Modern America is a Patriarchy

A patriarchy or a patriarchical system comes about when men have more power (whether it be socially, legally, economically, or otherwise) than women. That is the definition that we’re all familiar with, and those of us who are familiar are familiar with a textbook definition — some may not be as familiar with a real-world instance of a patriarchical system. Modern American society, whether some of us can see it clearly or not, is in fact a patriarchical system.

How do we know this? One way we can tell is by looking at political leaders. <a href='http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/11/america-is-still-a-patriarchy/265428/'Phillip Cohen says that looking at political figures is the “low hanging fruit of patriarchy statistics,” but he also concedes that they “probably are in the end the most important — the telling pattern is that the higher you look, the maler it gets.”

So just what do we find when we look at the American political system? We find that in 2014, the US Congress <a href='https://www.senate.gov/CRSReports/crs-publish.cfm?pid=%260BL%2BR\C%3F%0A'broke its own record for number of women Congresspeople. This seems highly encouraging, until we realize that that record was broken when American voters elected a Congress that was a meager 19% female. That leaves the resulting 81% of Congress, America’s primary lawmaking body, being male.

Of course, as Cohen says, that is fairly low-hanging fruit. If we reach a little higher on the tree, we might get the idea to look in the corporate world and see what the workforce is like in America. The Economist tells us that women make up about 46% of the American workforce. Great! That’s really encouraging news, considering that even 60 years ago women were commonly housewives while their husbands went out and worked. However, the Economist then tells us that 95% of senior managers in America are men. How discouraging.

So we see that women are underrepresented in the legal bodies that make the laws in this country, and they’re almost not represented at all in upper management. Women are raped more often than men are, and from One in Four also tells us that of rapists who rape women, an astounding 98.1% are male.

All of these things point to a patriarchy, and a toxic one at that. Until we recognize that America is a patriarchical society, we will be completely unable to effect any large scale change.