The male power myth

The claim that “men run society” begins with a true observation: men really are more common at the top of politics. The error comes when the sex of a small group at the top is turned into power held by men in general.

As of 1 January 2026, women held 27.5% of seats in national parliaments worldwide and 22.4% of cabinet posts. Among parliamentarians whose sex was known to the IPU, there were 31,912 men and 12,083 women.¹

That establishes a male majority in the political elite. It does not establish collective male rule over women.

A president and a homeless man can both be male. The president’s sex gives the homeless man no authority, money, or right to issue orders.

Power means being able to make someone act

Political science treats power as a relationship. In Robert Dahl’s classic formulation, one actor has power over another to the extent that the first can get the second to do something they would not otherwise do.²

A claim about power therefore needs a holder, a target, and some means of influence or compulsion. Office, property, money, control of a budget, military command, and lawful authority to issue binding decisions can all confer power. Being male by itself confers none of them.

Employer and employee can both be men. So can judge and defendant, general and private. Shared sex does not erase the subordination of one to the other.

Most legislators being men is not most men being legislators

At the start of 2026, the IPU counted 31,912 men among national parliamentarians whose sex was known.¹ That is a large majority among parliamentarians. There are, however, billions of men in the world.

“Most generals are men” does not mean “most men are generals.” A private receives no share of a general’s authority merely because both are male.

This is an aggregation error: a property of a small subgroup is assigned to the enormous category that contains it.

A male office-holder does not automatically represent men

There is a stronger version of the argument. An ordinary man may have little power himself, but perhaps the men at the top still govern in his interests.

Sometimes they do. A politician can enact a policy that benefits men as a group. Shared sex, however, does not tell us whom that politician substantively represents.

Research on political representation distinguishes the presence of a group in office from the representation of that group’s interests. Jane Mansbridge argues that descriptive representation can, under some conditions, improve communication, trust, experiential knowledge, and legitimacy. Her claim is contingent, not automatic.³

The sex of a legislator tells us something about the composition of a parliament. To learn who benefits and who pays, we need to examine laws, budgets, and outcomes.

When influence is measured directly

Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page examined 1,779 U.S. policy issues. In their model, economic elites and organized business interests had substantial independent effects on policy, while average citizens and mass-based groups had little or no independent influence.⁴

This is evidence about the United States, not a universal model of every country. For our purpose, the narrower point is enough: political influence can vary enormously within the same sex.

A wealthy man with political access and a man with no office, money, or organization behind him may have radically different capacities to shape public decisions. A male face at the top does not tell us who actually holds the lever.

Who elects a male-heavy elite?

The simple “male rule” story often skips a basic fact about democracies: office-holders are chosen by electorates, not by “men” as a sex.

Women have long participated in U.S. elections at higher rates than men. In the 2024 presidential election, the Census Bureau estimated turnout at 66.9% among women and 63.7% among men. In absolute numbers, 81.5 million women and 72.8 million men reported voting.¹¹

A male president can therefore win office in an electorate in which women outnumber men. His sex alone does not make the system a form of collective male self-government.

The evidence also blocks an opposite exaggeration. In 2024, U.S. women did not prefer the male candidate to the female candidate. Pew’s analysis of validated voters found that men favored Trump by 12 points, while women favored Harris by 7 points.¹²

So “women choose men to rule them” is too crude. The stronger claim is that women themselves help constitute political authority, and in the United States women outnumber men among those who report voting. That authority cannot honestly be assigned to one sex merely because the winner is male.

United States: women are more supportive of a larger state

The United States also has a persistent partisan gender gap. In Pew’s 2026 benchmark, 52% of women identified with or leaned toward the Democratic Party and 38% toward the Republican Party. Among men, the figures were 43% Democratic/lean Democratic and 49% Republican/lean Republican.¹³

The parties differ sharply over the role of government. In 2024, roughly three quarters of supporters of the Democratic presidential candidate preferred a larger government providing more services and a more active government role in solving problems.¹⁴ In an older direct gender comparison from 2019, 58% of women preferred a larger government providing more services, compared with 37% of men.¹⁵

These numbers do not prove a psychological story in which women “shift responsibility to the state.” Surveys measure political preferences, not hidden motives.

This changes the picture of power. Women in the United States are more likely to support a party that gives the state a larger social role, while the visible leadership of the state may still be disproportionately male. A man in office can be administering a political program supported by millions of women.

That is very different from the idea that men gathered together and built the state for men.

Russia: a paternalist rather than left-liberal version

Russia works differently. It would be misleading to describe it as an extension of the American left-liberal pattern.

Rosstat shows that women outnumber men in Russia’s population, with the imbalance especially large at older ages.¹⁶ We did not find a reliable national table breaking down actual turnout in the 2024 Russian presidential election by sex, so we will not invent a figure for women’s share of voters.

There is another relevant measure. In June 2024, the Levada Center reported that Vladimir Putin’s performance as president was especially likely to be approved by women: 88%. Men were more likely to appear in the disapproval group.¹⁷ This is approval, not vote choice, and the two should not be conflated.

Russian women do not simply demand a monopoly of male office-holders. In 2024, 73% of women approved of women participating in politics and 62% wanted women to hold top state offices on equal terms with men. Yet only 25% of women wanted a woman to become president within the next 10 to 15 years.¹⁸ In a 2025 FOM survey, 50% of Russians said they could imagine voting for a woman for president, while 38% ruled it out.¹⁹

The Russian pattern therefore cannot be reduced either to “women want a male master” or to “men exclude women from power.” A woman can support women’s political participation and still support a particular strong male president.

The implication is direct: the male sex of the head of state does not show that the state expresses the collective will of men.

Russia’s executive branch: male at the top, female-heavy in the apparatus

The federal cabinet must be distinguished from the much larger administrative machinery beneath it. In the current Russian Government, the prime minister, the overwhelming majority of deputy prime ministers, and most federal ministers are men.²⁵

The civil-service workforce looks very different. An official government report states that in 2021 women were 59.4% of civil servants in the central offices of federal government bodies and 74.2% of civil servants in regional executive bodies. Women were about 40% of managers in the federal central apparatus and 61% of managers in regional executive bodies.²⁶

In March 2026, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin put the point more simply: women generally predominate in the civil service, and in some agencies their share exceeds 80%.²⁷

So “Russia’s executive power is mostly female” is too broad if it refers to the political top. But the administrative state, especially regional executive civil service, is genuinely female-majority.

A visible political apex can be male while a large part of routine state administration is carried out by women. Counting only ministers makes that layer disappear.

Who raises men?

Political elites are only one layer of authority. Long before a person votes, adults spend years setting rules, evaluating behavior, rewarding conformity, and imposing sanctions.

Here the sex balance looks very different.

In U.S. public schools in 2020–21, 77% of teachers were women. At the elementary level, 89% were women. Women also made up a majority of principals: 56% in public schools and 63% in private schools.²⁰

For Russia, we did not find a convenient current national table for the sex composition of school teachers, so regional data should not be presented as a national percentage. The scale of the imbalance is nevertheless visible in official regional statistics. In the Komi Republic, women were 88% of school teachers in 2020–21; at the end of 2024, all 3,746 preschool educators in the region were women.²¹

Higher education is more mixed. Russia’s Ministry of Science and Higher Education, citing Rosstat, reported that women were 58% of teaching faculty, while women were 42% of Candidates of Sciences and 27% of Doctors of Sciences.²² In the United States in 2023, men were a slight majority among full-time faculty, and the gap was much larger among full professors: 120,390 men versus 71,910 women.²³

The claim that “men are raised by men in a male system” therefore describes childhood badly. Boys spend much of preschool and school receiving rules and evaluations from women. Male representation rises in higher education, especially near the top of the academic hierarchy.

None of this makes female teachers responsible for boys’ problems. It does make it implausible to explain male gender norms as rules “men imposed on men” alone. Women also transmit norms, reward conformity, and sanction violations. The mechanism is discussed separately in the myth of “male” gender rules and in the education section.

Family power does not appear in cabinet photographs

There is also private authority: the capacity to shape a child’s daily routine, rules, habits, and social environment.

Among U.S. different-sex couples in which both parents worked full time, 52% said in 2026 that the mother did more of the day-to-day parenting tasks; 10% said the father did more, and 39% said the work was shared about equally. Mothers also did more household chores in a plurality of these families.²⁴

That is first of all work and burden. It would be dishonest to relabel it as pure privilege. But work that includes daily decisions about a child also carries influence. A person can do more unpaid work and at the same time shape more of the child’s daily environment.

After separation, this kind of authority becomes especially visible. The Russian sections on family and children and child support examine the situation in which one parent keeps the child’s daily life while the other receives a visitation schedule and a financial obligation. In Russian practice, the second role is often the father.

A poster saying “men are in power” can therefore hang over a family in which the mother makes most day-to-day decisions about the child while the father later has to litigate for access to his own child.

The state as a “man”: a useful metaphor with limits

There is an obvious temptation to describe the modern state as a large substitute man: it is expected to protect, provide, collect money, intervene in disputes, and assume responsibilities once associated with a husband.

As a metaphor, this can be useful. U.S. women are more likely to align with the party that assigns more social functions to government.¹³¹⁴ In Russia, women can support a strong male president while constituting a demographic majority and supporting women’s political participation.¹⁷¹⁸

But the state is not male. Its decisions are produced by parties, bureaucracies, businesses, interest groups, courts, and millions of voters of both sexes. “The state as man” is useful only as a description of a provider-protector role projected onto an institution.

Take the metaphor literally and the same analytical error returns: an institution is assigned a sex, then its actions are charged to every person of that sex.

A man between family and state

For an ordinary man, the sex of a minister often matters less than the demands that reach him from private life and public institutions.

A man may be expected to earn, protect, initiate, and remain stable. After divorce, the state may preserve his financial obligation while his participation in the child’s daily life falls sharply. In Russia, the same state can conscript a male citizen aged 18 to 30 for military service.¹⁰

Conscription can affect the path to education before or after service as well. A study of Russia’s 2007–2008 conscription reform found that affected men were approximately 12% less likely to graduate from higher education.²⁸ That does not prove that the military explains male political disengagement. It establishes the narrower point that the state imposes a sex-specific obstacle on men’s educational trajectory that can affect their human capital.

That position sits badly with the image of a “ruling sex.” A man’s obligations to family, employer, and state can accumulate without male sex granting him any general authority over them.

This does not prove female rule over men. It does disprove the simpler story that being male automatically places a person on the side of power.

Power beside the throne was still power

History makes the same point in another way. Formal office is not the only channel of political influence.

Recent scholarship on monarchy treats rule as a dynastic and court system rather than the solitary work of one individual. Queens regnant, queens consort, regents, dowagers, royal mothers, favorites, and other women around the court could act as advisers, brokers, patrons, diplomats, and participants in government. A 2026 Oxford Research Encyclopedia review explicitly describes monarchy as a cooperative enterprise and royal women as key political actors across periods and regions.²⁹

A similar pattern appears in modern presidential systems. U.S. first ladies are neither elected nor appointed to public office, yet scholars treat them as political partners, advisers, campaigners, and policy advocates whose influence can be domestic and international.³⁰

This does not mean every wife secretly ruled her husband. Nor can we claim without evidence that most expansions of women’s rights came from rulers’ daughters, wives, or mistresses.

The opposite extreme is equally misleading. A woman’s absence from a cabinet list does not mean an absence of female political influence. Where formal office was closed to women, kinship, marriage, court access, and personal proximity to rulers were real channels of power.

An heiress is not a feminist quota

Female monarchs provide another useful case. They usually came to power through dynastic succession, not through a movement for women’s representation. Scholarship on medieval and early modern monarchy distinguishes several routes to female power: queen consort, regent, and reigning queen who inherited the throne.²⁹

In many dynasties, however, women faced a harder path to succession and could inherit only in the absence of a suitable male heir. Dynastic succession therefore shows two things at once. Women could exercise supreme political authority long before modern feminism, while succession rules often still preferred men.

Men, of course, also became rulers by inheritance. So inheritance does not establish a uniquely female privilege. It establishes something more relevant here: class and dynastic position could give one woman far more power than sex gave the overwhelming majority of men.

A queen could command a male peasant because she was monarch and he was subject, not because “women ruled men.” That distinction is central to any serious account of power.

Women’s rights were changed by movements and by people close to power

One mythology should not be replaced with another. History contains many cases of informal influence by wives, mothers, daughters, favorites, and first ladies. But the broad claim that women’s rights were granted mainly by women close to rulers rather than by organized women’s movements does not survive scrutiny.

Women’s suffrage in the United States is a direct counterexample. The U.S. National Archives describes the Nineteenth Amendment as the outcome of decades of organized agitation, petitions, lobbying, marches, picketing, and civil disobedience by the suffrage movement.³¹

First ladies also influenced debates about suffrage and, later, the Equal Rights Amendment. The causal structure is therefore not “movement or woman close to the president.” Both channels can operate: outside pressure from organized movements and inside access to the person making the decision.³⁰

Formal representation understates women’s political influence, but does not erase the causal role of women’s mass movements.

A quota is a sex-based restriction on a man

The central question is not whether a quota helps women. It is simpler: why should a man lose a chance at a position because he is male?

Once the state imposes a numerical target by sex, selection is no longer only a comparison between individual candidates. A man’s sex becomes a factor against him before his personal merits are exhausted. He can lose a place not because another candidate is better, but because the board still needs a different sex to satisfy the numerical rule.

This is not hypothetical. Directive (EU) 2022/2381 requires listed companies to reach by 30 June 2026 either at least 40% members of the underrepresented sex among non-executive directors or at least 33% among all directors. Where candidates are equally qualified, priority is to be given to the candidate of the underrepresented sex, subject to case-specific exceptions.³⁵

On boards where women are underrepresented, the practical consequence is straightforward: an equally qualified man can lose because he is a man. For him, that is not merely a correction to group statistics. It is sex being used as a lawful selection criterion against him.

The usual justification is historical imbalance. But an individual man is not a historical average. He did not hold all the seats occupied by men before him, and he cannot exercise their authority. Making his access depend on the percentage of other men in other boardrooms turns group statistics into an individual restriction.

There is a second effect: quotas can damage the signal of merit itself. In experiments by Madeline Heilman, Caryn Block, and Peter Stathatos, managers rated women identified as affirmative-action hires as less competent and recommended smaller salary increases than for men and women without that label.³² An institutional preference can therefore create a ready-made explanation of a woman’s success through sex, including for women who would have won without it.

Norway’s experience does not show that women who entered boards after the quota were weaker. On observable characteristics, they were more qualified than female directors before the reform.³³ But that does not answer the central issue. The fact that the woman who received the seat is highly qualified does not by itself prove that the man displaced or deprioritized by the rule was less qualified.

A 2021 experiment also did not find that announcing a quota significantly increased the existing gender gap in performance evaluations.³⁴ So there is no need to claim that every quota automatically makes people respect women less. Even without that claim, the quota already uses a man’s sex against him.

The problem is already contained in the rule: when a man and a woman are evaluated not only as two individuals but also as representatives of the wanted and unwanted sex, the man is no longer competing on his abilities alone. His sex becomes a lawful reason to prefer someone else.

The stigma imposed on women is then an additional cost of the same policy. Once a quota exists, observers have an easier explanation for female success, and suspicion can fall even on women who never needed the preference.

A quota does not cure discrimination against an individual man; it authorizes it for a group outcome. One can debate whether that cost is justified by a social goal. The cost to the individual man still exists because he is male.

What about the “patriarchal dividend”?

A stronger feminist response does not require every man to be personally powerful. The concept of a “patriarchal dividend” instead describes group advantages that men may receive even when most men are outside the elite.

That argument cannot be dismissed with “I am not the president.” Connell and Messerschmidt themselves stress multiple masculinities and hierarchies among men.⁵ There is also research on specific male advantages. Schwiter, Nentwich, and Keller document preferential treatment reported by some men in female-dominated occupations and discuss it as male privilege.⁶

Specific male advantages exist. A general “dividend,” however, cannot be calculated from only one side of the ledger.

If men as a group are said to receive an advantage, the analysis should identify which men receive it, where, by what mechanism, and at what cost. Conscription, dangerous work, harsher criminal punishment, loss of day-to-day fatherhood, and male provider obligations are also parts of gender systems. They do not disappear because the president is a man.

Men are visible at the bottom too

The ILO estimates work-related mortality at 51.4 per 100,000 working-age men compared with 17.2 per 100,000 women.⁷

The sixth World Female Imprisonment List reports that women and girls make up 6.8% of the world’s prison population. The overwhelming majority of prisoners are male.⁸

In 2021, men and boys accounted for 81% of homicide victims worldwide. More than nine in ten suspects in intentional homicides were also male.⁹

None of these figures proves discrimination against men by itself. They depend on occupations, offending, criminal policy, behavior, and many other causes.

They are useful here as a test of method. If a male majority among presidents automatically made a man part of a ruling class, the same reasoning would make him part of a prison or homicide “class.” Aggregate statistics do not work that way.

Almost the reverse picture — and still not matriarchy

If patriarchy means collective male rule over women, parts of the modern picture look almost inverted.

Boys are often surrounded by female preschool educators and teachers. Women can make up a larger share of voters. A large share of Russia’s executive bureaucracy is female. Mothers often do more day-to-day parenting and therefore exert more influence over a child’s daily life. A state can be headed by a man supported by women while an ordinary man remains subject to family, workplace, and state obligations.

In this narrow sense, the mechanism works against the simple patriarchal picture: women are not excluded from choosing authority, while a male-headed state can itself compel ordinary men.

Calling this “matriarchy” would repeat the same mistake in reverse. A female teacher does not gain power over all men. A female voter does not command every male politician. A female civil servant does not rule men as a class. A mother who does more childcare does not automatically rule her husband.

The narrower conclusion is stronger: the sex of the person at the top is a poor answer to the question of who has power over whom in a particular relationship.

Test

The claim “most of the political elite are men” is supported by the evidence.

The claim “therefore men as a sex run society” requires much more.

It would be necessary to show that the power of male elites is actually transferred to men in general; that policy systematically expresses the interests of men as a sex; that women’s influence through elections, families, education, civil service, and informal channels does not materially alter the picture; and that male-specific obligations and constraints do not outweigh the proposed group “dividend.”

Counting presidents, ministers, and billionaires is not enough.

The power of a particular man is better measured by whom he can compel, what decisions he can impose, and what resources he controls. If he is the one carrying out other people’s demands, the sex of the person above him is little consolation.

Sources and notes

1. Inter-Parliamentary Union, Global and regional averages of women in national parliaments, January 2026; UN Women and IPU, Women in politics: 2026: as of 1 January 2026, women held 27.5% of seats in national parliaments and 22.4% of cabinet posts.
2. Robert A. Dahl, The Concept of Power, Behavioral Science, 1957, 2(3):201–215.
3. Jane Mansbridge, Should Blacks Represent Blacks and Women Represent Women? A Contingent “Yes”, The Journal of Politics, 1999, 61(3):628–657.
4. Martin Gilens, Benjamin I. Page, Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens, Perspectives on Politics, 2014, 12(3):564–581.
5. R. W. Connell, James W. Messerschmidt, Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept, Gender & Society, 2005, 19(6):829–859.
6. Karin Schwiter, Julia Nentwich, Marisol Keller, Male privilege revisited: How men in female-dominated occupations notice and actively reframe privilege, Gender, Work & Organization, 2021, 28(6):2199–2215.
7. International Labour Organization, Nearly 3 million people die of work-related accidents and diseases, 2023.
8. Helen Fair, Roy Walmsley, World Female Imprisonment List, sixth edition, Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research, 2025.
9. United Nations, The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2023, Goal 16, UNODC data for 2021.
10. Federal Law No. 53-FZ of 28 March 1998, “On Military Duty and Military Service,” Article 22: conscription applies to male citizens aged 18 to 30 who meet the statutory conditions.
11. U.S. Census Bureau, 2024 Presidential Election Voting and Registration Tables Now Available, 2025; February 2026: Presidents Day: turnout was 66.9% among women and 63.7% among men; 81.5 million women and 72.8 million men reported voting.
12. Pew Research Center, How voting patterns changed in the 2024 election, 2025: men favored Trump by 12 points while women favored Harris by 7 points.
13. Pew Research Center, Party Affiliation Fact Sheet (NPORS), 2026.
14. Pew Research Center, Americans’ Views of Government’s Role: Persistent Divisions and Areas of Agreement, 2024.
15. Pew Research Center, Gender gap widens in views of government’s role – and of Trump, 2019.
16. Rosstat, Women and Men in Russia — 2024 and Population of the Russian Federation by sex and age.
17. Levada Center, June 2024 ratings.
18. Levada Center, Public perceptions of 23 February and 8 March, 2024.
19. FOM, International Women’s Day survey, 2025.
20. U.S. Department of Education, NCES, Characteristics of Public School Teachers and Characteristics of Public and Private School Principals, 2020–21.
21. Komi Statistics Office, School teacher composition, 2021; Preschool educators in the Komi Republic, 2025.
22. Russian Ministry of Science and Higher Education, Women in research and higher education, 2022, citing Rosstat.
23. U.S. Department of Education, NCES, Number of full-time faculty in degree-granting postsecondary institutions, by sex and academic rank: Fall 2023.
24. Pew Research Center, How working parents divide family responsibilities, 2026.
25. Government of Russia, Members of the Government, current composition checked for this article.
26. Government of Russia, official report on the National Strategy for Women, 2021 civil-service figures.
27. Government of Russia, remarks by Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, 5 March 2026: women generally predominate in the civil service and exceed 80% in some agencies.
28. Elena Kotyrlo, Elena Varshavskaya, Impact of the compulsory military service reform of 2007–2008 on the demand for higher education, Economics of Transition and Institutional Change, 2022, 30(4):715–735.
29. Elena Woodacre, Female Rulers and Queenship, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Gender and Women’s History, 2026; Amalie Fößel, The Political Traditions of Female Rulership in Medieval Europe, The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, 2013.
30. Lisa M. Burns, Teri Finneman (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to US First Ladies, Cambridge University Press, 2025; see also First Ladies, Suffrage, and the Equal Rights Amendment.
31. U.S. National Archives, 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Women’s Right to Vote, on the decades of organized suffrage agitation, lobbying, marches, picketing, and civil disobedience preceding ratification.
32. Madeline E. Heilman, Caryn J. Block, Peter Stathatos, The Affirmative Action Stigma of Incompetence: Effects of Performance Information Ambiguity, Academy of Management Journal, 1997, 40(3):603–625. In two experiments with 264 managers, women identified as affirmative-action hires were rated as less competent and received smaller recommended raises than men and women without that label.
33. Marianne Bertrand, Sandra E. Black, Sissel Jensen, Adriana Lleras-Muney, Breaking the Glass Ceiling? The Effect of Board Quotas on Female Labour Market Outcomes in Norway, Review of Economic Studies, 2019, 86(1):191–239. After Norway’s 40% board quota, women appointed to boards were observably more qualified than female directors before the reform; the authors found little discernible spillover to women outside boardrooms.
34. Albena Neschen, Sabine Hügelschäfer, Gender bias in performance evaluations: The impact of gender quotas, Journal of Economic Psychology, 2021, 85:102383. The study found lower evaluations of women in sequential evaluations, but the quota did not significantly increase the size of that bias.
35. Directive (EU) 2022/2381 on gender balance among directors of listed companies, Articles 5–6: by 30 June 2026 Member States must ensure that listed companies are subject to either a 40% objective for the underrepresented sex among non-executive directors or a 33% objective among all directors; where candidates are equally qualified, priority is given to the candidate of the underrepresented sex, subject to case-specific overriding reasons.