The sad truth is we are still struggling with this absurd system where sexism, patriarchy, and misogyny are in control of the world..
How much have we really changed, and what more can we do to ensure that at least our future generations can live in peace, equality, and equity, with consideration for both genders?
What is sexism and its role in our lives?
Sexism is prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination against people based on their sex or gender.It is driven by the belief that one sex or gender is inherently superior, more capable, or more valuable than another.
While sexism can affect anyone, it historically and systematically disadvantages women and girls the most. It functions across three major levels of society:
Individual & Interpersonal Sexism-Examples: Making degrading comments or jokes about a specific gender, assuming a woman cannot handle a technical task, or expecting a man to never show vulnerability or emotion.
Institutional & Systemic Sexism-Examples: The gender pay gap (paying women less for equal work), lack of parental leave policies, or legal systems that do not adequately protect victims of gender-based violence.
Cultural & Societal Sexism-Examples: Marketing household cleaning products exclusively to women, designing children’s toys to steer boys toward science and girls toward domestic care, or using language that labels an assertive man as a “leader” but an assertive woman as “bossy.
Global and historically-
Sexism distorts understanding by creating systematic blind spots in how we gather data, design research, and record history. When one gender’s perspective or biology is treated as the default human experience, the resulting knowledge base becomes incomplete, biased, and often dangerous.
Here is how sexism actively compromises the integrity of knowledge across different fields:
1. Medical Science: The “Male Default”
For decades, clinical trials for drugs and medical devices were conducted almost exclusively on male subjects and male lab mice.
- The Distortion: Researchers assumed that female hormonal cycles would complicate data, and that findings from male bodies could simply be scaled down.
- The Misleading Result: This left a massive knowledge gap regarding how women metabolise pharmaceuticals, leading to higher rates of adverse drug reactions. Furthermore, it distorted our understanding of heart attack symptoms, which were historically documented based on male physiology (chest pain), causing doctors to misdiagnose or dismiss women experiencing “atypical” symptoms like nausea or fatigue.
2. Artificial Intelligence: Automated Bias
AI algorithms learn by scanning historical data. If that historical data reflects sexist societal structures, the AI treats those biases as objective truth.
- The Distortion: Hiring algorithms trained on resumes from historically male-dominated tech fields learn to penalise applications that contain the word “women’s” (e.g., “women’s chess club captain”).
- The Misleading Result: The resulting technology does not objectively find the best candidate; it recreates past discrimination under the guise of an “impartial” computer program.
3. Archaeology & Anthropology: Projecting Modern Roles
Early archaeologists often viewed ancient artefacts through the lens of Victorian-era gender roles, assuming men were always the active “providers” and women were passive “homemakers.”
- The Distortion: When ancient skeletons were found buried with weapons or hunting tools, researchers automatically classified them as male without doing skeletal analysis.
- The Misleading Result: Recent DNA testing of famous remains—such as the Birka Viking Warrior—revealed that many celebrated hunters and warriors were biologically female. By projecting sexist assumptions backwards, historians created an inaccurate timeline of human social evolution.
4. Economics: The Invisibility of Unpaid Labour
Traditional economic metrics like Gross Domestic Product (GDP) measure wealth based strictly on market transactions.
- The Distortion: Because domestic labour, childcare, and elderly care have historically been performed disproportionately by women without a paycheck, traditional economics categorised this work as having “zero economic value.”
- The Misleading Result: This produces an incomplete knowledge base for policymakers. When a country’s economic health ignores the foundational infrastructure of care work, governments fail to invest in childcare or family leave, leading to unstable economic models.
How to Fix the Knowledge Base
To produce accurate, complete knowledge, institutions are moving toward:
- Disaggregated Data: Mandating that research data be split and analysed by biological sex and gender.
- Diverse Research Teams: Ensuring women and marginalised groups are leading studies, as they naturally think to ask questions that a homogenous group might overlook.
- Interdisciplinary Audits: Re-evaluating historical textbooks and scientific baselines to strip away unproven gender assumptions.
Oh, there’s more, such as crash-test dummy safety design, psychiatric diagnoses (like ADHD), or historical records?
1. Crash-Test Dummy Design: The Physics of Safety
For over 40 years, standard automotive safety tests used only a 50th-percentile male dummy(representing a 177 cm tall, 76 kg man).
- The Distortion: Engineers assumed that a safety cabin designed to protect an average male body would naturally scale down to protect everyone else. They ignored critical physiological differences, such as female bone density, neck muscle mass, and typical seating positions.
- The Dangerous Result: When women sit closer to the steering wheel to reach the pedals, or when a seatbelt fits poorly across a smaller frame, the physics of a crash change. Because of this incomplete testing data, research shows that a female driver wearing a seatbelt is 47% more likely to be seriously injured and 17% more likely to die in a frontal car crash than a male driver in the same scenario.
2. Psychiatric Diagnoses: The Invisibility of ADHD
Historically, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) was studied almost entirely in young boys.
- The Distortion: Because boys frequently exhibit “hyperactive” symptoms (fidgeting, running around, disrupting classrooms), researchers built the diagnostic criteria around external, disruptive behaviour. They missed how ADHD manifests internally or subtly.
- The Misleading Result: Girls are far more likely to experience “inattentive” ADHD, which shows up as daydreaming, internal anxiety, or hyper-focusing. Because they do not disrupt the classroom, they are frequently misdiagnosed with pure anxiety or depression, or missed entirely. Millions of women grow into adulthood without knowing they have ADHD, internalising their struggles as a personal failing rather than a neurological condition.
3. Historical Records: Erasure of Legacy
Sexism alters history through a phenomenon known as the Matilda Effect—a bias where female scientists and creators have their work credited to their male colleagues.
- The Distortion: Societal structures assumed that women lacked the capacity for high-level scientific breakthroughs or leadership, so their names were omitted from publications or patents.
- The Incomplete History:
- Rosalind Franklin: Her crucial X-ray photograph (Photo 51) proved the structure of DNA, but James Watson and Francis Crick took credit and won the Nobel Prize.
- Jocelyn Bell Burnell: She discovered the first radio pulsars (a massive breakthrough in astrophysics), but the 1974 Nobel Prize for the discovery went to her male supervisor.
- When history textbooks omit these names, it creates a false narrative that women have not contributed to human advancement, discouraging future generations from entering those fields.
The Cost of Incomplete Data
When data is gathered unevenly, the resulting systems—whether they are car seats, medical checklists, or history books—are not broken by accident. They are perfectly designed for the limited data they were given.
Sexism has shaped our lives, influenced our health, understandings, psychological place in this world as well as positioned us as secondary citizens and inferior beings escalating and empowering patriarchy.
Fighting against it is not about yelling and going for violence. It’s about educating and first being educated ourselves. It’s about empathy for both genders by both genders. It’s about respecting, each other and ourselves.
Don’t look at feminism as something biased towards one gender. It’s equality for all. Not one in particular. It’s respect for all.
In these dark days, the real feminism is being lost. If we have evolved anywhere better from before today it’s because of feminist movements that created some shifts in the world but of course it hasn’t ended yet. We are still targeted by sexism, patriarchy and misogyny. Let’s understand the truth of feminism and sexism before it can corrupt the lives of our future generations as well. Once you understand this, you might even become a humanitarian. That won’t be a far-off journey.