A new survey by the Washington Post and Kaiser Family Foundation tested Americans views towards feminism, and the results are pretty depressing. Over half of women identified as feminists, while only one-third of men identified as feminists. This is depressing because feminism benefits everyone. But several other questions had sad results as well.

Not only do people not want to identify as feminists, they also hold some unfortunate views about feminism as a movement.

Feminists are often viewed as “man hating,” but this simply isn’t true of mainstream feminism because most feminists actually want to help men! Men are a part of a patriarchal system that hurts everyone, and calling out that system isn’t an insult of any individual men.



I was surprised to see nearly half of women state that inequality was their fault. I’d really like to ask these women what choices they are making that are creating such inequality!

These results about activism were also pretty depressing as well. I’d love to see more people be engaged in the political process in general so only 14% of women talking to public officials was sad to see. I think that reflects the American public’s attitudes towards the political system.

I’d be really curious to see how these results would change if the participants were presented with just a few facts about feminism beforehand. As previous surveys have showed, simply informing people that feminists are simply for equality of the sexes makes the much more likely to identify as feminists. I’d imagine if people were shown what feminism is actually about instead of warped perceptions of being “man hating,” these results would be much more positive.

Featured images from Washington Post