Doing the work

Doing the work

Published 2026-07-03

A Personal Practice of Feminism<br>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....