Myths and Arguments Against Feminism

Equality is the same as Feminism, or? Today’s feminism has gone too far and both lie and spread false myths. That feminists focus unilaterally on cases where women are disadvantaged cannot be good for a functioning and equitable society in the long run. Especially when several of the cases are based on myths.

Feminism is divided into three different waves. The first wave came at the end of the 1800s / 1900s and is about women’s right to vote, entitled to education and financial independence. The second wave came in the 1960s and is more about the woman’s belonging to the house. That it is the woman who will take care of the home, the children and the family while the man in the house is going to work. If a woman would work, it meant a double workload. The man was seen as a norm to which the woman was related.

Recently, there has come a third wave of feminism that has lied and spread myths. Below I have gathered the most common myths that feminism has spread.

1. Gender is a social construction
2. Women receive lower pay for the same job
3. Women are harder to make a career
4. Men beat women
5. Women double work
6. Women get worse healthcare.

If we take the salary as an example. Today, one can often hear how much pay gap is between men and women and this is something feminists often point out. Women earn as a whole less than men do today and in 2016 women earned a total of 12% less than men according to Medlingsinstitutet.

This is the total pay gap between men and women and applies to all jobs, both private and public sector, workers and civil servants. But this does not mean that women and men earn a lot of money for the same job, but only that they earn less in full. One of the biggest factors that men earn more in overall is as simple as men usually choose higher paid jobs than women do. Although the choice of profession is completely optional. When doing these surveys, they do not count on how many hours they work, work experience, the content of work, difficulty, and degree of enthusiasm and flexibility. These are a few of the factors that create the pay gap. When taking into account these differences and comparing what the different sexes work with and how they work, the pay gap reduces to almost nothing. Where is the “unexplained pay gap”.

If we take jobs in the state as an example, women earned 7.8% less on average than men did. Taking into account the explanatory factors, the difference is only 0.9%, this is the “unexplained pay gap” and it turns out that the inexplicable pay gap has arisen because there were more men than women who were managers.

Another myth that one often hears is that “men beat women”. All focus is on women. Of Sweden’s population, there were 2.5% of men who were abused in 2015 compared with 1.5% of women according to BRÅ, the Crime Prevention Council. That means that there were almost 100,000 more men than women who were exposed to violence in 2015. If this is true, it’s all focus on the women. In the minutes of the parliamentary debates for five years (2006-2011) the phrase “violence against women” has been mentioned 1,365 times, while “violence against men” has been mentioned 61 times. The violence against women receives 22 times as much attention as the violence against men is believed to be more men … Why should violence against women receive 22 times more attention when the next 100,000 more men are exposed? It’s just as if the Riksdag does not take men of the same seriousness. I do not think this is ok, if you are to fight for gender equality, you must also take both sexes equally seriously. These are just two examples of several lies and I do not think that feminists have the right to start major discussions based on lies. Especially not when they do not show the whole truth. In order for a functioning and equal society, we must stop identifying between feminism and gender equality, and we must stop staring at blind differences on average between men and women.

Works Cited

1. Wahlström, L. (2019). Feminism, Gender Equality, and the Myth of the Wage Gap. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, 38(4), 374-387. doi:10.1108/EDI-05-2018-0112
2. Glick, P., & Fiske, S. T. (1996). The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory: Differentiating Hostile and Benevolent Sexism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(3), 491-512. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.70.3.491
3. Weisberg, D. K. (2018). Men and Feminism: A Partially Annotated Bibliography. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 43(4), 975-995. doi:10.1086/696869
4. Edwards, H. (2017). Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity. NYU Press.
5. Pina, A., & Gannon, T. A. (2012). An Overview of Gender-Neutral, Gender-Inclusive, and Ally Approaches to Supporting Women in STEM. New Directions for Institutional Research, 2012(154), 69-80. doi:10.1002/ir.20028
6. Blackwood, L. M., & Haslam, N. (2017). The Importance of Being “Warm (or Cold) and Competent”: Examining the Effects of Stereotype Content on the Promotion of Gender Equality. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 20(5), 585-602. doi:10.1177/1368430216664619