Gender and the Practical Demands of Complexity: ​
Beyond Oppressors and Oppressed

*last updated on May 15, 2026

At a professional lunch several years ago, I found myself sitting with another woman and two male colleagues. Very quickly, the conversation settled into a pattern. One of the men (let's call him Steve), who had more energy and presence in the interaction, kept directing his attention mostly to the other man (let's call him John). The other man responded, and the two of them carried the conversation forward. The two of us, women, were not completely ignored, but we were not really being drawn in either. We spoke to each other some, and perhaps tried here and there to enter the larger conversation, but it did not feel as though there was much room for us in it.

Later, as we were walking away, John spoke to me and acknowledged what had happened. In just a few words, he apologized for the fact that he and Steve had ended up talking mostly among themselves. I answered almost automatically, with a smile: “That’s okay.”

But it was not okay.

What has stayed with me over the years is not only the fact that the interaction felt gendered. It is also the fact that, when given an opening to say so, I did not say it. I felt some brief relief at being noticed, at having the awkwardness acknowledged, and that momentary validation seemed to make it easier to smooth things over than to say what I actually felt. I have thought about that moment many times because it captures something important about gender that I do not think is fully grasped by a simple framework of oppressors and oppressed. The men’s behavior mattered. My response also mattered. The larger pattern that made the whole scene feel familiar and passable mattered too.

That is where I want to begin.


What the Binary Paradigm Sees

Many public and activist discussions of gender in contemporary Western societies still proceed, implicitly or explicitly, through a binary paradigm. Men appear primarily as the dominant group and women as the subordinated one. On this view, the main task is to identify structures of male power, show how women continue to be disadvantaged by them, and work to correct those inequalities through critique, activism, institutional change, or policy.

This framework has real explanatory force. It can help name clear asymmetries. It can help make sense of specific incidents of exclusion, harassment, humiliation, or unequal opportunity. It can also help keep historical memory in view. Women have in many contexts been excluded, patronized, constrained, harmed, dismissed, and denied access in ways that are not accidental. It would be foolish to deny that.

In some local situations, the binary picture seems to fit almost perfectly. A woman enters a male-dominated setting and is treated as though she does not fully belong there. A woman is talked over, sidelined, or reduced to an object in ways that men around her are not. At that level, the asymmetry can be obvious. One party has more situational power. The other has less. It is important to be able to say so.

I do not want to abandon that clarity where it is warranted. But I do think that if we stop there, we misunderstand both the problem and the practical demands of changing it.


What the Binary Paradigm Misses

The lunch scene is a good example of why. If I describe it in the bluntest possible way, I can easily make it fit the familiar pattern: two men occupied the conversational space, while two women were left on the margins. One could say that the men enacted a small but recognizable form of gendered exclusion, and that would not be false. But that description leaves out too much.

It leaves out the differences between the two men. One of them was more active in producing the pattern. The other participated in it, but not in the same way. To collapse them into a single undifferentiated category of “men” would be to lose an important nuance of the interaction.

It also leaves out what the women were doing. That does not mean blaming the women for being excluded. It means noticing that the pattern was not only something done to us from the outside. We, too, were caught in it. We adapted to it. We slid into it. We spoke to each other instead of insisting more strongly on entry into the shared conversation. And when the pattern was named afterward, I softened it. I accepted the apology by neutralizing the experience: “That’s okay.”

That response did not come from nowhere. It came from my own individual history, my own habits, my own efforts and difficulties around speaking more directly. But I do not think it was only individual. I think it was also shaped by broader cultural patterns that make it harder, at least for many women and in many situations, to name discomfort plainly, to risk seeming rude, to ask for more space, or to interrupt a dynamic that others seem content to let continue.

This is why a simple binary framework starts to feel insufficient. The men were not identical. The women were not passive objects. The pattern was real, but it was being carried in different ways by different people. It involved action, inaction, accommodation, habit, politeness, age dynamics, professional hierarchy, conversational momentum, and gendered expectations all at once. Once that becomes visible, the situation no longer looks like a simple morality play in which one side acts and the other side merely receives the effects.


Gender as Patterned Participation

What interests me more and more is the possibility that many gendered problems are better understood not simply as expressions of domination, but as patterns of participation in which power and powerlessness are intertwined.

That does not mean that everyone participates equally, or that responsibility is always evenly distributed. It does not mean that men and women face the same kinds of constraints. It does not mean that naming asymmetry has become impossible or unnecessary. It means something else. It means that the social reality of gender often takes shape not through a simple opposition between a powerful group and a powerless one, but through the repeated enactment of roles, expectations, compensations, fears, accommodations, and habits that constrain different people differently.

This matters because an exclusive reliance on the language of domination can make the situation seem simpler than it is. This language can suggest that men, as a group, hold power and resist relinquishing it, while women, as a group, are acted upon and must be empowered. In some settings, that description captures something important. But in many cases it obscures the deeper fabric through which gendered patterns are actually reproduced.

Those patterns do not survive only because some men consciously cling to advantage. They also survive because men are pressured into certain forms of masculinity, because women are pressured into certain forms of responsiveness or self-silencing, because institutions reward some behaviors and penalize others, because social life often normalizes interactions that no one fully chose, and because both men and women may inherit and reproduce patterns whose full logic they do not clearly see.

This is one reason I think scholarship on masculinities, including the costs and pressures associated with masculine norms, matters and should not be treated as peripheral. If men are studied only as a dominant group and not also as people shaped by pressure, fear, role expectations, and forms of suffering specific to masculinity, then the picture remains partial. A more complex view does not replace concern for women with concern for men. It asks that both be seen as part of the same social fabric.

The point is not to say that everyone is equally trapped, equally harmed, or equally responsible. The point is that social patterns can constrain all participants while still constraining them differently. Men and women may both be stuck, but the "stuckness" manifests differently. On the surface, that difference may look like simple domination from one side and simple subordination on the other. But beneath that surface there is often a more entangled reality.


Why Complexity Is Hard to Accept

I understand why this way of thinking is not especially attractive. A binary framework gives moral and practical clarity. It tells us where to look, who is being harmed, who is benefiting, and what kinds of interventions make sense. A complexity paradigm is harder to inhabit. Once everything is placed in a larger and more interconnected context, an uncomfortable question arises almost immediately: Then what do we do?

That is a fair question. It is also, I think, one reason complexity is often resisted. It can seem to make action harder. If gendered harms are embedded in a dense social fabric in which many kinds of behavior—including ordinary, seemingly benign behavior—help reproduce larger patterns, then there is no single lever to pull and no single group to confront. That can feel frustrating, politically weak, or morally unsatisfying.

But the alternative is not simplicity. The alternative is oversimplification. Oversimplification can produce action, and sometimes even useful action, but it can also produce new distortions. When solutions rest too heavily on a framework of blame, they may create visible change while leaving deeper patterns intact. They may alter who occupies certain positions without altering the emotional, relational, and interpretive structures that made the problem possible in the first place. They may also feed new resentment, defensiveness, or backlash, not because justice should defer to anyone’s hurt feelings, but because social change that systematically ignores how people experience loss, threat, or confusion is unlikely to be stable.

Here I am not defending the status quo, and I am not saying that everyone’s feelings deserve equal normative weight in every context. I am saying something narrower and, to me, more practical: if people are treated only as bearers of group power and not also as human beings shaped by histories, vulnerabilities, and patterned forms of misrecognition, then the response may remain shallow even when it looks successful on the surface.


What Changes Practically

This brings me to the practical point. A complexity paradigm does not mean doing nothing. It does not mean giving up on policy, institutional reform, or the naming of real harms. It means changing what counts as an adequate explanation, and therefore changing what kinds of remedies we should expect to matter.

Under a binary paradigm, the practical task is often framed as identifying inequality, exposing those who benefit from it, and redistributing access, status, or institutional power. Sometimes that is necessary. Representation measures (including quotas in some contexts), anti-discrimination policies, and formal accountability can matter. I do not want to deny that. Some changes have been important precisely because they forced institutions to stop treating exclusion as normal.

But if we rely on those tools alone, we risk mistaking visible correction for deeper transformation. A board can become more balanced without conversational norms changing. A workplace can become more diverse while still running on patterns of self-presentation, confidence, interruption, deference, and recognition that distribute ease and difficulty unevenly. A man can lose a position, and a woman can gain one, without the underlying emotional and cultural structure becoming more humane, more reflective, or more capable of mutual understanding.

A complexity paradigm asks different practical questions. Not only: who holds power here? But also: how is this pattern being carried? By whom? At what level? Through what habits, expectations, fears, and incentives? Where is the agency, however limited, within the constraint? What forms of speech, listening, education, self-reflection, institutional design, and cross-experience understanding might weaken the pattern rather than merely rearrange its visible outcomes?

This approach is less satisfying if what one wants is a clear enemy and a clear victory. But it may be more promising if what one wants is change that actually reaches deeper.

I also think it implies a different tone. Not passivity. Not excuse-making. Not moral relativism. But less accusatory thinking and more interpretive seriousness. If scholarship and public discussion of women’s disadvantages and men’s gendered pressures remain disconnected, then public conversation about gender will continue to be distorted. If men appear mainly as the problem and women mainly as the injured party, then we are left with an account that can name many harms but has more difficulty explaining why those harms persist even after substantial progress, or why some remedies produce tensions they do not know how to absorb.

A more complex approach would not deny conflict. It would try to understand it better. It would allow for accountability without reducing people to moral categories. It would remain attentive to specific injustices while resisting the temptation to treat those injustices as the whole story.


Returning to the Lunch Table

This is why I keep coming back to that small scene at the lunch table.

It would be easy enough to tell that story as a miniature example of male exclusion and female marginalization. It was that, at least in part. But what continues to interest me is everything that escapes that simple description. The unequal conversational dynamic. The differences between the two men. The way the women adapted. The apology. My refusal, in that moment, to say what I actually felt. The mix of individual history and larger cultural pattern in that refusal. The fact that the whole interaction was neither trivial nor dramatic, neither a major injustice nor nothing at all.

That is the scale at which much of social life actually happens. Not only in spectacular acts of domination, but in small patterned moments in which people slip into roles they did not fully choose and reproduce dynamics they may only partly understand.

If gender is approached only through the framework of oppressors and oppressed, many such moments can be named, but not fully understood. A complexity paradigm does not make them morally simpler. It makes them analytically harder. But it also makes them more human.

​And that, to me, is its practical demand. To look more carefully. To resist explanations that are satisfying mainly because they are simple. To remain able to name inequality where it is real, while also asking what deeper pattern is being enacted through it. And to search, within all that constraint, for the small but real wiggle room of agency through which something different might begin.