Gender Equality in Six Parts: The Documentaries, the Data, and the Myths

My name is Eric Leo, and this is my take on gender equality as a sociologist and social psychologist. I want to do something with this post that most writing on the subject doesn't do, which is treat gender equality as one enormous system instead of a single argument. To get there I leaned on six documentaries: Gender Revolution, The Hunting Ground, Seeing Allred, Tricked, Miss Representation, and the "Why Women Are Paid Less" episode of Explained. I also pulled from talks and reporting by Elliot Page, HeForShe, TED, Jordan Peterson, the World Bank, and the UN. To make the whole thing usable, I split it into six categories: LGBTQ, phobic, sexual, mental, feminist, and economic.

Fair warning before you dig in. I am going to walk you through some evolutionary arguments I used to find persuasive, and then I am going to show you where they fall apart. I think that's more useful to you than pretending I arrived at every conclusion cleanly.

LGBTQ: Sex Is What You're Born With, Gender Is Who You Are

When most people hear "gender equality," they picture gay rights and women's rights, and that's where they stop. Katie Couric's Gender Revolution makes the case that the picture is much wider than that. The working distinction is simple: sex refers to biological characteristics like chromosomes, hormones, and anatomy, while gender is how a person identifies and moves through the world. Or, as the saying goes, gender is who you go to bed as and sexual orientation is who you go to bed with. Your external anatomy is one input, not the whole answer.

You've probably seen the "Genderbread Person" diagram floating around, which separates gender identity, gender expression, biological sex, and attraction into four independent sliders. I'll be straight with you: that's a teaching tool created by an educator, not a research instrument, and I'd treat it as a way to organize a conversation rather than a scientific finding. What it gets right is that these four things vary independently in real people. I'm cisgender, meaning I identify with the sex I was assigned at birth, and I mention that because most of us never had to think about the distinction at all.

The documentary spends significant time on intersex conditions and on surgeries performed on infants. Variations in androgen production and androgen sensitivity — conditions like androgen insensitivity syndrome and congenital adrenal hyperplasia — can produce bodies that don't sort neatly into the two boxes. You'll see the figure "1.7% of people are intersex" repeated online, and you should know that number comes from a broad definition; under narrower clinical criteria the figure is closer to two in ten thousand. Either way, we're talking about real children whose bodies were surgically altered before they could consent, which is why several medical bodies have moved toward delaying non-urgent procedures.

On brain development, be careful with what you've heard. There is evidence that prenatal hormone exposure contributes to gender identity, and identity does appear to be established early rather than chosen. But the popular "male brain in a female body" framing oversimplifies decades of messy neuroscience, and honest researchers will tell you the mechanism isn't settled. What is well documented is gender dysphoria — significant distress from a mismatch between identity and body — and the fact that access to bathrooms, locker rooms, and basic public accommodation is where this abstract debate becomes a daily problem for actual people.

Phobic: The Real Price of Being Yourself

The LGBTQ category and the phobic category overlap, but they're not the same thing. One is about identity; the other is about what the world does to you for having it. Same-sex marriage is legal across the United States, and in a number of countries being gay still carries the death penalty. That gap is worth sitting with before anyone tells you the fight is over here.

America's own numbers aren't good either. The 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey found unemployment among transgender respondents running about three times the national rate at the time, and for Black transgender respondents it was closer to four times. Elliot Page — who appeared on Ellen in 2014 and came out as transgender in 2020 — has helped popularize another figure worth knowing: roughly 40% of homeless youth identify as LGBTQ, according to a Williams Institute survey of service providers. That last number is a provider estimate rather than a census, so treat it as a strong signal rather than a precise measurement. Even discounted, it tells you that a group that is a small share of the population is a huge share of kids sleeping outside.

Sexual: The Campus Numbers Nobody Wants to Report

A large share of gender equality is sexual, and by that I mean protection from assault and real consequences when it happens. The Time's Up Legal Defense Fund was built for exactly that, and it's still worth knowing about even though the Time's Up organization itself dissolved in 2023 and the fund continued under the National Women's Law Center. Legal defense money is one lever. It doesn't fix the culture that generates the cases.

The Hunting Ground frames campus sexual assault as an epidemic, and the broad picture holds up. The 2015 and 2019 Association of American Universities campus climate surveys found roughly a quarter of undergraduate women reported nonconsensual sexual contact by force or incapacitation. Reporting rates are extremely low, often in the single digits to low teens depending on the incident type. A 2014 Senate survey found a substantial share of institutions reporting zero incidents in a year, which tells you more about institutional incentives than about student safety.

I want to flag something the film gets shaky on, because accuracy matters to me more than a clean narrative. The Hunting Ground drew serious, public criticism over its handling of specific cases, including an objection signed by nineteen Harvard Law professors. The often-repeated claim that a tiny fraction of men commit the overwhelming majority of assaults traces to a 2002 study by Lisak and Miller, and a 2015 JAMA Pediatrics study by Swartout and colleagues challenged it, finding that most men who reported committing rape did so in a time-limited way rather than as lifelong serial predators. That second study has critics of its own. The honest summary is that a "small number of monsters" model is convenient and probably wrong, which matters enormously, because it means prevention can't just be about catching a few bad actors.

Fraternities do show up in the research, not just in anecdote. Multiple studies have found fraternity membership associated with higher rates of sexual assault perpetration, and the same is true for some athlete populations. Both groups also come attached to alumni money and institutional prestige, which is precisely why universities move slowly. I'd argue that a school unwilling to expel over sexual assault has quietly told you what it values.

Power: Why "Just Fight Back" Is Bad Advice

When I visited friends at MSU in college, I heard about the campus "rape trail." That framing is misleading, and it misleads in a way that gets people hurt. The stranger in the bushes is the rare case; the large majority of assaults are committed by someone the victim knows, often indoors, often with alcohol involved. If your entire mental model is the dark path home, you have no model at all for the party, the dorm room, or the date.

For years I told people that if you want to avoid being assaulted you should walk with purpose, look formidable, and fight back. I've stopped saying it, and I want to tell you why rather than quietly dropping it. Research on resistance is genuinely mixed — forceful resistance is associated with lower completion rates in some studies — but framing it as personal advice puts the job of prevention on the person least responsible for the crime. It also fails on its own terms, because it does nothing about the acquaintance scenario where the whole dynamic is social pressure rather than physical ambush.

Here's what actually has evidence behind it. The EAAA program, tested in a randomized trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2015, cut completed rape among first-year university women by roughly 46% over the following year. Bystander intervention programs like Green Dot have shown measurable reductions in victimization at the campus level. Those are real, replicated, unglamorous interventions, and they beat "look tough" by a wide margin.

One more correction. The line that rape is about power and not sex comes from Susan Brownmiller's 1975 book Against Our Will, and it was an important intervention at the time. Current research treats perpetration as multi-causal — entitlement, hostility toward women, peer norms, opportunity, and sexual motivation all show up in the data. Saying it's "not about sex" is an overcorrection that makes prevention harder, because it tells you to look for a power-hungry villain instead of a normal-seeming guy operating inside permissive norms.

Monkey See, Monkey Do: What Chimps and Bonobos Actually Show Us

Evolutionary psychology is the right lens for part of this, so let's use it properly. Chimpanzees do exhibit documented sexual coercion, and long-term field research at sites like Ngogo has linked male aggression toward females with mating success. Bonobos, our other equally close relative, look strikingly different: females form coalitions that check male aggression, and sexual behavior functions socially to defuse conflict. Two species, nearly identical genetic distance from us, two opposite social solutions.

That contrast is genuinely instructive, and here's the lesson I'd draw from it. Recent work on bonobos suggests female power comes largely from female coalitions — females backing each other up. That is a finding about social structure, not genetics, and it points at solidarity rather than breeding as the mechanism. Humans clearly carry capacity for both patterns, which is exactly why the culture we build around that capacity does so much work.

While we're here, let me kill a story you've probably heard. The tale that wedding rings originated with a caveman tying a cord around a captured woman's finger is a twentieth-century invention with no archaeological support. Ring exchange traces back to ancient Egypt and was carried forward by the Greeks and Romans, along with the charming and anatomically false belief in a vein running from the fourth finger to the heart. Marriage by capture has existed in some societies, but the ring story is folklore that happens to flatter a theory. I repeated it for years before I checked it.

Marketers set cultural norms and values, operating under advertising rules that got a lot looser after deregulation in the 1980s. Some of this may echo our evolutionary history, but most of it is learned, and learned early.

The classroom is where I find this most visible, particularly with women and math. The story goes that girls are told they're bad at math and therefore become bad at math — a clean self-fulfilling prophecy. I have to give you a caveat here: stereotype threat, the psychological mechanism usually invoked, has had a rough decade in replication research, with several large registered replications finding effects much smaller than the classic studies. 

What's solid is the outcome data. Large analyses of U.S. testing, including Hyde and colleagues in Science in 2008, found essentially no gender gap in average math performance. Where gaps persist internationally, they correlate with a country's broader gender equality measures, which is a strong hint that we're looking at culture rather than capacity. So when I tell women that they're as good at math as men and point them to Hidden Figures, I'm not being encouraging — I'm being accurate. Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson were doing orbital mechanics for NASA while the country insisted women couldn't.

The Looking-Glass Self: What the Media Hands Girls

Sociology has a concept called the looking-glass self: we build our identity partly from the reflection other people show us. Miss Representation's core argument is that the reflection handed to girls is broken. Around the time the film came out, women were roughly 11% of protagonists in the top hundred grossing films. That number has more than doubled since and now bounces around a third depending on the year, which is real progress and still not parity.

The pattern matters more than any single figure. Female characters are far more likely to be defined by romance or motherhood than by personal achievement, and Jane Fonda's point in the film is that media manufactures consciousness — so if men control it, the consciousness it manufactures won't include women leading. That flows directly into politics, where voters carry a mental image of what a leader looks like that they never consciously chose.

Then there's appearance. Watch any hour of programming and you'll absorb the message that a woman's value is visual, measured against a standard that is both statistically rare and digitally retouched into impossibility. Objectification theory, developed by Fredrickson and Roberts in 1997, documents how internalizing that outside view predicts body shame and depression. I'd stop short of saying objectification directly causes violence — that link is weaker in the literature than advocates often claim — but a culture that trains people to see women as objects is not a neutral input.

In fairness to men: Emma Watson's 2014 HeForShe speech at the UN made the point that men are trapped in this too, denied vulnerability and pushed toward a performance of masculinity that costs them their relationships and their health. Men who aren't harmed by rigid gender roles have no incentive to change them, which is why I think the fix has to be structural rather than attitudinal. Build institutions, events, and stories that demonstrate a woman's societal value independent of her sexual appeal, and the reflection changes on its own.

Feminism: The Iceland Lesson

The best demonstration I know of happened on October 24, 1975, when roughly 90% of Iceland's women refused to work, cook, or care for children for a single day. The country stopped. Five years later Iceland elected Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, the world's first democratically elected female president, and Iceland has ranked first on the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Index every year since 2009. One day of withdrawn labor made the invisible visible, and the country never fully un-saw it.

That's the lesson feminists should be taking seriously. Feminism, as I understand it, is about power and freedom — equal power to men and freedom from the tyranny of prescribed roles. HeForShe frames it as everyone's project, and I think that framing is correct rather than merely diplomatic. Practically, it comes down to control over fertility, control over self-image, and control over economic future.

I used to argue that everything would change if women voted exclusively for women. I don't believe that anymore, and I'd rather correct myself in front of you than sell you a slogan. Voting by identity alone would hand power to candidates who oppose women's interests as easily as ones who advance them, and the data on descriptive versus substantive representation bears that out. What does change outcomes is turnout, organized voting on specific issues, and enough women in the pipeline that a female candidate isn't a novelty. Iceland's women didn't vote as a bloc; they withheld their labor and made the country do the math.

Economic: Gender Equality Is Smart Economics

Jordan Peterson and Michael Kimmel don't agree on much, but both land on a version of the same observation: where women gain rights, prosperity tends to follow. Kimmel's TED talk makes the argument that gender equality is in the interest of countries, companies, and men themselves, and the corporate data broadly supports it — more equal firms tend to show better retention and performance. It's genuinely a positive-sum situation, which is the rarest thing in policy.

The "Why Women Are Paid Less" episode of Explained gets to the heart of the wage gap, and this is where the research is strongest. Claudia Goldin won the 2023 Nobel in economics for showing that the modern pay gap is driven overwhelmingly by what happens after a first child. Men and women in the same jobs start close and diverge sharply at parenthood, because the highest-paying roles pay a disproportionate premium for long, inflexible, always-available hours — and someone has to be home. The gap is less between men and women than between mothers and everyone else.

That reframing tells you what to fix. It's not primarily a bias problem to be solved with training; it's a structural problem about childcare, parental leave that fathers actually take, and jobs designed so that flexibility doesn't cost you your career. Countries that pushed on those levers narrowed the gap. Countries that ran awareness campaigns did not.

Zoom out and the international picture is clearer still. The World Bank has argued for years that gender equality is smart economics, and its data show poverty falling as gender equality rises. Access to credit and secure land title for women is one of the most reliable development interventions we have, in part because women reinvest a larger share of income into their households. Restricting women's economic participation isn't just unfair to them; it depresses the welfare of entire families. Gender equality is the UN's fifth Sustainable Development Goal, targeted for 2030, and at current rates we are not going to make it — which is an argument for moving faster, not for giving up.

Mate Selection: Where I Landed Instead

I opened by saying I'd take the evolutionary argument seriously, so let me tell you what survives it. Female choice is a real and powerful force in biology — across many species, what females select for shapes what males become over time. Humans have it too, and it's why the cliché exists about what each sex is supposedly shopping for. That's the kernel of truth in the argument I started with.

But the version worth acting on isn't a breeding program, it's agency. Women being active rather than passive in dating — asking, initiating, choosing on their own terms instead of waiting to be selected — changes real outcomes for real people right now. It doesn't require a law, doesn't require anyone's consent to be overridden, and doesn't require us to believe something false about genetics. Culture moves faster than gene frequencies anyway. If you want gentler men in one generation instead of forty, you change what gets rewarded, not who gets born.

What I Actually Want You to Take From This

Six categories, one system. Identity, safety, sex, mind, power, and money aren't separate fights, and progress on one is fragile without the others. The evidence says the levers that work are unglamorous — bystander training, parental leave, childcare, credit access, land title, institutions willing to expel and prosecute, and enough women in enough rooms that nobody's a novelty. None of them require re-engineering the species.

The thing I'd most like you to take is the habit I had to develop writing this. I held several of these beliefs confidently, checked them, and found some of them were myths I'd been repeating. That's not a failure; that's the process working. If a claim about human nature happens to justify controlling someone else's body, that's exactly the claim to check hardest.

If this way of thinking is useful to you — taking your own assumptions apart and rebuilding from evidence — that's the entire premise of my book Can and Will Do. It's about turning that examined mindset into action you can actually execute on. You can grab it at CanAndWillDo.com.

Thanks for reading! Please comment!

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