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A couple of months ago, a school in upstate New York purchased a $57,000 humanoid robot, Sally, to serve as a teaching assistant.

Manufactured by Realbotix, whose corporate lineage runs through the company behind the RealDoll AI-enabled sex doll brand (thanks to for bringing this rabbit hole to my attention), Sally is a young-looking, conventionally attractive brunette who could pass for a sex robot herself.

And although the school paused plans to deploy her following the backlash, many other robots are already taking on similar roles. Socially assistive robots (SARs), also known as ‘carebots’ — humanoid or non-humanoid autonomous machines designed to operate in social contexts — are increasingly being touted as a great ‘fix’ for persistent shortages across education, healthcare and other care services. Last year, a San Diego school rolled out not one but two of them, called Ameca and produced by Engineered Arts. Realbotix is now also set to pilot its robots in UK care homes, as well as in the hospitality sector in Spain and Portugal. The EU, meanwhile, has allocated €1.3 billion to support the deployment of AI and robotics, including the development of robotics in care.

It’s hardly surprising that the care crisis is yet another domain we try to solve technologically. But what also shouldn’t be surprising, especially to anyone who’s ever worked in the care sector or has more than a surface-level understanding of what care labour actually entails, is that it’s not something easily outsourced even to the most eager of machines.

Robots are better at some tasks than others. During the recent World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, for instance, one robot ‘athlete’ ran so fast that it broke the 100-metre world record set by Usain Bolt.

The event also included competitions in room tidying, laundry, clothing folding and bed-making. Watching robots attempt household chores is decidedly less impressive, though. Most struggled to get past the washing-and-drying stage of the laundry competition—taking clothes out of a washing machine and hanging them up. Folding a piece of clothing came more easily, but they still took considerably longer than an able-bodied adult would. Robots also tend to have difficulties with other equally mundane tasks, such as picking up unfamiliar items or hammering nails, as well as with social skills, particularly reading human emotions. In fact, they perform worst when interpreting older faces.1 So, what happens when we entrust these machines with caring for humans?

Japan is one place to look. Facing a deep demographic crisis and severe labour shortages, the country has made significant investments in carebots, deploying a vast range of them in elder care, medical facilities, schools and hotels. By 2040, it aims to roll out an additional 10 million AI-equipped robots across 18 sectors, including healthcare and caregiving.

Yet studies investigating the introduction of robots in Japan have produced results that are, to put it generously, not that convincing. A 2021 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research examining robot adoption and its impact on staffing across 860 nursing homes found that in homes where robots were introduced, the number of nurses and care workers actually increased—by 28% and 39%, respectively. However, those increases occurred entirely among ‘non-regular employees’—workers on flexible, part-time contracts with fewer benefits. Regular employees, meanwhile, experienced a wage decrease of about 22%.

In his 2023 book, Robots Won’t Save Japan, anthropologist James Wright, who studied elderly care facilities across Japan, observes that the introduction of SARs, as well as other types of robots like physical assistance robots (PARs), has shifted some employees’ tasks away from caring for and giving attention to people and towards managing the robots instead. And they didn’t exactly deliver on their time- and labour-saving promises either.2 As Wright writes:

Using Hug [a type of PAR] did indeed take additional time — and space — to wheel around, position, operate, and store; in fact, wider-scale implementation of Hug would seem to create more work for care workers rather than saving labor.

The introduction of another robot, Paro — a seal-like SAR designed to improve communication, reduce loneliness and regulate mood, particularly among patients with dementia and other cognitive disorders — also ‘led to a degree of withdrawal from the communal social world of the care home,’ Wright observes.

And although each unit carries a hefty price tag of roughly £6,000 (around $8,100), evidence on its effectiveness in delivering care remains mixed. A systematic review of SARs, including Paro, found no difference between Paro and ‘placebo Paro’—the same robot, just switched off—in improving the general mood and well-being of patients. Only the ‘placebo Paro’ (so, a big plush toy) costs a few thousand less. Still, in Denmark, Paro has been introduced in care facilities in more than 80% of municipalities. Japan, the US and Germany have widely adopted it, too.

The money for the new, shiny, AI-powered machines almost seems to come from some magical, bottomless vault; the purse of Fortunatus, of sorts. Meanwhile, the human workers who perform care jobs—overwhelmingly women—continue to receive much less attention, and even less money.

All around the world, women still perform the majority of both unpaid and paid care work. According to estimates by the ILO and the WHO, based on data from 54 countries, women make up nearly 70% of health and care workers. But they earn, on average, just around a quarter (24%) less than their male colleagues. For women raising families, the gender pay gap is even more significant.

Overall, these professions — as well as roles in other female-dominated fields such as education, hospitality and administration — are among the lowest-paid and most insecure, frequently relying on temporary contracts while offering minimal or no benefits. In the US, care workers earn the fifth-lowest hourly wage of any occupation. In the UK, up to 51% of care workers earn below the Real Living Wage.3 In many countries, including the US and EU states, teachers’ salaries remain significantly lower than those of professionals with similar qualifications.

However, these are also some of the most emotionally and mentally demanding and, yes, even physically demanding and hazardous jobs. Analysis of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ workplace injury data shows that people working in healthcare and education—particularly psychiatric aides and technicians, personal care aides, nurses, teaching assistants and elementary teachers—are at the highest risk of non-fatal but severe injuries. And the number of occupational injuries from violent attacks, which include being shoved, choked, punched, kicked and bitten, has only been increasing in recent years, with much of that increase coming from attacks against women.

Care workers are also among the occupational groups most prone to musculoskeletal disorders—injuries affecting joints, muscles, tendons, nerves, etc.—and burnout, which in turn leads to higher staff turnover and, surprise, surprise, workforce shortages.

Humans (or at least some of us) might believe in rugged individualism, but in reality every single one of us has needed, and likely will need, care from others at some point in our lives. We’re certainly the most dependent and helpless of mammals when young, taking not weeks or months but years to reach even basic self-sufficiency, and that’s with a considerable amount of care and education to get us there. Thanks to advances in medicine, more and more of us also reach an age at which we once again need care from others. Some need it throughout the years in between, too.

It’s so utterly absurd and mind-boggling that the labour most crucial to the continuation and well-being of our species is among the most, if not the most, undervalued and underappreciated. But the low status of care work is no mystery. Patriarchal gender norms have long cast these professions as ‘natural’ to women, mere ‘women’s work,’ and anything branded with that fatal label tends to sink to the bottom of society’s hierarchy.

If women can do it, then surely everyone can. Clearly not robots, though.

But acknowledging the latter also means acknowledging that care work isn’t as simple and reducible to lines of code as some of us might like to think.

The carers in my late grandmother’s nursing home never stood still. They kept rushing from one place to another; checking in and talking with residents; helping those with mobility issues dress, walk and use the bathroom; distributing snacks, blankets and medications; managing visitors; and so on. And those are only the visible duties.

My other grandmother suffered from severe dementia and other health issues, and my family decided to get a carer for her instead. But even with the carer coming every single day, my parents, aunt, and I still had our hands full when she wasn’t around, and sometimes even when she was. I can’t imagine even the most sophisticated robot knowing exactly when to give my grandmother the binder we had made, containing all the FAQs about her situation, to prevent a breakdown. Or knowing how to tell when, for a brief moment, she was actually there with us sometimes.

Care work is unpredictable, messy and non-linear, requiring copious amounts of often invisible, deeply human emotional work that can’t be broken down into a set of instructions for a machine to follow.

Yet we rush to automate care long before we value or understand it. We pour vast sums into robot carers while the humans who perform these roles, and perform them more effectively, receive little recognition and often none of the investment. The race to robotise care seems less about solving the most pervasive problems in the sector or making workers’ lives easier and better, and more about populating the world with pricey new gadgets and young, attractive, sexualised robot-women, while filling the pockets of a few technology companies under the rationale of cost-saving. Because why else would we be so enthusiastic about replacing a form of work we have never properly valued in the first place?

As linguist Emily M. Bender argues in her essay on ‘Resisting Dehumanization in the age of AI’: ‘we should be identifying practical problems that could benefit from computational solutions, not ML [Machine Learning] solutions that could benefit from problems.’ Too often, though, it seems we do the latter.

Meanwhile, the solutions to the chronically underpaid and understaffed care workforce are staring us right in the face — better contracts, higher wages and more humane workplace culture. Reducing the physical and less human-demanding workload so workers have more time to deliver quality, proactive, in-person care and support. Alleviating shortages through immigration and encouraging more men to join these fields.

Much of this is also what care workers themselves have repeatedly called for in numerous surveys, although the message doesn’t seem to travel very far inside the tech bubble. In one 2019 study in Finland, just 39% of workers said the introduction of robots would be useful, while 57% suggested that robots would be appropriate only for indirect nursing care, such as janitorial or reception work. There are problems that technology can and should solve—and there are those that it can’t and perhaps shouldn’t. The introduction of less sophisticated digital technologies, such as tablets for recording medical notes, centralised record-keeping systems, and assistive technologies, including mobility aids and wearable monitoring devices, has indeed reduced the time workers spend on non-care tasks.

And that should be the goal: for technology to reduce the workload, not replace care.

If our priorities weren’t upside down, the heart of care work—being there for others, listening, connecting, empathising—would be one of the very last things we’d think to automate. You can’t perfectly substitute human touch or empathy anyway. And even if you could replace it with the ‘next best thing’—a simulated, pretend ‘empathy’ from a machine that simply says and does whatever it’s calculated to be the most appropriate response—should you?

Unfortunately, it increasingly seems that instead of using technology to free humans from the more mechanical, monotonous labour, we’re ‘freeing’ society from having to care about humans.

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Golf courses use more water than data centres. At least for now.1

And though this fact has recently become a popular defence of the latter, it also shows that, long before the AI boom, we were already pouring extraordinary amounts of water and other resources into activities that, in turn, have a disproportionate impact on the environment — and, ultimately, on the climate crisis itself. Golf courses. Oversized vehicles. Suburban sprawl. Private lawns. Beef-heavy diets. Fast fashion. The list goes on.

Of course, these aren’t universal. You won’t find nearly as many massive sport-utility vehicles and pickup trucks across much of Europe or Asia as you will in the US. You also won’t easily stumble upon a golf course outside the US, Canada, Japan, and parts of Western Europe. The lifestyles and behaviours we come to view as ‘normal’ and desirable are largely shaped by the societies and cultures we live in. But even within the same culture, not everyone participates in them equally. Sometimes, that’s because they simply can’t afford to. Other times, because engaging in these activities doesn’t bring the same fulfilment or social rewards, or avoiding them the same penalties as they do for other groups.

Yet while the physical aspects of climate change— emissions, fossil fuels, resource extraction, etc. — receive plenty of attention, and understandably so, the relationship between these physical changes and social norms and structures that sustain them receives far less. But they matter, too.

If you were to guess which demographic contributes disproportionately to the worsening of the climate crisis through its consumption patterns and overall influence, you wouldn’t be far off by answering wealthy, white men in the Western world.

That’s also the conclusion of a 2025 paper published in Norma: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, which pulls together research from 13 countries and 22 scientists and introduces the term (m)Anthropocene. Compared with women, men tend to have a higher carbon footprint and environmental impact, particularly through travel, tourism, transportation, and meat consumption.2 One French study cited in the paper found that men produce 26% more emissions than women from transport and food alone. Men are also less likely to be concerned about climate change, less willing to change their behaviours to reduce its impact, and less supportive of climate policies. In fact, as another study reviewed by the authors found, the wealthier the country, the less concerned men become about climate change, in part because it comes to be perceived as a ‘women’s issue.’

The paper emphasises, however, that these patterns are most pronounced among affluent white men in developed nations, especially those with conservative political beliefs and rigid views of gender roles. That very same group of men also continue to overwhelmingly control and profit from the world’s most extractive and polluting industries, including industrial agriculture, automobiles, and AI. In the oil and gas sector, for example, men occupy nearly 100% of top executive roles globally.

As the authors note when introducing the term (m)Anthropocene:

The prefix ‘m’ highlights that the destructive ecological and social processes are associated with and largely driven by the activities of privileged eurowestern countries, particularly elite white men (…) and certain dominant and hegemonic masculinities, through colonialism, extractivism and capitalism.

Hegemonic masculinity, a concept developed by sociologist R.W. Connell, describes a form of masculinity that prioritises traits such as aggression, strength, dominance, and authority as a means of maintaining power over women and other marginalised groups. In the context of the environment, the same logic arguably extends to nature itself, too.

In a 2018 paper, political scientist Cara Daggett built on this idea to introduce another form of masculinity — ‘petromasculinity.’ She argues that fossil fuels have become deeply entangled with both authoritarian politics and masculine identity, offering some men who feel left behind in society a sense of power through their extraction and consumption. As she writes:

(…) burning fossil fuels can come to function as a knowingly violent experience, a reassertion of white masculine power on an unruly planet that is perceived to be increasingly in need of violent, authoritarian order.

One example Daggett discusses is the ‘rollin’ coal’ trend, the practice of modifying a diesel engine to deliberately emit large amounts of thick black smoke. Although it emerged as a conservative protest against environmentalism, the noise, the stench, the smoke, the pollution, and the spectacle itself also give those engaging in it — mostly men — what Daggett describes as ‘the sensation of power.’ But that performance then comes at someone else’s expense: usually unsuspecting female pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers of hybrid or Asian-made cars (‘rice-burners’).

The consequences of the climate crisis aren’t distributed evenly along lines of gender, race, or class either.

Climate change has been called a threat multiplier for a reason. Every time a heatwave, flood, drought, or another extreme weather event strikes — events increasingly intensified by a warming planet — it deepens the cracks already running through society.

And there’s plenty of evidence that it’s women around the world, especially Black, Brown, Indigenous, and working-class women, who experience climate change impacts the hardest.

Women, after all, are already more likely to live in poverty than men, with one in ten women worldwide living in extreme poverty right now, according to 2024 UN estimates. Women also tend to spend more overall time working once unpaid domestic and care labour is taken into account, including tasks such as walking long distances for water and food, or caring for children, older people, and sick and disabled relatives. And, increasingly, much of that work takes place in overheated homes, under-resourced cities, or under extreme weather conditions, and sometimes during pregnancy, when exposure to heat can pose serious risks.

As a result, women make up the majority — by some estimates, as many as 80% — of people displaced by climate change, and they are more likely — up to 14 times — to die in climate-linked disasters and to experience climate-driven food insecurity. According to the same UN projections, climate change is expected to leave an additional 236 million women and girls facing hunger by 2030, nearly twice as many as men (131 million). Most disturbingly, studies from around the world have also found that the climate crisis fuels both gender-based violence and child marriage. Fiona Doherty, a social work researcher and author of a recent systematic review examining the relationship between extreme weather and child marriage, explains that, following disasters, marrying off daughters is often seen as a way of reducing a household’s economic and food burden, while in communities that practice a ‘bride price’, it also brings in extra income.3

It isn’t wrong to describe the climate crisis as a women’s issue. In many respects, it is. The problem begins when both the crisis and its solutions become heavily, and pejoratively, gendered, giving some men yet another reason to cling to the patriarchal status quo. Another study reviewed in the (m)Anthropocene paper found that men who felt their masculinity was under threat were significantly more likely to deny climate change ‘to restore a sense of masculinity.’ That’s also the pattern identified by Dagget.

The claim that our world is becoming feminised, too soft, too ‘woke,’ too caring; that the ‘traditional,’ supposedly ‘natural’ order is crumbling; that men are being left behind, forgotten and emasculated, all of this can push some to inflate, exaggerate, or otherwise distort their masculinity to get that power back. And if masculinity, of the hegemonic or ‘petro’ kind, is bound up with fossil-soaked lifestyles — driving big cars, eating big steak, pumping big black smoke into the atmosphere — it’s then no wonder that political movements championing those fears and ideals are leading the backlash against climate action and dismantling or scaling back climate regulations across the US and the EU.

Any challenge to the fossil-fuel order is perceived as a challenge to the patriarchal order. To certain forms of masculinity and the privileges attached to it. How can we then separate gender from the causes and the consequences of the climate crisis when some of its strongest deniers (or defenders) clearly don’t?

As I pointed out recently, what some men engage in is essentially environmental manspreading. The same entitlement to take up and use more space, and to dominate over it, except it’s our ecological space. Not every behaviour may be as deliberate as ‘rollin’ coal,’ sure, but the underlying function is similar. It reassures one’s identity (white, masculine) when it feels precarious, and it gives a sense of power, even if, ultimately, that power amounts to setting fire to the house you’re standing in.

Even if every single person reading this became the most environmentally conscious version of themselves, it still wouldn’t be enough to meaningfully shift the trajectory of climate change. It’s a no-brainer, really, that without collective solutions, we’re cooked — figuratively and, increasingly, literally.

But two things can be true at once. We need systemic change, yes, but our individual behaviours, especially here, in the West, don’t exist separately from those systems. In fact, whether we move towards a more sustainable future or continue down our current path of intensive fossil fuel consumption, there will, almost certainly, be changes to how we live, what we consume, how (and if) we travel, and so on. In the second scenario, those changes may happen not because we choose them, but because we can no longer afford to avoid them. Take beef, for example. Intensifying heatwaves expose cattle to dangerous levels of heat stress and, as a result, significantly increase their mortality. Fewer cattle equals less beef; less beef on the market likely equals higher prices.

Our current resource-intensive consumer culture simply won’t be sustainable for most people for much longer. Tiptoeing around that reality, and around the role social forces play in the climate crisis, only risks creating a self-reinforcing cycle of resentment and anger.

Gender alone hardly explains it all, of course. Nevertheless, it’s a crucial lens through which to understand not only the causes and consequences of climate change, but also the solutions needed to address it. You can’t protect those already experiencing the consequences of climate change without understanding who is most vulnerable and why. But also, you can’t address the growing global backlash to climate action without understanding where it comes from and what fuels it. And you can’t easily build support for collective solutions when some see them as inherently inferior.

The systematic devaluation of care, compassion, cooperation, and respect for nature — values associated with ‘traditional’ femininity and dismissed as ‘primitive’ when embodied by Indigenous and other non-Western cultures — is one of the key reasons so many people, regardless of gender, continue to tolerate, participate in, or even celebrate the destruction of our planet.

Ultimately, though, when a deadly heatwave collides with a power outage that renders many AC units useless, or when a flood cuts off roads and essential services — both scenarios made more likely by climate change — the qualities that help people survive won’t be the ones our societies have long rewarded most. It won’t be dominance, destruction, aggression, endless expansion, or hyper-individualism. It will be care.

Some golf courses have already been transformed into extensive public parks, stormwater repositories, and biodiverse sanctuaries as interest in the sport declines. Although most (roughly 80%) of golfers are men, younger men, particularly Millennial men, don’t seem to be so fond of it. One of the reasons they cite is that it’s bad for the environment.

The good news is that customs, hierarchies, and social norms, including those around gender, aren’t our biological destiny. They never were.

A better future requires not only better policies and technologies (or better use of the ones we already have), but also a willingness to question the social scripts that brought us here in the first place.

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The Noösphere is an entirely reader-supported publication that applies recent social science research to the cultural, political, and technological issues shaping our world today. If you read it every week and value the labour that goes into it, consider supporting it by liking or sharing this essay, becoming a paid subscriber or buying me a coffee! Thank you!

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History has a funny way of becoming decidedly less male-dominated the moment we stop assuming it always was.

Take ancient Rome, for instance. Despite the legal, economic, political, and social restrictions imposed on Roman women, many did play roles other than wife, mother, and daughter — including priestess, empress, midwife, shop owner, captain, and merchant. In a dedication dating to around 200CE, uncovered by archaeology professor Carrie Atkins, two Roman women described themselves as ‘distinguished matrons, Red Sea ship owners and merchants.’ Atkins has also found dozens more references to women just like them in other historical sources.

Just-published research by archaeologist Tamara Lewit adds yet another profession to that list: wine and olive oil producer. By analysing various Roman texts — laws, business records, grave inscriptions— spanning five centuries, Lewit found that the vilica, previously dismissed by historians as little more than a housekeeper, was actually a female farm manager overseeing wine and olive oil production, bookkeeping, sales, and other operations. As she writes:

Although no vilica has left us an account of her work in her own words, by paying careful attention to all the evidence available to us, we can hear an echo of her voice.

But that’s the thing; the evidence existed all along. The echoes — and the screams — of women occupying diverse, influential, and public roles, even within patriarchal societies like ancient Rome, were there. Yet only recently have we stopped treating them as background noise.

Ancient Romans were hardly unique in their determination to clip women’s wings. Ancient Greeks were, arguably, even worse, with the belief in women’s supposedly ‘innate’ intellectual, emotional, moral, and physical inferiority reverberating throughout much of Greek society.1 Now imagine their surprise, or perhaps sheer horror, when they encountered women who definitely didn’t fit that mould. Because they did encounter some.

In Histories, written in the fifth century BCE, Herodotus — the ancient Greek historian and the ‘father of history’ — recounts how the mythical Amazons, female warriors and hunters, became entwined with the very real Scythian tribes, an Iron Age nomadic people of Eastern Iranian origin. Their descendants, the Sauromatians, carried on this tradition. According to Herodotus, Sauromatian women ‘kept to their primal way of life: they go out hunting, whether their husbands are with them or not; they go to war, and they dress exactly like the men,’ ultimately wielding ‘a power no less than that enjoyed by men.’ The Greek tragedian, Aeschylus, likewise described them as ‘the Amazons of the land of Colchis, the virgins fearless in battle, the Scythian hordes who live at the world’s end.’

Herodotus also reported, in no small detail, Scythian customs, burial rituals, and material culture — descriptions later corroborated by archaeological evidence.

One very recent example is a study published in Science Advances. Ancient DNA analysis2 of 85 individuals buried across 21 sites in Kazakhstan and Russia revealed that among elite individuals — a total of 37 — nearly half (42%) were female, suggesting that women could indeed attain high social status within Scythian society. One remarkable example is the ‘Princess of Urdzhar,’ found in eastern Kazakhstan with an elaborate gold headdress, a stone altar, and medicinal plants, pointing to her likely role as a spiritual leader, priestess, or healer. Additionally, the study found no evidence that elite status followed either patrilocal or matrilocal residence patterns (that is, descent through the male or female line), suggesting instead a more complex form of social organisation — and one likely not based primarily around gender.

Previous ancient DNA analysis also revealed that many Scythian individuals scarred with battle wounds and buried with an assortment of spears, arrowheads, and horseback riding equipment were women as well. One such burial, discovered in 1988, was initially assumed to belong to a 13-year-old boy. But it turned out to be the grave of a 13-year-old warrior girl. In another, archaeologists found both a man and a woman, but the weapons — a Scythian bow-case — lay only beside the woman. Yet curators at the museum concluded that the weapons must’ve belonged to the man next to her. As the museum display confidently informed visitors: ‘weapons were for men what jewels were for women.’

And it didn’t seem to matter, neither to these museum curators nor to many earlier scholars, that weapon-wielding, high-status Scythian women had already been mentioned in Greek historical sources. Those accounts were too often ignored or dismissed as mere myths.

But the Scythians aren’t an isolated case of evidence being overshadowed by androcentric assumptions. A remarkably similar pattern emerges in another Iron Age society renowned for its warrior culture: the Celts.

Ancient Roman writers described the Celts, whose territories stretched from the British Isles across Western and Central Europe, as fierce warriors and ‘primitive barbarians.’ But it was Celtic women who seem to have particularly fascinated — or terrified — them. The Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus recounted how Celtic women could ‘swing their robust and snow-white arms, using their feet and their fists and landing blows that seem triggered off by a catapult.’ They were also said to take multiple husbands, divorce, inherit property, hold positions of authority, and fight in battles — and just as courageously as men.

After all, some of the earliest recorded British rulers were women, too: Cartimandua, queen of the Brigantes, and Boudica, queen of the Iceni, both of whom ruled in the first century CE.

Yet Roman accounts of Celtic female rulers and warriors were frequently dismissed as legend or propaganda — or, at least, until modern DNA evidence confirmed them. Recent research also suggests that many Celtic communities were likely matrilocal and matrilineal, with women remaining within their kinship groups, managing land and property, and likely inheriting both, while men joined them through marriage.

Still, Greco-Roman texts weren’t the only pre-twentieth-century sources to suggest that women across the world held positions of status and performed roles later assumed to belong almost exclusively to men.

By the mid-seventeenth century, European missionary reports from the American shores were already describing Indigenous societies as marked by an ‘equality of the sexes.’ 3 Similar observations also appeared later in the accounts of European explorers, traders, and colonists. In his 1724 work, Moeurs des sauvages américains comparées aux mœurs des premiers temps (‘Customs of the American Indians compared with the customs of primitive times’), French Jesuit Joseph-François Lafitau described Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) and Wendat (Huron) societies as a form of gynécocratie, meaning ‘rule by women.’ As he wrote:

Rien n’est cependant plus réel que cette supériorité des femmes. C’est dans les femmes que consiste véritablement la nation, la noblesse du sang, l’arbre généalogique, l’ordre des générations et de la conservation des familles.

(Nothing is more real however, than this superiority of women. It’s through women that the nation properly consists, the nobility of blood, the family tree, the order of generations, and the preservation of families.)

Fast forward to the nineteenth century, and an increasing number of scholars — including Johann Jakob Bachofen in Das Mutterrecht (Mother Right, 1861) and Lewis Henry Morgan in Ancient Society (1877) — assembled evidence from across the globe pointing to societies in which women occupied roles Europeans, at the time, considered unusual or scandalous.

But it wasn’t really until the last century that more echoes of our far more complex, and far less universally male-dominated, past began breaking through the wall of assumptions built around it.

As long as humans have kept records, it turns out, there have been queens, empresses, pharaohs, priestesses, female warriors, keepers of knowledge, women who captained their own ships (the Red Sea matrons) and ran their own businesses (the ‘housekeepers’ who turned out to be winemakers), and other women who supported themselves, sometimes living free of society’s otherwise patriarchal bonds.4 There have also been some patrilineal and patrilocal societies in which women enjoyed considerable freedom and autonomy. And societies in which class and rank superseded gender or in which neither class nor gender likely mattered as much. And matrilineal and matrilocal communities across North and South America, Asia, and Africa, over a hundred of which still exist today.

The surprising part isn’t really that women occupied all these various roles and positions, but that we continue treating them as exceptions to the rule, even as new archaeological methods challenge that idea over and over again. As Angela Saini writes in her brilliant book The Patriarchs:

What’s odd is how hard so many scholars even today try to dismiss evidence of working, independent women or powerful women rulers and warriors in the ancient record. It is almost as though history doesn’t make sense to them unless women are powerless and invisible.

Today, male‑centred narratives of the past also persist beyond academia. And perhaps nowhere is this rigid vision of history more enthusiastically embraced than in the ‘manosphere’ — the online ecosystem of misogynistic men’s forums and sites.

To justify its belief in the universality and inevitability of patriarchal structures, the manosphere often relies on biological essentialism, the idea that there are immutable, biologically hardcoded differences between women and men, including in behaviour and abilities. ‘Weapons are for men what jewels are for women,’ in other words, because only men supposedly fight, hunt, and lead, and only women care about aesthetics.

Well, considering that school curricula already underrepresent women — in the UK, women are absent from a majority of history lessons, while in the US they appear in only a fraction of historical content — that many people struggle to recognise even key female figures in history, and that some scholars, as Saini points out, continue to view the past through a heavily male-centred lens, the manosphere doesn’t need to try hard to convince its followers that women contributed little of importance throughout history.

However, the manosphere’s insistence on universal male dominance also leads to another familiar conclusion: that women’s increasing empowerment is a violation of the natural ‘order of things,’ with disastrous consequences for society, especially men. Ancient Greeks actually worried about this, too. This is what classical scholar Froma Zeitlin described as the ‘Amazon Complex’ — the fear that women rejecting their ‘natural’ subordinate roles will result in a total female domination and male enslavement or extinction. Thousands of years later, some men seem to be grappling with the same anxiety. Some cultural fears die hard.

But if even in staunchly patriarchal societies, and not just in the ancient world5, women still repeatedly navigated a maze of gendered codes and laws to pursue activities we now associate primarily with men, how ‘hardcoded’ can these biological differences really be? To manufacture a story in which gender roles are the inevitable result of fixed biological rules requires an almost impressive amount of ignorance of the historical evidence and the messy, complex realities of human lives.

Because once you set aside the baggage of assumptions, you’ll find that women and men have always lived lives far more complex than the black-and-white (or rather, pink-and-blue) caricatures we try to fit them into.

Although the Roman vilica produced wine, Roman women were, at various points, forbidden from consuming it, likely due to beliefs that alcohol could affect their virtue, making them unfaithful to their husbands.

Women have certainly been denied an awful lot of things throughout history. But perhaps nothing quite as significant and enduring as the recognition for the societies they helped sustain and build.

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In a not-so-distant past, women could be fired for almost anything: tying the knot — or untying it — cohabiting with a man without a ring, getting pregnant, wearing ‘unbecoming’ clothes, putting on a few kilos, reaching the ripe old age (around 32), or having a drink in a bar.1

Across much of the industrialised world, those and many other discriminatory practices are now largely illegal (though not entirely absent), and one consequence has been the rise of female breadwinners — women who are the primary or sole financial providers for their households. In the US, only around 14% of married or single mothers were breadwinners in 1967, with another 15% being co-breadwinners. But by 2023, those figures had risen to 45% and 24%, respectively, meaning that the majority of mothers (69%) are now either the main or a joint provider. Black mothers are even more likely to be breadwinners — nearly 70% are.

Similar trends can be observed across Australia, the UK, and much of Europe, too. Young women are also working at higher rates than ever, with around 78% of American women born in the 1990s now in employment.

Yet this historic leap towards self-sufficiency and financial independence, something generations of women before us could scarcely have imagined, is still too frequently treated not as the triumph it is, but as an uncomfortable, even unwelcome, disruption of ‘traditional’ gender scripts. Including, ironically, by many of the very men who stand to benefit from having an equal partner.

‘Women don’t eat grass. If you want her to stay, make sure you have money,’ says one Guadeloupean proverb. For some time now, breadwinning has been considered a predominantly male domain, propped up, in large part, by a scaffolding of legal, economic, and cultural institutions that restricted women’s earning power and employment opportunities — including the many absurd reasons women could be fired. Man’s money and breadwinning were then certainly a plus; something that affirmed his ‘manliness’ and elevated his standing in society — and the marriage mart.

However, as a growing body of research suggests, when it’s now heterosexual men, rather than women, who find themselves out-earned by their partners, many don’t exactly jump for joy.

A 2024 study, published in The Economic Journal and conducted in Sweden — considered one of the world’s most gender-equal countries —analysed a decade of earnings and mental health data from heterosexual couples. And it found that once a married woman starts earning more money than her husband, the likelihood of receiving a mental health diagnosis increases by 8% overall and by 11% for men alone. The effect was strongest among middle-aged, middle-income men. A similar finding was reported in another 2024 study in the European Sociological Review, which analysed over 14 years of European social survey data: while women’s well-being declined only marginally in female-breadwinner households, men’s declined significantly. This was the case for all countries studied, including Germany, the UK, Ireland, Spain, and Finland — another more gender-equal nation.2

Qualitative research offers some clues as to why. One such study, published in the Journal of Family Issues, conducted more than 40 in-depth interviews with American mothers and fathers in households where women currently or previously worked full-time and earned most of the income. Women generally described feeling proud of their breadwinner role, though many also spoke about the stress of juggling paid work with responsibilities at home. Men, meanwhile, had mixed feelings. And they often framed their wives’ breadwinning mostly in terms of how it affects them — and their masculinity. Here are some of the men’s responses:

I could be alternately proud and embarrassed.

It stings your pride a little bit that your wife’s the one out making all the money.

I’m, you know, a guy’s guy. You tell them you stay home, and they think you’re some feminine dude.

If you’ve spent your whole life internalising the idea that a man’s worth is measured by his ability to provide, earning less than your partner — or nothing at all — can create a feeling of disempowerment; of loss of masculine identity and status. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, both men and women in female-breadwinning couples also tend to lie about their earnings. A 2018 paper from the US Census Bureau found that men in such marriages overstated their incomes by around 3%, while breadwinning wives downplayed theirs by 1.5%. The researchers called it ‘manning up’ and ‘womaning down.’

Some studies also suggest that men partnered with female breadwinners are more likely to be unfaithful, and that these relationships are more likely to end in separation.

A just-published study in the Journal of Marriage and Family, analysing almost two decades of data from more than 500,000 married or cohabiting heterosexual couples across 29 high-income countries, found that couples in which women earned more than their partners were 36% more likely to separate. Among couples with children, that figure rose to 49%.

One plausible explanation, according to the researchers? Even when women rear children and continue working full-time and contribute more financially, they still do more domestic labour than men.

There’s perhaps no better proof that social attitudes still lag far behind women’s workplace progress than the continued unequal division of domestic, care, emotional, and mental load.

I’ve written about this many times before3, so I won’t go into too much detail here, but the gist of recent evidence is this: women partnered with men do more housework when both partners work full-time. And whether or not the couple has children. And when women are the breadwinners. And when they get promoted. And when their male partners get promoted. And when they work from home. And when their male partners work from home. And when their male partner is unemployed. And when the couple is wealthy enough to afford domestic help. And, often, even when the man is a stay-at-home father.4

Domestic and care inequality persists across virtually every heterosexual household imaginable. Women have increasingly taken on ‘traditionally’ male roles, but men have been far slower to take on female roles.

Much of this situation is because the latter continues to be seen as ‘unmanly’ and thus ‘beneath men.’ But it’s also driven by a phenomenon known as ‘gender deviance neutralisation’ — women compensating for stepping outside gender roles in public by embracing them even more intensely at home. I’ve watched this dynamic play out in my own family too. My mother, despite having a demanding academic career, still insisted on baking cakes every week, making soup from scratch almost every day, and taking on most other household chores. She was often so exhausted that she’d fall asleep in the armchair right after dinner.

This also undermines the idea that female breadwinners and the ‘girlbosses,’ generally speaking, are supposedly all selfish, uncaring, and career-obsessed women. If that were true, why do they still, statistically, do more domestic and care work than their male partners?

Many men might struggle with female breadwinning, as we’ve already seen. But it isn’t because the weight of the home has suddenly shifted onto their shoulders. In most cases, it’s not.

Still, you’d be mistaken to assume that women at the opposite end of the spectrum — stay-at-home wives, mothers, or so-called ‘tradwives,’ women embracing what they believe to be ‘traditional’ homemaking roles — are getting a better deal. Some men, especially young men, certainly do idealise that arrangement. In fact, nearly a third of Gen Z men (today’s 18–29-year-olds) believe a wife should obey her husband, and almost a quarter believe that women shouldn’t appear too independent or self-sufficient, according to a recent survey by Ipsos and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London.

Yet, the first study to examine men’s attitudes towards ‘tradwives,’ just published in Psychology of Women Quarterly, found that young men most likely to support the ‘tradwife’ movement also scored highest on measures of hostile sexism. They were more likely to believe, for instance, that women’s caretaking role is ‘easier than breadwinning role’ and that dependent women unfairly exploit men’s financial provision. In other words, the very men who believe women should embrace such ‘traditional’ roles simultaneously seem to resent the women who do.

Here’s another confounding piece of the puzzle: the same survey that found many Gen Z men want an obedient wife also found that they are, by far, the demographic most likely to say that women’s professional success is attractive. More than 40% think so.

As I wrote in an earlier piece discussing this survey, it’s then rather difficult to picture what the ‘ideal’ female partner looks like in this worldview. She shouldn’t stay home while her husband wins the bread, because then she’s too dependent. But she also shouldn’t work and earn too much, because that threatens his masculine identity.

The perfect woman, then, appears to be… a co-breadwinning tradwife.

In a patriarchal culture, women are already disproportionately affected by what’s known as ‘tall poppy syndrome’ — being resented or even attacked for their success, confidence, or visibility, simply because these qualities clash with feminine norms of self-effacement and domesticity. Women in politics and other highly visible professions know this all too well.

The same seems to be true in heterosexual relationships. High-achieving women then may end up ‘womaning down’ — hiding their accomplishments to avoid bruising their partner’s ego while doubling down on stereotypical femininity roles, especially at home, because they see no better alternative. And because that’s still what’s expected of them.

Ultimately, though, this is mostly a futile attempt to make sense of and survive within a system in which women can’t win, regardless of what they do or how perfectly they perform these roles.

‘Having it all’ — juggling paid work with most of the unpaid domestic and care work at home —frequently means time poverty, burnout, the gender pay gap, and slower, or even stalled, career progression. Becoming the breadwinner can bring all of that too, along with relationship strain and perhaps women holding themselves back from pursuing better, higher-paying opportunities for fear of upsetting the balance at home even further. Staying home, meanwhile, brings the risk of financial hardship and greater vulnerability in the event of divorce, widowhood, or a partner’s sudden incapacity, due to interrupted careers, lower retirement savings, and uncertain financial support from a former spouse.

At least financial independence also comes with considerable benefits. Studies consistently show that women who earn and control their own money enjoy greater autonomy and decision-making power. Just as importantly, it gives them the freedom and the safety to leave unequal or abusive relationships. Or not enter them in the first place.

Luckily, more and more women understand this, too, particularly younger women, and regardless of their political beliefs. Some are giving up dating men altogether. And unsurprisingly so. Why would a woman choose to be with someone who might resent her success? Why commit to a partner who might also resent her if she stayed home to raise children? Why build a life with someone unwilling to contribute fairly to the household they live in? Increasingly, young women don’t want the lives they watched their mothers and grandmothers endure.

Rigid gender norms, of course, aren’t doing men any favours either. They stand in the way of men appreciating their female partners, valuing care work, and, ultimately, valuing themselves beyond their earning power. The expectation that men should be the breadwinners, and the way this role has become intertwined with masculine identity, has long taken a toll on men’s well-being, too. In an era of insecure work and rising costs of practically everything, that pressure is likely even more damaging.

Men can then either begin shaking off this conditioning and join women in building more equitable relationships and structures, and not just within relationships, or remain trapped in norms that generate little besides insecurity, resentment, and status anxiety.

The latter path, however, may eventually leave them walking it alone.

Despite the collapse of many structural barriers in the workplace and the rise of financially independent and breadwinning women, social expectations seem to have taken very little notice. Women are expected to work like it’s 2026, but care for their families like it’s the 1950s.

The result is that we have one foot in the future and the other firmly planted in the past, and instead of moving forward, we’re moving in circles. Or perhaps not at all.

If we actually want to go someplace else, someplace better for all of us, it’s not enough for women to enter the workplace; men must also enter the home.

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Once upon a time, scribes spent hours crafting a single letter or other short document — preparing parchment, planning the layout, mixing ink, and then, finally, with quills in hand, committing the final strokes.1

If you couldn’t write yourself, or preferred not to, you also had to make the journey to a scribe and let them sweat over it on your behalf.

Then came cheap paper, rising literacy, and, in the nineteenth century, the fountain pen and the mighty typewriter. Writing a message no longer took several hours or days, but an hour or two. Fast forward to the digital age, and it takes mere minutes. With AI autocomplete and other tools, even seconds. But just as the time needed to write a message shrank, the volume of communication exploded. Typewriters both made writing faster and fuelled demand for a new clerical role: secretarial work. Instead of offices producing the same amount of correspondence and giving workers more free afternoons, they simply wrote much more—and hired people, mostly women, to manage the ever-growing pile of paperwork.2

Every new wave of technological innovation might arrive with the promise of less drudgery and more free time. Typewriters promised it well over a century ago. And so did washing machines. And vacuum cleaners. And personal computers. And now AI. Yet the long-promised golden age of leisure never seems to arrive, does it?

AI makes promises that are even grander than those of any technology before it. Techno-optimists insist it will soon ‘do everything,’ ushering in an age of abundance where we’ll all be healthier, smarter, and blessed with longer, more fulfilling lives spent entirely on pursuits of our choosing.

But this vision of utopia falls short when compared to reality. In a recent eight-month ethnographic study, researchers at UC Berkeley observed and interviewed employees at a 200-person technology company with broad access to generative AI tools. And they found that these tools did free up some time — only for that time to be quickly swallowed up by taking on more work. As one of the researchers, Xingqi Maggie Ye, observes:

They [employees] would run AI processes in the background while reviewing code, drafting documents, or attending meetings. Some even ran multiple AI agents simultaneously. This created a rhythm where both the human and the machine were constantly in motion.

In the interviews, the employees described feeling more capable after AI entered the picture —  but also busier, more stretched, and less able to properly disconnect from work. Ye and her co-researcher, Aruna Ranganathan, argue that this can create a vicious cycle: the initial productivity boost eventually becomes the new normal. And as expectations rise to match workers’ expanded capacity, the job becomes denser, more demanding, and ultimately harder to sustain, not less.

A similar finding was reported in a 2025 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Analysing data from the American Time Use Survey between 2004 and 2023, the researchers found that workers in occupations with greater exposure to generative AI experienced significant increases in working hours alongside corresponding declines in leisure time. Between 2023 and 2024, moving from relatively low to relatively high AI exposure (from the 25th to the 75th percentile) was associated with an additional 3.4 hours of work per week and 3.7 fewer hours of leisure. Exposure to AI-powered workplace surveillance was linked to longer working hours as well.

Meanwhile, overall job satisfaction and work-life balance among AI-exposed workers — though measured using different data3 — declined during the same period. Coincidence?

In their paper, the researchers suggest that the reason technology-enabled productivity gains slip through our fingers and, paradoxically, can end up making us work more is that the benefits tend to be captured by employers or consumers rather than workers themselves. As they conclude:

Our analysis reveals a consistent pattern: workers in occupations with higher AI exposure end up working longer hours and enjoying less leisure time. This effect is particularly pronounced in contexts where AI significantly enhances marginal productivity and monitoring efficiency. It is further amplified in competitive labor and product markets, where workers’ limited bargaining power fails to keep up with productivity gains, with rents often accruing to firms or consumers.

Still, productivity gains aren’t even guaranteed. Another 2026 NBER survey of nearly 6,000 executives across Europe and the US found that although 69% of firms actively use AI, nearly 90% report no impact on productivity over the last three years. Some of the time AI supposedly saves is frequently instead spent on ‘botsitting’ and ‘workslop’ — correcting mistakes and hallucinations in AI-generated output— or offset by ‘AI brain fry’ —the cognitive fatigue that can accompany excessive reliance on AI tools.4

AI may also further intensify the workload of the very demographic already carrying more than its fair share: women.

Historically, it was women, in particular, who were expected to welcome technological innovation as their knight in shining armour. Take the washing machine, for instance. In the mid-twentieth century, it was celebrated as one of electricity’s biggest benefits, combining multiple chores — scrubbing clothes on washboards, boiling them in heavy pots, and then wringing them by hand — into a single machine-driven process, and rescuing homemakers (mostly women) from domestic drudgery.

But as historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan argues in her 1983 book More Work for Mother, labour-saving appliances didn’t substantially reduce women’s domestic workload. Instead, they reorganised it and raised the standards women were expected to meet. Washing clothes takes less time? Well, now there’s no excuse for your child to walk around with even a single stain on their shirt. As Cowan writes:

Labor-saving devices were invented and diffused throughout the country during those hundred years that witnessed the first stages of industrialization, but they reorganized the work processes of housework in ways that did not save the labor of the average housewife. […] The nature of the work has changed, but the goal is still there and so is the necessity for time-consuming labor.

Time-use data from the US show that prime-age women (between the ages of 18 and 64) spent around six fewer hours per week on domestic and care labour between 1900 and 1965, and another twelve fewer hours by the early 2000s. However, prime-age men increased the time they devoted to household work over the same period. Overall, per capita time spent on domestic chores also slightly increased over the century.

Plus, the digital age has now brought new, gendered demands. A 2024 study published in the Community, Work & Family, examining European Social Survey data across 29 countries, found that women are almost twice as likely as men to juggle high levels of digital communication at both work and home, a phenomenon the researchers dubbed the ‘digital double burden.’ After all, it’s women who are still overwhelmingly expected to shoulder the bulk of emotional and mental labour in both spheres.5 And while secretarial and administrative jobs may have steadily vanished after the typewriter helped bring them into existence, the work they did hasn’t.

Someone has to handle the constant and increasing flow of digital correspondence and notifications and juggle the many apps and platforms and tools and group chats and keep track of the other online demands, and that someone is disproportionately likely to be a woman. And if AI, as we’ve already seen, increases both the volume of tasks and the expectations placed on workers, it risks exacerbating this digital double burden. The authors of the 2024 study believe so, too.

There are two paradoxes at play here: the Jevons Paradox and the Solow Paradox. On the one hand, efficiency gains can increase the use of a given resource, thereby creating more demand for workers’ labour (the Jevons Paradox). On the other hand, new technologies don’t necessarily translate into greater productivity (the Solow Paradox).

And the pattern seems remarkably consistent whether we’re talking about typewriters, washing machines, or AI — technology often does reduce the time and effort required for a specific task. But your plate rarely ends up emptier. It’s just refilled with different demands. And perhaps even more demands than before.

A 1911 advertisement for the Monarch Light Touch typewriter boasted that it allowed the female secretary to complete ‘a full day’s work at early morning’s speed’ without experiencing ‘three o’clock fatigue.’ But it also made clear who gets the biggest benefit — the employer, since ‘she puts more in the day’s work for you.’ At least this advert kept it real.

Over the last century or so, technological change has certainly allowed productivity to skyrocket. Since the 1950s alone, output per worker in the US has increased by nearly 300%. Yet neither median wages nor leisure time has seen a remotely comparable rise.

Meanwhile, as the chart below shows, average working hours in wealthy industrialised countries largely stopped declining around the 1980s. In some places, they even began rising again; in the US, hours worked per working-age person rose by about 150 hours between 1980 and 2000.

It doesn’t seem to matter all that much how many time-saving, productivity-boosting technologies we invent lately. Many of us are still stuck working 40-plus-hour workweeks. And women are still often coming home to a second shift that’s barely lighter than their grandmothers’.

Technology can promise whatever it wants, but it’s not up to technology to make good on that promise. It doesn’t decide (at least not yet) what happens to the time and effort it saves. That’s entirely on us, and on another kind of machine entirely— the socio-economic one.

Under capitalism and patriarchy, where institutions are largely organised around protecting the interests of those at the top, time doesn’t trickle down any more than money does. The hours saved by new technologies rarely find their way back to the people whose lives they were supposed to improve. Instead, they are transformed into higher expectations, more consumption, more paid and unpaid labour, and, ultimately, more profit. Sometimes they also produce even greater inequality.

And eventually we forget, or are urged to forget, about all the promises made along the way. A recent Wall Street Journal article, titled ‘Does leisure make us happy? Often the answer is no.’ seems to do that, nudging us to question the very thing technological progress was supposed to deliver. One day, some of us may even feel grateful for being treated like machines.

For the rest of us, though, getting off the hamster wheel, as great as it is for our well-being, gender equality, and the climate, isn’t as simple as stepping off. How many of us can afford to do that today anyway?

If we want technology to deliver on its promise, we need to start paying attention to who gets to keep the time, wealth, freedom, and other benefits it creates (and whether it creates them at all), and start measuring progress by the lives it improves, not just the output it increases.

Writing a message can now take seconds— but should it? I’d much rather have technology free me from countless other things than from spending hours writing a letter, cooking a meal, or tending to tomatoes in my garden. Not every activity is a friction to be eliminated. And sometimes, saving time can only end up costing us more.

Perhaps, at some point, AI or another technology will actually free us from a significant amount of unwanted work. But that is no guarantee that the people whose time is freed will get to keep it and write those letters.

And if we keep having to run faster and faster to stay in the same place, or not even there, we may eventually forget that the point was never to run faster. It was to live better.

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Content note: sexual harassment, stalking, and technology-facilitated abuse.

One morning, on my way to high school, a teenage boy slid into the bus seat beside me. He told me he lived nearby and that we went to the same school. Then, just as casually as if he were commenting on the weather, he added that he liked taking pictures of me when I was running.

When I relayed the story to my female friends, nauseous at the idea of a stranger creeping on me like this, they said similar things had happened to them, too. This was the early 2010s; almost every phone already had a built-in camera. Boys then used them to try to snap pictures of girls walking upstairs in skirts. Or in bathrooms. Or changing before PE. And sometimes, those photos were also shared around, including the ones girls had sent in confidence to just one boy.

I quickly internalised the message that these things ‘just happen,’ that this is an unpleasant but inevitable feature of girlhood — and, later, womanhood — not least because there were rarely any consequences for boys who did them. What can you do? Boys will be boys.

Today, we treat newer forms of technology-facilitated harassment and abuse in much the same way. Each time a new tool appears, men and boys find ways to weaponise it against us, while the companies that launch it and the public mostly give a collective shrug. These things just happen.

The latest addition to that digital abuse toolkit? Meta’s smart glasses.

Smart glasses are essentially smartphones for your face. They can send messages, answer questions, and record photos and videos, all hands-free. Meta’s latest AI-powered version, dubbed Meta Glasses, is also virtually indistinguishable from an ordinary pair of designer frames. The company even enlisted Kylie Jenner and a slew of other influencers to promote the product.

So how can you know if someone wearing these Cybertrucks of eyewear is recording you? In theory, the glasses turn on a small LED light whenever recording begins. In practice, the internet is full of step-by-step tutorials on how to cover the light or deactivate it altogether.

Meta’s ‘hands-free companion’ might market itself as a tool helping people live in the moment and ‘capture life,’ but it has also made it easier than ever to capture the lives of people who never agreed to it — and who likely won’t even realise it’s happening. And, unsurprisingly, most of those being filmed non-consensually are women.

A recent CNN investigation found that some men wearing Meta’s smart glasses have been secretly recording themselves approaching women in public and attempting to pick them up. The footage is then uploaded to their social media accounts without the women’s consent or knowledge, racking up millions of views and thousands of comments — many of them sexually explicit and abusive — all while generating revenue for the ‘creators’ behind it. None of the women CNN spoke with reported seeing the glasses’ recording light during these encounters. And even those who contacted the men to ask for the videos to be removed had little success. As other reports have also shown, experiences like this usually leave women humiliated, distraught, and feeling stripped of their right to move freely through public spaces. One woman told the BBC:

I had no idea it was happening to me, I didn’t consent to that being posted, I didn’t consent to being secretly filmed. It really freaked me out — it made me feel afraid to go out in public.

Meta’s response was as predictable as the harassment itself. In statements to media outlets covering the story, the company said it was aware of a ‘small number of users’ choosing to ‘misuse’ its products, while stressing that it would ‘continually review opportunities to enhance our AI glasses informed by customer feedback.’

This reminds me of what happened with another of Meta’s recent ventures: the Metaverse and its virtual reality platform Horizon Worlds, built for the modest sum of ‘just’ $80 billion. Even during its early development, Horizon users reported being harassed and abused online. And when one beta tester said they were ‘groped,’ describing the experience as more ‘intense’ than online sexual harassment, Meta’s then-VP of Horizon, Vivek Sharma, merely responded that the incident was ‘unfortunate.’

As Laura Bates writes in her brilliant new book, The New Age of Sexism:

For Meta, women’s online experiences of harassment and abuse are all helpful fodder for improving their product and making more money out of it. The ‘make it now and fix any safety issues later’ approach has never been more clearly on display.

And, as could also be predicted, that beta tester was just the first of many, mostly female, victims.1 The safety features Meta later pointed to weren’t always easy to find, nor did they consistently work. Horizon Worlds then quickly became a cesspool of sexually explicit content, racism, grooming, sexual harassment, and abuse — including against children.

This is all a familiar Big Tech script: Move fast. Break things (though mostly women and girls). Worry about the harm done later on. Or don’t even bother. Rinse and repeat.

That isn’t to say our society completely ignores the darker side of technology. Some critics, for instance, warn of a Terminator-style apocalypse in which superintelligent AI seizes control of weapons and turns against humanity. Others fear that AI-generated political misinformation could bring about the collapse of democracy.

But it usually isn’t women who are most concerned with these grand, hypothetical scenarios unfolding in some distant future. Women don’t really need to imagine technology hurting them. It’s already doing exactly that. And the everyday horrors it enables don’t end with the Metaverse or smart glasses, either.

Ahead of its Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva, UN Women released a report based on a 2025 survey across 119 countries. And it found that nearly one in four female journalists, writers, activists, human rights defenders, and other public communicators had experienced some form of AI-assisted online violence. Among those surveyed, 27% had received unwanted sexual advances through direct messages — including unsolicited explicit images or videos, a practice known as ‘cyberflashing’ — 12% had had personal images shared without their consent, and 6% had been targeted with deepfakes — realistic fake images, videos, and audio generated using AI.

Writers reported some of the highest levels of online abuse. As a female writer myself, I can’t say any of this surprises me.

Deepfakes also increasingly target women and girls with little to no public presence. According to a 2023 report by the cybersecurity firm Security Hero, the number of non-consensual, sexually explicit deepfake videos increased by 464% between 2022 and 2023 alone. Nearly all of them — 99%— featured women.

This is largely due to the widespread availability of AI tools that create them. Just one global platform identified by Oxford Internet Institute researchers hosts around 35,000 deepfake tools, which have been downloaded 15 million times since late 2022. Some have even made their way directly onto social media platforms, either embedded in AI assistants (like X’s assistant, Grok) or openly advertised there. One deepfake app, Perky AI, ran more than 260 different advertisements across Meta’s platforms, several of which featured a blurred fake nude image of the then-underage actress Jenna Ortega. And although roughly 30 of those adverts were suspended for violating Meta’s policy, the ones featuring Ortega weren’t. The app was also available through Apple’s App Store.

Tech companies consistently failing to meet their own moderation standards — or even to have proper ones, as with Apple, which still has no rules specifically about deepfake apps — is another massive issue. While women’s content, particularly health-related, is frequently shadowbanned and censored, deepfakes, misogynistic harassment and bullying campaigns, as well as the flood of manosphere-adjacent content — now also including non-consensual footage captured with smartglasses — circulate largely unchecked. As Bates notes in The New Age of Sexism, an entire ‘deletion industry’ has sprung up as a result to profit from this failure, charging victims anywhere between $3,000 and $8,000 to trace and remove online content featuring them. Some of these companies have even been found to work closely with the very websites hosting that content.

But even all of the above isn’t the full picture. Spyware,2 location-tracking apps, smart home appliances, and wearable technologies are also increasingly being used to control, monitor, harass, and stalk women, especially by their intimate partners. Refuge, the UK’s largest domestic abuse organisation, reported a 62% increase in referrals to its technology-facilitated abuse team in 2025 alone.

There’s clearly a vast, rapidly expanding, yet still remarkably under-discussed ecosystem of technology-driven, gendered abuse that women and girls are simply expected to adapt to and endure. Because these things just happen, right?

As a woman, you’re often made to feel mad for simply wanting to exist in the same way a man does.

It wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t been so outspoken. It wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t been running outside all alone. It wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t responded to men you didn’t know. It wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t left your home. (Yet, sometimes it also does happen if you don’t leave your home, considering that, statistically, that’s where women are most likely to suffer abuse, or if you don’t respond to a man — or respond in the ‘wrong’ way.)

Women and girls continue to be hemmed in by a maze of double binds and restrictions on their autonomy, privacy, and ability to move through the world freely. Our patriarchal society and men, meanwhile, continue to treat these constraints as common-sense necessities, and any abuse that happens as an inevitable consequence of women ‘transgressing’ them.

One of the most profound effects of this persistent threat of abuse, online or offline, is withdrawal. The recent UN Women report also found that nearly half of female writers, journalists, and other public communicators self-censor on social media due to online attacks. Among female journalists specifically, this represents a 50% increase since 2020. Around 20% of women surveyed also reported self-censoring at work.

I know far too many brilliant women who’ve stepped back from the internet because it became unbearable as well. I can’t fault them. But I also can’t stop worrying about the kind of world we are becoming when half the population must choose between enduring abuse for existing, speaking up, or simply doing their jobs, or vanishing entirely.

Meta has allegedly (and silently) also added facial-recognition technology to its smart glasses. This feature would effectively allow users to identify people captured by the glasses’ camera. I won’t speculate here on all the possible consequences of such a technology being misused against women and others, but I think you, dear reader, can imagine them clearly enough.

The tech giants may claim to prioritise user safety, yet their actions tell a very different story. Time and again, they prioritise growth and speed to market, releasing tools, platforms, and devices without sufficient safeguards, and adding protections (frequently little more than band-aids) only after harm has already occurred and public pressure becomes unavoidable. Sarah Wynn-Williams, author of Careless People, an insider account of her time as an executive at Meta, aptly calls this behaviour ‘lethal carelessness.’ Somewhere along the way, Big Tech’s lethal carelessness also got mingled with patriarchal entitlement. As Bates writes:

It all comes back, again and again, to men’s entitlement. Entitlement to progress. Entitlement to wealth. Entitlement to plausible deniability. Entitlement to our bodies. Entitlement to our faces. Entitlement to our lives. Entitlement to our genitals.

Governments, too, have largely failed to hold tech companies accountable when things go wrong and have allowed regulation to lag far behind rapidly evolving technologies. Out of 138 countries assessed by the UN, only 18 (13%) include substantive gender-responsive provisions in their national AI strategies. The overwhelming majority don’t even mention gender.

It’s a dangerously deluded belief that there’s nothing whatsoever we can do to ensure women can exist safely in online and offline spaces, or even in their own bodies, and if there’s anything that can be done, it’s entirely on women, and women alone, to take the necessary precautions.

These things don’t ‘just’ happen. Our society lets them happen.

And we keep allowing them to happen today, including through brand new forms of humiliation and dehumanisation. How many more will we have to witness? How many broken women and girls are a ‘fair’ price to pay for technological progress?

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The Noösphere is an entirely reader-supported publication that applies recent social science research to the cultural, political, and technological issues shaping our world today. If you read it every week and value the labour that goes into it, consider supporting it by liking or sharing this essay, becoming a paid subscriber or buying me a coffee! Thank you!

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Natalya Baranskaya’s 1969 novella, A Week Like Any Other, captures a frantic week in the life of Olya Voronkowa, a scientist and mother of two, juggling her career with the pull of domestic life in Soviet Russia.

Olya is always late; she’s late to work, late to come home, constantly sprinting from one duty to the next. While her husband finds time for reading and contemplative tea-sipping, she has almost no time for anything beyond all the cooking and scrubbing and sweeping and mending. She manages to read for a few minutes just once, on the bus to work. But it’s a story everyone else finished ‘ages ago,’ she notes with frustration.

My mother, also a scientist, also a mother of two, also working and raising children in a similar era, only in Soviet Poland, rarely found time to read either. And when she did, she’d often drift off to sleep on the couch instead, the book unopened beside her. The Soviet Union’s promise to free women from ‘domestic slavery’ largely failed to materialise, saddling them with the double burden of paid and unpaid labour — the ‘second shift,’ as sociologist Arlie Hochschild described it in 1989— a few years before many of their Western counterparts.

But even today, Olya’s race against the clock feels all too familiar to women across the world. We’re sold the fantasy of ‘having it all,’ yet most not only do not have it all, but they also have almost no time. No time for rest, joy, ambition, or anything else beyond the endless to-do list. And that time doesn’t vanish on its own. Nor without a cost.

A study published last month by the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP), based on datasets tracking more than 13,000 individuals from 1996 to 2017, examined how parenthood affects the academic careers of women and men in Denmark, one of the world’s most gender-equal countries.

Before parenthood, women’s and men’s careers actually follow fairly similar trajectories. However, afterwards, and despite Denmark’s generous policies and equality protections — such as 24 weeks of parental leave for each parent, subsidised childcare for all children from six months of age, and strict anti-discrimination laws — these trajectories split quickly and sharply.

Right after becoming mothers, women’s odds of staying in university jobs nosedive by 23%. Within eight years, the drop deepens to 29%. For fathers, the initial drop is smaller, around 9%, and it stabilises at roughly 14% over the same period. But unlike fathers, mothers who leave academia face a 12% reduction in earnings and are far less likely to land other jobs in research institutes and laboratories, suggesting many exit research altogether after having children.

Even for those mothers who remain in academia, inequalities persist. After childbirth, mothers are 35% less likely to secure tenure compared to their childfree peers, and still 23% less likely eight years later. For fathers, though, there was no measurable change. Gender differences in research output — counted in published papers — were significant as well.

The main culprit, according to the authors, is no mystery: women still shoulder the lion’s share of unpaid domestic and care work. A survey conducted alongside the same study found that women have nearly five times as many such duties as men. As the graph below shows, they are far more likely to care for the child at night, tend to them when they’re sick, manage doctor visits, and pick them up from daycare. The only task where men have a lead — a marginal one — is daycare drop-off.

The same survey also asked participants whether they believe families function best when partners split childcare, housework, and paid work equally. The majority (75%) nodded along. And yet, these beliefs, despite all the extensive policy interventions and equality protections, clearly don’t translate into behaviour. Even in Denmark. Even today.

That doesn’t exactly bode well for the rest of the world, does it? In the US, women spend roughly twice as much time as men on nearly every household task. In the UK, they spend about 50% more time. And a recent National Bureau of Economic Research study shows that this gap widens not just with children, but also with marriage, persisting regardless of income, education, working hours, or even employment status.

Unsurprisingly, childcare and marriage penalty follow women beyond academia as well. That cost then similarly shows up in lower earnings, lower likelihood of employment, fewer promotions, and stunted career progression, as women have less time for paid work and are more likely to rely on part-time arrangements to balance it all.

But even childfree, unmarried, or unpartnered (with men) women aren’t spared from the gendered burden of care and emotional labour at work. Studies show that women’s time is more frequently interrupted and fragmented, chopped up by additional service work, administrative tasks, mentoring, teaching, and other demands. And while women are expected to accommodate everyone else’s needs, men get long stretches to think, research, create, publish, and get ahead.

Still, it’s not just women’s careers and wallets that suffer as a result of time inequality.

I frequently come back to this quote by writer Nicola Jane Hobbs:

Growing up, I never knew a relaxed woman. Successful women? Yes. Productive women? Plenty. Anxious and afraid and apologetic women? Heaps of them. But relaxed women? (…) I’m not sure I’ve ever met a woman like that.

A genuinely relaxed woman remains almost a mythical creature, near-impossible to spot in the dense undergrowth of a patriarchal jungle. And that’s in no small part because of gender disparities in time allocation.

Time-use surveys also consistently show that men spend more time on leisure — exercise, sports, entertainment, socialising, education, and personal well-being. A 2023 Pew Research Center report found that in the US, this gap exists among married, employed couples regardless of whether they have children. And, surprisingly (or not), it actually widens most dramatically when young children enter the picture, with employed husbands with children under five having nearly five more hours of leisure per week than their also-employed wives. That’s the equivalent of over ten full days of additional leisure per year.

Across the EU, gender differences in leisure time are pronounced as well. Recent data from the European Institute for Gender Equality shows that nearly half of all men spend eight or more hours a week on leisure activities. In contrast, fewer than a third of women do.

After all, men’s typical hobbies, like fishing, hunting, golfing, climbing, biking, attending life sporting events, etc., can be both money- and time-intensive, requiring men to be away from home for several hours at a time, if not entire days or weekends.

And as writer Melanie Hamlett has observed many times, the hidden cost of these adventures is usually paid by their female partners. Someone has to remain on call for the children, especially when they are young, and someone must keep the household running, and that someone is, more frequently than not, a woman. Women’s hobbies then tend to be squeezed into whatever slivers of time they manage to find, fitted around other chores, and often confined to the four walls of home or its vicinity.

This leisure gap, in turn, leads to an exhaustion and burnout gap. A 2022 survey across the US, the UK, Australia, France, Germany, and Japan found that women are 32% more likely to experience burnout and stress than men. A poll conducted in France the same year revealed that most women still feel tired (70%) and stressed (53%) even at the end of a holiday, unlike most men, a difference driven by the fact that women do more chores even when on a break. Less time for leisure, particularly for exercise, also feeds directly into long-term health inequalities.

And if all that wasn’t enough, even at night, when our bodies and brains are meant to be recharging from our already overburdened daily lives, women’s time continues to be interrupted. Sociologist Sarah Burgard found that working mothers are two-and-a-half times as likely as working fathers to interrupt their sleep to care for others, leaving them more prone to various sleep problems and their nasty side effects.

Time poverty shapes nearly every corner of women’s lives. And even more than we perhaps realise.

The irony is that writing about, researching, or fighting time inequality and the myriad of other gender inequalities consumes women’s time, too. As actress and author Amber Tamblyn poignantly put it:

(…) the patriarchal systems and those that uphold them are, among other things, experts at stealing our time. That, in and of itself, is a form of violence we don’t talk nearly enough about. Oppressive people and the systems they empower force themselves constantly into our conversations and day-to-day life and work because we as women can’t afford not to talk about them or do something about them.

This remains especially true in the face of the ongoing assault on women’s rights, particularly reproductive rights, which, once again, forces women and girls to spend time and energy defending their bodies, freedoms, and safety. Black, trans, immigrant, and others marginalised women are even more persistently robbed of their time having to secure their livelihoods and push back against discrimination.

The beauty and body expectations imposed on women and girls are another massive drain on our time. On average, women spend about three times as long as men getting ready to go out, for both work and social engagements, totalling about 136 days over a lifetime. Factor in all the other aesthetic chores, and we’re probably talking about years, not days, spent keeping up with the ever-changing beauty ideals. And, sure, you can opt out, but that, too, comes at a cost.

Our world never tires of reminding us that time is money, that it’s the most precious currency there is, since its supply is both finite and fickle. Yet women are expected to voluntarily — and gleefully — squander theirs, including to fill everyone else’s cups until they overflow, while their own sit bone-dry. Time is precious, but not yours, sweetheart. Yours is to be spent as if it never runs out.

Patriarchy is a time thief, yes, but it’s ultimately also an energy, labour, money, power, influence, ideas, and creativity thief.

Historically, it’s been precisely women’s largely unpaid and invisible labour that allowed the most celebrated men to avoid the drudgery of daily life and devote themselves fully to their work, to the creation of Great Thoughts, Great Art, Great Legacies, and, of course, Great Wealth. Women have almost never enjoyed that same luxury. And we have lost — and continue to lose — so much because of this.

Women’s time poverty, particularly the lack of long, uninterrupted stretches of time, still limits the extent to which their knowledge and perspectives shape science, research, culture and art, as also evidenced by the latest CEP study. As a result, the world we build doesn’t accurately serve and represent the whole of humanity. Just a fraction of it.

Time spent on care and domestic labour is certainly not wasted time. Our entire world, and patriarchy itself, runs on it. It essentially runs on women’s time. Yet it simultaneously refuses to recognise its value.

Women can’t then keep surrendering their time out of the goodness of their hearts, no matter how insistently patriarchy frames it as duty or love or ‘just how things are.’ Every promise of equality, however grand, will too remain little more than a fairy tale unless women’s time is valued as equal to men’s. But also, unless women themselves start treating it that way, snatching it back whenever and wherever possible.

So go read that book, drink your tea, or do whatever else you feel like — and do take your time. You might be the first woman in your lineage to do so.

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Over the past decade, academic freedom declined in 50 countries, with only 9 registering any improvement. That’s according to the latest Academic Freedom Index, which measures the extent to which academics can research, teach, publish, express their views, and participate in academic life without interference.

The situation is particularly grim in the US, which the report notes is now outpacing not only its Western peers but even autocratising countries such as Hungary, India, and Türkiye in throttling academic freedom.

This downward spiral, together with the growing public distrust of experts and intellectuals — the so-called ‘elitist’ woke class — and the continuous flood of mis- and disinformation, signals a worrying rise in anti-intellectualism. What now passes for ‘common sense’ and ‘critical thinking’ is too often just a knee-jerk rejection of scientific consensus, powered by vibes and contrarianism for contrarianism’s sake, not rigorous analysis or evidence. It doesn’t matter what you’re saying, as long as it’s the opposite of what they say, and as long as you shout loud enough.

Yet this current wave of anti-intellectualism isn’t just triggered by global democratic backsliding, nor is it applied evenly across all fields. Instead, it’s more selective — but also, gendered.

Today, women are more educated than at any point in history. And the gender gap in education hasn’t just closed but flipped, with women making up roughly 60% of graduates in high-income countries. They’re increasingly the ones scooping up advanced degrees, too.

In Europe, women account for the majority (58.6% as of 2022) of those enrolled in master’s programmes, and nearly half (48.5%) of doctoral students. In the US, the divide is even starker — women outnumber men at both levels, earning nearly twice as many master’s degrees and around 40% more doctorates overall. American women are also beginning to dominate academic fields once dominated by men, including law, medicine, veterinary medicine, and pharmacy.

And while more women are chasing degrees, more men are bowing out. Since 2020 alone, nearly a quarter of a million fewer men have enrolled in US colleges. Meanwhile, an NBC News poll conducted last year found that two-thirds of Americans believe a four-year college degree isn’t worth the cost. Surveys in the UK suggest a similar, and growing, sentiment.

In other words, the perceived worth of higher education has waned just as women have begun to outnumber men within it. Is it really a coincidence?

Take, for instance, fields long dominated by women — such as gender studies and, more broadly, the humanities and social sciences, the disciplines most frequently written off as ‘useless’, ‘not real’, or offering ‘no value to society’. Unsurprisingly, these are now also among the most aggressively targeted. Across the US, gender and women’s studies programmes are being shut down or face reductions as the second Trump administration continues to bulldoze through diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. Similar, though less intense, attacks are taking place in parts of Europe as well, notably in Hungary.

The White House has also challenged a range of other university funding programs and cancelled federal humanities grants. And, as expected, the consequences are uneven. A recent analysis published in PNAS revealed that last year’s federal funding cuts at the National Institutes of Health disproportionately affected early-career researchers and women — 58% of terminated projects were led by women, compared to 48% led by men.

But it’s not only research explicitly done by or about women or gender that risks being devalued. Researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Education analysed nearly 1 million doctoral dissertations from US universities over a recent 40-year period, classifying them as more ‘feminised’ or ‘masculinised’ based on words referencing gender as well as terms with a stronger association with women — like school, parent, culture, and participation — and those with men — efficiency, energy, and electronics. And they found that across disciplines, from sociology to computer science, academics whose research topics were more ‘feminine’ had consistently poorer career prospects. The researchers also uncovered that this pattern held steady over the entire four decades.

In an unequal, prejudice-ridden society, the value of knowledge is often judged by the identity of those who produce it. So, in a patriarchal society upheld by misogynistic beliefs and attitudes, knowledge is devalued when it becomes associated with women. And it’s not the only thing that does.

Even if you doubt the link between anti-intellectualism and misogyny, just listen to the people at the top of our economic food chain who no longer bother to whisper the quiet part. In a recent CNBC interview, billionaire and Palantir CEO Alex Karp described their AI technology as targeting ‘highly educated, often female voters, who vote mostly Democrat.’ In previous interviews, he’s also repeatedly taken aim at higher education, urging young people to skip it altogether.

Many other tech billionaires have been singing the same tune, aligning themselves, politically and ideologically, with populist and far-right movements that are waging a ‘war on woke and feminism.’

And so have ‘manosphere’ influencers — the online peddlers of get-rich-quick schemes and questionable lifestyle advice, all wrapped in misogynistic, dehumanising rhetoric. One such figure has even recently declared that reading books is ‘for losers’ and a ‘total waste of time,’ adding that ‘he’s too smart’ for it.

The devaluation of reading and books, and the consequent plummet in reading time, is yet another alarming recent phenomenon. One of the most extensive studies on the subject, published last year in iScience, found that daily reading for pleasure among Americans — across books, audiobooks, magazines, and newspapers — has dropped by 40% over the past couple of decades. Studies in the UK and Europe have identified a parallel trend. And, yes, there’s a gender gap here, too. The study in iScience shows that both women and people with higher education levels (who, as we saw earlier, are increasingly women) are more likely to read. Women also read more fiction, from a more diverse pool of writers, and publish more books than men.

The pattern strikes again: interest in reading mysteriously (or not really) plummets, just as more women pick up the pen and turn the pages.

In some ways, this is reminiscent of the 18th- and 19th-century backlash against the novel, which was declared ‘dead’ by literary critics relatively shortly after it first appeared, not least because it was mostly written and read by women, usually exploring ‘frivolous’ and ‘unimportant’ themes of courtship, marriage, love, family life, and domesticity. As one male critic wrote in 1760:

So long as our British ladies continue to encourage our hackney scribblers, by reading every romance that appears, we need not wonder that the press should swarm with such poor insignificant productions.

Although, at least back then, other intellectual pursuits were still respected. Women, after all, continued to be barred or discouraged from attending formal education, universities, professional societies, cultural institutions, etc. Prestige followed men and masculinity, because the male perspective itself was ‘respected’, ‘serious’, and, above all, ‘universal.’

But now that more and more women exist, and excel, in these highbrow spaces, now that we’re free to read, learn, study, and work, the prestige and respect once associated with them seem to be in ever shorter supply.

And it isn’t only women who pay the price.

Teaching, too, has gone from being largely male-dominated in the 19th century and earlier to female-dominated with the expansion of the public school system and women’s access to education. Catharine Beecher, a 19th-century educator and anti-suffragist, even argued that teaching was ‘women’s work,’ claiming that women’s innate ‘nurturing’ abilities made them ideally suited to the role.

Only whatever occupation gets branded as such, as ‘women’s work,’ and then becomes female-dominated, suffers from the double-whammy of decreased prestige and pay, a phenomenon also known as ‘occupational feminisation, as coined and identified by sociologist Paula England.

It’s then no wonder that teachers — still mostly women— don’t exactly enjoy much of either, earning significantly less than their equally educated peers. Or that these days, they also find themselves lumped in with academics and experts as public enemy number one. One British far-right figure even recently declared a ‘war on teachers,’ accusing them of ‘poisoning our kids.’

For aspiring and unrepentant autocrats, it’s certainly convenient that women are increasingly associated with the very activities that can clear away the fog of ignorance and passive compliance. Misogyny isn’t the only driver behind this wave of anti-intellectualism, but it’s nonetheless a powerful one that, although too often ignored, can’t be ignored any longer if we hope to change course one day.

Both history and the present show that whatever women embrace is quickly dismissed as ‘feminine,’ ‘uncool,’ ‘niche,’ and, inevitably, ‘lesser.’ And when this happens to higher education, the social sciences, the humanities, or even reading, the result is a society that’s vulnerable to polarisation and manipulation by those with the most power, to their gain and everyone else’s expense.

When we devalue the understanding of how our society works, how its different parts interact and flow into one another, we effectively also lose the ability to repair it. Because how do you solve massive problems like climate change or wealth inequality if you don’t understand the cultural forces and the collective behaviours that fuel them, or who they affect most? Or how do you discern facts from falsehoods polluting our information ecosystems when you only know how to consume, not to question?

You can’t just slap a technological, AI-powered plaster on problems that aren’t technological to begin with. And most of our problems today aren’t.

Anti‑intellectualism has long been the handmaiden of authoritarianism. Right now, it serves patriarchy as well.

Time and again, society has stunted its own progress through its disdain, conscious or not, for women and all things deemed ‘feminine.’ And this won’t be the last time if we keep failing to recognise and expose these patterns for the utter nonsense they are.

In the meantime, women shouldn’t back down from the pursuit of knowledge and equality, no matter how hard some people are working to shove them back into the rigid mould they have just escaped from. But men need to join them, too.

A society that can’t think about itself can’t save itself.

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Almost a third of Gen Z men — those born between 1997 and 2012 — believe a wife should obey her husband, according to a survey by Ipsos and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London, released for this year’s International Women’s Day (IWD).

Across the entire sample, which included more than 23,000 people in 29 countries, the situation was admittedly less extreme — about one in five respondents agreed with this statement. In the US, the proportion was slightly above the global average, at 23%, while in Australia and the UK, it dropped to 18% and 13%, respectively. In some places, however, such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and India, over half of the population surveyed held this belief.

Still, what’s most worrying is that Gen Z men seem to cling more tightly to ‘traditional’ gender roles than any previous generation. A third, for example, also believe that a husband should have the final say in important decisions, compared with just 17% of baby boomer men (born 1946–1964). And nearly a quarter think women shouldn’t appear too independent or self-sufficient, double the share among men in that older cohort.

This is quite paradoxical. For one, because young people are often assumed to be more, not less, likely to reject rigid social expectations, including those related to gender. But also because young men today hardly fit the traditional masculinity mould either.

In fact, it’s hard to imagine that most of them ever will.

Even during the periods we tend to imagine as the height of traditional gender roles, male authority in the household — and women’s supposed obedience — were never entirely automatic. A man’s privilege and power in the home were instead largely conditional on his ability to provide.

As historian John Tosh writes in A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-class Home in Victorian England:

This [breadwinning] was what justified the husband in demanding the deference and obedience of his wife and children. Failure to provide was unmanly and undermined the claim to authority. Hence for a wife to make this charge against her husband was to strike him at his most vulnerable point — sometimes at the cost of inciting him to violence.

The term ‘breadwinner’ itself only really caught on in the early Victorian period, i.e., the first half of the nineteenth century. By that point, domestic production (making goods at home) was becoming outdated, and labour increasingly meant work done outside the home, usually for a wage or salary. And among some socio-economic groups, it was mostly men who ‘won’ the bread, while women’s labour at home faded into the near-invisible background.

The key phrase here, though, is ‘some’. For upper-class Victorians, earning bread was rarely a must, although their lives were still structured along gender lines, with men managing estates, finances, public roles, etc., while women handled domestic and social duties. Among the working classes, on the other hand — the majority, making up around 75–85% — paid work and breadwinning weren’t just male domains. Analysis of nineteenth-century census data from England and Wales by researchers Amanda Wilkinson and Edward Higgs shows that many married women worked, too. Nobel Prize winner Claudia Goldin also uncovered a similar pattern in her research on the US labour force.

Even during the supposedly halcyon mid-20th-century ‘housewife era,’ a period heavily curated by glossy magazines and advertisements promoting the idealised image of eternally cheerful homemakers, not all women stayed home, especially those who weren’t white, and not all men were the sole earners. In fact, in the US in 1950, married women in the workforce outnumbered single women — 8.6 million to 5.6 million.

The breadwinner model was neither ‘universal’ nor ‘traditional.’ Yet it took root in our cultural imagination anyway. And although there was another version of martial masculinity taking shape in the nineteenth century as well — following the British Empire’s intensified imperialist ambitions in the 1880s — defined by toughness, aggression, and obedience to higher-ranking men, traditional masculinity came to be mostly equated with authority earned through money and status.

Of course, a man’s ability to perform this role depended on a number of conditions other than class, particularly later on: women being excluded or discouraged from pursuing higher education and many professional careers, which limited their access to well-paid work, yes, but also steady employment and a single income being enough to support a family.

So what happens when few, if any, of these conditions can be met, but some still hold tight to these old norms?

The IWD survey also shows that the gap in beliefs between Gen Z men and women tends to be wider than in previous generations, particularly when it comes to gender roles and equality.

More than half (54%) of Gen Z women now identify as feminists and agree that things would work better if women held more leadership positions, both figures higher than among women in any previous age group, and much higher than among Gen Z men. The overwhelming majority also rejects the idea that a wife should obey her husband, or that marriage suffers if a man stays at home to raise children while his partner works.

But perhaps the most surprising gap shows up in attitudes toward the attractiveness of women’s professional success (see the bottom-right chart below). While Gen Z women are slightly less likely than Millennial women to say that successful women are attractive to men, Gen Z men are the most likely demographic group — across all ages and genders — to say so.

If you tried to stitch together the ideal partner based on what some Gen Z men say they want, you’d likely end up with a peculiar hybrid: a woman who’s ambitious and professionally accomplished, enjoying the freedoms won by the women’s rights movements in public life and earning a good income, yet still willing to stick to old gender rules at home.

But given all the other recent studies pointing to widening ideological, religious, and political divides between young men and women, there simply aren’t many women who fit that description — and certainly not enough to match the demand. After all, that gap shows up even among young people who share the same politics. A recent NBC News Decision Desk poll, for instance, found that right-wing Gen Z men see marriage and parenthood as life’s ultimate achievements, while their female peers are more likely to value… independence and spirituality.

Some young men might want to cosplay as well-off Victorians or characters from 1950s ads, but they can neither easily find women willing to play along nor realistically live up to those roles themselves — and they seem to be aware of that, too. The old traditional gender bargain has collapsed, both socially and economically.

Younger generations, in particular, are up against a grim economic reality. Youth unemployment is often twice as high as for everyone else, so many struggle to find stable, long-term work. Meanwhile, wages have stagnated while housing costs have shot up, making it much, much harder to buy a home now than it was for previous generations. For most households, a single income is also no longer enough to cover even basic living expenses.

I’d argue that it’s precisely this mix of economic precarity and status anxiety stemming from failing to meet masculine expectations that fuels the political and ideological gender gap among young people. The online ‘manosphere,’ along with right-wing populists, then exploit this sentiment by promising a return to the so-called ‘good old days’ of male breadwinners and female homemakers. For many young men, this presents a seemingly straightforward, even if ultimately illusory, solution to their problems.

In the most extreme scenario, this would entail forcing women out of the workforce en masse. In the short term, a smaller labour supply could indeed push wages up in some sectors. But over time, removing millions of workers would shrink consumer demand, cut economic output, and make the whole economy smaller — an illustration of what economists call the ‘lump of labour’ fallacy, the mistaken belief that there’s only so much work to go around. What’s far more likely is that shutting women out would push wages and household incomes down, and then hand even more power and wealth to those already at the top.

So, yes, we’d manage to turn back the clock. But not exactly to better times.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that most young and young-ish people — Gen Z and Millennials alike — feel as though the rug has been pulled out from under us, and no matter how hard we try to find stability or certainty in this reality, we end up failing, often miserably. And when the world outside your own bubble feels out of control, it can perhaps be tempting to try to tighten your grip on what happens inside it instead.

Although the breadwinner model at the heart of old-school masculinity is no longer economically or socially viable for most men, especially young men, they can still look for other ways to assert authority. The fantasy of an obedient ‘trad’ wife at home and a modern woman in the workforce is one such shortcut. In this arrangement, young men can gain the sense of symbolic dominance and validation that once mostly came with being a provider, without actually being one.

In practice, though, it’s actually women who do more of the ‘providing’, since they contribute through both paid labour and through the unpaid domestic, care, and emotional labour that keeps everything running.

But being stuck in the past, or caught in these fantasies, will ultimately hurt all of our futures. Young men won’t find control or security by clinging to social and economic systems that have always relied on the exploitation and subordination of a vast underclass of women — and men. Or by directing anger at women and their hard-won independence instead.

The way forward isn’t through symbolic power plays, trad-life fantasies, or a rollback of women’s economic security and independence. The way forward is through rewriting the old scripts around gender and relationships, but also work.

Men shouldn’t have to be breadwinners. Most men never really were — and certainly not if you look at the whole of human history rather than just the last couple of centuries — and most likely never will be. But women shouldn’t have to be, either. If initiatives such as a universal basic income were taken seriously, and the pressure to work to survive were lifted, relationships could be freed from financial stress and old hierarchies that still haunt so many of them. And they might become something else entirely. Something much better.

There are many things we could control if we only collectively set our minds to it instead of turning on one another.

The good news is that the latest IWD survey shows that in many countries, the die-hard defenders of traditional gender roles are in the minority, even if that minority is bigger than we might hope, and likely a tad bigger than it was some years ago.

Unfortunately, progress tends to be wonky. We take one step forward, then two or more steps back. And then we start again and again.

Still, young men and everyone else would do well to keep their eyes on the road ahead, not the rearview mirror, and keep taking those steps forward.

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