Microfeminism: The next big thing in fighting the patriarchy

If you have ever intentionally addressed your female colleagues first during a meeting or shut down a guy trying to manspread on the subway, you may have been practicing microfeminism — small but meaningful acts of uplifting women in male-dominated spaces.

“When I send an email, let’s say to a CEO, and you have to copy their assistant for scheduling purposes, if the assistant is a female, I will always, in the ’email to’ line, enter their address before the CEO’s,” Ashley Chaney said in a viral TikTok post this year.

“That’s my favorite form of microfeminism,” she said. “What’s yours?”

Chaney did not invent the term, but with her video garnering thousands of comments and video responses of other people explaining how they go about promoting women’s voices, she introduced the word to a new audience.

“I always call the dads first when the kids are sick and the moms for billing questions,” one preschool worker wrote in response.

“I write real estate contracts and I always put the wife’s name first,” another respondee wrote. “The [husbands] question it a lot even though it makes zero difference to the contract, just their ego.”

These acts might seem trivial to some, but experts say the little tricks can have a big impact.

Little “winks and nods”

Chaney, the woman behind the viral TikTok, said she was inspired to talk about her acts of microfeminism after an upsetting day of dealing with a male coworker.

“I remember particularly just thinking, god, there are these things that happen to me on a daily basis that drive me crazy. And I know in my head that I’m doing these little sort of winks and nods to the women around me. I wonder if they notice,” she said.

The response, Chaney said, has been overwhelming.

“It is something that women A) notice and just like me are also trying to do, which I love. And moreover, if they hadn’t heard of it, they’re now inspired and they’re seeing tiny ways in which they can uplift women around them,” she said.

“I think that people really resonate with that because it gives them something to do that’s not going out to march or burn your bras or whatever. It’s like, ‘Hey, these are things that I can do and I can actually affect change in a small way.’ “

The backlash

While many of the comments were positive, Chaney said there was also a wave of mostly men who ridiculed and derided her stance, with some going so far as to say she should die.

“In the comments, I got people saying that I was a misandrist and that I was doing witchcraft,” Chaney said.

“The first thing they attack is your physical appearance. So I got everything from fat, ugly, old, to stupid and a dumb woman,” she said. “Honestly, it scared me so much.”

While the backlash Chaney received was frightening — she stopped posting online for weeks after the episode — ultimately, it made her more secure in her beliefs.

“It has inspired me to identify more loudly and publicly as a feminist,” she said. “My entire platform is not dedicated to feminism, but I am being louder about it, particularly as people have criticism or critiques of it. I’m like, OK, that means that there is a need for a loud voice here.”

Everyday sexism

Research has shown that everyday instances of sexism affect women at all levels, including in matters of physical and mental health.

Microfeminist proponents hope to mitigate some of those effects in their own personal ways.

Halima Kazem-Stojanovic, Ph.D., is the associate director of the Feminist, Gender, Sexuality studies program at Stanford University.

She says it’s important to normalize addressing everyday gender biases in order to make bigger changes.

“When you start to adjust society’s norms, then that has a lasting effect. That has a conscious and a subconscious effect,” Kazem-Stojanovic said.

She said that small things like changing male-centered language — for example, using “guys” as a catchall term for people — are the kind of changes that are easy to make and will benefit everyone in the long term.

“Knowing that to keep things more neutral really kind of helps everybody because the patriarchy hasn’t even helped masculinity,” Kazem-Stojanovic said, noting that patriarchal expectations of manliness lead to strict limitations on how men can present themselves and express their emotions.

Feminism after Roe

Kazem-Stojanovic said that working against the patriarchy is as important now as ever before, particularly in light of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and restrictive abortion bans that have cropped up across the country in the years since.

Despite these changes in the current political environment, Kazem-Stojanovic said that the virality of Chaney’s TikTok video gives her hope that the younger generations understand how important it is to fight for women’s rights, no matter the scale.

“I’m a mom of two girls, teenagers … and I see them engaging in social media. And I think there’s this recent interest with microfeminism stems from a video from TikTok, which my girls are always on,” she said. “I find it interesting that little snippets of these long-held kind of feminist ways of thinking and being and embodying feminism have kind of come out in these modern multimedia little videos, which I find really interesting, which makes me happy to see.”