Doing the work

Published 2026-07-03

Most men who call themselves feminists got there by agreeing with ideas. Agreement is the easy part. The hard part is the gap between a man's stated principles and his Tuesday afternoon: who he interrupts, what he laughs at, which household tasks he notices before being asked, and what his daughter learns from watching him. This article is about closing that gap, not through activism but through personal practice. It starts with principles, because behaviour follows perception; moves on to concrete rules of conduct at work, at home, and in fatherhood; and ends with the unglamorous engineering that makes change survive longer than a good intention.

I write from the Netherlands, a few Dutch words and societal specifics appear along the way. The patterns they describe are not Dutch at all.

Feminism is a practice, not a badge

The first trap for a man who wants to be a feminist is treating it as an identity, a label to acquire, defend, and expect credit for. Identity is static; it invites the question "am I a good one?" instead of "what did I do today?" Worse, identity-feminism tends to be performed for women, as a bid for approval, which quietly re-centres the man. Women notice this. It reads as another form of demand.

The move is to drop the noun and keep the verb. The useful question is never "am I a feminist?" but "was that action feminist?", where "that action" is the meeting just run, the school email answered or ignored, the joke laughed at or not when no women were in the room. This framing has a second advantage: verbs are testable. Identities are not. Behaviour can be instrumented; a self-image cannot, and self-images are notoriously flattering instruments anyway.

One more ground rule before the principles: any man doing this should expect to find sexism in himself. Not as a confession ritual, but as a base rate. He grew up in the same water as everyone else. Cordelia Fine's work on "neurosexism" is useful here, not because it proves men and women are identical, but because it shows how eagerly people absorb just-so stories about innate difference, and how thin the evidence for most of them is. If a claim about "how women are" would be embarrassing said about people from one particular city, it deserves the same suspicion. The goal is not purity. The goal is noticing, and noticing faster each year.

Part I: How to see

Behaviour follows perception. If a man's way of seeing women is off, no checklist of behaviours will save him; he'll follow the rules while radiating the old assumptions, and the mismatch will show. So the principles come first. There are six.

1. The default human is not male

Simone de Beauvoir's core observation in The Second Sex still does most of the work: man is treated as the default, woman as the deviation, "the Other." He is the subject; she is defined in relation to him. Once seen, the pattern is everywhere, and Caroline Criado Perez's Invisible Women documents it with data: crash-test dummies modelled on male bodies, drug dosages trialled on male subjects, office temperatures calibrated to male metabolic rates, smartphone dimensions sized to male hands. The world is full of design decisions where "person" silently meant "man," and women absorb the cost as a personal inconvenience rather than a system failure.

The personal discipline that follows: notice when maleness is being treated as neutral. When a woman's approach to a problem differs from a man's own, the default-male reflex labels her approach the marked one: emotional where his is rational, cautious where his is realistic, aggressive where his is assertive. The principle says there is no unmarked position. His way of running a meeting, arguing a design decision, or expressing frustration is also a way, not the way. She is not a variation on him.

2. Credibility is the currency

The philosopher Miranda Fricker gave a name to something women have described forever: testimonial injustice, receiving less credibility than a statement deserves because of who is making it. It is the mechanism behind the familiar pattern where a woman raises a point in a meeting, it lands on silence, a man repeats it eight minutes later, and it becomes "great point, Mark." It is why women in technical fields report having to prove competence repeatedly that men get to assume once.

This matters because credibility is the actual currency of professional life. Architecture decisions, incident post-mortems, hiring debates: these are all credibility markets. A small, systematic tax on women's credibility compounds exactly like interest does, and after fifteen years it looks like "she just never quite became senior," which everyone then attributes to her.

The principle: extend women the default credibility men extend one another, and then check whether that actually happens. Not "believe everything any woman says"; that is condescension wearing a costume. Rather: when a man feels the flicker of doubt at a woman's technical claim, the question is whether he would have felt it from a man with the same CV. Sometimes yes. Often, honestly, no.

3. Misogyny is enforcement, not hatred

Kate Manne's Down Girl makes a distinction worth internalising deeply: misogyny is not primarily men hating women. Most sexist men love women, their mothers, wives, daughters. Manne argues misogyny functions as the enforcement arm of patriarchy: it doesn't punish women for being women, it punishes women for stepping out of role. The warm, wonderful woman who supports, nurtures and defers meets no hostility. The same woman becomes "difficult," "abrasive," "ambitious" (said with a curl of the lip) the moment she claims what men claim without comment: authority, anger, airtime, money.

Manne's companion concept is himpathy: the reflexive sympathy that flows to men, especially likeable, high-status men, when they are accused of mistreating women. "He's a brilliant engineer, this could ruin his career" arrives in the mind faster than "what did it do to hers?"

The discipline: watch the allocation of one's own sympathy. When a conflict surfaces between a man and a woman at work, notice whose disruption registers first, whose future draws the worry, whose account gets stress-tested harder. And notice the role-policing hiding in vocabulary. Any man who has thought "abrasive" about a woman can run the substitution test: same sentence, same tone, from a man. A well-known analysis of performance reviews by Kieran Snyder found "abrasive" appearing repeatedly in women's reviews and essentially never in men's. That word is doing enforcement work.

4. See the cage, not the wire

Marilyn Frye's birdcage metaphor solves a problem that comes up constantly: individual sexist acts often look trivial, and dismissing them individually is always locally reasonable. Examine one wire of a birdcage up close and it is impossible to understand why the bird doesn't just fly around it. Only from a distance do the wires resolve into a cage. No single wire holds the bird; the arrangement does.

The interruption in one meeting is a wire. The assumption that she'll take notes is a wire. The client who addresses questions to the male junior instead of the female lead is a wire. The school that calls the mother first is a wire. Each one is survivable, deniable, "not a big deal," and each defence is technically true. The principle: when a woman says something small mattered, resist the urge to evaluate the wire in isolation. She lives in the cage; the man inspecting one wire and calling her oversensitive is missing the structure she is describing. The useful job is to hold the systemic view even, and especially, when the individual instance looks innocent.

5. Patriarchy is also men's prison

Bell Hooks' The Will to Change is the book to start with, because it supplies the only motivation that survives long-term: not guilt, but self-interest rightly understood. Hooks argues that patriarchy's first act of violence is against boys. It demands they amputate emotional range, punishes tenderness, ridicules dependency, and leaves grown men with one sanctioned emotion (anger) and one sanctioned confidant (a female partner who becomes their unpaid emotional infrastructure).

The terrain is easy to verify. A man can count his friendships in which he could cry, admit fear about his career, or say "I'm lonely" without engineering the confession into a joke. For most men the count lands between zero and one, and the one is their partner. That is patriarchy operating on men, and it explains why male feminism grounded in guilt collapses (guilt exhausts itself) while male feminism grounded in liberation persists. This is not charity work for women. It is also an escape.

6. No man is the exception

The final principle guards all the others. Every man who reads this material concludes, somewhere quietly, "fortunately I'm mostly past this." That conclusion is itself the most reliable symptom. Bias research is genuinely contested. Implicit-association tests predict behaviour weakly, and mandatory bias trainings show little durable effect and sometimes backfire, so the science shouldn't be oversold. But the honest version is worse, not better: nobody can introspect their way to certainty about their own fairness, and the feeling of being unbiased is uncorrelated with being unbiased. The sane approach treats sexist habit like technical debt in an old codebase: assume it exists in anything running this long, find it by testing rather than by vibes, and fix it without a shame spiral, because shame makes the incident about the man's feelings, which is, once again, re-centring the man.

Part II: Rules of conduct

Principles decay without operationalisation. What follows are rules, concrete enough to be checkable, ordered by domain.

Everywhere: the baseline rules

The empty-room rule. A man's feminism is measured when no women are present. In the all-male channel, the drinks after sport, the group chat: what he laughs at, what he lets pass, and how he speaks about women's bodies, exes, and female colleagues is the real audit. No lectures required. "Not funny, man", said flat and unembarrassed before moving on, costs four words and does more than any essay, because men calibrate to other men. Silence is calibration too.

The airtime rule. In any mixed group, the rule is to actually track, not estimate, who speaks and who gets interrupted. Research on conversational dynamics consistently finds men overestimate women's speaking time; groups where women speak roughly a third of the time are frequently perceived as female-dominated. Male subjective sense is miscalibrated by design. The fix for a caught interruption is simple: "sorry, you were saying," followed by genuine silence. Not as theatre. As debugging.

The appearance-ratio rule. Comments on women's appearance are not forbidden, but the ratio deserves an audit. When a man's remarks to and about women skew heavily toward how they look while his remarks about men skew toward what they do, he is teaching everyone in earshot (including any child present) where a woman's value lives.

No cookies. When a man does any of this well, no one owes him recognition, and fishing for it ("as a feminist, I…") converts the act into a status transaction. Do the thing. Say nothing about the thing.

At work: what seniority obligates

A middle-aged or senior man is no longer a participant in meeting culture; he is meeting culture. Junior colleagues copy what he tolerates. That is leverage, and leverage is obligation.

Attribute relentlessly. When an idea resurfaces stripped of its author, reattach the name: "that's the approach Sanne proposed earlier. Sanne, want to expand?" The Obama White House's female staffers called their version of this amplification: repeating each other's points with attribution until authorship stuck. A senior man can do it unilaterally at no cost to himself, which is precisely why he should.

Refuse to let glue work be gendered. Tanya Reilly's essay "Being Glue" is essential reading: the noticing, documenting, onboarding, morale-tending work that makes teams function is essential, undervalued, and disproportionately routed to women, after which it is held against them at promotion time ("great team player, but where's the technical impact?"). The rules: rotate note-taking and meeting scheduling explicitly rather than letting them "naturally" settle; when a woman on the team carries heavy glue work, name it in calibration discussions as leadership, in those words; and do visible glue work as a senior man, because a senior man taking notes reprices the activity for everyone.

Audit evaluative language. In hiring debriefs and performance reviews, every adjective deserves the substitution test. "Abrasive," "emotional," "not strategic enough," "lacks executive presence," and the lethal "I just don't see her at the next level" all merit the question, asked out loud and mildly: "what specifically did she do?" Vague negative gut-feel is where bias hides, because it is unfalsifiable. Specifics can be examined.

Sponsor, don't just mentor. Mentorship is advice given in private; sponsorship is credibility spent in public: putting her name forward for the architecture review, the conference talk, the incident-commander rotation. Women are over-mentored and under-sponsored. Advice is cheap; reputation is the currency that moves careers.

Never appoint a spokeswoman. The one woman in the room is not the diversity spokesperson, and asking her to educate the team is unpaid extra work she never applied for.

At home: the load, not the chores

The Netherlands runs on the anderhalfverdienersmodel, the 'one-and-a-half earner' household. Dutch women work part-time at the highest rate in Europe, and the cultural default quietly assigns them the household's operating system regardless of hours worked. The surrounding defaults are stacked; equality at home requires actively overriding national settings, not just personal goodwill.

Own the mental load, not just tasks. Arlie Hochschild named the "second shift" decades ago, but the sharper modern framing is Eve Rodsky's: every domestic responsibility has three phases. Conception (noticing it's needed), planning (deciding how and when), and execution (doing it). Men disproportionately do execution-on-request and count it as sharing. Executing a partner's plan makes her a project manager with an unreliable report; it adds a coordination layer to her load. The rule: own domains end-to-end. The man who owns school communication notices the studiedag himself (the school's random day off), arranges the childcare, and updates the calendar. His partner should be able to forget the domain exists. The same goes for whatever else he takes: gifts and birthdays on his side of the family (kin-keeping is invisible and enormous), the children's sports logistics, holiday planning from research to booking.

Delete "helping" from the vocabulary. "Can I help with anything?" means "this is your job and I'm available as a volunteer." There is no helping in one's own household. There is only doing a share, or not.

Run the default-parent test. Who does school call first? Whose calendar absorbs a sick child? Who knows the shoe size, the friend drama, the vaccination status? When the answers cluster on one parent, that is the backlog. The fix is structural rather than aspirational: the father's number first on the school's contact list.

Do your own emotional labour. This is Hooks again, applied domestically. A man whose partner is the sole processor of his fears, frustrations and griefs has outsourced his inner life to her at cost. Building at least one male friendship that can carry real weight, and actually using it, is one of the most concretely feminist acts available, because it retires a job she never applied for.

Take her anger seriously. Per Manne: anger is the emotion patriarchy most rigorously denies women. When a partner is angry, the trained male responses are to police the tone, defend against the content, or fix the problem to end the discomfort. The feminist response is duller and harder: stay, listen to completion, ask what she needs before offering anything, and treat her anger as information with the same standing as one's own.

As a father of a daughter: the primary-school window

A father of a young daughter has a window, roughly the primary-school years, before peer culture out-shouts him. Two findings should organise everything inside it.

First: she is watching his hands, not his mouth. Research by Alyssa Croft and colleagues found that fathers' actual share of domestic work, not their stated egalitarian beliefs, predicted daughters' occupational aspirations. Fathers who talked equality but lived the traditional split raised daughters with narrower ambitions. Every rule in the home section above is therefore also a parenting intervention. The most feminist thing a daughter can see is her father owning the boring domestic conception-work without being asked, and, more subtly, her father being corrected by her mother and taking it gracefully. A man who can be wrong without sulking teaches her that female authority is normal weather.

Second: her body is hers, starting with her father. She decides about hugs and kisses, including with grandparents, including with him. "Give oma a kiss" trains her that adult social comfort outranks her physical consent, precisely the lesson she'll need to have unlearned at sixteen. Offering alternatives ("kiss, high-five, or a wave?") and backing her choice cheerfully, every time, does the opposite.

Then the daily grain. Praise her for strategy, persistence and courage more than for looking nice: ratio, not prohibition. When she interrupts with a counter-argument, the flash of paternal irritation is worth suppressing in favour of engaging the argument; a girl who argues with her father learns her reasoning has standing with male authority, which is exactly the settings file worth shipping. Sport that builds physical confidence, climbing or martial arts, teaches her to know her body as an instrument rather than an ornament, which is harder to destabilise later. "Boys will be boys" should never be said about anything, and when a boy is unkind to her, "that means he likes you" is off the table, because that sentence is a training manual for accepting mistreatment as affection. Finally: how her mother, her teachers, and women on television get discussed within her hearing matters more than any deliberate lesson, because she is compiling a model of what women are worth from every offhand remark.

Part III: Making it stick

Real, sustainable change works the same way as changing any complex running system: not through resolve, which is a consumable, but through instrumentation, defaults, and repair procedures.

Instrument, don't intend. Intentions don't survive contact with a Tuesday. The alternative is observable metrics, actually measured. One meeting per week: tally interruptions, one's own included. One month: log who initiated each household task versus who executed it (Rodsky's Fair Play card system is effectively a Kanban board for this; the full audit, done once with a partner, is usually a shock in visual form). Quarterly: review the school's contact history, the language used in performance calibrations, the appearance-ratio. Anyone who trusts tests over vibes at work can extend himself the same courtesy.

Use implementation intentions, not goals. "Be a better listener" is unfalsifiable. "When I notice I've interrupted, I say 'sorry, go on' and stay silent until she finishes" is an if-then rule that fires without deliberation. Three or four are enough. Examples: when a woman's idea resurfaces unattributed, I reattach the name in that meeting. When I hear a sexist joke in male company, I say "not funny" within five seconds; the window closes fast. When my daughter refuses physical affection, I say "prima" and move on. When I feel the urge to explain something, I first ask one question.

A partner is not a feminism coach. Asking her to monitor progress, supply the reading list, and process a man's guilt about past behaviour assigns her yet another job. The reading is homework: Hooks' The Will to Change, Manne's Down Girl, Criado Perez's Invisible Women, Fine's Delusions of Gender, Rodsky's Fair Play, Reilly's "Being Glue." One genuine, specific question a few times a year, such as "what's one thing I still reliably don't see?", received without litigation and acted upon: that is the entire acceptable footprint.

Recruit men, quietly. This is not activism; it is environment design. A man changing alone inside an unchanged male peer culture is swimming upstream indefinitely. Talking honestly with one or two other men about the mental load, about emotional isolation, and about what is being attempted and why, is personal behaviour with compound interest, because men calibrate to other men, and most have never once heard another man discuss any of this seriously.

Fail in the correct direction. The interruption will happen; the studiedag will be forgotten; the wrong joke will get a reflexive laugh; fair criticism will trigger a flare of defensiveness. The failure mode to avoid is not the mistake. It is the shame spiral afterwards, which converts the error into an emotional event the woman involved must now manage. The procedure is familiar from engineering post-mortems: blameless in tone, specific about the fix, focused on the system change that prevents recurrence. Acknowledge briefly, repair concretely, adjust the default, move on. A man who can hear "you did the thing again" and answer "you're right, fixing it" without a three-act drama is, day to day, most of what the practice looks like.

Accept the horizon. There is no finish line, no graduation into safety where the monitoring stops. That is not bleak; it is simply what practice means: nobody finishes a martial art either. The forms get more natural, the noticing gets faster, the corrections get smaller, and some year a grown daughter describes her father to someone else and the description contains, unprompted, the word fair. That is the metric. Everything above is just the training plan.

Sources worth the time

Bell Hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, for the motivational core. Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, for the sharpest analytical frame. Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women, for the data. Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender, for the evidence hygiene. Eve Rodsky, Fair Play, for the household operating manual. Tanya Reilly, "Being Glue" (talk and essay, free online), for the workplace lens. Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, dense but foundational; a summary suffices if the full text is too academic. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, the root; the introduction alone repays reading.

If you want to read more

Exact pointers for the two most-cited references above. Rodsky is a book: Eve Rodsky, Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live), G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2019; the card-system audit described in Part III comes directly from it, and a companion card deck exists for the physical Kanban version. Croft is a peer-reviewed paper: Alyssa Croft, Toni Schmader, Katharina Block & Andrew Scott Baron, "The Second Shift Reflected in the Second Generation: Do Parents' Gender Roles at Work Predict Children's Aspirations?", Psychological Science, vol. 25, no. 7 (2014), from the University of British Columbia. The headline finding: fathers' enacted share of household labour predicted daughters' career aspirations over and above the parents' stated beliefs.

This article was written with the help of Claude Fable 5.