Bill O’Reilly is so far keeping his $18m-a-year gig at Fox, despite serial accusations of sexual harassment. The US vice-president apparently won’t dine alone with any woman other than his wife. And just about every week now, it seems, there’s a photo released of another all-male group of legislators gathered around a table in Washington preparing to strip women of essential benefits – in what some believe is a calculated signal to the GOP base that the US Congress remains a boys’ club.

How did we suddenly wind up back in the Mad Men era when it comes to gender relations at work?

As battles we thought had been settled decades ago resurface, social scientists say we’re witnessing a backlash to the loss of male dominance in the world of work. The phenomenon was a key factor in the election of Donald Trump.

Dan Cassino, a political scientist at Fairleigh Dickinson University, found when he asked primary voters questions crafted to remind them that many women earn more money than men, those men became less likely to support Hillary Clinton. Some white guys in power would like to keep it for themselves, thank you very much. With a little help from voter suppression and democratic complacency, maybe they will.

As the attorney Lisa Bloom put it in a Monday press conference calling out a culture of sexism at Fox: “We are not living in the stone age or the Mad Men era.” She was speaking alongside her client Wendy Walsh, one of the most recent women to step forward to accuse O’Reilly of harassment, and she seemed to be trying to convince herself as much as anyone. Bloom is also the attorney for Jill Harth, Trump’s former business partner and the first woman to go on record accusing him of sexual assault – and last year, along with her mother, Gloria Allred, she was the go-to lawyer for women accusing the soon-to-be president of sexual misconduct.

That such work is every bit as relevant today as when her mother began doing it decades ago would not surprise the Mad Men staff writer Carly Wray. “The show takes place in the 1960s, but so much is about today,” Wray said in a recent interview. “It’s just a lens through which you’re seeing these stories that happen every day in everybody’s lives.” But what’s happening now feels less like a blip or continuation than a backlash.

“It wasn’t just that white Americans voted Republican, which they usually do,” the writer Rebecca Traister observed after Hillary Clinton’s loss. “It’s that they chose a uniquely unqualified candidate who openly sold himself on promises of resistance to and revenge on the women and people of color who were poised to exert a historic degree of power.”



Boys’ club? Some see the Trump administration as a return to retro gender roles. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

We’re seeing that play in other realms too. It’s not just that Fox stood by Bill O’Reilly when new allegations of sexual assault emerged: it’s that a large audience did, too. It’s no coincidence that he hosts the most popular show on cable news, generating a reported $446m in ad revenue between 2014 and 2016 alone. His regressive worldview with respect to women in the workplace isn’t incidental to his bestselling books – it’s central to it. If he is a “one-man multimedia juggernaut and a star asset”, as he’s been described, it’s in no small part because his audience subscribes to the brand of machismo he’s selling. So too, it seems, do an increasing number of young Americans.

Reports from the Council on Contemporary Families confirm a drop in support for gender equality in family arrangements among voters aged 18 to 25 compared with 20 years ago. And a study monitoring the attitudes of high school seniors found that between 1994 and 2014, the proportion of high school seniors who agreed “the husband should make all the important decisions in the family” jumped roughly 10 percentage points. By 2014, 58% of students questioned said they preferred a family arrangement in which men are breadwinners and women stay at home.

At the end of Mad Men’s run in 2015, the writer Matthew Gilbert wrote that the show would be remembered for its depiction of “what it meant for a woman to have lived in a man’s world”. The optimism – then as now – was in the conviction that a man’s world would someday truly be past tense. If the future is female, it feels very far away.