiricism movements laid the foundation for advances in modern scientific methodology that challenged centuries of dogmatism. Technologies deriving from scientific inquiries outpace millions of years of gradual change. Yet the quest to infer the unmanifested mind remains a challenge even as mental health's significance is increasingly acknowledged in news, social media, journals, and everyday conversation.

Since 2020 there have been some critical turns of events. First, the widespread misinformation rejecting the existence of the SARS-COV-2 pandemic, and then the tragic murder of George Floyd that led to a hyperpolarized society and civil unrest [ 1 ]. Lastly, there was outrage about the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, effectively overturning Roe v. Wade, thereby restricting an individual's right to abortion [ 2 , 3 ]. Considering these events, the surge in the epidemiological trends of mental disorders without access to healthcare highlights the imminent status quo and inspires the need for alternative ideas. Amidst these developments, in 2021 a declaration of a National State of Emergency in Children’s Mental Health came from the American Academy of Paediatrics, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and Children’s Hospital Association. Complex, intertwined, and confounding multifactorial aetiologies are gaining more recognition [ 4 , 5 ]. There are organizational efforts to develop systematic inquiries and uncover potential blind spots by applying the principles of scientific skepticism to psychiatric phenomenology [ 6 ]. The overarching pledge is to create a multifaceted understanding of the transgenerational effects of race, racism, social justice, and equity. There is a compelling rationale to expand the scope of the examination to include the societal institution of patriarchy, its marked pervasiveness in individual and social existence, and its pivotal role in human development. There is, indeed, an urgent need for systematic scientific verification of the relationship between gender-based discrimination issued from patriarchal worldviews and mental health trajectories for children, adolescents, and youths. However, without first having a coherent understanding of the essential construct that might command substantial consensus among stakeholders and, in turn, lead to objective measures to assess and refine it, there will remain a steep gap in the clinical practices of contextual psychiatry.

A panoramic overview of the rich literature scattered across disciplines is provided to establish the groundwork for a better understanding of the relationship of patriarchy to the psyche. Given the systemic omnipresence of patriarchy and the likelihood of subtle indoctrination among children and youths, this overview has implications in the context of both developmental psychopathology and implementing measures for course correction. 

This article was previously posted to the www.researchsquare.com preprint server on January 09, 2023.

A comprehensive search of several databases from the date of inception to the date of the search was conducted. The databases include PubMed, PsychINFO, Cochrane Library, and Google Scholar. We also searched the database of ongoing clinical trials through clinicaltrials.gov . The search was designed using controlled vocabulary and keywords such as "Patriarchy*", "Mental Health"," Feminism", "Trauma*", "Adverse Childhood Experiences", "Anthropology", "Developmental Psychopathology", Gender Discrimination Therapy,", and "Social Determinant*". It was performed in all languages and was limited to human subjects. We also performed a manual search. The inclusion criteria were any published material on patriarchy across all ages with links to mental health. Studies focused on social determinants associated with gender-based discrimination, patriarchy, and developmental psychopathology were selected for the review. We identified 305 published materials after the removal of duplicates. After reviewing the abstract, only 35 studies met our inclusion criteria. And 24 other studies were added manually after reverse citations were reviewed to update the material. Figure ​ Figure1 1 provides the details.

**270 articles were removed as they were not relevant to the topics of patriarchy and mental health

Is patriarchy a coherent concept?

Patriarchy is often used loosely to indicate women’s oppression through male domination. There is a growing body of literature studying the impact of patriarchy (as a social determinant) on psychological functioning, and there are numerous theoretical explanations of patriarchy stemming from various fields, including not only the social and political sciences but also the humanities [ 7 ]. A contextual understanding of patriarchy’s deeply entrenched roots would be incomplete without diving into historical literature. Feminist movements paved the way for systematic studies of patriarchy; both Anglo-American and French feminist criticism and theory, for example, offer unique insights into the term "patriarchy." The former meditated on the concept of gender in a patriarchal society, and the latter did so in the specific context of literature and art [ 8 ]. In his sociological definition of patriarchy as a system of government in which men rule societies through their positions at the head of their families, Max Weber refers to "Herrschaft" a relationship based on the domination of men over women and subordinate men in households [ 9 ]. Critics have found this definition to be focused too exclusively on domination and submission and consequently grossly lacking in intersectionality.

Given the complexity of the topic, it is imperative to examine the evolution, perpetuation, and factors associated with the persistence of patriarchy. A panoramic overview of its mention in the various forms of literature provides insight from various vantage points.

Among Western cultures, there are accounts from early Celtic settlements (6th to 11th centuries) in which women were legally equal to men [ 10 ]. They could hold and sell property, marry or divorce, and hold high educational degrees (physician, lawyer, or religious). Subsequently, Gaelic Christianity was brought into alignment with Roman Catholic orthodoxy [ 11 ]. ‘Traditional’ patriarchal concepts of marriage, equality, authority, and ordination became dominant in biblical interpretation and canonical literature [ 12 ]. That priestly ordination can only be conferred upon men is controversial to this day.

Although scripture states God created men and women as equals in his image, giving them both dominion over the earth and all living things, the writings of noted theologians declare otherwise. St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica, q. 92 a.) writes: "Woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of a woman comes from defect in the active force or some material indisposition…" [ 13 ].

St. Augustine (De Genesi ad litteram, 9, 5-9 ) writes: "I don’t see what sort of help woman was created to provide man with if one excludes the purpose of procreation. If a woman was not given to a man for help in bearing children, for what help could she be…?" These writings influenced the development of Western philosophy and Western Christianity.

Likewise, in Eastern theology, the ancient Sanskrit scripture Manusmṛiti dating back from the 2nd century BCE to the 3rd century CE was a systematic legal text of written codes establishing Brahminic (caste-based social order) patriarchy. The text discusses denying women the right to bodily integrity, marriage rights, contraception, divorce, etc. [ 14 ]. Women are objectified and considered sexually promiscuous in a deeply disturbing misogynist set of rules (dharma) in which subordination is celebrated to propagate the patriarchy as natural.

In the rules of medieval common law in England, widows were usually automatically entitled to a third share of their late husband's wealth. However, it changed with the Statute of Westminster II (1285) c. 34, when property holders may claim exceptions citing elopement and adultery to oppose widows’ attempts to claim their share [ 15 ].

Advocates and apologists for patriarchy have used the sexual division of labor to explain the gender roles propagated by patriarchy. According to Lerner, the progression of civilization from tribal existence into larger communities required different individuals to attend to varying necessary life activities [ 16 ]. The female was seen as the birthgiver and child-rearer, while the male was seen as the hunter, provider, and protector. The latter set of roles was perceived as the more highly valued one in society, which led to a sort of excuse for the legitimization of female inferiority. Apologists' views of gender continue to reference this idea of higher male value perpetuating male supremacy in society as an attempt to explain gender relations.

Marxism and Feminist Marxism

In the 19th-century movement of ideas of an egalitarian state with classless societies, Marxism completely rejects theological hegemony with its theories about gender and equality. Nonetheless, Friedrich Engels perpetuates an argument rooted in the hunter-gatherer society. Engels states that in such a society, women were demoted to the subordinate position of childbearer, caretaker, and provider of erotic pleasure to men. Paralleling Marxism, he maintains that the development of private property led to the "enslavement" of women [ 17 ]. This perspective draws from an evolutionary theory of sociobiology, however, a theory that has been largely debunked [ 18 ]. Feminist Marxism understands patriarchy as the capitalist mode of production. According to Sylvia Walby, patriarchy is "a system of social structures, and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women" [ 19 ]. Juliet Mitchell refers to patriarchy as a system of kinship among men based on the commodification and exchange of women [ 20 ]. Eisenstein connects patriarchy to a sexual hierarchy, with the woman’s role relegated to domestic labor and procreator [ 21 ]. Patriarchy is thus often seen through a wider lens, including not only capitalism but also colonialism and racism. It should consequently be noted that in early Anglo-American feminist movements, women carried banners for not only women’s suffrage but also the abolition of slavery and ending the exploitation of children in the labor force. Furthermore, in the 1960s, women were championing not only feminism but also civil rights, an end to the Vietnam War, children’s welfare, and social and educational reform for individuals with disabilities [ 22 ]. The history of these opportunities for women is not a linear one but rather a 'snakes and ladders' type of projection in which the trajectory forward has often been plagued by societal failures and political pitfalls.

Anthropological and developmental points of view

Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex argues that mate choice is explicitly aesthetic. Darwin repeatedly writes of mating preferences as an ‘aesthetic faculty’ and describes them as a "taste for the beautiful". These theories remain deeply problematic for millennials, whose reproductive options, sexual orientations, and gender identities have become more fluid. Contraception has revolutionized reproduction [ 23 ]. It has afforded innumerable individuals autonomy over their bodies. According to the natural selection argument that fitness and worth are intertwined with reproductive capability, contraception diminishes the worth of the person using it. Currently, with mounting political opposition to abortion and contraceptive rights, patriarchal factions seem bent on imposing laws on the bodies of women-another plummet down the game board of 'snakes and ladders.' These theories have lent themselves to arguments invalidating those who identify as part of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) community and/or undergo gender affirmation surgery.

Among mammals, sex differences in behaviors stem from differences in how females and males reproduce. According to Trivers, reproduction is an intensely time- and energy-consuming process for the female, beginning with gestation and continuing after birth to lactation and childrearing. For the male, however, there is less commitment, according to Trivers, in terms of time and effort, as the male commitment ends with fertilization [ 24 ]. Thus, Trivers refers to the interest of the male as simply maximizing the number of fertilized eggs to increase the chances of having children [ 24 ]. This divergence of interest, translated into human world-building based on ownership of private property and disproportionate valuation of male-male community bonds, and the resulting aggression can be seen as the beginning of the patriarchal domination of the female. In this view, females have been forced to surrender power and property to males to ensure heightened safety for their offspring, usually to the detriment of female advantages [ 25 ]. However, the anthropological account does not suggest that counterstrategies are entirely unavailable to females. Smuts found that after studying great apes, aggressive male sexual conquest of females was mitigated by social support from same-sex communalism among females [ 25 ]. The groundbreaking work of Margaret Mead laid the foundation for challenging gender roles and social norms around sexuality [ 26 ].

Perpetuation of systemic patriarchy

According to Walby, six structures-broadly termed the patriarchal mode of production, patriarchal relations in paid work, patriarchal relations in the state, male violence, patriarchal relations in sexuality, and patriarchal relations in cultural institutions such as religion, media, and education-perpetuate systemic patriarchy [ 19 ]. While these structures can be seen in the larger society, they are also seen in the familial unit, in which patriarchal tradition, practices, and ideals are vertically transmitted from generation to generation [ 27 ].

Parental guidance is shaped by patriarchal beliefs about gender norms, which are usually a large part of patriarchy in practice and perpetuated through households both consciously and unconsciously. The be-all and end-all goals of patriarchal practices remain control over female reproduction, and the ultimate sanction to achieve this goal is a violation of the basic human rights of others. Evolutionary analysis suggests that whenever we consider any aspect of gender inequality, we need to ask how it affects female sexuality and reproduction in ways that benefit men at the expense of women (and other men).

Anecdotal narratives of such indoctrination and subsequent commodification are rampant among women from the Indian subcontinent. It is not uncommon for families to be unwilling to send women to school, preferring to save up for their wedding expenses instead [ 28 ]. The culture of the extravagant wedding with the expectation of the bride’s family bearing the expenses underscores the pervasiveness of these practices. The oppression is often at a subversive level, enmeshed within the culture. Innocuous comments underlie the instinctive disdain for anything feminine, indicating that an achievement worth celebrating can only be achieved via a man. This has a deeply traumatic effect on the psyche of women, who learn to view themselves as inherently "less."

Parenting plays a formative role in the indoctrination of gender roles from infancy [ 29 ]. Parents make lasting decisions regarding a person’s gender identity from the time of birth, dictating the person’s name, pronouns, semantics, and activities. Any male child showing an instinctive preference for so-called feminine toys or colors may be chastised and ridiculed. Young girls may be encouraged to act in "womanly" ways, indicating a submissive and yielding attitude. This indoctrination of societal norms creates an oppressive environment, damaging the self-confidence of men and women.

Closely related to this is the issue of body image. Increasingly, cases of extreme anorexia and bulimia, often significantly heightened through exposure to a highly patriarchal social media feed, are becoming common among teenage girls and young women. The patriarchal convention of the "perfect woman," accompanied by a punishingly harsh physical model, bears a negative effect on impressionable psyches. Women are driven to desperate measures in their attempts to conform to unrealistic physical expectations. These psychological issues lead to intense physical harm and can even prove fatal in extreme cases. In a patriarchal society, gender identity is viewed through a fundamentally rigid heteronormative lens. The heteronormative standards are maintained as "normal," and as a result, any deviation from heteronormative behavior is presumed to be a form of deviance that needs treatment [ 30 ]. This has led to the labeling of homosexual and transgender individuals as diseased people who are then shunned and mistreated. Members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer/questioning, asexual (LGBTQIA+) community face harassment and violence in society as their authentic gender identities lead to ostracism. Thus, oppressive social norms are linked to mental health disorders. 

The patriarchal system perpetuates a narrow, heteronormative, and archaic worldview. In the context of South Asian societies, certain patriarchal beliefs and practices can be traced back to history.

Patriarchy and its historical relationship with psychopathology

Malleus Maleficarum (Latin: Hammer of Witches), a detailed legal and theological document written in 1486 by Heinrich Kramer, an Inquisitor of the Catholic Church, was regarded as the standard handbook on witchcraft, including its detection and its extirpation, until well into the 18th century. Published 30 times between 1486 and 1669 and a best seller in Germany and France, it is a deeply disturbing misogynistic treatise on female religious transgression [ 31 ]. The Hammer of Witches is an especially egregious example, but in other historical periods too, we can discern societal developments that were particularly influenced by a patriarchal understanding of gender rules and behaviors.

Elaine Showalter explores this theme in The Female Malady, in which she discusses the development of psychiatry in England. The Victorian period, spanning almost the entire 19th century, was known for its rigid rules of conduct based on the division of the sexes [ 32 ]. It was also a time of enormous scientific discovery; studying the human mind became particularly exciting, and there was significant interest in understanding and treating mental ailments. Despite this rising interest in mental illness, the study was steeped in socially prevalent patriarchal beliefs, resulting in deep-rooted biases against women. Unsurprisingly, such institutionalized patriarchy, with its inherent misogyny, had a profound impact on the female psyche.

Numerous ailments were viewed as "feminine problems" and allotted a place of derision. This very naming of certain maladies brings this inbuilt bias to light. A psychiatric diagnosis of "hysteria" was often imposed on women suffering from epileptic fits, and the term is derived from the Latin term for "uterus." Similarly, "madness" was viewed as a feminine affliction in Victorian England, and treatments often included surgically removing internal female reproductive organs (The Hysterical Female). Psychiatrists often diagnosed perfectly sane women with insanity if they did not conform to social norms and conventions. Such diagnoses were often followed by incarceration in mental asylums with heinous practices including electric shock and lobotomies. Women, children, and the severely mentally ill were particularly likely to be lobotomized without their consent or, sometimes, even knowledge [ 33 ].

Generations of the scientific community theorized and perpetuated oppressive norms for women. In the last three decades of the 19th century, lobotomies gained widespread popularity for not only dysmenorrhea and ovarian neuralgia but also epilepsy, nymphomania, and insanity. Thousands of primarily young women had their healthy ovaries removed to cure them of a range of mental disorders that were believed to be caused by menstrual disorders. Thus, female sexuality, viewed as a dangerous aspect of femininity that needs to be kept under tight control, was increasingly viewed through a pathological lens [ 30 ]. Ironically, "madness," unnatural behavior, and trauma were often actually the results of women’s desperate efforts to live up to stifling social norms of conduct.

Sociologist Thomas J. Scheff referred to the relationship between power hierarchies in society and the labeling of individuals as mentally ill in Being Mentally Ill: A Sociological Study [ 34 ]. Socially negotiated power dynamics under the patriarchal system put men at the highest level of authority, and social-behavioral norms parallel patriarchal rules. Actions or behaviors that might threaten such social norms and conventions are summarily termed "deviant." Any behavior that could be related to mental illness was seen as deviant behavior, and thus, women who were relatively powerless in society became more susceptible to being labeled mentally ill [ 34 ].

Phyllis Chesler, in her 1972 book Women and Madness, argues that one of the largest causes of a numerically higher prevalence of women in mental patient populations is that "women, by definition, are viewed as psychiatrically impaired-whether they accept or reject the female role-simply because they are women" [ 30 ]. Women’s behavior is then devalued and even pathologized. Given that the world of psychiatry has also traditionally been overwhelmingly male, it is hardly surprising that patriarchal stereotypes of acceptable sex roles and the presumed inferiority of feminine traits underlie attempts to address mental ailments. Notably, it is because of the overwhelming presence of male thinking and the establishment of the study of the mind as a masculine enterprise that psychoanalysis continues to be more successful in understanding men than women.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) claimed that anatomy is destiny and that one’s gender determines one’s main personality traits (1973). This belief has continued to play a dangerously significant role in shaping how women are treated by men and even fellow women. Women have been taught that the fluctuations of their natural biology, such as menstruation, menopause, and pregnancy, are pathological conditions that incapacitate their ability to function [ 35 ]. While considering herself a disciple of Freud, Karen Horney (1995-1952) disagreed. She argued that the overwhelming impact of culture over biology was the primary determinant of personality. She refuted Freud’s claims that a woman’s sense of inferiority to the male sex stemmed from some universal process, what Freud referred to as "penis envy." She wrote, "[t]he wishes to be a man... may be the expression of a wish for all those qualities or privileges which in our culture are regarded as masculine, such as strength, courage, independence, success, sexual freedom, right to choose a partner" [ 36 ].

Developmental psychopathology and patriarchy

The societal impact of patriarchal attitudes toward women’s anatomy is nearly universal. Women are taught about the role and behaviors expected of them from infancy. The impact of patriarchal oppression on women can be found in presumably healing scenarios. In analytical psychology, the term "father complex" was developed both by Freud and Jung, and it's applied to a group of unconscious associations specifically about the image or archetype of the father [ 37 ]. Freud described the male child’s ambivalence toward parental authority in his multiple writings ( Rat Man  in 1909,  The Schreber Case  in 1911,  Totem and Taboo  in 1912, and  The Future of an Illusion  in 1927, etc.), as that which manifested as fear, defiance, and disbelief of the father, which could be interpreted as resistance to treatment. On the contrary, the Jungian view incorporates both males and females into the purview of the father complex. It theorizes that while a positive father complex is attributed to conformity with authority, a negative father complex could dispose one to an internalized image of all men as harsh, uncooperative, dominating, etc. [ 38 ].

In Western culture, the 1960s sexual revolution and subsequent feminist movements have had a huge impact on somewhat diminishing the gender gap [ 39 ]. However, in the non-Western world, including populous Southeast Asia, women continue to be subjected to violence in many forms, including domestic violence, rape, harmful traditional and customary practices, "honor killing," and trafficking [ 40 ]. In India, for example, it is common for young women to be treated as secondary to their male siblings. The needs of the male children in the patriarchal family are given precedence in aspects ranging from clothing and nourishment to education and medical attention. The idea that a woman is someone else’s property gets reemphasized at every step of her life. These beliefs go on to feed the unwillingness of parents to spend on their daughters' education. They attempt to justify this by stating that since the girl will have to be married off at a fairly early age, any benefits from her education will not accrue to the birth family and is thus seen as a waste of limited resources [ 41 ]. 

Scholars have observed the underlying phenomenon of commodification and "exchange of women," a socially accepted form of conduct that dehumanizes women and makes them a commodity to serve male requirements. Interestingly, this phenomenon also indicates a degree of male-male cooperation in humans that remains highly unusual in other mammals [ 42 , 43 ]. Negotiated marriages, bride stealing, and ritual defloration are common representations of this commodification. Women are indoctrinated from childhood to accept their subordinate roles and their obligation to their kin to accept such exchanges.

Impact of patriarchy on mental health

The patriarchal division of gender norms has set certain behavioral expectations for individuals based on their biological sex. Patriarchy perpetuates the psyche of equating biological sex with the socially constructed element of gender-pressurizing individuals in society to adhere to a strict set of narrow "acceptable behaviors" for each biological sex. This could be traumatic for individuals who may not necessarily want to adhere to such behaviors or extremely limiting gender boundaries. These individuals face alienation and ostracization and are more susceptible to sexual violence. For example, individuals from the LGBTQIA+ communities are frequently subjected to harassment and sexual abuse.

Thus, a patriarchal society makes for a fundamentally unsafe and detrimental space for non-conforming women and those who do not fit within narrow societal limits of gender and sexuality. Though this power imbalance may often be seen to exclusively benefit men, it has insidious dangers for their psychological well-being as well.

The rigid patriarchal outlook became particularly prominent in the social norms of the 19th century. William Alcott’s The Young Woman’s Book of Health (1850) and Edward H. Clarke’s Sex in Education or A Fair Chance for the Girls (1873) are both examples of instructive texts that were created based on the premise of female physical inferiority [ 44 , 45 ]. Needless to say, such a social outlook had a massive impact on the psychological well-being of women, who imbibed a predisposition towards submission based on presumed lower status, and thus accepted male aggression and violence towards them as normal and even necessary.

With the increasingly ubiquitous presence of social media, people are more vulnerable to patriarchy-induced deterioration of mental health. Social media and the internet have made it easier to perpetuate gender bigotry, support patriarchy, and spread negative portrayals of women [ 46 ]. Studies have specifically indicated that "social media use may be tied to negative mental health outcomes, including suicidality, loneliness, and decreased empathy" [ 47 ]. For example, social media platforms exhibit curated visual content promoting unrealistic lifestyles and body images that can trigger comparison, jealousy, and anxiety in individuals. Social media has also become a fertile ground for sexual predators [ 47 ]. Prepubescents and teenagers are particularly susceptible to falling victim to grooming, a practice in which an adult "builds a relationship, trust and emotional connection with a child or young person so they can manipulate, exploit and abuse them." Sexual violence is a major element of adverse childhood experiences (ACE) and leaves lifelong scars on a child's psyche. Feminist thinkers and intellectuals, beginning with Simone de Beauvoir, have postulated that a patriarchal society is built around and caters to male sexual instincts from early childhood [ 48 ]. Mary O’Brien has argued that male sexual violence is essentially a form of dominance display used to compensate for the male's inability to bear children [ 49 ]. According to Elizabeth Fisher, the mating practices and forced mating of animals became the source of inspiration for the human male to practice sexual violence [ 50 ]. This conducive social atmosphere gave root to men’s sexual dominance and institutionalized aggression.

In the 1970s, Susan Brownmiller, a member of the New York Radical Feminists, started a movement against the prevailing narratives around sexual violence. In a blistering rebuttal, she famously said, "rape is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear." In 1975, her ground-breaking book Against Our Will was published, years after the foundational works of Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex [ 51 ].

Needless to say, sexual violence is experienced by both sexes, though the number of female victims significantly outnumbers male victims. Perpetrators, too, are overwhelmingly male, once again validating the fundamental definition of patriarchy as an institution of dominance aided by aggression and violence [ 52 ].

Adverse childhood experiences and subsequent trauma have life-altering impacts, often diminishing a person’s long-term well-being. A particularly brutal example of ACE is female genital mutilation (FGM)/cutting. This refers to the "surgical modification of the female genitalia, comprising all procedures involving partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or another injury to the female genital organs for cultural or nontherapeutic reasons" [ 53 ]. This practice continues to be prevalent in many parts of Africa and Asia, and sporadically around the globe. According to the World Health Organization, available data from 30 countries where FGM is practiced in the Western, Eastern, and North-Eastern regions of Africa and some countries in the Middle East and Asia reveal that more than 200 million girls and women alive today have been subjected to the practice, with more than 3 million girls estimated to be at risk of FGM annually. Victims of FGM often suffer prolonged health complications and even death, and survivors of the practice report extreme levels of trauma [ 54 ].

An oft-overlooked ill effect of patriarchy on mental health vis-à-vis gender is the negative impact it has on the well-being of men [ 55 ]. A large section of the male population faces incessant pressure to go against their natural inclinations and behave according to acceptable stereotypes. Men are expected to exude ‘masculinity’ in their everyday lives by negating emotions and adopting an aggressive attitude. Boys face ruthless bullying and cruelty from peers if they display sensitivity or other ‘feminine’ traits. As a result, they learn to suppress emotions and adopt a lifestyle that normalizes violence to live up to patriarchal gender constructs [ 56 ]. It has been long documented that men, on average, have a shorter lifespan than women. While some of this can be attributed to genetic and biological factors, it is also largely exacerbated by increased risk-taking behaviors and the consequent heightening of stress levels in men [ 57 ]. A large proportion of men exhibit signs of stunted emotional development, which eventually leads to difficulties in forming and maintaining relationships as adults. Stereotypes about male resilience and ‘toughness’ prevent men from seeking mental health help, which worsens an already difficult situation. There may be a hidden cost of patriarchy in the mounting burden of mental disorders, but it is yet to be estimated. However, inferences could be drawn from recommendations from gender equity commissions that, when adopted, have yielded improvements in economic indicators and workforce productivity after decades of advocacy for equal pay and labor opportunities. 

Addressing patriarchy in clinical encounters

It bears repeating that patriarchy is a fundamentally oppressive, all-pervasive system that permeates all aspects of life. The impact of this disruptive system is exemplified in the physical, emotional, financial, and socio-political realms, and as argued here, no more so than in the realm of mental health and disorder. As clinicians, we encounter persons with very different concerns. What can clinicians do?

We, as clinicians, are accustomed to making personal inquiries into all aspects of a person's life, particularly into their competencies founded upon their attachments, their adverse life events, and how these shape their embodied experience of current stressors. Further inquiries into their stress responses in the body and mind, coping strategies, and the experience of demoralization are distinct from but interactive with any psychopathological interferences there may be in their pursuit of personal flourishing. Life-affirming values provide a motive force for countering demoralization and trajectories toward harm and restoring them to their trajectory of personal flourishment. And lastly, their support systems provide scaffolding and guidance when individual efforts to retrieve life-affirming values falter.

Instead of a linear image of climbing ladders, scala in alignment with the ways of human flourishing is required, examples of which we have from antiquity and which can be conjured by clinicians from childhood memories. Such as the game of 'snakes and ladders' (aka chutes and ladders) that depicts roadblocks, setbacks, and effortful turnarounds. With this image in mind, if clinicians construe patriarchal oppression to be among the factors potentially affecting competencies, contributing to ongoing stressors while constraining adaptive stress responses, contributing to demoralization, affecting the formation or deformation of values supporting or undermining revaluations, factors lodged firmly among the encrypted structural biases that lead to social system failure, then clinicians can begin shaping clinical inquiries into the snakes and ladders board game in which persons have been given roles to play [ 58 , 59 ].

Some people will have concerns about the role they perceive they have been assigned and seek to challenge it. Some will seem content with the rules as received, while others will discern the injustices inherent in them and call for new ones. Some will deeply wonder about the construction of the game board itself. In each case, the clinician has the privilege of making personal inquiries. See Figure ​ Figure2 2 for details.

Image used with permission from Dr. Matthew Galvin of the Indiana University Conscience Project.

Limitations 

There are several limitations to this narrative review. The potential for selection bias, given that it is not based on protocol-based searches, provides a piece of weaker evidence. Given that patriarchy is not yet established as a valid mental health construct, there is a dearth of studies that measure its association with developmental psychopathologies. Also, this is a broad review of patriarchy and attends to multiple faculties within scientific disciplines to provide a critique of many pieces of information together in a readable format.

Conclusions

The virtues that supported human evolution since the Neolithic ages are no longer of similar importance. Especially since inherent subjugation failed to stand the empirical verification process and societal perspectives began to alter towards progressiveness during the 14th-century Renaissance period.

Likewise, it is critical to validate the subjective experiences of those affected across genders and recognize and acknowledge the plausible negative effects of patriarchy on mental health. Several confounding variables require robust empirical scrutiny, and the crucial first step is to spread awareness regarding patriarchy. While the negative impact of patriarchal oppression on women and other minority communities has been long recognized across many disciplines, it is vital to highlight that the advantages of this institution for men are frequently overridden by severe detrimental and long-term deleterious effects. The recognition of this universal construct perpetuated by existing systems is imperative for institutional overhaul. It is undoubtedly a tricky proposition, as it will involve a paradigm shift in the societal power dynamics of gender and heteronormativity and will certainly encounter resistance from many quarters. Overhauling a systemic, institutionalized philosophy will involve identifying and eradicating the instruments that perpetuate patriarchy. The decades-long scholarship by feminist thinkers, mental-health experts, and social workers will be of immense value in this endeavor.

As John Stuart Mill pointed out in  The Subjection of Women  (1873), we cannot know the inherent nature of the sexes as long as we are reared in environments in which women are subordinate. Until gender equality exists, we cannot claim to know what shape the natural unfolding of male and female psyches will take. The experience of nearly gender-equitable societies such as those in Scandinavian nations indicates that a society free of patriarchal oppression leads to improved mental and physical health and a thriving and prosperous community.

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the support from the Indiana University Conscience Project.

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Autocracy and patriarchy are surging worldwide—but women are pushing back

HKS faculty members Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks explain the relationships between rising authoritarianism, assaults on gender equity, and the power of nonviolent resistance.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine is unfolding into the autocrat’s most aggressive move to extend his reach.  Beyond Putin’s Russia, authoritarian regimes are on the rise globally—a worrying trend that could roll back decades of democratic gains and human rights achievements worldwide. Autocracies pose a particular threat to gender equity and the rights of historically marginalized people, including women and LGBTQ+ people.

To explore those trends, Harvard Kennedy School faculty members Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks have conducted research to understand the interplay of gender, violence, and resistance—including through the Women in Resistance Data Project. They discuss the rise of autocracy and its attendant patriarchal backlash in a substantial new Foreign Affairs essay .

We spoke to Chenoweth, the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment, and Marks, a lecturer in public policy, about their work.

Q:  You write about a current wave of authoritarian regimes that are highly patriarchal—from Xi Jinping’s China to Vladimir Putin’s Russia—including democracies that are moving in an illiberal direction, such as Brazil, Hungary, and Poland. Why do you think we are seeing this global patriarchal backlash now, at this moment?

EC: The world has witnessed a major wave of autocratization, which has been expanding for the past 16 years (according to Freedom House and the Varieties of Democracy project). In response, we’ve seen an unprecedented number of mass pro-democratic social movements rising up to resist the autocratic tide. Many of these—in places like Turkey, Russia, Hong Kong, and the United States—have featured a high proportion of women participants. But many of these mass movements have been defeated, at least in the short term, and patriarchal backlash is one way that autocrats attempt to undermine and prevent mass movements from effectively mobilizing again.  

ZM: Democracy by definition requires equal human and civil rights for citizens—including, of course, women, who have had the right to vote for less than 100 years in most countries. Authoritarians often rely on the overrepresentation of male power (patriarchy)—in both public and private life—to consolidate their power and chip away at crosscutting social coalitions. They seek to minimize women's equal rights as citizens and frame it as niche "opposition" or identity politics; and they center masculinity and male breadwinners' status as the key indicator of the nation. Some of the most male-dominated parties and regimes are also the most preoccupied with reasserting gender hierarchies, revealing profound insecurities about gender equality and LGBTQ freedom.

“[G]ains by women, gender minorities, racial minorities, and other historically excluded groups are often contingent on systems becoming more just. It is antidemocratic to reverse these trends.”

Q:  While misogyny and gender discrimination may at times be expressed differently in different cultures and contexts, what overlapping themes cross national boundaries? 

EC: The primary commonality—and the most dangerous trend—is the enshrinement of sexist policies. These include increased state control over women’s reproductive rights (i.e., withdrawal of healthcare, forced pregnancies or forced abortions), the loosening of laws punishing sexual violence or domestic abuse, the criminalization of LGBTQ+ people, the promotion of the “traditional family” where women’s roles are to be subservient to men and primarily confined to the home, and laws that make it more difficult for women to fully participate in the workforce and in politics. All of these policies serve to reinforce gender hierarchies in which women are not considered full and equal persons.

Q:  You write that women’s participation in protest can make a big difference in fighting against authoritarian and patriarchal regimes. What can organizers do to increase women’s participation or to create a more gender-inclusive environment?

EC: First and foremost, they should see gender parity as a necessary but insufficient factor in the movement’s success. At a minimum, this requires actively recruiting and retaining women organizers, activists, community leaders, and public figures to build a deep bench of women participants. It also means providing many different points of entry for movement participation recognizing that many women tend to have numerous care responsibilities that make it difficult for them to become full-time dissidents without support (e.g., child care at planning meetings, etc.).

ZM: We know from our research that women participate at much higher rates in nonviolent mass movements and that women's presence can lead to new strategies and tactics in civil resistance. Campaigns that turn violent will be less inclusive, as well as less effective. We are currently doing a deeper dive into the effects of women leaders and gender equitable ideology. Activists looking to harness the power of inclusive revolution should certainly incorporate women and full equality at every level of the movement.

Q:  You discuss how some authoritarians get women to support them by valorizing the concept of traditional motherhood, and that these authoritarians sometimes use their own wives or daughters as examples. Why does this tactic work? And why is it compelling for women?

ZM:  Many women benefit from the status quo, especially elite women and those from dominant castes, like white women in the United States. Women have also been socialized in the same patriarchal society that trains us to imagine the default voter, politician, worker, or business-owner is a man, and that being a "good" wife or daughter to a successful man is deeply desirable. The combination of being invested in one's own status—often tied to a man—and being socialized to deprioritize your own autonomy and ambition can be incredibly politically disempowering for women, while also feeling aspirational.

“Americans who are interested in protecting and improving democracy in the United States must see these assaults on women’s equality as assaults on democracy.”

Erica chenoweth.

Q:  Another authoritarian tactic you mention is creating the perception that masculinity is under threat. How can people work against this narrative? And in what ways can more men be allies in building gender-inclusive agendas?

ZM: First, when people say men are under threat, we can step back and look at how economic and political power is still overwhelmingly male—in this country and in most of the world. Second, we can take seriously concerns about men's mental health and declining life expectancy and recognize that women and gender minorities are not the cause of these problems. Often, they're tied to growing inequality, environmental and economic crisis, and other complex problems that require fully inclusive solutions. Third, at the executive and legislative levels, politicians pushing the male victimhood narrative are also selling the story that the system is unjust unless they're winning; it's important to pause to recognize that gains by women, gender minorities, racial minorities, and other historically excluded groups are often contingent on systems becoming more just. It is antidemocratic to reverse these trends. Anyone—men, LGBTQ allies, all people—can support democracy and gender-inclusive agendas by remembering that they, too, lead gendered lives, that pernicious hierarchies and inequalities hurt all of us, and that everyone, regardless of their gender, can advocate for what bell hooks describes as "an end to sexist oppression." 

Q:  What role can, or should, the United States play in combating misogyny and attacks on women’s rights in other countries?

EC: As with anything the United States does to support women’s rights and pro-democracy movements worldwide, the struggle starts at home. Today, in numerous states around the country, restrictions on voting—such as eliminating drive-through voting in some states—have made it harder for women to vote. There are full-out assaults of the rights of trans children and their families. The Supreme Court appears poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, with numerous states ready to introduce draconian restrictions on abortion access immediately thereafter. Americans who are interested in protecting and improving democracy in the United States must see these assaults on women’s equality as assaults on democracy. If the United States wants to champion democracy abroad, it could help to marshal its considerable resources to convene a global summit of democratic leaders, advocacy organizations, civil society, and grassroots activists and organizers to help to boost a multinational campaign to promote both democracy and women’s equality. But I think our most important point is that the United States cannot afford to treat these issues as separate any more.

— Banner image: Women from the Ukranian community in London protest the attack on Ukraine by Russia. Photo by Jenny Matthews/Getty Images. Faculty portraits by Martha Stewart

More from HKS

Erica chenoweth illuminates the value of nonviolent resistance in societal conflicts, q&a with zoe marks: diving deep into the complexities of war and peace in africa, covid-19: gender and the pandemic.

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Patriarchy, Development, and the Divergence of Gender Equality

47 Pages Posted: 2 Aug 2023

Lewis Davis

Union College - Department of Economics

Date Written: August 1, 2023

What will happen to gender equality as the world develops? While modernization theory stresses the emergence of increasingly cosmopolitan gender values, work on the cultural roots of gender roles finds that measures of historical patriarchy exert a persistent influence on contemporary attitudes toward and outcomes for women. Motivated by this disparity, I develop a simple model illustrating the interplay between economic development, sexist social norms, and women’s labor supply. The model predicts that women’s labor supply will follow a U-shaped relationship, and that female labor supply will be lower, fall over a greater income range, and then rise more slowly for countries with a more patriarchal history. I investigate and confirm these predictions in a broad sample of countries employing six different measures of patriarchal history reflecting agricultural history, religious traditions, rainfall patterns, and linguistic structures as well as a composite measure of patriarchal history. These findings suggest that gender inequality will diverge as countries develop, reflecting the ability of richer countries to more fully realize their sexist values.

Keywords: Female labor force participation, Patriarchal culture, Feminization U curve, Gender inequality, Sexism

JEL Classification: J16, O15, Z10

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Lewis S. Davis (Contact Author)

Union college - department of economics ( email ).

Schenectady, NY 12308-3107 United States

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The historical nature of gender-based violence confirms that it is not an unfortunate aberration but systematically entrenched in culture and society, reinforced and powered by patriarchy.

Systemic Gender Oppression

Violence against women maintains the structures of gender oppression; be it carried out by individuals in private and/or by institutional forces in the public sphere. A UN Women study reveals that in combat zones, it is now more dangerous to be a woman than to be a soldier. Families, communities, and social, legal and civic institutions may covertly and overtly endorse it. Whilst violence commands greater attention and fear; sexism and misogyny do their share to shape inequality, by defining and upholding restrictive gender norms.

Patriarchy is about the social relations of power between men and women, women and women, and men and men. It is a system for maintaining class, gender, racial, and heterosexual privilege and the status quo of power – relying both on crude forms of oppression, like violence; and subtle ones, like laws; to perpetuate inequality. Patriarchal beliefs of male, heterosexual dominance and the devaluation of girls and women lie at the root of gender-based violence. Patriarchy is a structural force that influences power relations, whether they are abusive or not.

Power sets the agenda for patriarchy. But, conflating it with abuse or masculinity is problematic and we need a more complex analysis of the typical power and control explanations. Feminism, which is about women claiming their rights to self-determination and equality, confronts gender conformity and aims to replace relationships of power with relationships of meaning.

Culture is used to justify gender inequality and violence by evoking traditional cultural beliefs about how women should be treated. The defense of the culture of a place, country, religion, etc., is in fact a defense of the culture of patriarchy in that country, religion, identity; and the culture of violence everywhere. The culture of patriarchy is not static: its manifestation on an army base differs from that in a rural town; just as the culture of patriarchy in Chicago differs from that of Dubai, or Manila.

Racial Oppression

Analyses of violence by men of color against women of color tend to over-emphasize how racial oppression contributes to men’s use of violence. But, within communities of color, women and non-abusive men who are exposed to similar social histories of oppression, do not resort to battering to cope with racism; just as LGBTQ women and men do not resort to hate crimes or intimate violence because of homophobia. While oppressions based on race, class, gender, heterosexuality, etc., are undeniable; explanations relying on oppression are inadequate. Because the intersection of race and gender are complicated, race is all too often privileged over gender. Holding this and other intersectionalities together offers a more effective route to accountability and transformation.

Resources on Patriarchy and Power

Engendering change: transforming gender roles in asian & pacific islander communities, 2007.

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Colonization and Violence against Women, 2002

By Val Kalei Kanuha This talk explores the connection between colonization and patriarchy, and how this dynamic perpetuates gender violence.

Engaging Asian Men: Divesting from Gender Violence; Investing in Gender Equality, 2013

What will it take for men in our Asian communities to divest from gender violence and invest in gender equality?

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Sexism and feminism

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A feminist study of gender in society needs concepts to differentiate and analyze social inequalities between girls and boys and between women and men that do not reduce differences to the notion of biology as destiny. The concept of sexism explains that prejudice and discrimination based on sex or gender, not biological inferiority, are the social barriers to women’s and girls’ success in various arenas. To overcome patriarchy in society is, then, to dismantle sexism in society. The study of sexism has suggested that the solution to gender inequity is in changing sexist culture and institutions.

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The disentanglement of gender (and thus gender roles and gender identities) from biological sex was an accomplishment in large part of feminism, which claimed that one’s sex does not predict anything about one’s ability, intelligence, or personality. Extracting social behaviour from biological determinism allowed greater freedom for women and girls from stereotypical gender roles and expectations. Feminist scholarship was able to focus study on ways in which the social world subordinated women by discriminating against and limiting them on the basis of their biological sex or of sociocultural gender-role expectations. The feminist movement fought for the abolishment of sexism and the establishment of women’s rights as equal under the law. By the remediation of sexism in institutions and culture, women would gain equality in political representation, employment, education, domestic disputes, and reproductive rights.

As the term sexism gained vernacular popularity, its usage evolved to include men as victims of discrimination and social gender expectations. In a cultural backlash, the term reverse sexism emerged to refocus on men and boys, especially on any disadvantages they might experience under affirmative action . Opponents of affirmative action argued that men and boys had become the ones discriminated against for jobs and school admission because of their sex. The appropriation of the term sexism was frustrating to many feminists, who stressed the systemic nature of women’s oppression through structural and historical inequalities. Proponents of men’s rights conjured the notion of misandry, or hatred of men, as they warned against a hypothesized approach of a female-dominated society.

As the academic discipline of women’s studies helped document women’s oppression and resilience , the men’s movement reasoned that it was time to document men’s oppression. Proponents called for research to address the limitations of gender roles on both sexes. Critical work on men began to examine how gender-role expectations differentially affect men and women and has since begun to focus on the concepts of hegemonic masculinity and hegemonic femininity to address the oppressive aspect as well as the agency aspect of gender conformity and resistance.

According to some, sexism can be found in many aspects of daily life. Education, for example, has often attracted particular attention. Sexual harassment and gender-biased treatment—male students are often encouraged to take classes in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics ( STEM ), while females are not—are seen as widespread problems. Furthermore, in many parts of the world, women are barred or discouraged from attending school. It is estimated that two-thirds of illiterate people worldwide are females. This inequality in education contributes to gender disparities in the workplace, which has also drawn claims of sexism. Activists often note discrepancies in salaries and occupations between genders. For example, in the early 21st century in the United States , women typically earned about 84 percent of what men received. Moreover, women were often excluded from certain jobs, especially those of leadership; as of 2019 less than 10 percent of CEOs of S&P 500 companies were female.

In addition, sexism has been seen as contributing to violence against women. Such violence, whether sexual or otherwise physical, is widely viewed as a global problem; indeed, an estimated one in three women experiences it at some point during her lifetime. It is often the product of societal norms based on sexist beliefs, including the idea that males have the right to discipline females and the idea that women often encourage the violence, which is frequently blamed on their wearing so-called provocative clothing.

Yemen was already a hard place to raise an autistic daughter. Then war started

By Haitham Alqaoud , for CNN  

Editor’s note: This story is part of As Equals , CNN’s ongoing series on gender inequality. For information about how the series is funded and more, check out our FAQs .

Sanaa, Yemen — In his house on the outskirts of Yemen’s capital Sanaa, Mothafar squats on the floor, proudly displaying the pencil sketches made by his 21-year-old daughter, Emtenan, who sits silently beside him, dressed fully in black.

The drawings speak volumes. One shows a child curled up into a ball inside a deep hole in the ground, a lush tree sprouting out of them. Another depicts a man pulling a young girl away from a school building, to which she looks back with a devastated look on her face.

Emtenan has autism and finds it challenging to interact with others socially and typically avoids eye contact, her father explains. A therapist has been working closely with her to help her use sketches to express herself.

“Look at these drawings,” Mothafar said proudly. “She has so much talent and I’m sure there is so much more she can do. But given the situation we’re in… there is only so much I can give her,” the widower and father of five told CNN. He asked that he and his daughter be referred to only by their first names, because of the ignorance and stigma associated with autism in Yemen.

Emtenan, 21, who is autistic and largely non-verbal, works with a therapist who helps her use her drawings to communicate. Courtesy Emtenan

As a farmer with no formal education, Mothafar says he knew little about autism until he had Emtenan, and says he feels guilty for not spotting early signs of the condition.

“I thought she was only being a silly child,” he says, recalling her screaming fits, repetitive movements and inability to play with other children by the age of 4. “I didn’t know [what the condition was], and neither did anyone we knew.”

Being a woman with autism, Emtenan belongs to two marginalized groups in a country that has long ranked​​ among the lowest globally for gender equality.

“Yemen’s society still regards women as objects that must be concealed and hidden,” said Afrah Nasser , Yemen researcher at Human Rights Watch. ​They​ face cultural and social barriers, such as restrictions on their movement​, marriage choices​ and access to education. They are also subject to gender-based violence.

Women with autism face even greater challenges, due to the stigma and lack of awareness that persist around the condition. “By virtue of women facing more hardships than men in the various aspects of life, the plights of autistic women are multiple that of a man,” Nasser told CNN.

This pencil drawing shows a man pulling a young girl away from a school building, as tears roll down her face. Due to her autism, Emtenan struggled to settle down in school. Courtesy Emtenan

Autism spectrum disorder refers to “a broad range of conditions characterized by challenges with social skills… and communication, repetitive behaviors, resistance to changes in routine, or restricted interests,” according to Dr. Daniel Geschwind, professor of human genetics, neurology and psychiatry at UCLA.

There is wide variation in the type and severity of symptoms people experience and so therapies and interventions also vary and should be based on an individual’s needs. Early diagnosis enables early intervention and behavioral adjustment, which helps improve an autistic person’s condition and quality of life.

But in Yemen, spotting the signs of autism in a child is the family’s responsibility, Dr. Tameem Al-Basha, professor of special education at the Ibb University, told CNN, because the health sector has been destroyed by a civil war, which is entering its tenth year. The devastation has caused one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises and stripped many people with autism of the opportunity for diagnosis or treatment.

Rising costs in wartime a huge barrier to care

It was not until she turned 6 that Emtenan was diagnosed with autism. She spoke only a few words, had frequent tantrums, was hyperactive and would break things, Mothafar explained. School was also a struggle as she couldn’t settle well in class or follow simple instructions.

“No one advised us to visit a specialist. I would’ve done something [earlier],” added the 54-year-old, who says he now does everything he can to support his daughter.

But the treatment facilities closest to them charged exorbitant fees, he said, and the one he could afford was 22-km from their home. The journey there cost $8, triple what it did before the war. “Now, just thinking​ ​of the cost of transportation to make these trips, is exhausting,” he said.

Ultimately, Mothafar said he could not keep up. “After the war [began], things worsened greatly as the economic and security situation meant that I was less and less capable of giving her the care she needed,” he said. But his daughter’s behavior had been improving so their medical visits went down to twice a month, then monthly, and eventually stopped when Emtenan was 13. At that time, the war was already underway.

Conflict affected not just prices but also Emtenan’s temperament: “The sound of bombs and shelling also added to her agitation,” Mothafar told CNN.

Children look on as smoke billows above the residential area following airstrikes of the Saudi-led coalition targeting Houthi-held military positions on March 07, 2021 in Sanaa, Yemen. Mohammed Hamoud/Getty Images

These days, a therapist visits Emtenan for a full day each month. At 5,000 Yemeni rials ($20 USD) a visit, that is all her father can afford, telling CNN he earns approximately 50,000 rials ($95) a month growing tomatoes, though his brother in Saudi Arabia sends about $50 a month to help.

“During these visits, she’s taught how to express and take care of herself, she’s also encouraged to do house chores and interact with others, and her surroundings. She’s responding well,” Mothafar said, though she still speaks in short sentences and doesn’t engage with her surroundings with ease.

A healthcare system itself on life support

The number of facilities still able to offer treatment is unknown, says Abdullah Bunyan, head of the independent National Union of Yemeni Disabled Associations. There were 118 organizations registered with the union before the war, but “we are unable to define the exact number of entities still able to offer support and treatment, due to the economic and security situation in Yemen,” he told CNN.

Nouriya Mishlen is the head of the independent People of Determination Foundation for Special Education in Sanaa, a center providing treatment and rehabilitation for people with special needs. As an independent entity, the center relies on donations, which dropped significantly when the war began. The four-room facility is run down; the furniture appears worn and in disrepair. In some classrooms, carpets and curtains are absent, and even some bathrooms lack functioning water pumps. The small garden outside is overgrown.

“In the past, our operating costs were affordable, including rent, electricity, water, and psychologist salaries,” Mishlen told CNN. “However, inflation and war have doubled the prices, and we are barely able to cover our operational costs.”

Human resources are equally low. According to 2016 figures from the World Health Organization, there are just 0.2 psychiatrists and 0.4 psychologists per 100,000 people in Yemen; in the US, this figure is 10.5 psychiatrists and 29.8 psychologists per 100,000 people.

Mothafar is grateful he’s found a reliable female therapist to assist Emtenan. “To have her taken care of here at home is ideal. I feel reassured that she’s safe, with another woman,” he explained. But having access to a carer doesn’t offer protection from society’s judgement.

"If she was a boy, it wouldn’t have been an issue. But she’s a girl​.​ Her behavior has brought us scandal and shame" Adel al-Yazidi, father of an autistic teenager

Multiple studies show that families often suffer from negative societal responses to children with autism, especially when they exhibit socially inappropriate behaviors in public. For girls, this would include speaking loudly, yelling or screaming, aggressiveness, defiance and stubbornness, especially toward cultural norms like modest clothing or being quiet among men they are not familiar with.

“Some kids might face abuse, especially these days,” with the war and living conditions at their worst, said Fayad al-Derwish . The architect, who was born in 1990, grew up with autism in Yemen and faced bullying as a child.

According to al-Derwish, Oxfam’s Water and Sanitation Lead in Yemen, it is common for people in rural areas, home to around two-thirds of Yemen’s estimated 34 million people, to see the onset of autism as possession by a djinn, or devil. “If you have any health issue or psychological issue, the first thing the sheikh [local religious leader] in the village does is he brings a piece of steel, burns it with fire, and puts it on your stomach. If you go to a swimming pool in Yemen, you’ll see this mark on peoples’ stomachs,” said al-Derwish.

Dr. Sahar Taresh, senior lecturer at Malaysia’s Lincoln University College, researches awareness levels of autism in her home country of Yemen. Taresh said that while autistic people of both genders are subjected to abuse based on the belief their condition is caused by an evil spirit, “women are more prone to such treatment as a result of fear of being ‘loved by a djinn,’ and the possibility of her tarnishing her family’s reputation, or bringing them shame by her actions.”

Women have long faced discrimination and hostility in Yemen, which in turn affects their access to resources. For most years between 1998 and 2022, Yemen performed the worst on the United Nations’ Development Programme’s gender inequality index. ​This means that while, theoretically, both men and women have equal access to the same therapy opportunities for autism, family and society choose to “prioritize males over females,” said​ Adila Al-Khader, secretary-general of ​the ​ Yemeni​​ Women​’s​ Union ​.​

This gender inequality deepened, and the discrimination of Yemeni women worsened , as a result of the conflict. Destitution and displacement added to the many layers of vulnerability for girls and women, exposing them to more gender-based violence, particularly those with disabilities.

A Yemeni woman prepares food for her family outside a shelter at a makeshift camp for Internally Displaced Persons in Sanaa, Yemen, on August 22, 2023. Yahya Arhab/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

‘Protecting her from herself’

Adel al-Yazidi’s 16-year-old daughter was diagnosed with autism and severe ADHD at the age of 5​ and has trouble communicating and concentrating. ​While living in Saudi Arabia in 2020 she wandered out of her house and fell victim to a group of ​young men ​who ​sexually ​abused her.

Adel al-Yazidi, ​said he and his wife ​now chain the teen’s legs to her bed for most of the day to keep her at home, safe from sexual abuse. In a visit with a journalist, the girl showed no sign of upset over her restricted movement, cheerfully bouncing and interacting with her father.

“It’s to protect her from herself. I have no other choice,” said the father of three during a video call from Cairo, where the family is currently based. ​Her mother ​explained that they​ struggle to stop her ​daughter ​from wandering off.​

​​​​​“If she was a boy, it wouldn’t have been an issue. It wouldn’t have mattered what he does or does not do. He’d be able to fend for himself. But she’s a girl​,” al-Yazidi said. “H​er every action matters. And her behavior has brought us scandals and shame,” ​he added.​

Khader​, of​​ the Yemeni Women’s Union, explained that ​​​many Yemeni families hide their autistic daughters because they know they won’t be embraced by society, or accepted as wives. “They are looked down upon and disrespected, and are therefore mistreated by their own families,” both verbally and physically,​ she said.​

"I wish I could give her more. I want her to lead a life as normal as can be… I’ll do my best to help her achieve it" Mothafar, whose daughter, Emtenan, is severely autistic

A therapist in Sanaa, who asked not to be named due to the stigma associated with caring for women with autism, told CNN she’s seen marks of what she believed was beating and torture on a 16-year-old girl with autism. She added that such girls are often kept out of sight, and sometimes get married to grooms who aren’t told the truth about their condition, and are then left to their own fates, which could include marital abuse or divorce.

Khader, of the Yemeni Women’s Union, says that the biggest problem in Yemen lies with families’ lack of understanding of how to deal with girls growing up with autism. But she adds that increasing community awareness about this disorder will greatly contribute to reducing bullying and increasing the integration of this group into society and in their families.

“Training and qualifying women specialists in the field of autism spectrum, as well as creating specialized and free centers, will also [help] significantly.”

​​In the meantime, Mothafar refuses to give up on his daughter. ​They interact mostly with close friends and family who treat Emtenan’s condition with respect to avoid her facing any harassment or mistreatment, and Mothafar is careful to keep it that way. ​​“It’s something I can’t tolerate if anyone refers to her condition in a mocking or bullying way,” he said. ​​​​ ​​​​​ ​​“I wish I could give her more. I want her to lead a life as normal as can be, where she interacts with the world in a normal way, establishes relationships and completes her education… I’ll do my best to help her achieve it.”

5 Powerful Essays Advocating for Gender Equality

Gender equality – which becomes reality when all genders are treated fairly and allowed equal opportunities –  is a complicated human rights issue for every country in the world. Recent statistics are sobering. According to the World Economic Forum, it will take 108 years to achieve gender parity . The biggest gaps are found in political empowerment and economics. Also, there are currently just six countries that give women and men equal legal work rights. Generally, women are only given ¾ of the rights given to men. To learn more about how gender equality is measured, how it affects both women and men, and what can be done, here are five essays making a fair point.

Take a free course on Gender Equality offered by top universities!

“Countries With Less Gender Equity Have More Women In STEM — Huh?” – Adam Mastroianni and Dakota McCoy

This essay from two Harvard PhD candidates (Mastroianni in psychology and McCoy in biology) takes a closer look at a recent study that showed that in countries with lower gender equity, more women are in STEM. The study’s researchers suggested that this is because women are actually especially interested in STEM fields, and because they are given more choice in Western countries, they go with different careers. Mastroianni and McCoy disagree.

They argue the research actually shows that cultural attitudes and discrimination are impacting women’s interests, and that bias and discrimination is present even in countries with better gender equality. The problem may lie in the Gender Gap Index (GGI), which tracks factors like wage disparity and government representation. To learn why there’s more women in STEM from countries with less gender equality, a more nuanced and complex approach is needed.

“Men’s health is better, too, in countries with more gender equality” – Liz Plank

When it comes to discussions about gender equality, it isn’t uncommon for someone in the room to say, “What about the men?” Achieving gender equality has been difficult because of the underlying belief that giving women more rights and freedom somehow takes rights away from men. The reality, however, is that gender equality is good for everyone. In Liz Plank’s essay, which is an adaption from her book For the Love of Men: A Vision for Mindful Masculinity, she explores how in Iceland, the #1 ranked country for gender equality, men live longer. Plank lays out the research for why this is, revealing that men who hold “traditional” ideas about masculinity are more likely to die by suicide and suffer worse health. Anxiety about being the only financial provider plays a big role in this, so in countries where women are allowed education and equal earning power, men don’t shoulder the burden alone.

Liz Plank is an author and award-winning journalist with Vox, where she works as a senior producer and political correspondent. In 2015, Forbes named her one of their “30 Under 30” in the Media category. She’s focused on feminist issues throughout her career.

“China’s #MeToo Moment” –  Jiayang Fan

Some of the most visible examples of gender inequality and discrimination comes from “Me Too” stories. Women are coming forward in huge numbers relating how they’ve been harassed and abused by men who have power over them. Most of the time, established systems protect these men from accountability. In this article from Jiayang Fan, a New Yorker staff writer, we get a look at what’s happening in China.

The essay opens with a story from a PhD student inspired by the United States’ Me Too movement to open up about her experience with an academic adviser. Her story led to more accusations against the adviser, and he was eventually dismissed. This is a rare victory, because as Fan says, China employs a more rigid system of patriarchy and hierarchy. There aren’t clear definitions or laws surrounding sexual harassment. Activists are charting unfamiliar territory, which this essay explores.

“Men built this system. No wonder gender equality remains as far off as ever.” – Ellie Mae O’Hagan

Freelance journalist Ellie Mae O’Hagan (whose book The New Normal is scheduled for a May 2020 release) is discouraged that gender equality is so many years away. She argues that it’s because the global system of power at its core is broken.  Even when women are in power, which is proportionally rare on a global scale, they deal with a system built by the patriarchy. O’Hagan’s essay lays out ideas for how to fix what’s fundamentally flawed, so gender equality can become a reality.

Ideas include investing in welfare; reducing gender-based violence (which is mostly men committing violence against women); and strengthening trade unions and improving work conditions. With a system that’s not designed to put women down, the world can finally achieve gender equality.

“Invisibility of Race in Gender Pay Gap Discussions” – Bonnie Chu

The gender pay gap has been a pressing issue for many years in the United States, but most discussions miss the factor of race. In this concise essay, Senior Contributor Bonnie Chu examines the reality, writing that within the gender pay gap, there’s other gaps when it comes to black, Native American, and Latina women. Asian-American women, on the other hand, are paid 85 cents for every dollar. This data is extremely important and should be present in discussions about the gender pay gap. It reminds us that when it comes to gender equality, there’s other factors at play, like racism.

Bonnie Chu is a gender equality advocate and a Forbes 30 Under 30 social entrepreneur. She’s the founder and CEO of Lensational, which empowers women through photography, and the Managing Director of The Social Investment Consultancy.

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About the author, emmaline soken-huberty.

Emmaline Soken-Huberty is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. She started to become interested in human rights while attending college, eventually getting a concentration in human rights and humanitarianism. LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and climate change are of special concern to her. In her spare time, she can be found reading or enjoying Oregon’s natural beauty with her husband and dog.

• Research article
• Open access
• Published: 13 May 2020

Patriarchy and gender-inequitable attitudes as drivers of intimate partner violence against women in the central region of Ghana

• Yandisa Sikweyiya 1 , 2   na1 ,
• Adolphina Addoley Addo-Lartey 3 ,
• Deda Ogum Alangea 4 ,
• Phyllis Dako-Gyeke 5 ,
• Esnat D. Chirwa 1 ,
• Dorcas Coker-Appiah 6 ,
• Richard M. K. Adanu 4 &
• Rachel Jewkes 1 , 2   na1  

BMC Public Health volume  20 , Article number:  682 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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In order to reduce women’s exposure to violence and develop culturally appropriate interventions, it is important to gain an understanding of how men who use violence rationalize it. The present study sought to explore the perspectives of men who had used violence on their female partners, specifically their views on intimate partner violence (IPV), gender norms, manhood, their gender attitudes and to understand how these may drive male perpetrated IPV against women in the Central Region of Ghana.

This was a qualitative study involving purposively sampled adult men who had participated in a household-based survey in selected districts in the Central Region of Ghana and who had self-reported perpetration of IPV in the past 12 months. In-depth interviews were conducted with 17 men.

Data revealed how a range of social, cultural, and religious factors ̶ stemming from patriarchy ̶ combined to inform the construction of a traditional masculinity. These factors included the notion that decision-making in the home is a man’s prerogative, there should be rigid and distinct gender roles, men’s perceptions of owning female partners and having the right to have sex with them whenever they desire, and the notion that wife beating is legitimate discipline. Findings suggest that it was through performing, or aspiring to achieve, this form of masculinity that men used varying forms of violence against their female partners. Moreover, data show that the men’s use of violence was a tactic for controlling women and emphasizing their authority and power over them.

Conclusions

Developers of interventions to prevent IPV need to recognize that there is a coherent configuration of aspirations, social norms and behaviours that is drawn on by some men to justify their use of IPV. Understanding the perspectives of men who have perpetrated IPV against women and their motivations for perpetration is essential for interventions to prevent IPV. This is discussed as drawing authority from ‘tradition’ and so engaging traditional and religious leaders, as well as men and women throughout the community, in activities to challenge this is likely to be particularly fruitful.

Peer Review reports

In Africa intimate partner violence (IPV) is widespread [ 1 ]. Whilst there has been relatively little research on IPV conducted in Ghana, published studies have shown that more than one third of women report being abused in some form or another [ 2 , 3 ]. A nationwide study on violence against women (VAW) in Ghana reported that 33% of women experienced physical violence at the hands of their current or previous partners, 29% of women had their first experience of sexual intercourse by force, whilst 33% of the women had been touched inappropriately against their will [ 3 ].

Women’s vulnerability to experiencing IPV is exacerbated by their relative lack of material resources, which creates dependency on male partners, as well as community norms of male dominance and acceptance of violence, with cultural ideologies that place women in subordinate positions [ 2 , 4 , 5 ]. These structures of domination and exploitation of women, which heighten their vulnerability to violence, obtain legitimacy from patriarchy [ 4 , 6 , 7 ].

In Ghana, the reports of exposure of so many women to violence points to a socially normative element in the use of IPV, yet its legitimacy is still contested. A recent study found that wife beating is commonly reported to be unacceptable, however a proportion of those interviewed asserted that it was justified in some circumstances, including when a woman disobeys her husband, neglects the children or refuses to have sex with her husband [ 8 ].

In the context of very high prevalence, these contested narratives of the acceptability of violence indicate both the need for interventions to prevent IPV and the possibility of building upon existing social disagreement to develop and deploy interventions working the discursive space of violence acceptability and the practical space of demonstrated assistance to women experiencing IPV. Understanding how narratives of acceptability of violence operate to create vulnerability for women and to justify the use of violence against them by male partners is critical for efforts directed at social change. This requires a much deeper understanding of how men who use violence understand and justify their behaviours, and the paths through which they seek legitimacy for it.

A starting point for research to understand men’s use of IPV is a theoretical understanding of Ghanaian society as deeply patriarchal [ 9 ]. There are distinct gender roles, with women expected to marry, bear children, keep the home and nurture children, whilst being available sexually for their husbands [ 8 ], while men are chiefly expected to work, earn and provide for their families [ 9 ]. Ghanaian patriarchy provides the framing of gender inequality and concomitant unequal power, social values, entitlements, and roles. In this context men construct and perform masculinities, which express their identities, aspirations and values, in their social relationships with other men as well as with women. Connell [ 10 ] argues that in any setting there are multiple masculinities, all of which draw on the patriarchal privilege, but they have an uneven relationship to domination and control over women, and also are held with unequal esteem by other men. Some masculinities are much less violent than others, and emphasise to a greater extent men’s responsibilities and position them in a supportive and cooperative relationship to women. Others are predicated much more strongly on dominance and control over women, often with men’s success and honour viewed through the lens of their ability to do this, and violence or threats are strategically used to achieve this position over women, teach them gender hierarchy and punish transgressions. These, and other, different models of manhood sit uncomfortably side by side within a community, with their relations unequal and contested. Among them there is usually a communal cultural model of masculinity that is most widely recognized as an ideal and superior to the other masculinities [ 11 , 12 ]. This is described by Connell as hegemonic masculinity [ 10 ]. In the hierarchy of masculinities, the dominance maintained by the hegemonic masculinity is attained through a social agreement, rather than through violent suppression of the subordinate masculinities [ 13 , 14 ].

Hegemonic masculinities, as an ideal, reflect a masculine position which is aspirational as often as it is occupied. For example, in most societies it includes elements of ideas of men as providers, and these are esteemed and aspired to by both men who are financially able to occupy this role as well as by men who may be marginally- or un-employed and struggle to do so. In sub-Saharan Africa hegemonic masculinities invariably express men’s power and dominance over women, but the role of men’s violence in achieving this is contested. Wood et al. [ 15 ] argued that amongst the Xhosa in South Africa it is men’s power of verbal persuasion which is more highly regarded, although violence may be used at times when persuasion fails. In other settings or among other groups within that setting, violence may be more readily deployed by men. There is considerable debate in the literature [ 16 ] about whether the use of violence makes men feel good, and much as it is often legitimated as ‘discipline’, it is often asserted that it does not if viewed as ‘loss of control’. A further pertinent element of this debate is elucidation and understanding of how men justify their use of violence to deflect blame for it, where they see the act as blameworthy, and to deflect the stigma that might otherwise be accorded to men who ‘lose control and are violent’ [ 16 ].

For those who seek to end women’s exposure to IPV, and develop culturally appropriate interventions, it is critical to gain and understand the perspectives of men who perpetrate IPV against women, their motives and justification for perpetrating it. In this paper, we draw on the narratives of men who acknowledged their use of violence over their wives and girlfriends in Ghana and show how a range of social, cultural, and religious factors ̶ flowing from patriarchy ̶ intersected to inform the construction of a traditional masculinity, and how men draw on this to legitimize their violence.

Study design

This qualitative study was conducted during the pre-intervention phase within a larger trial that assessed the community level impact of the Rural Response System (RRS) intervention (registered on ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT03237585). The baseline survey for the larger trial used a multistage stratified cluster random sampling process to select participants. Full details regarding the sampling approach for the larger trial are described elsewhere [ 17 , 18 ].

The primary objective of the RRS is to reduce and prevent VAW in Ghana. The RRS uses the strategy of trained community members known as community-based action teams to undertake awareness-raising on VAW as well as providing support to victims of violence to access justice. For this study, in-depth interviews (IDI) were conducted with men who had self-reported in the quantitative baseline survey to have perpetrated IPV ( n  = 17 IDIs).

The scope of inquiry for the IDIs (see appendix 1 ) was to understand the perspectives of the men in our sample ̶ with regards to IPV, their views on gender norms, manhood, and their gender related attitudes and practices, and whether and how these drive male perpetrated IPV. The questions which were asked in the interviews were developed by the authors of this paper for the purpose of this study.

The trial was conducted in four districts located in the Central Region of Ghana. Two of these districts are along the coast while the other two districts are inland districts. The four districts in the study (each comprising about 10 communities) were selected based on operational and program considerations. Selection of participating districts was done using a census map of the Central Region that showed Inland and Coastal districts.

After excluding some districts because previous intervention work on VAW has been carried out in those districts; two inland and two coastal districts were then purposively selected as study sites. Designated sites were separated from each other by a geographical buffer (at least one district wide) to reduce spill over . Adult literacy rate in the Central Region is about 50%, with more men being literate (69.8%) compared to women (46.3%) (Ghana Statistical Service, 2013). The region is predominantly Akan speaking (82.0%) and Fante is the indigenous dialect of most districts in the region. Unemployment rate is 8.0% which is 2.4% lower than the national average.

Study participants

Research assistants were trained and primed to identify men who reported experience of IPV (as perpetrators) during the baseline survey. These respondents were followed-up and privately asked to confirm if they had perpetrated any form of IPV (physical, sexual, emotional, economic) in the past 12 months. Those who admitted to such behaviour were invited to participate in the IDIs, which would offer them an opportunity to share their experiences within a private space.

The same research assistants contacted those who agreed to this invitation to conduct the IDIs. Focusing on such individuals allowed us to capture specific IPV experiences in these communities and examine how these experiences highlight the knowledge and understanding of the negative impact of IPV as a social issue as well as actions taken. All IDIs with men were conducted within the intervention communities. While the research assistants came from similar communities as participants, they did not conduct interviews in their own communities and had no prior knowledge of the participants.

Participants’ characteristics

Seventeen men undertook IDIs, majority of whom were married or cohabitating, professed Christian faith, and had attained junior high school level of education (grade 7–9). With regards to age, they ranged between 18 and 73. Each of the 17 men was interviewed once. Few of the participants had lived less than 5 years in the community, while most had lived there over 16 years. In terms of age, four men were between the ages of 18–25, six were between 26 and 35 years, three were between 36 and 44 years and six were between 45 and over. With regards to marital status, 13 were married, three were single, two were cohabiting and one was divorced. One had never attended school, six had completed primary school, three had completed junior high school, five had completed senior high school, two had tertiary education.

Amongst those employed, most men were likely to be working in the agriculture sector (including fishing) as it was the main occupation and employed more than two-thirds of the work force in many districts. Fishing is concentrated mainly along the coast, whereas cocoa and oil palm production is concentrated inland.

Data collection

The IDIs were carried out from May to June 2016 by male interviewers. The interview guides were translated into local languages (Fante and Twi) by bi-lingual members of the project team at the University of Ghana. This was independently back translated by consultants who had not seen the English guides. The project team then discussed and resolved differences before the tools were used. Participants were interviewed in either Fante and Twi, in a private space of their compound or away from their residence (if desired). Interviews lasted about 1.5 h. From about the 15th interview, no new information was being produced, and this suggested to us that saturation had been reached.

Data analysis

All audio-recorded interviews were transcribed verbatim. Transcriptions were augmented with researcher’s field notes generated through observations during the IDIs. Data were analysed inductively using thematic analysis [ 19 ]. However, there were deductive elements to the analysis as we explored themes that have been reported in similar published studies and then tested those in our data.

Transcripts were read repeatedly, and initial codes developed based on the IDI guide and short words or phrases representing segments of the text in the transcript. The first author used the codes to develop a codebook. Following this stage, all authors reviewed and tested the applicability of the codebook using the raw data from the transcripts, which led to expansion of codes. Next, text which seemed to fit together was grouped together under a specific code [ 20 ].

Further to this, the authors explored the data and identified numerous open codes. Analogous open codes were grouped together under clearly defined categories [ 20 ]. Next, the authors explored the relationships between the categories and interpreted what they saw emerging [ 19 ].

Ethical considerations

Ethical approval for the study was obtained from the Institutional Review Board at the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research, University of Ghana, (# 006/15–16) and the South African Medical Research Council’s Ethics Committee (EC031–9/2015). All project staff received training on gender, VAW, and research ethics prior to implementing the trial. All participants were asked to provide written informed consent before participating. This was done in participants’ language of preference (English or local languages).

Participants were informed about the purpose, risk and benefits of the study and that participation was voluntary. They were also informed that they may withdraw at any stage or skip any question in the research, with no adverse consequences to them. All participants were assured that the information they provide will be handled confidentially and that findings will be reported with complete anonymity (pseudonyms were used for participants during interviews and are not representative of any particular ethnic group).

All interviews were recorded both in writing and audio taping with the consent of the participants. Participants were reimbursed for their time with a beverage (malt) and water as well as Ghs 10 (~ 2.5 USD).

The sample of this study was limited to men who reported in the baseline survey to have used violence on their female intimate partners. As such, these findings reflect the gender attitudes and practices of men who reported to have used IPV, and not those of all men in the Central Region of Ghana.

Men make decisions at home and perform his roles

Most men held a view that decision-making in the home is a preserve of men, and also a responsibility men cannot abdicate, as it is part of their expected gender roles. This was best illustrated in Dodzi’s narrative to follow: ‘ At home I make the decisions and perform my roles and do the things that I’m supposed to do for my wife when it comes to our chop money [i.e. money for food and the home and other things]’. Several men viewed decision-making in the home as a man’s natural and essential role, as Adjo explained: ‘ In most cases, it’s the man who has to initiate such issues of planning for the future of the children. If that fails to happen, the future of the children will be jeopardized ’.

Our interviews suggested that a man’s failure to provide such direction to his family would reflect badly on him as a man, in so doing call into question his masculinity. Yet, on the other side, this socially sanctioned duty of men to provide direction to his family primarily worked to elevate and emphasize men’s position as superior to women and other males (e.g., boys) in the gender hierarchy. Elikplim’s asserted: ‘ The man can tell his son not to go out and he’ll listen but the woman can also tell the son the same thing but the son won’t listen to his mom ’.

Men considered that the hierarchical gender structure described here, with men occupying the top most position, needed to be respected by the wives to prevent violence in their homes. Any challenge to it from a wife could result in beating from her husband. To argue and substantiate their view that a man is the head of the household, some men drew on religious teachings and texts. Danquah contended that: ‘ As Christ is the head of the church so is a man to the house ’. Several of the men drew on the higher authority of ‘God’s law’ to justify their view that they were superior to women. Adjo commented that: ‘ If we are to be honest, even the Bible makes us understand that the man is the head of the family … ’. For these men, this ‘God given’ role could not be contested, and this meant that women must subject themselves to their control, and dutifully perform their duties to serve them. It was in the context of a perceived challenge to men’s rules and authority that men emotionally and or physically harmed their female partners.

‘Women are not regarded in society’

While Acheampong explained that in his community ‘ men do not treat women as fools’ , and ‘ men are not rough with women ’, other men shared contrasting attitudes and experiences regarding gender relations between men and women in their communities. They shared narratives that suggested they thought women were sub-human or intellectually inferior. This is evidenced by Elikplim’s argument:

Elikplim: I think that since women are not regarded in the society that’s why they’re not allowed to make decisions; we count them as part of our cooking utensils and other things.

Interviewer: So, are you saying that women are counted as cooking utensils and other things?

Elikplim: Maybe this is one the woman 2, like plate 1, woman 2, and spoon 3.

Highlighting that women were feeble-minded and sub-human, men like Elikplim contended that it was the men’s duty to think on behalf of women and provide them with direction on what ought to be done and how. Yet, while some men reasoned that it was progressive for a man to consult with his wife when taking decisions, they stressed that the final decision-making lies with the man. Abedi underscored that: ‘ A man [takes the decision] but a woman also brings her idea to touch, so it’s going to be 70-30 ’.

Similarly, other men argued that it is important for a man to listen to his wife’s opinions as that can aid men in making well thought through decisions. However, it was apparent in the data that the final decision on a matter rested with the man. While initially it may appear that these men were different from those, within this sample, who demonstrated gender-inequitable attitudes with regards to decision making at home, these men had no intention of considering the views of their wives and allowed no indication that their wives had the power to make them decide on anything that did not suit them. Also, interviews showed that the men’s trepidation about including their wives in decision-making process stemmed from how they felt the society would perceive them and appeared to have nothing to do with the quality of the woman’s contribution.

Our interviews suggested that almost all men interviewed preferred a wife who exhibited a femininity characterized by obedience towards her husband. This is best illustrated in Abronoma’s extract to follow:

Decisions normally taken are farm related. The man could take a decision like “I have seen some farm somewhere here, let’s go clear the land”. If the woman is “correct” [obedient] she will go and assist you cultivate the land. On the other hand, if she is not correct [disobedient], she will not help the man in the farm. (Abronoma)

The notion that a good woman acquiesces to men was a strategic tool in bolstering this traditional masculinity and worked to sustain these men’s dominance over women. Practically, the men’s stated preference for a subservient wife was another tactic for controlling women and ensuring that they be fearful and subservient to their husbands, and thereby conform to their dictates. The ever-present threat of violence underpinned this.

Interviews suggested that wives, however, were not completely excluded from decision-making. We interrogated the data to understand the terms and circumstances under which women were included. The narratives suggest that instances of a wife’s inclusion had conditions attached, and chiefly depended on the woman’s demeanor. For example, wives who were perceived to be disrespectful by some men, and disagreed with them were excluded, while those viewed as subservient were included. In his interview, Abedi explained that he broke his engagement with his fiancée when he noticed that she had started disrespecting him and challenging his decisions:

We were planning to get married but later I gave one of my keys to her but she felt pompous; if I said ‘oh Abena do this’, she said she won’t do that. She started challenging me so I told her I can’t continue this thing … she can go her way. So as for women, if you study her well and you get married to her, you can share ideas. That’s why most men don’t share ideas with their wives, only a few. (Abedi)

Thus, the women’s inclusion in decision-making was a reward for their subservience and support to men’s ideas, a subtle strategy to control women and keep the existing hierarchical gender structure undisturbed. It appears that the wives of these men knew of these expectations, were aware of the violent consequences to them if they challenged the husband’s authority.

Men should provide, and women must cook

The interviews suggest there were rigid and distinct gender roles which were conspicuously reflected in the attitudes and practices of these men. Men’s dominance of decision-making was one male gender role, but there were many more that were perceived as ingrained in inflexible and unchanging ‘culture’. For example, Aboagye asserted that in his culture there were ‘ responsibilities that were solely reserved for women and others exclusively meant for men ’.

The gender roles for women centered around the home ̶ and this is best shown in Adjo’s explanation that: ‘ The difference here is, in the case of a woman, your responsibilities are to clean the home, tidy up everywhere including the toilets, and cook for the man ’. In the interviews, it appeared that the need to reinforce men’s supremacy over women, primarily informed the gender roles for women. For these men, women’s responsibilities were menial and domestic.

On the other hand, there were roles that were clearly reserved for men. Many men expressed the view that a man’s place is outside the home; where he is expected to toil to earn money for his family’s upkeep. This provider role ̶ a key trait of the traditional masculinity which was valued by most of the men comes with clearly stipulated responsibilities that a man must perform. Aboagye’s assertion that: ‘ The role of the man is that since you brought the woman into your house, you have to make sure you provide her with food, clothing, good shelter, and other basic things at home ’, is explanatory.

As argued by Adjo below, a man who succeed in performing these responsibilities obtained some social rewards including respect and honour as a man in his community:

In terms of reward, if there is any that comes, it goes a lot more to the man than the woman because your ability as a man to take very good care of your wife for her to look good is what brings honour to you. (Adjo)

Yet, interviews suggest that a man who failed to meet these responsibilities may lose the respect of his wife and therefore be stripped, symbolically, of his position as the head of the household.

Gender roles could, however, be temporarily filled by either men and women. Yet, per these men’s views, this exchange of gender roles chiefly depended on men’s will. Some men emphasised that such change was time and circumstance bound and never perpetual. In explicating this, Aboagye said:

It will work because it could happen that there is some day the woman wouldn’t be feeling that ok so since you the man knows she is sick and cannot do her household duties, you have to give a helping hand maybe for 2 or 3 days. In the same way when it comes to the woman, you have noticed that the man isn’t feeling well so the roles or duties he is supposed to do that period and he isn’t doing, you have to help him accomplish that task for maybe 2 or 3 days.

In line with Aboagye’s view, in other men’s narratives there was an indication that gendered tasks could be shared in a limited way under certain circumstances. For example, Kofi emphasised that a man should help with domestic chores when the wife was infirm and therefore unable to carry out her domestic roles but not in other circumstances. He posited:

The role of the woman is that you have to cook, you can also fetch water for your husband to take his bath and ask him to eat his food. You the woman has no right to ask your man to go to the kitchen and cook food. What is even the essence of the marriage in the first place? The only time you can sacrifice and do those things is when you realise that your wife is sick and cannot do anything. (Kofi)

In the interviews, it was evident, however, that the rigidness of the gender roles was challenged under various economic conditions especially when the woman was bringing in money in the home or was the sole breadwinner, but even here it was implied that this could be temporary. Aboagye’s extract below shows this:

Sometimes when you the man is financially unstable, you can at least talk to your wife to support with what she has, and later you will pay her back. So, I think when all these go on in the house there will be peace. (Aboagye)

Linked to the notion that the men’s place is outside the home, material provision was a critical feature of the traditional masculinity, valorized by most men in our sample. To attain this masculinity, men had to provide for their wives and children. Any failure to provide triggered frustration in their wife and, sometimes, a violent response from the men. Kofi’s extract to follow is illustrative:

Chop money can also generate violence in the house. Maybe even if the man is financially unstable, he [husband] won’t even inform the woman of the fact that he doesn’t have money today but the moment the woman asks for money, then he will use pride. Pride can never solve that problem. (Kofi)

If the wife questioned the men’s inability to provide for her and his children, men interpreted this as a direct assault on his masculinity and would use violence to temporarily reclaim his honour.

She is mine and must allow me to do it (sex)

In the interviews, several men emphasized that the wife’s responsibility towards her husband centered around her ‘pampering’ him. According to these men, ‘pampering’ meant to sexually pleasure and satisfy the male partner. Two reasons appeared to inform these men’s sexual entitlement on their female partners: the bride-price and the notion that ‘men own their female partner (i.e. ‘You are my girl’)’. In the interviews, men interpreted their bride-price payment as meaning that they own their wives, and that their wives cannot refuse their sexual advances.

Our data showed that men’s entitlement to be ‘pampered’ by their wives was inextricably tied to their view that because the man had paid bride-price for his wife and met other customary demands from the wife’s family, he was entitled to her sexually. For men who held this notion, a wife was thus culturally bound to satisfy her husband sexually whenever he desired. Adom explained: ‘ How can I marry you and put a ring on your finger and when I want to have sex you say no? If you won’t do it then it means you don’t love me ’.

The payment of bride-price emphasized men’s sense of ownership of their wives and entitlement to their bodies. It also meant that wives were not permitted to go with other men. For men like Danquah, a woman who was suspected, or known, to have cheated on her husband should expect to be physically beaten. Danquah posited:

The woman I was with cheated on me with another man as a result I got annoyed and gave her some punches. Because, as a woman that I have married legally, how can you cheat on me? So, if a woman goes out without coming to sleep home, what does it mean? So, that is what happened which led to the violence. I gave her some punches which she also replied and become a problem which led to the divorce. (Danquah)

It was not only in a marriage that some men felt sexually entitled to their partners. Men in dating relationships also felt entitled to have sex with their partners whenever they desired sex. Several men reported that they had forced their girlfriends to have sex with them.

It appears their entitlement to have sex with their girlfriends, whenever they wished, was also linked to their view that men own the women they are in a relationship with. Such sexual entitlement and sense of ownership of women is best illustrated in Abedi’s extract below:

Oh I forced her I told her, ‘chaley [dude] today I feel oo’ so I want to have sex with her, but she said ‘chaley today I am tired’, but I said ‘oo what are you talking about, that is why I told you I am in love with you, you are my girl so you have to allow me to do it’, but as I said I had to force her … yeah, about 3 months, 4 months I hadn’t had sex so (laughing). I forced her. (Abedi)

In our sample, men who reported to have sexually violated their partners were likely to also report that they felt entitled to their partners’ body, that their partners were their possessions, and had strongly identified with the traditional masculinity circulating in this context.

Beating as discipline

The men in our sample viewed partner violence as a strategy to discipline a female partner. Addae very simply remarked: ‘ occasionally the man will beat the woman’. Danso similarly explained that: ‘in marriage it is not always smooth, there will definitely be beatings, but they are no big issues ’. Through first diminishing and even dehumanizing women, men found it easier to inflict violence on their female partners.

For some men, wife beating was an entitlement that came with marriage, and was closely tied to men’s payment of the bride price for the wife. Adom’s quote below shows this:

When I used to stay here the relationship that exists between a man and woman sometimes it’s heart-breaking … because a man can be living together with a woman while he has not performed the marriage rites, but the man beats the woman like he has performed the marriage rites of the woman. (Adom)

Wives were perceived to be men’s possessions and thus under their control. Dodzi explained that: ‘ for understanding to prevail in the home, she [wife] has to obey me and listen to what I tell her ’ . When a wife was judged to have misbehaved, or had been disobedient, men felt it was their responsibility to discipline her. Abronoma’s narrative to follow evidences this, he posited: ‘ I came from the farm only to find my wife sleeping instead of joining me in the farm. Meanwhile, she wasn’t sick … nothing happened. She wasn’t injured. I gave her a lesson [beating] ’.

Likewise, several other men described instances where they had beaten their wives. Abronoma reported that ‘ My second wife, I caned her … yes. I used a cane to whip her’. Suggesting that he has beaten his wife multiple times, he further said: ‘ … the last time it [beating the wife] happened was when I divorced my last wife ’ (Abronoma). That some men had repeatedly beaten their wives and used implements (such as a whip) to do this with, suggests the severity of IPV perpetration by these men.

Men felt they had the responsibility to discipline a ‘ lazy wife ’, and some, like Mawuli, went as far as to blame the women for their violence: ‘ [it] was because of what she said that made me raise my hands on her ’. He further explicated: ‘ Okay, I see some cases of these violent acts. Sometimes the woman is someone who doesn’t respect, so the man can hit her in the face or be physically violent towards her ’. He felt it was his responsibility to beat his wife when she ‘ deserved ’ it, and complaining about being hampered in doing this due to the children, Mawuli said:

I have hit her [wife] before. Interviewer: Was it because of her refusal to sleep with you? Not only that but other issues also gave rise to my violent behavior towards her … because of the kids at home I find it difficult to hit her even if she does wrong. (Mawuli)

Blame deflected any sense of guilt for the beating. When Kafui was asked how he felt after beating his partner, he stated that ‘ I didn’t feel anything because; I knew she wasn’t doing the right thing and if she had listened to me, I wouldn’t have beaten her ’. Beating their wives was a necessary form of discipline for a disobedience or shirking responsibilities, something that men could not abdicate. For them, it was part of being a man. Notwithstanding, few men perceived wife beating as violence and somewhat regretted it.

This study has described the perspectives of men who used violence against their female partners. We have shown how an array of social, cultural, and religious factors ̶ deriving from patriarchy ̶ coalesced to inform the construction of a traditional masculine position which the men interviewed aspired to occupy. These factors included the notion that decision-making in the home is a man’s prerogative, as are the rigid and distinct gender role (e.g. domestic work), men’s perceptions about owning their female partners and having the right to have sex with them whenever they desire, and the notion that wife beating is legitimate and important for discipline. Our findings show that it was through performing or aspiring to achieve this form of masculinity that men employed different forms of violence against their female partners. Moreover, findings suggest that the traditional masculinity displayed or aspired to by these men was rooted in patriarchal power relations in which men were positioned as superior to and dominant over women. Also, findings revealed that patriarchy was particularly reflected in the gender attitudes and practices of the men, who had reported that they have been violent towards their partners and had generally supported men’s dominance in decision-making at home and wife beating.

These findings are an important contribution to literature as they highlight how some structures of patriarchy (i.e. men’s violence and patriarchal mode of production) [ 21 ] play out in this setting to subordinate women and inform the construction of a traditional masculinity (amongst men in our sample) ̶ which often manifested itself through display of extreme gender-inequitable attitudes and use of various forms of violence against female partners. Thus, these findings bring significant nuance to understandings of the links between patriarchy and male perpetrated IPV in the Central Region of Ghana [ 22 ]. Furthermore, these findings shed light on the ideas and justification violent men in this setting drew on to support their use of violence against their female partners and deflect blame.

It has been argued that Ghanaian culture demands that women should not only be submissive to their husbands, but also demonstrate unquestioning respect, be dutiful, and serviceable to the extent that going against or challenging abuse may be interpreted as an attempt to disrupt the authority of the man [ 7 , 9 ]. In this study, what the participants described is an inflexible gender hierarchy, which is enforced, as we have shown, through authoritarian rule by some men in the home.

In this context, the use of violence against female partners is seen as an integral part of the dominant masculinity, as presented by these men who have all themselves used violence. Hearn and others have argued that the use of violence by men is not an inherent part of hegemonic masculinity [ 23 , 24 ], but our data suggest that in these contexts in Ghana it was inseparable from an authoritarian patriarchy and an intrinsic element of the expected and revered authoritarian rule by some men within the home.

Our study has shown that the structures of patriarchy (e.g. men’s violence and patriarchal mode of production) and related elements and practices illuminated by the interviews were very similar to those described by Walby [ 21 ] and found in very many settings: distinct gender roles, decision-making being a men’s prerogative, men’s sexual entitlement, and wife beating as discipline (see also [ 25 ]). However, these elements alone, reveal little about the specific cultural context in which men construct and perform their masculinity and the embodied meaning of these different elements.

Notable features from the interviews were the extremes of subordination of women – some of the men dehumanized their female partners or viewed them as feeble-minded, categorizing them as possessions, little more than animated household implements. This clearly constitutes pervasive emotional violence against women. Some of the authors of this paper have undertaken research on IPV in many countries over several decades and have often reflected that women are objectified and treated as children or as possessions, but have not previously encountered women described as household implements in any setting. Furthermore, the subordination and dehumanization described by men interviewed ̶ a tactic often used in genocides or conflict situations [ 26 ] ̶ was required in order to justify the treatment of women, when the men thought women were disrespectful, disobeyed or had transgressed gender roles. These men said it was their culturally sanctioned responsibility to control and discipline their female partners, as part of fulfilling their gender roles [ 27 ]. Feminist scholars argue that when the sub-humanness of women obtains justification from tradition and religion, it legitimizes men’s use of violence against women; and that, when men think of women as less human, they often act in violent ways towards them (Shose Kessi: personal communication). Indeed, some men’s sexual violence against their wives appeared to have been legitimated by the cultural practice of bride-price payment which, in turn, seemed to have informed these men’s sense of ownership of their wives, making them to believe they had unlimited access to their wives’ bodies [ 28 ]. It was thus in the context where wives resisted their husband’s sexual advances that men sexually assaulted their wives [ 5 , 7 ]. This is akin to findings of a South African study in which men’s sexual entitlement was the most commonly reported motivation for rape of women [ 29 ].

There are implications for the development of prevention interventions that stem from this research. To build effective programmes to stop men’s IPV in this setting, more research is needed to understand how men who are violent perceive dominant forms of masculinity and their contribution to IPV. It is difficult to see how interventions to prevent IPV can be effective without transforming the dominant construction of masculinity. For as long as men perceive that they are expected to enact authoritarian rule in the home, and view women as inferior to them emotional, sexual and physical violence are likely to be inseparable parts of the domestic regime. Building respect for and admiration of women, acknowledging domestic partnership and promoting shared decision-making are essential elements of programmes that seek to disrupt authoritarian patriarchies and prevent male perpetrated IPV. In this setting, such programmes should also address cultural and other context specific factors that drive male perpetrated IPV. Furthermore, among these violent men, who confidently perceived themselves to be ‘traditionally’ masculine men, widespread community-based change is most likely needed to enable and sustain change in masculinity, drawing on contributions from traditional and religious leaders as well as other community members.

We have also shown that some men refrained from beating their wives in front of the children or regretted beating their wives. This is an important finding as it displays a possible “crack” in the solid construction of violence as an intrinsic part of the hegemonic masculinity in this setting [ 14 ]. This suggests that the dominant masculinity circulating in this setting was fragile and open to challenge [ 14 ], and this needs to be emphasized as a factor that could potentially protect women from IPV. Moreover, this opens a window of opportunity for prevention interventions in those areas where it is difficult to tackle rigid gender norms upfront. Using violence within the family as an entry point should thus be an integral component of gender-transformative interventions to prevent male perpetrated IPV in Ghana.

Reflexivity

The authors constitute a team of African women and men researchers, who are situated within both academia and practice on the continent. They come from diverse disciplines and have expertise in qualitative research. The authors who are Ghanaians were born in Ghana and had lived within this context for the most part of their lives as academics and researchers. They were thus not only familiar with the context but had also spent a considerable amount of time in the study communities during the data collection period. With appreciation that their previous observations may bias their viewpoints on IPV perpetration in Ghana, they were fully aware and worked hard to be impartial in the interpretation of the data and avoid unintentionally imposing their personal opinions and assumptions on the data. Moreover, all authors including those who were African foreign nationals were a part of this study from conceptualization and data gathering through to the analysis and write up of the paper.

Limitations

In this study, we only interviewed men who had reported in the survey to have perpetrated IPV against a woman. This may explain their extreme perspectives on IPV, gender-attitudes, gender norms, and violent practices; and these men are likely to be different in terms of gender attitudes from other men who do not perpetrate IPV in the Central Region of Ghana. However, the data from the men’s interviews were triangulated with the researchers’ observation notes – which were documented during the fieldwork – and these notes were included as data in this analysis.

As this was a qualitative study, which interviewed men who had perpetrated IPV, our findings are not generalizable, however we hope the insights we have gathered are of interest to other settings. It is also possible that some men may have felt compelled to answer in certain ways, including feeling the need to describe themselves as macho or to represent themselves in a socially desirable manner with regards to their perspectives on gender relations with women and use of violence on their female partners. Notwithstanding, this study is notable for the unique sample it used to study qualitatively the drivers of male perpetrated IPV against women.

There is consensus in the field of IPV that to reduce male perpetrated IPV, social norms that hinder gender equity and foster violence should be addressed [ 22 , 30 ]. In Ghana, there is need for evidence-based primary prevention interventions that aim to disrupt and/or dismantle the existing hierarchical gender structure and the harmful hegemonic masculinity circulating in this setting. To reduce male perpetrated IPV in Ghana, there needs to be urgent implementation of evidence-based community-based interventions that aim to change destructive social and gender norms that render women subordinate to men and legitimate male violence, among which the COMBAT intervention that was evaluated as part of this research shows promise.

Availability of data and materials

The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Abbreviations

Violence against women

• Intimate partner violence

Rural Response System

Randomized controlled trial

In-depth interview

Focus group discussion

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Acknowledgements

We thank the participants who shared their time, experiences and reflections which made this analysis possible.

This paper is an output from the What Works to Prevent Violence: A Global Programme which is funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) for the benefit of developing countries. The South African Medical Research Council managed the funding. However, the views expressed and information contained in it is not necessarily those of or endorsed by DFID, which can accept no responsibility for such views or information. Furthermore, the funder was not involved in the design of the study, the collection, analysis and interpretation of data and in writing this paper.

Author information

All authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

Gender and Health Research Unit, South African Medical Research Council, Pretoria, South Africa

Yandisa Sikweyiya, Esnat D. Chirwa & Rachel Jewkes

School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

Yandisa Sikweyiya & Rachel Jewkes

Department of Epidemiology and Disease Control, School of Public Health, University of Ghana, Accra, Ghana

Adolphina Addoley Addo-Lartey

Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health, School of Public Health, University of Ghana, Accra, Ghana

Deda Ogum Alangea & Richard M. K. Adanu

Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences, School of Public Health, University of Ghana, Accra, Ghana

Phyllis Dako-Gyeke

Gender Studies and Human Rights Documentation Centre, Accra, Ghana

Dorcas Coker-Appiah

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Conceptualization: Yandisa Sikweyiya, Adolphina Addo-Lartey, Esnat D. Chirwa, Deda Ogum Alangea, Phyllis Dako-Gyeke, Dorcas Coker-Appiah, Richard M, K. Adanu, Rachel Jewkes. Formal analysis: Yandisa Sikweyiya, Phyllis Dako-Gyeke, Addolphina Addo-Lartey, Deda Ogum Alangea. Funding acquisition: Dorcas Coker-Appiah, Richard M. K. Adanu, Rachel Jewkes. Methodology: Yandisa Sikweyiya, Adolphina Addo-Lartey, Deda Ogum Alangea, Esnat D. Chirwa, Rachel Jewkes. Project administration: Yandisa Sikweyiya, Adolphina Addoley Addo-Lartey, Deda Ogum Alangea. Supervision: Richard M. K. Adanu, Rachel Jewkes. Validation: Rachel Jewkes. Writing ± original draft: Yandisa Sikweyiya. The author(s) read and approved the final manuscript.

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Sikweyiya, Y., Addo-Lartey, A.A., Alangea, D.O. et al. Patriarchy and gender-inequitable attitudes as drivers of intimate partner violence against women in the central region of Ghana. BMC Public Health 20 , 682 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-020-08825-z

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Gender Inequality: The Effect of Patriarchy

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This chapter discusses and analyzes the findings of the study regarding the issues of representation, access to resources, and the institutional practices that were presented in chapter 5. It relates these findings to the development approaches presented in chapters 2 and 3 as well as the context of Pakistan presented in chapter 4, to draw conclusions on the problem of gender inequality in the public sector of Pakistan. These conclusions are related to patriarchy through occupational closure and patriarchal benevolence, both of which can be used to explain the data. This chapter argues that women’s minimal representation and limited access to resources is an effect of the patriarchal control of men over women in the public sector. Gender inequality in the public sector is a political enterprise, with patriarchal institutional mechanisms bestowing power and privilege to groups of men in organizations, which results in women’s disadvantage. Any progress toward the elimination of gender inequality in the public sector depends on changes in the patriarchal policies rather than on any training. The representation of women in organizations goes far beyond goodwill through gender training and requires changes in the patriarchal policies, which exclude women from the public sector. The key conclusion that can be drawn is that since the public sector policies are patriarchal, women’s representation remains low.

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Tuesday, 20 August

Gender inequality persists in South African churches, say female theologians

• During a panel discussion at the fifth Annual Memorial Lecture in honor of Prof Mary-Anne Plaatjies-van Huffel, female theologians highlighted ongoing gender inequality in the URCSA.
• They shared personal experiences of patriarchy within the church and reflected on the challenges faced by women in ministry.
• The event also included the launch of a book featuring Plaatjies-van Huffel's published articles.

Gender-insensitivity is still alive and well in the Uniting Reformed Church of South Africa (URCSA) 30 years after the late Prof Mary-Anne Plaatjies-van Huffel from Uitzicht in Bellville became the first woman of colour to be ordained as a minister in the Dutch Mission Church in Robertson in 1992. The same patriarchal problems in the church she experienced and vocalised in published articles in her lifetime are still experienced by current female ministers.

This was highlighted by four women in theology in a panel discussion at the fifth Annual Memorial Lecture of Plaatjies-Van Huffel at the Faculty of Theology at Stellenbosch University on Monday 12 August.

At the same event, the book of all 21 of her printed articles was launched, Learning from Ma Ingonyama .

The panel that reflected on her life and work featured Dr Marlene Mahokoto of the faculty, Prop Sabriena September, Rev Nobuntu Penxa-Matholeni and Rev Noxolo Fihla with Prof Anita Cloete, also of the faculty of theology at Maties, as the facilitator.

Mahokoto spoke about the wellness of female ministers, which had to be done undercover as it was seen as a weakness in female ministers.

Another aspect grappled with is being the first woman of colour to be a professor at Maties. While this is an achievement, according to Mahokoto, it was seen as a token of gratitude and that she should stay in her lane and not ruffle feathers.

A lot has still to be changed in the URCSA for males and females to stand side-by-side and not by males still being seen as being better than their female counterparts.

Her husband, Rev Dawid van Huffel, and two of her four sisters attended the lecture and People’s Post spoke to her eldest sister, Evy Olivier, and her sister Francis Fourie in Abu Dhabi and this is what they had to say after the event.

Francis Fourie: “It’s almost midnight here in Abu Dhabi and I (have been) ‘formulating’ this post since Monday. The reason being that I am lost for words. 

“My sister was a gift from our Maker to our family, the church, the academia, the ecumenical body and the community at large. Monday night, the book Learning from Ma Ingonyama : The Life and Work of Mary-Anne Plaatjies-van Huffel: Minister, Intellectual, Prophetess, was introduced to the audience. The book contains all the articles that Anne wrote and which were published through the years.

“What a Wow! What a phenomenal woman. A woman of strength and power that needs to be saluted.

“I recalled how she fondly referred to Dr Natie Philander, editor of the book, as Broer Natie. When he gave insight on the book, he said: Ingonyama means ‘Lion’, so Anne was a lion, king of the animal kingdom, insightful and meaningful.

“A follow-up is in the making about all the books she wrote. We, as her sisters and husband, each received a signed copy and I teared up when he autographed mine. My heartfelt thanks to all who were involved in this heartwarming gesture. I am shedding tears.”

Evy Olivier says: “Last night was a memorable evening. We attended the annual memorial lecture at the Theology Department, US in honour of my late sister Prof MA Plaatjies-Van Huffel. Prof Anita Cloete was the facilitator of the round-table discussion by Dr M Mahokoto, Rev Penxa-Mathaleni, Rev Fihla and Proponent S September. Each one gave insightful reviews and reflections on speeches by my late sister. They all agreed that female ministers still have to deal with patriarchy in the church.

“Dr Natie Philander discussed the recently published book which contains all the articles my sister had published through the years. We were the proud recipients of the first edition of this book. Heartfelt thanks to Prof Reggie Nel and the panel facilitator Prof Anita Cloete, Dr Natie Philander and the rest of the Theology Department (who) arranged this memorable evening. Be blessed.”

Plaatjies-Van Huffel passed on in 2020 but her work and words still ring true after her passing, Cloete says.

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Empowering change and fighting Gender-Based Violence in Sierra Leone

Isha S.Y. Sumah, a 20-year-old university student, has always had a strong desire to make a difference in her community. Growing up in a society where gender inequality and violence against women and girls were rampant, she witnessed firsthand the suffering of women abused by their husbands, often with no consequences for the perpetrators. These experiences fueled her determination to fight for a society free from Sexual and Gender-Based Violence (SGBV), where both men and women can enjoy equal rights.

For years, discussions around gender equality in Sierra Leone had been stagnant, with little progress made toward passing crucial legislation. However, thanks to the combined efforts of UN Women and other partners, the Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment (GEWE) Act was finally enacted in 2022. This landmark legislation marked a turning point in the country’s journey toward gender equality, providing women with greater opportunities for leadership. The results were clear: women’s representation in Parliament doubled from 14.5% in 2018 to 30.4% in 2023, and female local counselors increased from 18.7% to 34%.

Isha describes this moment as pivotal in her advocacy journey. “There is never a better moment for me than this,” she said. With the GEWE Act now in place, she is more eager than ever to advocate for women’s and girls’ human rights in Sierra Leone. This is why she seized the opportunity to participate in a five-day training organized by UN Women in June 2024, focusing on critical issues such as Sexual and Gender-Based Violence referrals, gender entrepreneurship leadership, and sensitization on the GEWE Act.

Before this training, Isha acknowledged having little knowledge about the GEWE Act or how to address SGBV effectively. “I have never benefited from such a transformative and life-changing experience before” she reflects. The interactive sessions were a true eye-opener, according to Isha, who now feels more aware of the harsh realities many young people face daily, especially those who fall victim to SGBV. She feels more knowledgeable about the legal framework surrounding the GEWE Act and better equipped to advocate effectively for gender equality. “Now, I know how to better support survivors of sexual and gender-based violence,” she testifies.

Empowered by this newly acquired knowledge, Isha is determined to share what she has learned with her peers and other community members. Together, they can contribute to breaking the silence and raising awareness about the GEWE Act, SGBV, and the importance of women’s and girls’ empowerment in Sierra Leone.

Despite the challenges ahead, Isha remains strong in her activism. She aspires to one day open a safe home for SGBV survivors, providing them with refuge and holistic support, empowering them to regain their lives and participate as active community members.

With the help of UN Women, Isha is just one of many young men and women now leading the gender equality movement in Sierra Leone, ensuring that the future is brighter and provides equal opportunities for all.

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of UN Women – Africa.

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Challenging patriarchy: gender equality and humanitarian principles

In recent decades, the issue of gender has attracted increasing attention from humanitarian actors. This has seen a growing focus on the specific needs and vulnerabilities of groups marginalised by predominant gender norms and historically overlooked by humanitarian actors. It has also seen the mainstreaming of gender as a tool to assess the gendered nature and impact of conflict, as well as the gendered implications of humanitarian programming. Finally, it has seen the emergence of Gender-Based Violence (GBV) as a humanitarian sub-sector . [1]  This emergent spotlight on gender issues has been accompanied by commitments to ‘ combat structural and behavioural barriers to gender equality ’ in humanitarian settings.

Despite these advances, it seems more needs to be done to challenge gender inequalities. This is reflected in the consistently low percentage of humanitarian funding allocated to programmes contributing to gender equality – only 4% of the total aid funding between 2015-2016, according to OECD . Unsurprisingly, the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit ‘shared frustration that greater progress on gender equality humanitarian programming had not been made yet ’.

Definitions

In this article, I borrow Cynthia Enloe ’s definition of patriarchy, understood as ‘the structural and ideological system that perpetuates the privileging of [hegemonic] masculinit[ies]’. [2] Thus, it is a hegemonic system of power relations based on gender norms, which establish the expected roles of men and women. In this system, women and girls [3] have historically, and overwhelmingly, been oppressed, exploited or otherwise disadvantaged. So too have groups who do not conform with gender norms, the predominant binary approach to gender and sexuality, and/or heteronormative expectations. These include lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) populations, as well as certain groups of men and boys. [4]

Also central to this article is the concept of gender equality. While UN Women defines it as ‘equality between women and men’, I expand this definition to encompass equality between all people, regardless of their gender, their sexuality, and the degree to which they conform with gender norms and the patriarchal binary approach to gender and sexuality. In essence, gender equality emphasises the gendered aspects of inequality and the groups generally marginalised by patriarchy. Thus, the promotion of gender equality inevitably challenges patriarchy insofar as it fights against gender inequalities. The latter are enabled by the patriarchal system while also contributing to perpetuating it.

Humanitarian action focused on promoting gender equality can be characterised as gender-transformative . Examples of gender-transformative programming include women’s empowerment through livelihoods, for example in Syria , or the promotion of women’s participation in decision-making processes, as done by Oxfam in the Democratic Republic of the Congo . It can also involve activities specifically targeting men, such as raising awareness of the fact that sexual violence can also occur to men and boys, as done by the Refugee Law Project in Uganda .

Why challenge patriarchy?

As I have argued previously , gender-transformative action is essential to a resilience-focused humanitarianism, to the extent that it empowers groups marginalised by patriarchy to have a bigger role in local responses. Gender-transformative action can also be an answer to requests from local populations. As research by Oxfam reveals, local women’s rights actors in various countries have shown dissatisfaction with lack of recognition and lack of prioritisation of gender equality in humanitarian action.

Another good reason for challenging patriarchy lies in the fact that gender inequality underpins and intensifies risks and vulnerabilities in areas of key concern to humanitarian actors. These include, notably, gender-based violence , but also limited access, especially by women and girls, to education, healthcare, agricultural lands and water points, safe livelihoods opportunities and adequate shelter . In times of conflict, these gender inequalities can be exacerbated – which has been acknowledged by practitioners , donors and scholars .

Practitioners , donors and scholars also agree that conflict can create a window of opportunity for promoting gender equality, which can be supported by humanitarian actors. As Oxfam observes, while conflicts ‘create risks for women and can exacerbate inequalities, the collapse of political and social order can paradoxically create opportunities for change.’ Changes in the power dynamics in the household, the loosening up of the division of labour, and the strengthening of women civil society organizations can ‘provide opportunities for more fundamental issues to be addressed’.

Therefore, gender equality can contribute to more resilient, locally-driven, effective humanitarian action. At the same time, humanitarians may be uniquely placed to support the promotion of gender equality in times of conflict. Yet, many practitioners hesitate – or even refuse – to include gender equality in their mandates and activities.

A matter of principle

As Elisabeth Olivius observes, ‘[n]ot long ago, the promotion of gender equality was controversial in the UNHCR, as interventions in matters of culture were considered to be at odds with humanitarian principles’. The ICRC has also expressed similar positioning. Up until its 2011 edition, the organization’s Annual Reports included a general disclaimer that ‘in accordance with its principles of neutrality and impartiality, the ICRC does not claim to reform gender relations’.

Thus, the hesitation in addressing gendered consequences of conflict seems to be linked, to some extent, [5] to a perceived incompatibility between gender and humanitarian principles, especially neutrality. Nonetheless, I would argue that this perception is misguided.

Neutrality can be defined as ‘not tak[ing] sides in hostilities or engag[ing] at any time in controversies of a political, racial, religious or ideological nature ’. As Jean Pictet explains, this principle is composed of military neutrality and ideological neutrality. Evidently, gender-transformative humanitarian action cannot be understood to be in violation of military neutrality, for the power struggle derived of unequal gender relations is not of a military nature. Nonetheless, gender-transformative action can be seen as a violation of ideological neutrality, as it seeks to address the inequalities created by an ‘ideological system’ – patriarchy.

This reasoning, however, overlooks the fact that patriarchy is not an ideological system underpinning armed conflict; rather, in most (if not all) societies patriarchal dynamics are at play before, during and after conflict. It further ignores that, humanitarian actors also operate in, and are influenced by the norms of, a patriarchal world. In such circumstances, without continuous, conscious efforts to challenge patriarchy, humanitarian action may, even inadvertently, contribute to perpetuating it. An example of this is the common depiction of women as ‘intrinsically weak and vulnerable ’ in humanitarian messaging and practice.

Moreover, such a conceptualisation of neutrality is patriarchal in itself, for it is based on a male-centric understanding of the world, accidentally unaware or intentionally dismissive of gender inequalities that privilege hegemonic masculinities. As Lori Handrahan puts it, ‘[w]hile it can take a war for personal security to become an issue in most men’s lives, insecurity is all too common for women, irrespective of war. Female insecurity is so prevalent that it becomes invisible and accepted as the norm’. This can be said not only of women’s insecurity, but of other gender-based consequences of patriarchy as well, to both women and men.

Thus, attempting to be neutral vis-à-vis the existing gender relations in fact violates the principle of humanitarian neutrality. As Desmond Tutu famously said, ‘If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor’.

Humanity can be translated, inter alia, as an endeavour to ensure respect for the human being, including ‘[their] life, liberty and happiness’. However, the gender inequalities inherent in the prevailing patriarchal system are a constant obstacle to ensuring the respect of those whom the system seeks to marginalise. Therefore, the full application of the principle humanity not only allows for, but requires the promotion of gender equality, essential to the full respect for all human beings.

In line with the above, gender equality can be understood as a tenet of principled humanitarian action, contained in the principle of humanity. This means that, since humanity is an essential component of principled humanitarian action, so too must gender equality.

This has a serious implication for the application of neutrality. The principle of neutrality refers to the ‘reserve’ that a principled humanitarian actor ‘ must maintain with regard to any doctrine except its own ’ (emphasis added). In other words, as Hugo Slim observes, neutrality ‘does not prevent an organisation from having a principled position, based on firm ideals’. Therefore, neutrality does not prevent humanitarians from having a principled position with regards to gender equality – understood as part of the principle of humanity, and thus enshrined in a ‘principled position’.

In fact, this reasoning reveals that a humanitarian’s refusal to embrace gender equality is not an unfortunate consequence of the perceived constraints imposed by humanitarian principles. Rather, it is a choice by humanitarian actors themselves – a choice not to embrace gender equality as a ‘firm ideal’ and, thus, place it above neutrality.

Impartiality

Impartiality is another fundamental principle widely accepted by humanitarian actors. As Pictet notes, one of its key components is the fundamental idea of non-discrimination. In this regard, gender-transformative action is essential to ensuring impartiality. This occurs because the provision of humanitarian aid to specific populations, notably women, can sometimes be hindered by gender inequalities. In such cases, humanitarian action actually depends on challenging patriarchy.

As Julie Mertus notes , in Afghanistan, Oxfam and Save the Children suspended selected activities to protest the Taliban’s edicts blocking equal participation of women and girls. Similarly Clifton and Gell emphasise that ‘with no access to women, Oxfam GB did not believe it could deliver humanitarian aid with impartiality’.

Humanitarian actors are inevitably a part of patriarchal dynamics. For this reason, refusing to challenge existing gender relations has the effect of violating the very principles this refusal intends to uphold. This positioning is not in line with the principle of neutrality, insofar as it contributes to maintaining prevailing (patriarchal) power structures, and has further consequences on the application of the principles of humanity and impartiality.

Still, the place humanitarianism occupies in a patriarchal world goes largely ignored in the conceptualisation of humanitarian principles. As long as it remains so, principled humanitarian action is bound to continue perpetuating patriarchal dynamics that create or aggravate the very needs and vulnerabilities humanitarianism seeks to address.

A call for discussion

The fact that gender equality is not in itself against humanitarian principles does not mean that we, humanitarians, do not have to be careful about how we promote it. Gender-transformative action can still have a negative impact on humanitarian access, or on the security of humanitarian workers, depending on how it is perceived by local populations. This has to be taken into consideration on a case-by-case basis.

It is also key to ensure that gender-transformative action is based on local perspectives of the very people marginalised by patriarchy and gender inequalities. Otherwise, we risk imposing our own perspectives and values on them.

Thus, by no means does this article intend to be a comprehensive analysis of gender-transformative humanitarian action, or of its relationship with humanitarian principles. Rather, it is an invitation to seriously discuss gender equality and principled humanitarian action, without having humanitarian principles as a conversation stopper.

[1] This progressive focus on gender was reflected in the publication of multiple policy and guidance documents, such as the UNHCR’s Policy on Refugee Women (1990) , Guidelines on the Protection of Women (1991) , Gender-Related Persecution Guidelines (2002) and Handbook for the Protection of Women and Girls (2008) , and IASC’s Gender Handbook for Humanitarian Action ( 2006 and 2017 ) and Gender-Based Violence Guidelines ( 2005 and 2015 ), to name but a few. Most recently, it was also reflected the World Humanitarian Summit’s commitment to ensure that humanitarian programming is gender-responsive , which received the third highest number of endorsements.

[2] The acknowledgment of multiple forms of masculinity is essential to understanding how patriarchy can be damaging to certain groups of men. For this reason, I adapted Enloe’s definition by adding the qualifier ‘hegemonic’ and modifying the word ‘masculinity’ to its plural form.

[3] The use of the generalised terms ‘women’, ‘girls’, ‘men’ and ‘boys’ in this article is not meant to restrict specific effects of patriarchy to all, or only, women/girls/men/boys, but rather to emphasise how these groups are, in general, affected. These groups of individuals are not homogenous and are also impacted by other power dynamics, such as those of race and class. In this regard, see, e.g., Hugo Slim’s article in this blog, ‘Impartiality and Intersectionality ’.

[4] As Srushti Mahamuni observes, ‘patriarchy is not only harmful to women but to men as well. While it oppresses women and restricts them to subjugated positions in society, it imposes unrealistic expectations on men about what it means to “be a man”’.

[5] Humanitarian principles are not the only obstacles, raised by humanitarian actors, to gender-transformative humanitarian programming. Other obstacles would include (i) the perception that gender equality goes against local cultures, and (ii) the relinquishment of gender equality to ‘gender experts’, as opposed to mainstreaming it across all sectors. However, these issues will not be addressed here, as that would require a more comprehensive analysis, incompatible with the format of this blog post.

Other blog posts by this author

‘Basics’ won’t do: A response to Marc DuBois’ ‘new humanitarian basics’ , Ricardo Fal-Dutra Santos, 13 November, 2018

Further blog posts on gender and humanitarianism

Masculinity and humanitarianism , Graham Parsons, 20 May, 2019 Equal treatment for women in State armed forces: Three practical implications for medical care , Helen Durham & Vanessa Murphy, 8 March, 2019 The impact of gender and race bias in AI , Noel Sharkey, 28 August, 2018 Continuing the conversation: Which masculinities, which wars? David Duriesmith, 5 July, 2018 Masculinity and war–let’s talk about it , Hugo Slim, 15 March, 2018

DISCLAIMER: Posts and discussion on the Humanitarian Law & Policy blog may not be interpreted as positioning the ICRC in any way, nor does the blog’s content amount to formal policy or doctrine, unless specifically indicated.

War and what we make of the law

10 mins read  Gender / Gender and conflict / Humanitarian Action / Humanitarian Principles / Sexual Violence / The most read blog posts in 2019 Cordula Droege

Principles under pressure: have humanitarian principles really stood the test of time?

12 mins read  Gender / Gender and conflict / Humanitarian Action / Humanitarian Principles / Sexual Violence / The most read blog posts in 2019 Olivier Ray

Thank you, Ricardo, for a really interesting and thought-provoking piece.

The Diversity Inclusion team here in AAP is working to bring clarity and a consistent approach to gender (and broader diversity issues) and your article is helpful in identifying the numerous facets and challenges of what it means to integrate gender in our work and what it may mean for affected people if we do not.

As you say, we know that conflict is gendered. We know that pre-conflict, conflict-affected and post-conflict societies are gendered. We know that conflict disrupts gendered roles and responsibilities; exacerbating gender inequality in some areas and presenting opportunities for shifts in gendered roles and responsibilities that promote gender equality in others. Interlinking cogs are moving all around us. And yet we hesitate, cautious that any attention to gender will “reform” and “transform” gender relations. They are changing in any event and not understanding and adapting our actions to such change has the potential, I believe, to perpetuate a status quo of inequality or to hamper grassroots change that is occurring with or without us.

I look forward to continuing this important discussion on gender, the humanitarian principles and the ICRC’s position on integrating gender in operations.

I was reading a paper about young afghanistan’s girls being forced to marry old men to provide money to their family… and I found your paper. Thank you for helping us to apprehend what patriarchal inequality – that we all experiment in our lives – means.

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Climate migration amplifies gender inequalities, attachments.

By Sine Plambech, Sofie Henriksen, Benedikte Raft & Kolja Dahlin

Nepal is one of the countries in the world most vulnerable to climate change. International labour migration has become a strategy to secure funds to protect against the consequences of climate change, but for women it is not so simple.

Women living in poverty are widely assumed to be particularly vulnerable to environmental risks and climate change. In Nepal, the rising number of men migrating across borders to find work, leaving women with all the care and household responsibilities, is considered to be one of the main factors contributing to this climate vulnerability for women. However, the links between migration, climate change and gender are complex.

As one Nepalese woman, whose husband has been working in Saudi Arabia for the past five years explained, his migration meant that she had no one to take care of her and to share the burdens of daily life with. As a woman living without a husband, she was exposed to stigma from community members and her movement was constrained by strict gendered norms about where and when women can go without a male companion. She feared being alone at night and during weather disasters like floods, which were now common in the area, she was responsible for moving their family to a safe house. At the same time, his migration meant that she did not have to beg for money, and that she could feed their five children. She had used the remittances he sent monthly to secure their house from floods by raising it, and to buy a portable metal stove that she could use during floods when the clay stove on the ground was waterlogged. Her husband’s migration was therefore a source of new risks, but also a solution to a set of other challenges.

Key findings Both ‘everyday’ climate adaption, such as securing livelihoods, and long-term climate adaption, such as investing in and building robust houses, require funds. Labour migration contributes to financing both types. It is important to consider how climate change intersects with traditional and gendered dynamics, such as dowry. Crucially, due to traditional gender dynamics, men’s climate mobility can amplify women’s immobility. When men’s labour migration fails or the stream of remittances end, there are often no other ways for women to finance climate adaption. Therefore, alternative ways to finance long-term climate.

Climate change, migration, and gender in Madhesh province

The study focused on Madhesh province in south-eastern Nepal, on the border with India. In this area floods and droughts are becoming increasingly frequent, and the unpredictable weather puts pressure on agriculture, a primary source of livelihood in the region.

This province exemplifies a complex web of gendered, socio-economic and environmental risk factors that require an intersectional lens. Newer research on how gender, environment and mobility influence one another has pushed the general understanding away from viewing climate change as the cause of migration but instead as a modifier that amplifies already existing dynamics and vulnerabilities.

Supporting existing research, our study also found that the vulnerabilities experienced by Madhesi Dalit women, at the bottom of Nepal’s class, caste and gender hierarchies,(1) are rooted in the complex ways that climate change intersects with traditional and gendered dynamics.

Climate change, migration, and women’s work This brief is based on the pilot study ‘Climate change, migration and women’s work’, a collaboration between DIIS and the Danish Red Cross (DRC), with assistance from the Nepal Red Cross Society (NRCS) and funded by the DRC. The study included a desk review of literature, reports, and statistics. Data collection and analysis were based on seven days of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with 19 women and 6 community stakeholders in the Dhanusha district of Madhesh province in Nepal. Based on the study, a short documentary called Somehow She is Managing has been produced.

‘Everybody wants a brick house’

When asked what they would wish for, if they could ask for three things to help their situation, one woman replied: ‘a secure job, a water pump, and a brick house.’ The house she was currently living in was made of clay, mud and bamboo, and as she explained, ‘nobody wants to live in this house, everybody wants a brick house.’ Oftentimes the women we interviewed initially had very little to say about climate change as they did not understand themselves as being affected by such a global phenomenon.

As one woman said, ‘I don’t have any idea about climate change, but yeah, definitely something is changing. There is no rain at times, and everything is disturbed’. However, their wishes for the future often reflected the local and everyday realities of living under conditions of climate change, such as the growing need for a robust house, a steady income and access to water. Thus, any change in the climate is primarily understood through its consequences.

Madhesh province In 2021/22 the majority of Nepalese international labour migrants with formal labour permits were from Madhesh. Top destinations are Saudi Arabia, Qatar and UAE. Despite this high number of migrant workers, Madhesh province has one of the lowest proportions of women migrants (only 4% of migrants from the region are women). This stark contrast is likely due to socio-economic conditions as well as strict gendered and cultural norms specific to the Madhesh region. It has the highest number of people living below the poverty line and the lowest Human Development Index (HDI) of all Nepalese provinces. Sources: Nepal Labour Migration Report 2022 (pp. 66–68); Nepal Multidimensional Poverty Index 2021.

One example is that the changing rain pattern is not seen as a problem in itself, but rather because agricultural day labour becomes scarcer. One woman explained that a recent drought had reduced the opportunities for work in the surrounding fields, which resulted in her ‘sleeping with hunger’ because she suddenly had no income.

Because these women rarely own land and rely on day-to-day labour, climate change was mainly experienced as a decline in work opportunities due to floods and droughts and thereby a deepening of poverty. The effects of climate change were felt as economic uncertainty, which resulted in fears about the future for themselves and their children.

Remittances and debt as climate ‘solutions’

Of the 19 women we interviewed, 15 had a husband and/or sons who were currently or had previously been abroad for work, most often in Malaysia, Qatar or India. They had all left due to a lack of work opportunities in Nepal. Remittances were therefore a critical source of income for these women and their families.

Remittances from labour migrants abroad have seen a steady increase in Nepal in recent decades. In 2020 and 2021, Nepal received more than EUR 7 billion in remittances.(2)

For Madhesi Dalit women, the remittances are on the one hand used to buy food and household supplies and on the other to build new and safer houses that can withstand floods. An older woman, whose son had worked in Qatar, explained, ‘we had a house of mud that used to get destroyed when the floods came, so we made this house with my son’s money’. As such, men’s international labour migration makes it possible for these families to invest in climate adaptation. Remittances were also crucial to managing debt. Of the women we spoke to, at least 11 were in debt and struggling to pay it off. They had usually taken loans from wealthier people in their communities to pay dowries for their daughters’ marriages, to finance their husbands’ or sons’ migration, to cover healthcare expenses, or simply to survive. In this way climate change not only created new expenses (such as new houses or metal stoves), but also made it more difficult to secure money for traditional expenses such as dowry payments.

Men’s mobility and women’s immobility

Among the 19 women, only one had migrated abroad. In all other cases the women felt that migration was not a possibility for them because of social and gendered expectations, the burden of their care responsibilities, lack of education and job opportunities, and their families’ debts. The women had very limited freedom of movement and often had to stay in the house unless accompanied by their mothers-in-law, with whom they often live. While families increasingly depend on the remittances from men’s migration due to fewer work opportunities at home, women experience increased immobility because they often cannot leave their houses when the men are gone.

Follow the money The women in our study received approx. EUR 35–280 per month in remittances. Most women reported that they could make EUR 1–3 per day doing crop cultivation or household labour, if daily jobs were available. The loans held by the women in our study ranged from approx. EUR 1,400 to 5,600. Installing a water pump costs more than EUR 700, while borrowing someone.

The role of debt in this dynamic is double-edged: on the one hand, taking loans enables the mobility of the husbands and sons. On the other hand, the burden of debt enhances the immobility of the women left behind. This was especially the case for women whose husbands or sons were injured, fell ill, or died during their work abroad. Between 2008 and 2022, 10,666 Nepalese migrant workers were reported dead, the majority of these in destinations in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.(3) Most of these deceased migrant workers came from Madhesh province.

Five of the nineteen women in our study had husbands or sons that had become ill, died, or disappeared abroad. In these tragic cases, the women could no longer rely on remittances and were also left to pay off the debt on their own. One woman whose husband had died working in India told us that everyone around her had husbands abroad who sent them money. She explained that ‘if my husband were still alive, then he would also have sent everything. I would have finished my loans and lived a better life.’

The everyday effects of climate change

Understanding and addressing the vulnerabilities experienced by Madhesi Dalit women, and other marginalised women exposed to climate risks, requires an intersectional perspective on the structural violence and discrimination that women experience in the form of immobility, stigma and isolation. This implies, for instance, that while migration and loans are often the only options for Madhesi Dalit women to manage climate-related challenges such as a lack of work and weather hazards, debt and men’s migration often expose these women to increased risks. Thus, in this context, climate change amplifies the already highly uneven patterns of mobility between men and women.

1. UN RCHCO 2012. “Field Bulletin: Violence against Madheshi Dalit Women in Dhanusa & Mahottari districts.” RCHC Office Nepal, Issue 39, April 2012. 2. Government of Nepal 2022. “Nepal Labour Migration Report 2022”. Ministry of Labour, Employment and Social Security, page 119. 3. Government of Nepal 2022. “Nepal Labour Migration Report 2022”. Ministry of Labour, Employment and Social Security, page 109-110.

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