Systemic Sexism: Dignity

In the most developed countries of the world for a few generations, women formally have equal rights to men. But everything that we’ve talked about shows that if we just look beyond the surface of society and actually examine it scientifically, we can see that this is deceptive. Because women being legally equal to men doesn’t mean that women are culturally equal to men. Is it really likely that thousands of years of sexism passed down to us could be eliminated overnight by a bill? Legal changes are not cultural changes. After four millennia, sexism is no longer ‘legal’, strictly speaking. But it is still here with us. It is still cultural.

And this is why you might have heard of the phrase ‘systemic’ sexism. Because sexism is cultural, it pervades all the institutions of society that together make up the ‘system’. The law courts, government, schools, universities, workplaces, police forces, film studios, and much more are all made up of people who have absorbed all the sexist norms in our cultures that we’ve been talking about- because as we said, without conscious resistance people naturally do so. A positive feedback loop, running since the 4th millennium BCE, has formed whereby sexist norms are introduced to institutions and then perpetuated by them. Sexism becomes ‘institutionalised’- in other words, it gets built into the system.

This is what patriarchy is. It’s not a political invention. It’s not a historical, pre-modern memory. It doesn’t go away just because the law and the government says it has. A ‘wage gap’ between male and female salaries is formally illegal, but because patriarchal norms of female inferiority still persist, the highest positions in society get unjustly filled with men: exactly what was implied by that earlier 2012 study. The wage gap doesn’t apply to an individual job listing: it applies to our entire society.

We can still see that even in the minority of countries where sexism is no longer legal, it is still cultural. Patriarchy is still alive and powerful. All modern feminism is about is opposing this: it is genuinely nothing more than the desire for both legal and cultural gender equality. But because we naturally accept the norms we grow up with, this requires us to think critically (rather than just using it as a buzzword), question our society’s norms, and question the people and organisations spouting them.

Political groups, news outlets, and online spaces bombard us with portrayals of feminists as female supremacists, misandrists, and idiots, who are somehow unaware that 1960s civil rights legislation ‘ended sexism’. But feminism isn’t female supremacism; online, you just get shown attempts to discredit an entire movement by the actions of a few individuals. Even if you’re bombarded with dozens of these individuals, remember that on the grand scale of a whole movement this is nothing. You can be manipulated by anyone who cherry-picks people to influence how you think.

But, psychologically, the dogged agenda against feminism is exactly what you’d expect from male-dominated online spaces, male-governed political parties, and male-owned news channels: feminism challenges their own superiority. It should no longer surprise you that online ‘manosphere’ influencers and far-right politicians viciously insult and denounce feminists: the only way a woman can be valued by a patriarchy is by submitting to it. But the challenge to traditional gender norms is so unbearable to these institutions precisely because it questions tradition.

Tradition, when applied to politics, is a moral decision-making mechanism. It determines what norms are ethically right based on what norms have stuck around the longest. This sanctification of the status quo allowed it to be transmitted across generations- at the price of freezing a society’s moral beliefs. But as any historian will tell you, the ‘status quo’ throughout history has always been unfair. All the things we take for granted only happened because at some point, people stood up to the force of tradition in the name of moral progress. Democracy, the abolition of slavery, human rights, legal equality, legislation reducing the working day from 16 to 8 hours: all these were departures from a previous status quo. They were viciously opposed at the time by all institutions acting in the name of ‘tradition’.

All these developments only happened in the last couple centuries because they were seen as laughable by mainstream society for thousands of years. Generation after generation rejected them because they had absorbed the norms of their forebears and acted based on those. Obviously, traditional gender norms are not literal slavery. But the point is that the decision-making mechanism of tradition perpetrates injustice every single time because its aim is never to actually help people: it is only to preserve the status quo.

But accepting whatever norms tradition hands down to us is both unethical and irrational. In cognitive psychology, making moral decisions on the basis of whatever happens to already be the case is an example of a ‘heuristic’. Heuristics are cognitive shortcuts that allow us to make snap decisions without having to actually think about them: in this case, without having to think about which norms and policies actually benefit people and make a better society.

And traditional norms come from traditional societies: pre-industrial monarchies without human rights or electricity, where the overwhelming majority of people lived in grinding poverty. To try and take the moral beliefs of this world and apply it to our modern society makes no rational sense: it’s just the illogical tenacity of a heuristic. You owe it to both your intellect and your dignity to make your decisions based on reason.

But this is exactly what tradition-based parties, news outlets, and influencers aren’t doing. They don’t care about what the evidence says because they’re not making their decisions that way, and this is validated by scientific studies in political psychology. They tell you about the ‘woke agenda’ to distract you from their own agenda. But you don’t need to follow any agenda. The next time you Google ‘feminism’ or ‘sexism’ or ‘wage gap’ or anything, just type in ‘journal article’ in the search bar. That way, you’re not just getting some random person’s political ramblings, but genuine, rational scientific evidence (which is published in scientific ‘journals’ as ‘articles’).

It's OK to be suspicious of ‘bad science’- that suspicion is actually a very rigorous and scientific one! And it’s true that some published articles aren’t as high-quality as others. That’s why is essential not just to look at a single article, but multiple, to see what the consensus amongst experts is, rather than just a single input. The generally-shared viewpoint will only be common if it meets genuine, hard-nosed standards for evidence and credibility. It’s a lot more effort to find this consensus yourself than it is to find a random clickbait article which shoves answers down your throat, but you owe it to yourself to go through the effort.

You don’t have to take my word for anything I’ve been saying: you can find out your own answers for yourself. Just make sure that the places you’re looking aren’t trying to make you angry at a marginalised group so they get your clicks. When you Google politically charged topics without seeking out journal articles, the search algorithm just shows you whichever website angers the most people enough to click on it. Algorithms on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, anywhere, aren’t dedicated to giving you truth: they exist to make money, and influencers making you angry at feminists makes social media companies lots of it.

All of this is to say that feminists, contrary to what these people will tell you, do not want men to be subordinate, or ‘weak’, or ashamed to be born with a Y chromosome. They just want men to treat women with basic respect and humanity. Feminism is not a misandrist conspiracy to subjugate men. It’s nothing more revolutionary than the belief that your mum is owed the same respect as you.

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words & glorious research by Daniel Aaron Levy creator of Polymath

art by Feimo Zhu (Instagram & LinkedIn)

References & Further Reading

References

1. Berger PL, Luckmann T. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Penguin Books; 1991.

2. Ortner S. Is female to male as nature is to culture? Woman, Culture, and Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press; 1974.

3. Ellemers N. Gender Stereotypes. Annual Review of Psychology. 2018;69:275-298.

4. Jost JT, Glaser J, Kruglanski AW, Sulloway FJ. Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin. 2003;129(3):339-375.

5. Eidelman S, Crandall CS. Bias in Favor of the Status Quo. Social and Personality Psychology Compass. 2012;6(3):270-281.

6. Baron J. Thinking and Deciding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2023.

7. Jost JT, Banaji MR, Nosek BA. A Decade of System Justification Theory: Accumulated Evidence of Conscious and Unconscious Bolstering of the Status Quo. Political Psychology. 2004;25(6):881-919.