The myth that science confirms feminism

No. Science does not confirm feminism.

Science can support a particular effect, a particular instance of discrimination, or a particular group difference. Feminism is not one testable hypothesis. It is a family of political, historical, and moral claims about patriarchy, power, violence, family, work, sexuality, and the structure of society. Different feminist traditions also disagree about what oppression is and what should be done about it.⁷

So “science proved feminism” is already the wrong kind of sentence. Science cannot issue a certificate to an ideology. It has to break the ideology into claims and allow each claim to fail.

The trouble starts when that does not happen. The harshest examples of women’s position are collected from different countries, eras, cultures, and social classes, placed under one label — patriarchy — and the resulting collage is then presented as proof of patriarchy.

A woman could not control property in the nineteenth century. A girl is barred from school under a modern religious regime. A board has fewer women than men. One domestic-violence study finds more female victims. Another society has sex-specific inheritance rules. Every fact may be real. Their sum still does not establish one continuous mechanism of male power.

To establish a general system, the causal mechanism has to be shown. Sex has to be separated from class, wealth, religion, age, state power, war, family structure, and specific law. The same model must explain different societies better than serious alternatives.

Without that, the result is not a theory. It is a montage.

First the axiom, then the confirmation

Feminist philosophy often uses patriarchy as a broad system of male domination operating through family, state, economy, culture, and sexuality. Major overviews describe feminist inquiry as looking for the roots of a system understood as widespread across places and historical periods.⁷

That frame may be useful politically. Scientifically, its breadth creates a problem.

A male-heavy elite can be called patriarchy. A boy educated mostly by women can still be said to suffer patriarchy. A man killed in dangerous work can be treated as a victim of “toxic masculinity.” A woman who prefers traditional roles can be described through internalized patriarchy.

The framework can absorb almost any result.

When both confirmation and apparent contradiction can be translated into the same concept, the concept is no longer doing much testing. It starts sorting observations into predetermined boxes.

This does not make every paper using the word patriarchy bad. It means the word itself proves nothing. In every case we still need to show who has power over whom, through which mechanism, and why sex is the relevant cause.

Suffragists are ancestors, not a permanent moral blank cheque

There is no reason to rewrite history in reverse. The connection between feminism and suffrage is real. English use of the word feminism is historically rooted in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century mobilization for women’s rights and suffrage. What later became known as first-wave feminism was heavily focused on basic political and civil rights.⁷

But historical descent is not programmatic identity.

The 1848 Declaration of Sentiments demanded voting rights, control of wages and property, and access to education and professions.⁸ These were concrete legal disabilities that could be identified in law and removed.

By 1966, the U.S. National Organization for Women had a broader goal: bring women into full participation in mainstream political, economic, and social life. Its current agenda includes reproductive rights, economic outcomes, racial justice, LGBTQ policy, violence, and constitutional change.⁸

That is not the same program as allowing a married woman to own her wages or a woman to cast a ballot.

You cannot borrow the moral weight of a woman who was legally barred from voting and use it as automatic proof for a board quota a century later. A quota may be good or bad policy, but it needs its own argument. Historical debt is not evidence.

Modern feminism can reasonably call itself an heir to the suffrage movement. An heir still has to defend each new demand on its own merits.

Once legal exclusions fall, the object of politics changes

Across Western democracies, most of the direct legal exclusions targeted by early women’s-rights movements have been removed: women vote, own property, contract, study, enter professions, and hold public office. That does not mean every legal dispute or every case of discrimination has disappeared. It means the object of political struggle is no longer the same as it was in 1848 or 1910.⁸

As direct exclusions recede, the agenda moves toward outcomes: representation at the top, unpaid care, speech norms, childcare financing, sex ratios in occupations, reproductive law, and identity policy.

Those are arguments about how society should allocate costs, risks, and positions. They cannot simply be presented as the unfinished mechanics of basic legal capacity.

Our standard is straightforward: adult emancipation is reached when sex no longer determines a person’s rights and duties, not when government guarantees a preferred outcome. After that come personal responsibility, competition, negotiation, and the consequences of one’s own choices.

Equal adult status includes the right to succeed, the right to fail, and no permanent entitlement to explain every loss as a collective debt owed by men.

If patriarchy means every hierarchy, the word loses its subject

Ordinary definitions of patriarchy still refer to male control or male dominance, not merely to the existence of a superior and a subordinate.⁹

But activist usage often expands. A hierarchical corporation becomes patriarchal. Competition becomes patriarchal. Hard management becomes patriarchal. Performance demands become patriarchal.

Then a simple question follows. If the same structure is still “patriarchal” when the CEO is a woman, HR is mostly female, much of management is female, and male employees carry out their orders, what is specifically male about the structure?

If the answer is hierarchy, discipline, money, authority, and coercion, the subject is not patriarchy. It is management, bureaucracy, state power, or capitalism.

That distinction matters because causal claims depend on definitions. If the problem is hierarchy itself, the sex of the manager is secondary. If the problem is male power over women, then the evidence has to show men as a group exercising power over women as a group.

You cannot expand patriarchy to mean every unpleasant vertical structure and then use the existence of vertical structures as proof of male rule.

Corporate feminism does not abolish the hierarchy. It asks for a share at the top

There is no mystery about why feminists do not generally leave corporations and build an economy without management.

Liberal feminism largely never promised to abolish managerial hierarchy. NOW’s 1966 founding statement was explicit: women should enter the mainstream of American society and participate fully in decision-making alongside men.⁸

The goal was access to existing institutions.

From that perspective, a female CEO of a large corporation is a feminist success even if she fires employees, cuts budgets, and demands overtime exactly as a man in the same role would.

That exposes a weakness in loose talk about “patriarchal hierarchy.” If the hierarchy becomes acceptable once enough women occupy its senior positions, the movement was not fighting power as such. It was fighting over the distribution of power.

That is a coherent political position. It should simply be named accurately.

The loudest disputes are not necessarily where legal restrictions are worst

Large, direct legal gaps affecting women still exist worldwide. UN reviews continue to document restrictions involving work, property, marriage, violence, and access to justice, with sharp differences between countries.¹²

It would be false to say that feminism is absent where women face severe restrictions. Women’s-rights movements also operate under highly repressive conditions.

But there is an obvious asymmetry: the freer and wealthier the society, the easier it is to sustain public activism — to publish, organize, litigate, build NGOs, enter universities and media, and pressure institutions. Visibility therefore does not measure severity.

A dispute over the percentage of women on a Western corporate board can occupy more public space than the life of a woman in a country where she cannot freely study, work, or direct her own life.

That is not an argument that local problems must be ignored because somewhere else is worse. It is an argument against confusing media volume with moral scale.

Communist emancipation really did contain a project against the old family

It is historically wrong to derive all feminism from Alexandra Kollontai or Nadezhda Krupskaya; women’s-rights and suffrage movements predated them. But the revolutionary socialist branch did contain a much more radical project for the family.

In 1920 Kollontai explicitly described the old family as withering away under communism. Domestic economic functions were to move to social institutions, child-rearing increasingly to the collective, and women’s material dependence on husbands was to disappear.¹⁰

That is not a hostile paraphrase. It is her own program.

Krupskaya should not simply be inserted into the same claim. She linked women’s emancipation to socialism, but she explicitly rejected the caricature that joining the party meant giving up husband and children. She argued for remaking family life along communist lines, not simply abandoning family.¹¹

The accurate claim is stronger than the slogan: part of socialist women’s emancipation really did aim to strip the traditional family of much of its economic and child-rearing function. That does not mean feminism as a whole was invented to destroy the family.

Peer review can pass ideologically convenient nonsense

Even if we leave political philosophy aside and look only at academic machinery, the label peer reviewed does not solve the problem.

Reviewers generally do not rerun the experiment or rebuild a study from scratch. They judge work inside the concepts and norms of a discipline. A politically homogeneous field is therefore especially vulnerable to missing its own starting assumptions.

In 2015 José Duarte, Jonathan Haidt, Lee Jussim, Philip Tetlock and colleagues examined this problem in social psychology, arguing that political homogeneity can affect question selection, method, interpretation, and treatment of inconvenient findings.⁴

If almost everyone in the conversation already treats patriarchy as the correct starting model, the number of papers using patriarchy does not turn that model into an independent result.

The Grievance Studies Affair: reviewers accepted the right ideological grammar

In 2017–2018 Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian submitted twenty deliberately provocative and in places fabricated manuscripts to journals in gender, race, sexuality, and related fields. Before the project was exposed, four papers had been published and three more accepted.⁶

The best-known manuscript, Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism, was accepted by Affilia. A substantial part reworked material from chapter 12 of Mein Kampf into the language of intersectional feminism.⁶

The meme that the authors merely “replaced Jews with men” is inaccurate. The text was substantially rewritten. That does not rescue the review process. The authors learned to reproduce the expected moral and conceptual frame well enough for deliberately constructed material to be treated seriously.

The project had methodological weaknesses and cannot tell us what percentage of an entire field is bad.⁶

The narrower fact remains uncomfortable: ideologically recognizable prose can win reviewer approval even when it was deliberately built to probe the weaknesses of that intellectual environment.

Scientific language increasingly sells the result

The problem is broader than gender studies.

A BMJ analysis of PubMed abstracts from 1974 to 2014 found selected positive terms rising from about 2.0% of records to 17.5%, while selected negative terms rose from 1.3% to 3.2%. Neutral terms did not show the same pattern. Words such as robust, novel, innovative, and unprecedented rose especially sharply.¹

A later Scientometrics study of more than 2.3 million abstracts in psychology, biology, and physics found the growth of positively loaded language persisted after adjustments and was strongest in psychology.²

This does not prove a literal substitution of emotion for evidence. It does show a shift: scientific writing increasingly does more than report a result; it sells the result as new, strong, and important.

In politically charged disciplines there is an additional risk: a paper can be rewarded not only for being interesting, but for telling the morally expected story.

Social science is politically homogeneous

A 2026 Theory and Society analysis of roughly 600,000 English-language social-science abstracts from 1960–2024 classified about 90% of politically relevant papers as left-leaning under the study’s scale, with the leftward shift intensifying after 1990.⁵

That does not make every left-leaning paper false. It does make “academia agrees with itself, therefore the question is closed” a weak argument.

The internal consensus of a politically homogeneous environment is not an independent test of the environment’s starting concepts.

The replication crisis showed the price of a published result

In 2015 the Open Science Collaboration attempted to replicate 100 studies from three leading psychology journals. The original studies reported statistically significant findings in 97% of cases. The replications did so in 36%. Average effect sizes were roughly half the original size.³

That does not mean “64% of psychology is false.” It means published does not mean reproduced.

When a study is used to justify quotas, family policy, school programs, or restrictions on men’s rights, one p < 0.05 is not enough. We need replication, transparent data, sex-symmetric measurement, and a real possibility that the result will destroy the starting hypothesis.

Research about men needs the same standard

If a paper says men have power, measure power rather than count male surnames at the top.

If women are asked about victimization while men are asked about aggression, part of the sex difference is already built into the instrument.

If a female disadvantage is attributed to the system while a male disadvantage is attributed to personal choice, two causal standards are being used.

If every male disadvantage is reclassified as “the cost of patriarchy,” the framework wins regardless of the observation: male advantage proves patriarchy and male harm proves patriarchy too.

That construction is not being tested by the data. It is consuming the data.

Test

Science does not confirm feminism as one general theory of society.

Science confirms particular facts. In some places women were legally discriminated against. In some places they still are. In some contexts women are more often victims of a particular harm. In some contexts men have an advantage. In others women do.

None of that, by itself, establishes a single global and transhistorical system in which men as a class rule women as a class.

The central weakness of popular feminist argument is the tendency to collect the worst cases from different eras, countries, and systems under one name and then treat the collection itself as proof of one cause.

A suffragist barred from voting was not helped by the existence of a female executive a century later. A girl under a religious education ban is not helped by a Western board quota. A man compelled into military service gains nothing from the fact that the head of state is also male.

Those are different power relations. They should be studied separately.

And where law already gives women adult legal capacity on the same basis as men, the next step in emancipation cannot be the indefinite accumulation of compensation for collective female history. It is life without a guardian and without permanent victim status: one’s own decisions, risks, duties, and consequences.

If modern feminism demands a new quota, privilege, ban, or redistribution, it has to establish the need for that measure today. The suffragists, a girl in Afghanistan, and the word patriarchy are not universal passes around the burden of proof.

Sources and notes

1. Christiaan H. Vinkers et al., Use of positive and negative words in scientific PubMed abstracts between 1974 and 2014: retrospective analysis, BMJ, 2015, 351:h6467. In the selected vocabulary, positive terms rose from 2.0% of records in 1974–1980 to 17.5% in 2014; negative terms rose from 1.3% to 3.2%.
2. Moritz Edlinger, Finn Buchrieser, Guilherme Wood, Presence and consequences of positive words in scientific abstracts, Scientometrics, 2023, 128:6633–6657. More than 2.3 million MEDLINE abstracts in psychology, biology, and physics showed long-run growth in positively loaded scientific language.
3. Open Science Collaboration, Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science, Science, 2015, 349(6251):aac4716. Across 100 replications, statistical significance was obtained in 36% of replications versus 97% of original studies; average effect sizes were roughly halved.
4. José L. Duarte et al., Political diversity will improve social psychological science, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2015, 38:e130. The paper examines mechanisms through which political homogeneity can affect questions, methods, and interpretation in social psychology.
5. James Manzi, The ideological orientation of academic social science research 1960–2024, Theory and Society, 2026, 55:25. Roughly 600,000 abstracts were classified under a fixed ideological scale; the author cautions that measured left orientation is not itself proof that research is false.
6. Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship, 2018; project material for Our Struggle Is My Struggle. For critical assessments of the design: Mikko Lagerspetz, The “Grievance Studies Affair” Project: Reconstructing and Assessing the Experimental Design, Science, Technology, & Human Values, 2021, 46(2):402–424; Lee Jussim, A Re-Evaluation of the Grievance Studies Affair, Humanities, 2023, 12(5):116.
7. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy. The overview discusses the contested meanings of feminism, the historical roots of the English term in suffrage mobilization, and the differing agendas of feminist “waves.”
8. U.S. National Archives, Woman Suffrage and the 19th Amendment; National Park Service, The Declaration of Sentiments; National Organization for Women, 1966 Statement of Purpose and Core Issues. Together these sources allow a direct comparison between early civil-rights demands, second-wave institutional goals, and a current feminist organization’s agenda.
9. Cambridge Dictionary, Patriarchy; see also a contemporary research definition of patriarchy as institutionalized male dominance in “Like Us, but Not Quite Us”: Researching Gender Politics in Autocratic Contexts, Perspectives on Politics.
10. Alexandra Kollontai, Communism and the Family, 1920. Kollontai explicitly describes the old family as withering away and domestic and child-rearing functions moving toward social institutions under communism.
11. Nadezhda K. Krupskaya, On Communist Ethics, 1924–1936; Preface to The Emancipation of Women, 1933. Krupskaya linked women’s emancipation to socialism but explicitly rejected the caricature that party membership meant abandoning husband and children.
12. UN Women, Equality in law for women and girls by 2030: Progress review and updated targets, 2026; United Nations Statistics Division, SDG Goal 5, 2026. The global reviews document continuing direct legal restrictions and large differences between countries.