Every man who refuses to self identify as a feminist is ignorant, selfish, or cowardly. The clueless are those who fail to understand the complex structural challenges faced by most women but few men. The selfish are those unmitigated sods who know full well that recognizing feminism invites the possibility of having to respect and compete fairly with the, ahem, fair sex. The gutless are those who are plenty aware of the raison d’être for feminism, but lack the moral courage to assert what they know to be true and to do what they know to be right and join the ranks in opposition to persistent and oppressive inequitable distributions of power and privilege.

Feminists, whatever their gender, are a sundry sort. Strictly speaking, we should speak of feminisms rather than feminism. To be swift about it and to name a few approaches, the liberal sort share an awareness of the tendency toward qualitative differences in the social, political, and economic lives of women and men and a commitment to resisting and reversing the odious practices that put women at a disadvantage. The intersectional camp adds race, class, sexuality, age, and bodily ability into the mix, rendering an analysis of interlocking oppression part of the critique of contemporary interpersonal and system-wide relations.

Now, before anyone uses the crackpot line about how they’ve had a look around and women are doing just fine, thank you — Your lawyer is a woman, is she? Good for her! — let’s quickly rehearse some of the hefty silage of evidence supporting the argument that women face structural and specific disadvantages rarely faced by men.

First, money. According to a recent report from Statistics Canada entitled The Evolution of Canadian Wages Over the Last Three Decades, the difference between the average hourly income earned by a woman and that earned by a man is between eight and 15 per cent, depending on the measure. The gap is closing, but women in Canada are far more likely than men to be poor because they spend more time doing unpaid work and, often as a result, are overrepresented in precarious, low paid jobs. Eighty per cent of all lone-parent households are headed by women.

Next, careers. Fewer women than men are in positions of authority. According to the research group GMI Ratings, a mere 13 per cent of corporate directors in Canada are women. In Parliament, an anemic 24 per cent of members are women, placing our brave constitutional monarchy 48th in the world, behind such world leaders as Iraq, Tunisia, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, and Lesotho, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union. When women who are in positions of authority interrupt their work for child-bearing or domestic labour, they risk limiting their earning power and sacrifice long-term economic security.

And violence? According to the Canadian Women’s Foundation, half of all Canadian women have experienced physical violence. At least 3,300 women occupy shelters each night, fleeing domestic abuse — that’s merely a count of those who attempt to find a space. Women are 11 times more likely than men to face sexual violence. And while best estimates suggest that just 10 per cent of sexual assaults are reported, 460,000 women surveyed in 2009 admitted to being assaulted.

And of course — I haven’t the space to continue in detail — there’s the objectification of women in advertisements, television, and film; gendered double standards; and verbal abuse that positions women as less valuable than men.