You Get Trained Into It, And You Can Train Yourself Out
Patriarchy rarely arrives as a villain you can point to. It seeps in through defaults you absorb in tiny doses, the way a room angles toward certain voices without anyone announcing a rule. A lot of it runs on behaviors that feel necessary when you’re trying to keep the peace at work and at home. That’s why the sharpest parts can feel like common sense in the moment, like a reflex that saves time or avoids conflict for a while. Here are ten ways women can unknowingly reinforce patriarchy, followed by ten shifts that help women resist it.
1. Doing The Emotional Admin For Everyone
Remembering birthdays, smoothing conflicts, tracking everyone’s moods, and noticing who feels left out can become a woman’s unpaid second job. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s second shift idea fits here, because the work is not just chores, it’s management that keeps the whole machine running.
2. Apologizing As A Default Setting
Small apologies, especially the automatic kind, can train a room to see a woman as interruptible and negotiable. When sorry shows up before a sentence, it makes the point feel like a favor instead of a contribution.
3. Policing Other Women’s Likeability
Calling a woman too loud, too intense, too ambitious, or too much often amounts to patriarchy outsourcing its enforcement. Even when it comes dressed as concern or humor, it reinforces the idea that women should be pleasant first and competent second.
4. Treating Male Mediocrity As A Fixable Project
A partner who can’t plan, cook, or notice mess becomes a project with a patient manager assigned by default. The dynamic keeps men comfortable in under-functioning and teaches everyone that women will provide invisible scaffolding.
5. Shrinking Desire And Needs To Avoid Being Difficult
Women often learn to pre-edit what they want so nobody has to deal with it, whether it’s in relationships, sex, work, or family decisions. Asking for less may feel efficient, yet it also keeps the world from having to adjust.
6. Endorsing Purity Rules And Respectability Tests
Respectability politics can look like safety, and sometimes it is, yet it also maintains the idea that women earn dignity through restraint. When women judge other women’s clothes, bodies, or choices as moral proof, the checklist stays alive.
7. Laughing Along With Gendered Humor
Jokes about nagging wives, clueless husbands, dramatic girls, or crazy exes land because they’re familiar. Laughing can be social survival, and it also keeps the stereotype lubricated so it can keep shaping expectations.
8. Accepting Interruptions As Normal
Being interrupted, then yielding with a smile, teaches a group whose voice matters most. Each unchallenged cut-off is a tiny vote for the old hierarchy, and it trains women to speak in shorter bursts.
9. Turning Self-Sacrifice Into A Virtue
When exhaustion gets framed as devotion, depletion starts to look like proof of goodness. Patriarchy benefits when women treat burnout as identity, because a tired person is easier to manage than a rested one.
10. Letting Safety Concerns Become The Whole Map
Watching your drink, avoiding certain streets, and texting your location can be necessary, and it can also shrink a life. When women adapt their behavior as the primary solution, responsibility shifts away from the people and institutions that create risk.
The same daily life that trains these patterns also offers small exits, and the next ten on our list focuses on those exits.
1. Naming The Labor Instead Of Hiding It
Saying out loud who plans, who remembers, who anticipates, and who cleans up makes invisible work visible. Once the work has a name, it becomes something that can be shared, scheduled, and renegotiated.
2. Practicing Direct Speech Without Softening Every Edge
Clear statements feel rebellious when you’re used to cushioning every request and disagreement. You can say no without a long explanation, and you can ask for what you want without a disclaimer.
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3. Interrupting The Interruption
Holding the floor and returning to your point teaches people how to treat you. It also signals to other women that they’re allowed to take up space, even when the first attempt feels awkward.
4. Refusing The Role Of Household Manager By Default
Chores can be split, and the mental load can be split, too, through shared ownership instead of delegated tasks. Competence is learnable, and insisting on that truth prevents women from becoming the operating system.
5. Building Money Confidence And Talking About Pay
Patriarchy runs smoother when women stay quiet about money, so transparency matters. The U.S. Department of Labor and many researchers have documented persistent gender pay gaps, and secrecy helps keep them stubborn.
6. Treating Other Women’s Choices With Generosity
When women stop grading each other on beauty, motherhood, sexuality, ambition, and temperament, the system loses a key enforcement tool. Generosity does not require agreement, it requires refusing to turn preference into punishment.
7. Mentoring, Sponsoring, And Credit-Sharing
Mentorship helps, and sponsorship moves doors, because it puts a name behind an opportunity. Public credit matters, too, since women’s work gets absorbed unless someone attaches it to the person who did it.
8. Raising Boys With Skills And Accountability
Resistance starts early when boys learn to cook, clean, apologize, listen, and care for others without being praised as exceptional. Accountability matters, because excusing entitlement as normal boy behavior turns it into adult character.
9. Making Boundaries Normal In Friendships And Families
Patriarchy leans on women being endlessly available, so boundaries disrupt the supply line. Declining the mediator role, skipping the guilt-trip call, and letting other adults handle their own discomfort restores time and dignity.
Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash
10. Supporting Collective Power
Individual confidence helps, and collective action changes rules. Unions, voting blocs, workplace organizing, and community advocacy, including work highlighted by groups like UN Women, create pressure that systems cannot ignore.
