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Gender Inequality is Real

Gender inequality is real. Before even getting into the more subjective aspects such as cultural and social experiences, let’s first look at the hard data. I’m focusing on the U.S. and China due to my personal background, but bear in mind that these are two of the most influential countries in the current world.

The 2024 gender income gap was 26.3% in China and 34.2% in the U.S., according to the World Economic Forum. In China, women held less than 8% of senior leadership positions in 2022, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. In the U.S. Congress, only 28.2% of members are women. Neither country has ever had a female president.

These numbers and facts matter because the absence of women in positions of power, both in economic and political spheres, creates ripple effects throughout society. Decision-making at the highest levels shapes policies, business strategies, and social norms that impact everyone. When these decisions are predominantly made by men, they naturally skew toward male interests and undervalue women’s needs—not necessarily out of intentional exclusion, but due to a lack of female representation in the conversation.

I here present two examples of the real-world implications. I don’t need to emphasize how much venture capital and startup ecosystems encourage global innovation and drive change in key areas, yet it remains overwhelmingly male-dominated. Women account for only 9% of venture capitalists and 8% of firm partners, and research shows that male investors tend to fund male-led startups. This inequality excludes women from opportunities to build wealth or focus on issues important to women, and perpetuates pay gaps; beyond that, the “pattern matching” bias in VC forms a cycle of exclusion, where investors back entrepreneurs who resemble past successes that are typically male, restarting the cycle.

Similarly, in academia, women only make up less than 30% of researchers globally and face significant barriers in STEM fields, according to UNESCO. With fewer women in leadership roles, there are fewer research projects focused on women’s well-being, and women are less frequently considered as primary research subjects. This could result in obvious gaps—for example, in medical research, many diseases and conditions that predominantly affect women remain understudied and underfunded—and intangible overlook of women’s needs—for example, in urban planning, public transit systems are designed based on men’s commuting patterns. Again, these issues highlight the broader consequences of decision-making structures that exclude female perspectives.

Recognizing Gender Inequality is Step One

I wrote extensively about the reality of gender inequality because I believe acknowledging gender inequality and understanding its scope is our first step—and also one of the hardest. Society has long centered men in positions of power, and public discourse constrains individual minds. Many of these biases are not intentional results but are products of systemic inertia. We need to see their existence and impact on the day-to-day lives of people, especially women.

What Does Feminism Mean to Me

Many feminist thinkers have not sought to reverse gender hierarchies but rather to eliminate them entirely. I recently read Maria Mies, who challenges the conventional notion of equality, arguing that men often interpret equality as “equality of privilege, while in reality, what feminist movements truly seek is a non-hierarchical, non-centralized social structure. I was struck by this “de-gendered” perspective and find it a very compelling vision for the future.

Unfortunately, I noticed that many discussions of gender inequality often devolve into divisions. On Chinese social media, for example, the hot-topic debates revolve around 男女对立, which literally translates to “gender opposition,” a framing that pits men and women against each other. Silvia Federici takes this critique further and writes that capitalism excludes women and people of color, arguing that capitalism cannot function without the exploitation of these marginalized groups. A deeper discussion of her argument is for another time.

Why Privilege Limits Real Empathy and Actions

In a previous post, I demonstrated why absolute empathy is impossible—no one can fully, 100% experience what another person feels. Those in advantaged positions, in particular, cannot completely empathize with the disadvantaged. While many people have intentions to be kind and compassionate, historical struggles and present-day social structures show that personal interests often take priority, catering to our self-serving human nature.

A striking example is European colonization in the Americas. European settlers slaughtered Native Americans and enslaved Africans, disregarding the basic human rights of other groups to gain plantation profits. Once systemic exploitation is established, even those who benefit from it but morally oppose it have little room to resist, given the expectations and pressures imposed upon them by social structures. Beneficiaries of such systems are often compelled to conform to the rules, oftentimes essential for their own survival. In Shooting an Elephant, George Orwell illustrates this dilemma through the protagonist, a white colonial officer forced to kill an elephant to uphold the role imposed on him by the colonial system, despite his internal resistance.

The same dynamic applies to gender inequality being systemically established. Even men who are committed to addressing the issue would have a hard time fully understanding women’s experiences or enacting changes for women. More importantly, most who benefit from the status quo are unlikely to make significant efforts to empathize with or advocate for groups outside their own, especially when doing so risks their own privilege.

What Can Women Do As Individuals

Liang Yong’an’s Reading, Traveling, and Love talks about Chinese women’s culture. He advocates that for women to find their own spiritual value, they need to take these three steps: recognize the world, see the world’s diversity, and realize that there is always more beyond what is known; recognize the self, explore and define who you are; recognize life, acknowledge the infinite forms of life coexisting on this planet, rather than believing that only oneself exists. He believes that this is the process of achieving a “second birth” (the first being physiological, the second being spiritual).

He points out that the problem today is that Chinese society artificially interrupts this process for young women: “As soon as women graduate, they are pressured by society to date for marriage and settle down, and suddenly, their life path is fixed. They are pushed forward stage by stage, abiding by a rigid sequence, as if they were manufactured on an industrial assembly line… Their lives move forward in a state of constant anxiety. Where is their spiritual value and who cares?”

I deeply appreciate the “three-step process” he proposes, and it is something I have always been practicing. It is said that the new generation of women are against marriage and childbirth, but I think a more accurate way to put it is they are against a predetermined life. I personally feel comfortable and happy in a relationship and even look forward to marriage and having children. What matters is that women must have the right to design the path of their own lives, with critical thinking and maturity—ideally, after experiencing their “second birth.”

In today’s society, for the vast majority of people, no one is forced to do anything. More often than not, it is our own minds convincing us that “we have no choice”—when in reality, we simply don’t want to bear the costs of having a choice. Liang Yong’an writes that society imposes many restrictions on everyone, even more on women, but most of these restrictions are self-imposed, not from the external. He argues that once we overcome our psychological barriers, we may find that freedom is just one step away.

Yes, going against the mainstream is inevitably painful, but the fundamental question of what to do and where to go is ultimately in our own hands. In my opinion, for women to “cross this barrier,” they need intellect and persistence, from dropping short videos and picking up books, improving themselves, building financial independence, and truly recognizing that their value as women comes from within—not from validation through others, including but not limited to their aesthetic value, sexual value, marriage value.

Women’s Future Count on Women

Yu Hua’s To Live once again astonished me with how, in China’s old society under an agrarian economy, men and women had such starkly different, seemingly natural gender roles. Many of these patterns still leave traces today. Dale Carnegie, in How to Win Friends and Influence People, includes a questionnaire from the 1933 sixth issue of The American Magazine on marriage happiness, where all the questions assume the husband’s role is to earn money while the wife’s role is in the kitchen. Reading these books made me think: In less than a hundred years, women have already gained so many more choices. We have made great progress. But it is still far from enough.

In today’s era where the Chinese government continues to emphasize traditional gender roles (such as explicitly expecting men to have “masculine strength”) and major corporations in the U.S. are aggressively cutting DEI budgets, I am uncertain about the direction we are headed. But I only remember a quote from a TED Talk by a professor at Berkeley:

“Those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act.”

Again, a quick look at history shows that every structural transformation happened because the oppressed stood up and spoke for themselves—not because those privileged bestowed mercy and accidentally granted change. With that, I hope that in the future, more women will hold positions of power where they make important decisions, rather than quietly conforming to societal pressures and becoming housewives without ever having questioned why. Only when women’s presence is seen can women’s voices be heard, and only then can systemic change become possible.