There are many distinct views related to feminism that most people are aware of. Here, I’ve attempted to summarize all of the ones I’m aware of. There is some overlap between them, but they are meaningfully different, and some are mutually incompatible. As you read, it may be worth considering: which one (or combination of) these viewpoints is closest to your perspective.
I also ran a survey to examine people’s level of agreement with these different views. Respondents were allowed to choose more than one view if they agreed with more than one, since the views aren’t mutually exclusive. I recruited 193 respondents by posting on my Facebook wall, and an additional 254 U.S. respondents using our Positly.com study recruitment platform (plus some people from other social media). I used this data to analyze whether having each view is correlated with various demographic factors (it turns out that the results didn’t change much whether I looked just at regular correlations, or if I controlled for the other demographic factors).
Here are the views along with the survey results:
A – Anti-patriarchy: “Society and culture were designed by men more so than by women, and men self-servingly designed these systems to systematically and institutionally give advantages to men over women. Many women have also been taught to buy into or even support these sexist systems. Feminism should dismantle those aspects of society that continue to disadvantage women, and replace them with systems that are unbiased.”
47% on Facebook and 28% on Positly agreed. Agreement correlated with being educated, left-wing, and female.
—
B – Bias Resisting: “Prejudice, bias, and unwanted sexualization toward women clearly still occur to a substantial degree. While there have been real improvements over the last 100 years on these fronts, there are many individuals who continue to act in a biased, prejudiced, or harassing way towards women. The most important goal of feminism is to work towards reducing this mistreatment by bad-acting individuals, and to prevent future people from having these same biases.”
51% on Facebook and 31% on Positly agreed. It was the most agreed-upon of all the views. Agreement correlated with being left-wing, less religious, less spiritual, and thinking that women are better than men.
—
C – Capitalism Critiquing: “Some labor that necessarily falls onto people with XX chromosomes (like pregnancy or breastfeeding) is undervalued in capitalist systems because it cannot be freely traded like other labor. Hence, women tend to have less income, wealth, and power in capitalist systems, making those systems fundamentally biased against women.”
33% on Facebook and 19% on Positly agreed. Agreement correlated with being left-wing and female.
—
D – Difference Valuing: “Even though men and women are similar in many ways, on average men and women are not the same with regard to every skill, personality trait, and interest. But, unfairly, the more “feminine” ways of being (e.g., showing greater empathy) are valued less and rewarded less in our society than the more “masculine” ways of being (e.g., being more competitive). We should shift culture so that we value the feminine the same amount we value the masculine, and celebrate (rather than downplay) any actual differences that do exist, while also recognizing that differences in the average of a trait still mean that you will have some men and some women on both sides of that trait. Individuals are not averages.”
41% on Facebook and 32% on Positly agreed. Agreement was not correlated with any specific demographics.
—
E – Equality Seeking: “Men and women do not differ fundamentally in any of their skills, personality traits, interests, or relevant behaviors. So the differences we see in outcomes between men and women (e.g., less pay for women in similar jobs, or fewer women than men in engineering, or women spending more time on childcare than men) are the result of some combination of (i) discrimination, (ii) women being culturally indoctrinated (e.g., to believe they can’t be engineers, or that they should be the ones to take care of children), and (iii) asymmetrical burdens being placed on women (e.g., women avoiding finance jobs because they sometimes have a culture of toxic masculinity). Feminism’s main job is to get us to the point where women have the same outcomes as men across all life domains.”
24% on Facebook and 39% on Positly agreed. Agreement correlated with being left-wing, low-income, less educated, and female.
—
F – Family-focused: “Men and women are different, on average, and so we should expect to find differences in what roles they tend to play in society. This is a good thing for both women and men. For instance, on average, women are better at being nurturing, so it is a good thing for society that they tend to spend more time raising children than men. Men, on the other hand, have greater aggression and so thrive more often in work where aggression is a benefit, like in the military. There’s a reason why we find that most of the violence in society is carried out by men, and it’s because men are actually fundamentally more violent than women. Everyone is better off if people do the sort of work they are best suited for. Even though some women would benefit from feminist goals, women would, on average, actually be made worse off if the demands of modern feminism were met. Feminism pushes women to take on roles that they would often prefer not to be in, and to reject roles that they actually tend to prefer. If any particular woman finds she is better suited to work that is more stereotypically male, then, by all means, she should do that work (no one should be forced into work that is not right for them), but that doesn’t mean that what is right for her is right for most other women. If we ignore real average differences that exist, we do a disservice to women and make their lives worse.”
16% on Facebook and 23% on Positly agreed. Agreement correlated with being right-wing, more religious, more spiritual, male, and thinking that men are better than women.
—
G – Gone: “It used to be the case that women were badly discriminated against. Women first began to have the national right to vote in the U.S. in 1920. But society has changed dramatically since then, and women and men are now treated as equals. There are, inevitably, still some small number of individuals who discriminate against women, but there are also some individuals who discriminate against men. Every such act of discrimination is wrong and should be stopped if possible, but today such discrimination is actually quite rare. Feminism was successful. It was a valuable and important movement in our history, but it is no longer needed to a substantial degree now that we have a society with a high degree of gender equality. Most of what people point to when they perceive gender discrimination today are either isolated incidents (which should be stopped whenever possible, but which are not the norm) or false conclusions based on misinterpretations of statistics. For instance, if women are more likely to quit a job to raise a baby than men are, companies may pay them less because of this greater risk of leaving, which is costly to the company, rather than due to discrimination. Furthermore, there are natural market forces that help reduce discrimination. If, say, 20% of companies discriminated against women, the remaining companies would have a competitive advantage by hiring the talented women that the 20% underpay or refuse to hire. That being said, of course, if one day there is a resurgence of anti-female prejudice, then feminism would again become important, and in that case, we should work to eradicate that prejudice once again.”
15% on Facebook and 13% on Positly agreed – the least popular view. Agreement correlated with being right-wing, male, and thinking that men are better than women.
—
H – Human: “It hurts everyone to make assumptions based on biological sex, or to think that women are one way and men another. We are all just human. Parents should not give their girls dolls to play with while giving boys toy guns. That just encourages false gender distinctions and can create self-fulfilling prophesies where people attempt to act in accordance with gendered expectations. We should try to remove gendered distinctions when we can, and each person should ideally just be viewed as an individual human. There is no such thing as being a ‘good man’ or a ‘good woman’; there is only such a thing as being a ‘good human’. If people choose to identify as a man or a woman, that is, of course, fine, and we should respect that decision. But nobody should be encouraged to act a certain way just because of their biological sex.”
35% on Facebook and 31% on Positly agreed. Agreement was correlated with being left-wing.
—
I – Irked: “Feminism today is largely a way for women to try to gain power over men. While feminism was once about equality, now that equality has already been achieved, feminism has gone beyond that. Women usually want men to still fulfill their stereotypical gender roles, such as holding doors for women, being chivalrous, bringing in the highest income in the home, doing difficult and dangerous physical labor, being courageous when things are difficult, fighting (and potentially dying) in wars to protect the country, and so on. Yet women no longer want to do their traditional duties of raising a family and taking care of a home. Feminism is a double standard, and it is often harmful to men.”
16% on Facebook and 12% on Positly agreed – nearly tied for the least popular view. Agreement correlated with being right-wing, male, and thinking that men are better than women.
—
Additionally, 9% of Facebook respondents and 0% of Positly respondents wrote in their own “Other” view. Doing so was associated with being educated and left-wing.
—
In terms of demographics, the views tend to cluster into four groups:
(A) those associated with being a left-wing female:
• Anti-Patriarchy
• Capitalism Critiquing
• Equality Seeking
—
(B) those associated with the left wing, but with no sex association:
• Bias Resisting
• Human
• Other
—
(C) those associated with no particular demographics at all
• Difference Valuing
—
(D) those associated with being a right-wing male:
• Family Focused
• Gone
• Irked
— Appendix –
Here are additional results from the study:
(1) correlation matrix between agreement with the different views (note: if few people agree with a view, that automatically will make the correlations smaller against other, more popular views, given the way correlations work).
(2) percent of people in each group who agreed with each view:
Note: The list of views (above) is not comprehensive, as there are many different perspectives on feminism and many different nuances related to each one of those perspectives. The views above are simplified, and the names I use for each view are made up so as to keep them alphabetical.
This piece was first written on July 16, 2020, and first appeared on my website on April 9, 2026.
Comments