This is part of my surfacing the calling-out-of-idiocy, by crossposting whenever smart people do so.
So here, in this post and its predecessor, we have a diptych made up of this crosspost of:
Evans, Alice. 2026. “Stop Pink-Washing Patriarchy!”The Great Gender Divergence. October 18. <https://www.ggd.world/p/stop-pink-washing-patriarchy>.
And my earlier crosspost of:
Drezner, Dan. 2026. “The Op-Eds About Higher Education Need to Stop Until We Figure Out What the Hell Is Going On With the Op-Ed Contributors”.Drezner’s World. October 19. <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/crosspost-dan-drezner-the-op-eds>.
Dan called out the * right*. Alice now calls out the “left”. Although the people she critiques are not people of the
Alice speedruns through 1970s–80s feminist history, postcolonial studies, with a sidelook at the plough hypothesis of the rise of patriarchy (Alesina, Giuliano & Nunn). She argues that we now have more than a generation of feminist and postcolonial scholarship, and now the chatbots trained on it, systematically understated patriarchy by:
celebrating exceptional or “agentic” women;
hiding how far some regions have moved toward gender equality in the 20th century
hiding how much oppression persists elsewhere.
Spotlighting queens, litigants, market women and witches-as-rebels treats the exception as if it were the rule, and so mismeasures the degree of patriarchy.
How did we get her? In her telling, 1980s feminists wanted to show that “another world is possible,” so they searched the record for egalitarian societies, matriarchies and female agency. Meanwhile, moral-prestige incentives pushed Western scholars to “punch up” at home and avoid judging other cultures, for fear of being called neocolonial. And so we had the development of standard metrics (female labor participation, property, ritual roles) that often count drudgery rather than power, and that work very hard to avert their eyes form violence, coercion, forced marriage, and the destruction of women’s spaces where they could coalesce and form coalitions.
Alice:
<https://www.ggd.world/p/stop-pink-washing-patriarchy> <https://www.ggd.world>
Why do so many academic histories, popular books and museum exhibits celebrate exceptional ‘kick ass’ women, while minimizing patriarchy? It may feel empowering, exciting and rebellious, but such narratives are often grossly misleading. They blind us to colossal progress towards gender equality in some world regions, alongside persistent patriarchy elsewhere. Today, let’s examine why gender studies went so wrong, and how we might study patriarchy with open-minded empiricism.
Feminist scholars of the 1970s and ‘80s often wanted to show that patriarchy was not inevitable, but rather another world was possible. They scoured the ethnographic records for small-scale egalitarian societies, celebrated ancient ‘matriarchies’, and pointed to ancient goddess-worship.
Looking back at the European past, gender historians sought to highlight women’s historic agency, importance, wealth, and labour. This scholarship was often motivated by a feminist desire to counter past erasure and show that women mattered. But as Judith Bennett (2006) brilliantly argued, while it may feel empowering to document female agency and rebellion, this minimizes historic patriarchy.
Thankfully, patriarchy has largely been emasculated in most advanced countries. Challenges persist (such as women predominating in firms with greater flexibility and lower productivity), but pale in comparison to the moral gravity of femicides and arranged marriages. Yet the same violence, abuse and male-dominance that would provoke virulent critique in the West are sometimes ignored, or even defended elsewhere. Captured concubines in Persia are celebrated as strategic, modern Cairene women who embrace obedience and seclusion are heralded as ‘agentic’, while laws banning female genital mutilation are condemned as ‘stigmatizing’.
What on earth went wrong? Western feminists gain moral prestige by ‘punching up’ and criticising male hierarchies at home, but are often reluctant to scrutinize gender norms in other societies for fear of being branded neocolonial or racist. Elites in the Global South may downplay patriarchal oppression in their own countries, wary of being cast as ‘backward’. Globally-comparative analysis of gender is thus taboo.
Yet if we actually want to advance gender equality, we need to get real. We need to stop pink-washing patriarchy, and embrace an open, empirical enquiry.
The British Library’s exhibition on Medieval Women showcased a tremendous collection of manuscripts and artefacts, demonstrating women’s prominence, but almost to the point of sugarcoating 15th century misogyny.
Yes, Christine de Pizan wrote the Book of the City of Ladies, asserting women’s equal competence. But she faced an uphill struggle. Before mass printing, each manuscript had to be transcribed by hand, and every major institution was dominated by men.
Head into any Western bookshop and you’ll find celebrations of “bad ass” women from the past, but these are slim pickings. In a database of almost 59,000 European university teachers and academy members active before 1800, there were just 108 women.
Misogyny was rife. As Protestant and Catholic churches sparred for souls in 16th century West-Central Europe, they aggressively demonstrated their power to vanquish the devil (Leeson and Russ 2018). Thousands of ‘witches’ (mostly women) were accused, tried and murdered. Paintings cast women as potentially deceitful and dangerous, circulating via printing. Frans Francken the Younger’s paintings show women in ordinary, respectable clothing undressing to join demonic rituals - hinting that satan’s agents live amongst us.
Analyses of small-scale societies must also be viewed with caution. The Standard Cross Cultural Sample (SCCS) gives the Ashanti its highest possible score for ‘female power’, recognising Queen Mothers, but this same society was rife with pawning - as girls were given off as collateral. Moreover, focusing on a single, royal actor like the Queen Mother ignores whether women could organize powerful coalitions to defend their collective interests.
Violence is another major omission. Accounts centred on female prominence, labor, property ownership, matrilocality, and permissive sexual norms are misleading if they do not also recognise violence and coercion. That includes risks of rape, capture, enslavement and head-hunting. If men can get what they want through brute force, or arranged marriage, they need not demonstrate care, companionship or devotion. In my analysis of the SCCS, wife-beating was reported as common in 80% of coded societies.
The Siraya of Taiwan were matrilocal and women did the lion’s share of agriculture. But men still engaged in out-bounding raiding and exclusively dominated governing councils. Analyses that focus on gender divisions of labour may well be tabulating drudgery, while omitting child marriage, impoverishment and routine coercion.
If you attend any Economics course on gender, you’ll probably learn ploughs favoured male brawn and naturalised men’s participation in the public sphere, whereas hoes maintained women’s centrality.
This is possibly one of the most misleading ideas in economics (save all the other ones).
Women’s participation in agriculture doesn’t tell us whether women controlled any of the surplus, let alone whether they could build powerful coalitions. Hoe agriculture produces larger surpluses compared with slash and burn, and anything which generated a storable surplus made a village more vulnerable to external predation. This generated stronger incentives for raiding, defence and warfare. Male military coalitions grabbed power and enshrined themselves as leaders.
The real puzzle is why women worked so hard, but struggled to capture the rewards. What prevented women from organizing powerful networks, capable of challenging patriarchal authority and impunity?
Feminist histories of the Aztecs often highlight ‘gender complementarity’, noting that women ground maize and sold at markets.
But why are we elevating a hard slog? The overwhelming majority of Aztec mothers woke early, spent five hours a day grinding maize for tortillas, scrubbing their children’s clothes. Women’s work is often thankless. As a young woman told me in an Oaxacan market, “men think of us as servants”.
Dodds Pennock also seems to pink-wash human sacrifices. She notes that victims of human sacrifices were sometimes ixiptla (impersonators) of the gods, embodying the deity the ceremony was supposed to honor. Since female victims often embodied deities associated with earth, fertility, water, maize, salt, childbirth, disease and natural forces: “Women were bound up with the earth – and this connection gave both their lives and their deaths significance”.
Pardon?
Within Islamic history, postcolonial scholars have often emphasised women’s property ownership, donations to mosques, litigation in courts, and strategic ploys in the harems (Peirce 1993; Tucker 1985).
But this minimizes wider patriarchal oppression: teenage girls were betrothed to men they had not met, and thereafter kept cloistered, while men dominated every single institution. Late 19th century Egyptian reformist, Qasim Amin, was refreshingly honest, highlighting that women applied their seals to accounts and contracts, without understanding their contents, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation by husbands, relatives or trustees.
Today, female employment remains especially low across Central Asia, South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa (CASAMENA), and these same patterns persist when communities move abroad to Europe. Yet too often scholars attribute this to the challenges of balancing work and motherhood, thereby extending analyses derived from the West. But clearly there is something culturally specific about CASAMENA, since even when compared to economically-similar countries, female employment remains ultra low.
Patriarchy, therefore, gets a free pass.
Sub-Saharan Africa scores well on standard metrics of gender equality, on account of high female labor force participation, but this is grossly misleading, because work is not inherently liberating.
In low-income Africa, women may move independently, but their lives are still marked by relentless drudgery and insecurity. Too often, poor women wake before dawn and labour long after dusk, only to be stuck in the same place.
Since LLMs are trained on this same data, they reproduce the same selectivity. When I uploaded Upinder Singh’s (2008) tremendous book on India, which states that ‘the number of hymns attributed to women sages in the Rig Veda is small”, 𝕏Claude then told me: “The Rig Veda includes hymns composed by women - a testament to their participation in the intellectual and spiritual life of the time”. Dropping the qualification, Claude refashioned male dominance into female prominence!
Such narratives blind us to the fact that the entire world was run by fraternal coalitions, often extremely violent, and that over the 20th century we have made phenomenal progress!
When I asked ChatGPT, “Why do so few women in the Middle East and North Africa work for pay, when so many are university educated?”, it summarized a range of economics papers, emphasizing domestic labor and job scarcity. But this hypothesis seems unconvincing, given that MENA’s female employment is so much lower than other countries with similar economic development. ChatGPT seems reluctant to recognize region-specific cultural constraints, namely seclusion.
Even when LLMs do note patriarchy, they tend to excessively ‘hedge’ - such as by saying that in the Ottoman Empire, royal women might exercise influence. I suspect their training data includes academic papers that stress ‘exceptional women’.
Over the 20th century, the entire world made colossal progress towards gender equality, more rapidly in some regions than others. Pink-washing past and present patriarchy may feel nice, but is ultimately misleading because it blinds us to both progress and persistent oppression.
To understand how our world came to be, we need to study how male fraternities consolidated power, and why this persisted for so long. That means studying long historical processes, tracing the interplay of political, economic and cultural shifts, and comparing societies to understand what sustained (or weakened) patriarchal authority.
Digitization can help us track the longue durée. For example, we still don’t really know why ideals of female seclusion spread across Mesopotamia. I am hopeful that digitisation of hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets might help us track the adoption of veiling.
Social network analysis is now more possible at scale. I’m curious to learn how caste changes in the diaspora. What role do parents play in Indian American marriages? Can LinkedIn or Meta data help us understand jaati networks?
Visual media is the frontier! We could analyse, compare and track shifting representations of gender in paintings, photos film and television by harnessing vision-language models (as I suggested here). Which forms of masculinity become admirable, how does this vary over time and between countries?
Big data can be tremendously valuable, though it’s crucial to ask the right questions, grounded in social realities. For example, Baumard and colleagues generated an ‘Ancient Literary Fictions Database’ (a corpus of 2995 literary works on Wikipedia, spanning Ancient Egypt and the Norse World), then analysed depictions of [fa…
