How DEI is misunderstood — and the real route to gender equality

Patriarchy Inc.: What We Get Wrong About Gender Equality and Why Men Still Win at Work Cordelia Fine Atlantic (2025)

In 2021, white men managed around 95% of US hedge-fund assets. In 2024, only one of the 40 largest banks in the world had a female chief executive. And in an average UK week, men spend more of their time in paid work or education than doing unpaid tasks such as household chores or taking care of children; for women, it’s the reverse.

How did we get here? We know the answer, as psychologist Cordelia Fine tells us in her engaging book Patriarchy Inc. Yes, the culprit is patriarchy: gender influences who gets power, status, money and access to opportunities. But where this patriarchal framework stems from and how to build a more equitable society are harder to pin down.

Fine sets out to dismantle two existing “false visions” for gender equality. The first of these is the view that men and women are ‘different but equal’, a stance that emerged in the 1990s. The second is the concept of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) — a framework of policies and initiatives to increase workplace representation of people from marginalized groups — which has spread like wildfire in the business world and beyond since the 2010s. Fine focuses on critiquing ‘business DEI’ — but, in so doing, misses the chance to explore more effective ways to improve gender equity.

The various strategies that business DEI has sprouted to improve gender diversity in the workplace, such as diversity workshops and numbers games of equal-representational hiring, are aimed more at boosting productivity than at helping women. The approach is also often tokenistic, and fails to prompt much change: stereotypes and gendered norms continue to influence who gets ahead.

Views about how gender bias arose tend to fall into two camps, explains Fine. Many anthropologists and psychologists point to biology and evolution to justify the widespread gendered division of labour: men tend to be stronger, they say, and women more caring. Others insist that cultural conditioning is at the root of gendered roles. In this world view, children pick up norms about what being a girl or a boy is supposed to mean through messaging from their parents, carers, peers and friends, from the media and books around them. They learn from an early age who typically sews clothes or writes computer code.

Fine proposes a compromise: both evolution and social conditioning, she suggests, led to the division of tasks by gender. She argues that this has helped societies to succeed in certain situations: everyone is more efficient when roles are clearly defined. But in my field — behavioural science — extensive research has shown how it has also created status hierarchies, in which men continue to assume ‘important’ leading roles (often well-paid) while women are pushed into supportive, invisible ones (often remunerated poorly or not at all).

Dispelling intrinsic differences

Although Fine doesn’t discuss it, many feminist movements have long challenged gender norms and the gender binary more generally. And many scholars, including me, have been critiquing the insular and superficial approaches of DEI for a while. But clearly, women continue to carry much of the invisible mental load in the workplace and at home.

Yet, at the same time, other pockets of society are strengthening gender norms. There is more pressure on women than on men to have children. Once they do, women are expected to carry the majority of the caring responsibilities. Moves to take away women’s bodily autonomy and choices, along with regular media panic about falling birthrates, contribute to this divide. And toxic ideas of masculinity — that men need to be providers, as well as leaders at work and at home, for example — are gaining traction, perpetuated notably by Internet influencers.

In any case, it’s a mistake to attribute inherently different abilities to women and men simply because of the sex they were assigned at birth — not least because it ignores within-group differences. Not all women are the same. And beyond individual differences, we know how gender norms are racially grounded and how historic legacies of oppression have played out. Black and Brown women often report being held to different expectations from their white colleagues, as I describe in my 2022 book Hysterical. Efforts to ‘define’ gender through biological parameters — such as testosterone levels, used as a primary indicator of eligibility for women’s sports — typically take white European women as a baseline, even though typical ranges can vary with race and ethnicity.

More broadly, the idea that there is some sort of ‘feminine’ way of thinking and working has hindered efforts to tackle gender inequalities. It pigeonholes women, putting them into new boxes rather than disrupting the ones in which they have long been held captive.

Missing the mark on DEI

Fine touches on the idea that gender equality will improve the lives of everyone — not just those of women. This can at first seem counter-intuitive, because men are at a clear advantage in the current patriarchal framework; on the face of it, it might seem as if giving equal rights to women means limiting men’s rights. I wish Fine had laid out more clearly how gendered norms can also harm men by stifling them into a specific role. Emotional vulnerability, for example, is deemed unsuitable for men, a position that can lead to mental-health issues.

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And so gender equality should be the goal in itself. But organizations don’t work to break gender barriers just for the greater good — they want to see value and profit. It is to get them on board that some have endeavoured to ‘sell’ equality work by highlighting that diverse teams perform better. Although originally well-intentioned, this approach has moved away from the original goals of DEI and created new forms of gendered labour. It is mostly women, and people from other marginalized groups, who carry the load of DEI initiatives, for example through informal mentorships.