On Feminist Claims of Female Disadvantage in Modern American Society

I wanted to write an article examining the extent that women women are unfairly treated in modern American society. I post a lot about this topic on my twitter so I figure I should try to put a bunch of stuff in one place. A couple of points to make before we get started:

1. This article features some international data, but I am going to focus mainly on the United States in recent years.

2. This article isn’t meant to discuss every feminist claim, the magnitude of various psychological sex differences, or how society or personal relationships should be conducted, just claims of female disadvantage in modern American society.

3. I have little patience for claims of “cherrypicking” without specific examples. Nobody is without bias, and I am generally unsympathetic to feminists but if you want to make the claim that I am cherrypicking PROVE IT. I am ultimately just an interested layman and willing to take constructive criticism on anything.

Table of Contents:

1. How the WEF calculates gender inequality

2. Societal Attitudes Towards Men and Women

3. Childhood

4. Marriage and Family

5. Domestic Violence

6. Rape

7. Abortion

8. Criminal Justice System

9. Education

10. Sports

11. Workplace

12. Politics

13. Media

14. Healthcare

15. Happiness

16. Beauty Standards

17. Online Harassment

18. Conclusion

How the WEF calculates gender inequality

The WEF report on gender inequality is often cited to show that women are behind, but if you read the methodology you can see that countries are only penalized in metrics where women are behind. When looking at life span, satisfaction and education combined, it appears that in the most developed countries men are falling behind.

Societal Attitudes Towards Men and Women

The first thing to say about societal attitudes towards men and women is that if pollsters simply ask which sex they feel more warmly or coolly towards, both sexes rate women higher. Looking at Emil Kirkegaard’s analysis of the data from the American national election survey in 2022, we see that men are rated an average of 69.9 while women are rated an average of 79.3:

Some people might say that this is valid because men commit more crime and have many more negative traits than women. However, given that black people who also commit more crime score higher than white people and men score higher on many positive traits than women, this doesn’t seem to be the explanation.

Next we can look out how American view men and women having various traits. This study, analyzed gender stereotypes between 1946 and 2018 and found that Americans now view women as being on net higher in competence, agency and communion. It is worth noting that the net gap favoring women for competence is larger than in 2018 than the net gap favoring men was in 1946.

These views are not limited to women, as most men view women as more competent as well:

It has been well documented that people of both sexes rate women more favorably that the “women are wonderful effect” has its own wikipedia page. In their 2020 article “The Myth of Pervasive Misogyny,” Bo Winegard and Corey Clark extensively document all of the studies showing that people are more sensitive to harm towards women, and judge women more favorable in a broad variety of contexts. This counters the idea of “himpathy” proposed by Australian philosopher Kate Manne. There are few more examples of society viewing women more positively that I want to highlight. First, men and especially women seem to judge men more harshly for having an affair:

Second, Americans view women as on net better parents:

Next, Americans seem to judge men as having more harsh expectations in dating than women:

There are arguments that one could make about the empirical facts surrounding these questions, but it seems to me that the results that we are the result of a broad pro female bias rather than a careful examination of the facts. One way to tell if there was a large amount of sexual discrimination would be to see if a large number of women wanted to be men. I am only aware of one study that looks at whether or not one would want to change their biological sex, that being the dissertation of Dr. Wilfred Reilly published in 2015 and he found that the vast majority of both men and women would not want to change their sex for any amount of money:

Anecdotally, butch lesbian Norah Vincent lived as a man for a year and chronicled her experiences in the book “Self Made Man,” finding that living as a man was more difficult than she thought. Turning to affirmative action programs, Gallup has found that most men and women support affirmative action for women, and that this number has increased from 2001 to 2021.

Another measure of how sexist people are is “hostile sexism” in the modern sexism scale. More than 30% of Americans “Agree Slightly” with hostile sexist statements, and over 10% “agree somewhat.”

Here are the statements that a “hostile sexist” person would agree with:

1. Women exaggerate problems they have at work.
2. Women are too easily offended.
3. Most women interpret innocent remarks as being sexist.
4. When women lose to men in a fair competition, they typically complain about being discriminated against.
5. Many women are actually seeking special favors, such as hiring policies that favor them over men, under the guise of asking for "equality".
6. Feminists are making entirely reasonable demands of men.*
7. Feminists not seeking for women to have more power than men.*
8. Women seek power by getting control over men.
9. There are actually very few women who get a kick out of teasing men by seeming sexually available and then refusing male advances.*
10. Once a woman gets a man to commit to her, she usually tries to put him on a tight leash.
11. Most women fail to appreciate all that men do for them.

It seems obvious that these statements don’t actually measure sexism, they measure agreement with feminism, and this would be made clear if you looked at equivalent statements applied towards men:

1. Men exaggerate problems they have with dating.
2. Men are too easily offended.
3. Most men interpret innocent remarks as being attacks to their ego..
4. When men lose to women in a fair competition, they typically see it as a hit to their ego..
5. Many men seek to maintain male privilege.
6. Men's rights activists are making entirely reasonable demands of women.
7. Men's rights activists are not seeking for men to have more power than women.
8. Men seek power by getting control over women.
9. There are actually very few men who get a kick out of teasing women by seeming available and then using women for sex.
10. Once a man gets a woman to commit to her, she usually tries to put him on a tight leash.
11. Most men fail to appreciate all that women do for them.

In an yet to be published paper psychologist Lee Jussim found that people who scored higher on the “modern sexism scale” actually demonstrated more egalitarian behavior than those who scored lower on it:

Interestingly, most American women were satisfied with the treatment of women in the past but no longer are:

This is also true about the number of people who say that men have it easier in society:

It is likely that these questions have more to do with what is fashionable at the time to believe rather than the real level of discrimination. One piece of evidence that is often cited to prove bias against women is the 2023 Gender Social Norms Index published by the UN which looks at the World Value Survey and claims that just over 50% of American women are biased against women, and just under 50% of American men are. However when you look at the data you see that opposing abortion in all cases is considered a gender bias, and that few Americans believe the most concerning statements. It is sometimes stated that young men are particularly misogynistic. It does seem to be the case that young men are becoming more likely to say the US has gone too far in promoting gender equality:

And less sympathetic to affirmative action:

However there doesn’t seem to be much of a trend among young men against gender equality as whole:

Childhood

When asked if they prefer a boy or a girl, there has been a consistent preference for sons over daughters for decades, with there being an 8 point net preference for sons over daughters in 2018:

However, just because there is a stated preference for sons, doesn’t mean that people are acting on it in any meaningful way. One way to test this is to see if there is an increase in fertility if a couple’s first child is a daughter. This seems to be the case in the past, but not in the 21st century:

It is also worth noting that there doesn’t seem to be a preference for boys among couples who have a choice in choosing embryos, other than among foreign ethnicities that make up a small percentage of the US. It is difficult to disentangle whether parents treat their sons and daughters differently because they are biased, or because boys and girls are different. With that being said I think it is worth point out that parents across the political aisle are more likely to say they are worried about their son’s ability to be a successful adult:

Americans are also more likely to say that their daughter has grit, and are more confident that their daughters could become president.

Marriage and Family

It is commonly claimed that marriage and family disadvantage women in a broad number of ways. One of these is the “second shift”, the idea that mothers are now burdened with both paid work and domestic labor. This doesn’t seem to be the case since if you add up all of the total work that moms and dads do, dads do slightly more than moms:

It seems to be the case that fathers overall do more than mothers in every arrangement except for that where the mother is a full time worker and the dad is at home full time:

It is important to note that that fathers are much more likely to be at home because they are sick or disabled than stay at home mothers:

The work of Paul Dolan is frequently used to claim that women are less happy when they get married. However this is based on a misunderstanding of the data. It is not necessarily causal, but it is the case that women who are married with children are the happiest:

It also seems to be the case that a greater number of people regret not having kids than regret having kids:

Women also get more meaning out of family and children than men do:

Another common claim that feminists make about how marriage is bad is that women are much more likely to be left by their husbands when they get sick. This doesn’t seem to be the case. It does seem to be true that men do cheat more, especially as they get older:

Domestic Violence

Many feminists claim that women suffer uniquely from domestic violence, but if we look at the data from the latest National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, there is rough parity between men and women facing domestic violence:

It does seem true however that women seem to be more likely to be injured by domestic violence, and more likely to need medical care.

This is of course consistent with men being taller and stronger than women. This report does not give data for sex of perpetrator but they do state, “Third, we do not report sex of the perpetrator for intimate partner violence victimization, although prior findings have indicated that most female victims report male perpetrators, and most male victims report female perpetrators.” Looking at fatal intimate partner violence, in 2021 we can observe that 34% of women were killed by an intimate partner and 6% of men were killed by an intimate partner. Doing the math based on total number of murders each year we get that almost 40% of people killed by intimate partners in 2021 were men. An unknown proportion of these are same sex relationships, but if we give the “relationship unknown” the same distribution as the known ones, the gap between men and women shrinks even more. This conclusion seems to contradict relatively recent data from the National Violent Death reporting system, so I am not sure which one is closer to the truth.

It is also often claimed men killing their female partners is an act of misogyny. If this were the case we would expect that men killed their daughters more often than their sons, but fathers are more likely to kill their sons than their daughters.

Rape

First, it is important to have a definition of various terms:

With the above definitions, this is how often men and women report various acts occurring:

So while it is true that women experience these things more the differences aren’t as large as one might expect. It also seems to be the case that the majority of perpetrators of various acts against men are women:

It does seem to be the case that women are considerably more fearful of sexual assault:

It is often claimed that women don’t report rape for fear of not being believed, or there report taken seriously. That is the case for some people, but doesn’t seem to be a major reason:

Rape is seen as one of the worst crimes in society, with 61% of respondents saying that it is equally bad as murder and 13% saying it is worse. A final thing to note is that high school boys seem to be more likely to explicitly ask for consent verbally:

Abortion

After the 2022 supreme court ruling, abortion is now banned completely in 12 states. One could have a philosophical debate the extent that this unfair to women, (personally I support abortion within reason) but that is beyond the scope of this post. However claims that abortion bans negatively impact maternal mortality seem to be false. There are small sex differences in support for abortion, so the framing of “men making decisions about women’s bodies” doesn’t seem very accurate.

Criminal Justice System

The gap in sentencing between men and women for similar crimes on paper is larger than the gap in sentencing between blacks and whites:

Now this doesn’t necessarily mean there is discrimination against men since there could be other factors beyond just what the crime is on paper. In terms of whether being a woman helps in front of a jury the evidence seems to be mixed. There is a common statistic brought up that women get sentenced much more harshly for killing their partner than men do, but that statistic seems to be more than 35 years old.

Education

It is well discussed that women are now outpacing men in many aspect of education. For example, young women are now about 10 percentage more likely than young men to have a bachelor degree:

Women also now receive the majority of various professional degrees that are offered:

Despite the fact that women have outpaced men on various metrics, the vast majority of sex specific scholarships go to women. Colleges also have many more programs awards, centers etc. for women than men. There are some claims that men now benefit from affirmative action in the college admissions process. According to a survey of admissions officers from 2014 the vast majority of admissions officers don’t feel that men or women are let in with lower qualifications, but more admissions officers feel that that is the case for men:

In terms of paying for college women are less likely to pay their loans back, so they benefit more from government programs that pause or forgive student loan repayment.

Moving on to academia, it seems that psychologists are broadly more likely to support finding that portray women in a favorable light with a study conducted by William Von Hippel and David Buss in 2017 showing that 40% of psychologists found it plausible that women evolved to be more verbally intelligent, and only 30% saying they found it plausible that men evolved to be more mathematically intelligent. When looking at academic journal boards, Emil Kirkegaard and George Francis found that women are able to get on academic boards while being less qualified.

This is consistent with the fact that a substantial minority of board members support pro female discrimination.

Sports

I don’t want to focus too much on sports because it seems obvious to me that people are overall more interested in men’s sports because men are better at sports. I think that it is worth pointing out that even despite the obvious gap in talent, there are efforts like Title IX to give women’s sports equal funding and status. ( I am not saying that I have a problem with women’s sports ) I am not aware of any example where men are obviously worse at something than women but still demand equal money and status. With that being said it is worth pointing out that: A. Men watch women’s sports more than women and B. Women watch men’s sports more than they watch women’s sports:

Workplace

It is widely discussed that men earn more on average than women. This is the case but less true among younger people:

There is much discussion about the causes of the gap, but it worth pointing out that that it persists in occupations like Uber driver where the pay is completely meritocratic and wouldn’t be impacted by gender discrimination. Looking at a meta analysis looking at callback studies, women seem to now have slight advantage in certain types of jobs:

Another meta-analysis found the same result:

It makes sense that there isn’t discrimination in callbacks since HR is more than 70% female. Looking at the 2024 women in the workplace by McKinsey report, almost 80% of respondents say that gender diversity is a priority for their organization, and about half have career development programs for women.

The 2019 report found that 41% of companies set targets for female representation at the senior levels of management. It does seem to be the case that women are more likely to claim to be harassed in the workplace:

In blue collar work, one advantage that women could be said to have is that women are often held to lower physical standards for physical jobs, such as police officer, firefighter, soldier etc. Finally, female entrepreneurs seem to receive more callbacks than male entrepreneurs.

Politics

Feminists often claim that women are discriminated against in politics and that Clinton and Harris lost their presidential elections because they were women. Looking at American polling, the vast majority of people say that they would vote for a woman, and the majority of the country has said that they would since the mid 1950s:

Americans also on net say that a woman president would be better at handling every policy issue, and be superior on every character trait.

It is also worth noting that the majority of voters are women, with almost 10 million more women than men voting in each recent presidential election.

Looking at experiments, a 2021 meta analysis conducted by Schwarz and Coppock found that being a woman gave an estimated 2% point boost in a given election:

Looking at real life scenarios, the book Women on the Run (which full disclosure I have not read at length) looked at the 2010 and 2014 congressional elections and concluded that men and women are treated similarly by voters and the media. One amusing anecdote about perceptions about bias against women in politics was that after the 2016 election many people said that Clinton could never get away with acting in the debate how Trump acted. Actors at NYU decided to put this to the test and worked to create a play the featured a “female Trump” and a “male Clinton” that acted out various parts of the debate. They were surprised to find out that the mostly liberal audience found male Clinton boring and female Trump inspiring.

Another aspect to politics is how politicians respond to the group interests of both sexes. There are relatively large organizations that look out for the interests of women, but none for men. In addition initiatives like Biden’s National Strategy on Equity and Equality seem to be very concerned about disparities where women are behind but not those where women are ahead. It is worth pointing out there is no equivalent of this that happens when Republicans gain power.

Media

Women make up an increasing share of important roles in the media. This includes nearly half of journalists:

the majority of people who published books:

the majority of staff writers for TV shows:

and nearly half of theatrical film leads in 2024.

Healthcare and Medical Research

From a 2022 survey, about 9% women said that they had experienced discrimination from a healthcare provider in the past 2 years and there was a relatively small gap in whether they reported any one of the negative experiences listed:

It is often claimed that women are left out of scientific studies. However, if you look at who NIH studies are performed on, the majority have been women for decades:

In terms of funding for sex specific diseases, the majority goes to women:

Emil Kirkegaard recently looked at funding for male and female cancers, and found that breast and prostate cancers seemed to be outliers for how much was spent relative to the number of new cases, and the more male a cancer is, the less funding it gets.

Happiness and Psychological Well Being

Women seem to be broadly about as satisfied as men on various aspects of their life:

They also seem to be more satisfied with their personal lives:

As described in this WSJ article, there is a complicated relationship between gender and happiness. Women report being happier, but report less signs of being happy like smiling and having fun etc. Women’s happiness also decreased in absolute terms and relative to men between the 1970s and early 2000s despite various advancements women made.

Beauty Standards/Pink Tax

Women seem to be broadly less secure about their appearances than men:

Women are more likely to say they feel pressure to have a particular body type, and more likely to say that they worry about how they look for their partner:

However, these standards may not be effecting people’s behavior much, because if you include strength training as improving one’s physical appearance, sex is no longer predictive of how long one spends on their appearance:

Lastly, there is the idea of the pink tax, that women pay more money for similar beauty products. This seems to not be the case.

Online Harassment

It is commonly stated that women suffer uniquely from online harassment, but a Pew research survey found that there is actually rough parity on this metric:

Conclusion

My takeaway is that in modern America there is a broad moderate pro female sentiment in terms of societal opinions, and this carries over to slight pro female bias in various things like politics, employment, medical research and education. Women also are not a meek powerless group, with them making up the majority of voters, HR employees and increasing proportions of important media positions. The best case for female disadvantage in modern is the higher levels of sexual aggression that they face from men, but these statistics are not as lopsided in terms of gender as some people think. Even if you think I am completely wrong and biased (and i’m sure in an article that tries to cover so much I made some mistakes), I hope you learned something and got a different perspective.