We return this month with our series which recaps our favorite (or least favorite) moments in gender equity from news, media, and longreads all over the internet. You’ll see installments for This Month in Gender Equity the fourth week of each month. If you have ideas or contributions, leave a comment or tweet at us! Ahead this month: when male partners step up or hang back, lies one author thinks our mothers told us, and what we can do with all that anger.

We have greatly underestimated feminism's harmful influence on millennials

I’m hesitant to even link to this article because it is so fallacious. The author claims to be “The Feminist Fixer” and to “free women from feminist lives so they can find lasting love with men.” This is heteronormative and implies that feminism – which undergirds the personhood and equality of women – is something that requires fixing. Further, it suggests that feminism and loving relationships with men are mutually exclusive. Nonsense. The thesis of the article is not clear or consistent: it is ostensibly about millennial debt but then pivots to talk about women and feminism. The author seemingly intentionally misconstrues the feminist movement and the self-esteem movement before suggesting a series of resultant binaries among which women must choose: “a wife and mother” or “rule the world.” She talks about women piling up degrees in order to get established for marriage but now being in debt and therefore unable to get married. There are so many issues here: women do not need to acquire educations in order to be established for marriage. Both are choices open to them, but their opposites are equally valid. Additionally, this article doesn’t critically examine the context in which people accrue college debt or the astronomical cost of higher education as things which need policy solutions. We ultimately highlight this article because it is representative of a sector of dangerous, limited thought patterns that find their way to seemingly reputable outlets’ opinion columns.

‘Feminine Weakness’ Is a Scam

This is a beautifully written opinion peace that addresses one way that women think about power. I found it to be especially poignant because it discusses both the ways that women can become exhausted by the overt and covert manifestations of misogyny and one way to conceptualize taking back that power. The author lays out some of the ways that women feel devalued professionally and personally, looking at issues ranging from personal safety to ways that workplaces can diminish the power of women through carelessness or lack of resources (remember those NASA space suits? Yeah, me too). Anger can be a tricky thing for women to voice, since often it is written off as being hysterical or irrational. I was glad to see this author embrace both the anger and the means of dealing with that anger in a positive way. The author ends in a place of reminding us that we can both embrace our fear and anger and channel it in a direction for positivity and change. And that is definitely something that I am fully on board with.

Even Breadwinning Wives Don’t Get Equality at Home

This article is a great reminder that, even in the face of gender advancement in so many areas, women are still expected to do the bulk of labor in their households. In a disheartening and, frankly, confusing quote from the article, we learn that “As wives’ economic dependence on their husbands increases, women tend to take on more housework. But the more economically dependent men are on their wives, the less housework they do.” In other words, whether you make more or less money than your husband, as a woman, you are still doing the bulk of those household chores.

When Men Step Up ― And Back ― To Support Women’s Ambitions

If you’re like us, you cheered for AOC twice (and still do): once in real time when she ran in New York and again when we got a closer look at her campaign via the documentary “Knock Down the House” on Netflix. One of the most interesting features of the doc was, as this HuffPost article states, AOC’s long term partner, Riley Roberts. His support of Ocasio-Cortez was unfailing and meant that he didn’t occupy the spotlight. In fact, he took on tasks we often associate with the supporting partner: household labor. We wrote earlier this month about women who take back seats to their higher-earning partners and an article above talks about the inequality of household work. Roberts’s activity, and those of other male spouse’s like Elizabeth Warren’s husband Bruce Mann, suggests that partnerships don’t always work against women. We would obviously love to see a world in which both partners in any relationship are free to pursue their careers and passions, but for the moment, the system tends to only allow one partner to be career-focused. “In an ideal world,” says author Emma Gray, “Both partners in a long-term heterosexual coupling would be free to pursue their ambitions with vigor and abandon. But for now, it remains a constant negotiation ― one in which women full of ideas and goals, both personal and professional, often end up on the short end.”

It’s refreshing to see male partners who offer a new picture of what support and celebration can look like for a female partner.

-Amy and Lauren