Thread:Willbachbakal/@comment-30437313-20161107061712/@comment-1330314-20161107080147

But it justifies and explains that, though. Women truly are pushed towards certain specific jobs, and men towards others, and women-dominated jobs tend to pay less. Again, it is easy to verify the concentration of men and women in different jobs (like, say, nurses and secretaries, versus surgeons and CEOs), and the pay in those respective sectors. Arguing that women only do this by choice assumes that they somehow want to be paid less, which is insulting, and attempts to downplay the very real and very visible structures in place that condition job tracks based on gender.

The "evil men" bit also suggests a misunderstanding of what a patriarchy is: a patriarchy isn't a system in which only men participate, it's a system whose power structures are slanted in favor of men. Looking at the number of men versus women in positions of power right now is just an example of that. Women can also participate in and enforce the norms of a system that largely privileges men, in part because these norms tend to be self-perpetuating and conditioned from an early age.

However, I think it's only fair to point out that the patriarchy hurts men too, and that women do have some privileges in very specific circumstances. Women are more likely to receive custody of children in the case of a divorce, for example, and men are treated with suspicion when applying for the position of a caregiver towards children, because they are often assumed to have ulterior, sexually predatorial motives, and are generally seen as less fit to provide care than women. While a lot of awareness has been raised around the issue of sexual violence against women, sexual violence against men is still considered a joke by a large part of the general public, and until recently it was not even considered legally possible for men to be raped (the law was amended to include such a definition largely due to the efforts of feminists). It's easy to paint gender issues as this black-and-white, men-versus-women war of the sexes, but the reality is that both men and women enforce the current system and suffer from it, and both have something to gain by changing it.