Resistance is not evidence that gender equality is failing. It’s evidence that it is working.
Around the world, support for gender equality appears to be under pressure. Anti-feminist influencers attract millions of followers. Diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives are increasingly questioned. Some argue feminism has overreached. Others dismiss the backlash as little more than misogyny resurfacing whenever women make progress.
As a research psychologist who now regulates gender equality, I’ve spent the past five years watching what happens when institutions are legally required to change. Victoria’s Gender Equality Act covers around 300 organisations and almost half a million employees. We collect the data, review the action plans and progress reports – and publish them all to keep leaders accountable. We can see where change is occurring, and we can see the resistance that inevitably accompanies a change like this in all its recurring forms – denial, disavowal of responsibility, inaction, appeasement, co-option and repression.
The more interesting question is not why gender equality has encountered resistance. It is why we expected one of the largest social transformations in modern history not to.
History suggests we shouldn’t have.
Women’s suffrage, the abolition of slavery and civil rights movements all expanded freedom while provoking organised opposition. Australia followed the same pattern. Women gained the federal vote in 1902, yet equal pay, sex discrimination protections and workplace gender equality laws unfolded over the next century. Social change of this scale has never been linear.
This doesn’t excuse resistance, nor does it assume progress is inevitable. But Australian researchers Michael Flood, Molly Dragiewicz and Bob Pease have long argued that backlash is a predictable response whenever established gender arrangements are challenged.
Psychology helps explain why.
Social Identity Theory tells us that people derive part of their identity from the groups to which they belong. When the status of those groups shifts, people can experience that as personally threatening, even if their own circumstances haven’t changed. Kahneman and Tversky’s work on loss aversion adds another insight: we feel losses more intensely than equivalent gains.
For many women, gender equality represents opportunities previous generations were denied. For some men, the same social changes can feel like the loss of certainty about roles they had long assumed were simply normal or based on biology. The experiences are not equivalent, but both are shaped by powerful psychological processes that influence how people interpret social change, engage in public debate and, ultimately, vote and behave.
Real pressures, misdiagnosed causes
People of all genders are navigating rising housing costs, insecure work, declining social mobility, loneliness, and weakening trust in institutions. Boys are falling behind girls at school. Men are less likely to seek help for mental ill-health, account for around 95% of Australians killed by traumatic workplace injuries each year, and die by suicide at more than three times the rate of women. Women, meanwhile, remain more likely to retire into poverty, reduce their paid work to undertake caring responsibilities, carry the greater share of unpaid domestic labour, experience gender-based violence, and record higher rates of work-related mental stress injuries because they are concentrated in occupations with greater psychosocial hazards.
These are real, urgent problems on both sides of the ledger. But the evidence fits poorly with the claim that women’s advancement caused men’s difficulties. The more plausible explanation is that many of these outcomes arise from the same underlying systems: economic insecurity, technological disruption, weakening community connection, and the persistent gender segregation of work and care. Those forces shape men’s and women’s lives differently, but they are not competing problems. They are different expressions of the same social structures. Yet those broader forces are increasingly interpreted through a gendered lens because gender is the story many people are hearing.
Too often that story comes not from evidence but from social media algorithms that reward outrage over understanding.
From scorekeeping to systems thinking
Have we explained clearly enough that restrictive gender stereotypes constrain men too? Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell’s work on masculinities made this case decades ago, but outside universities it has struggled to compete with simpler narratives. Public conversation has understandably concentrated on the structural barriers facing women. But many boys and men have never heard a compelling explanation of what gender equality offers them: the freedom to be an engaged father without career penalty, to choose caring professions without stigma, or simply to ask for help without shame.
This isn’t about balancing competing grievances. It is about recognising that rigid gender stereotypes constrain everyone, even if they do so in different ways.
Look at Australia’s labour market. Men remain concentrated in industries such as construction, transport and agriculture, where workplace fatalities are highest. Women are concentrated in health, education and care, where psychosocial hazards are greatest. The same system of gendered expectations channels people into different kinds of work and exposes them to different kinds of risk. That is not two separate problems. It is one structural problem with different consequences.
Victoria’s Gender Equality Act reflects that understanding. It recognises the structural disadvantage women continue to experience while also seeking to dismantle the stereotypes that limit opportunity, safety and participation for people of every gender.
That broader conversation has become increasingly important.
Research from Plan International Australia’s Gender Compass found overwhelming public support for gender equality. Yet it also identified a growing minority, particularly among younger men, who feel alienated from the conversation. If gender equality is consistently presented as something that benefits only women, we should not be surprised when some conclude it has little to offer them.
The goals of gender equality do not need to change. But perhaps the way we explain them does.
History reminds us that resistance often accompanies profound social change. Psychology helps explain why. Sociology reminds us that identities are shaped by the institutions and cultures we build, which means they can be built differently.
None of this diminishes the inequalities women continue to face. Nor does it guarantee continued progress. But backlash should not be read as proof that gender equality is failing. It may instead be evidence that one of the most significant cultural transformations in modern history is still very much underway – and that the transformation is reaching deeply enough to challenge long-held assumptions about identity, work and family.
The task for the next decade is not simply to keep changing laws and workplace policies, important though they are. It is to build a broader story about gender equality that more people can see themselves in. Because its long-term success will depend not only on improving women’s lives, but on helping everyone understand that they, too, have something to gain.