Chirac, like most men who have once found a woman weak, imagined that he understood women profoundly

Chirac, like most men who have once found a woman weak, imagined that he understood women profoundly. He thought of women as the Occidental thinks of the Chinese, as a race apart, mysterious but capable of being infallibly comprehended by the application of a few leading principles of psychology. Moreover he was in earnest; he was hard driven, and he was honest. He continued, respectfully obedient in withdrawing his arm:

A. Bennett, The old wives' tale (1908), 334

He had the unmistakable look of a man about to be present at a row between two women

Mt Pett, meanwhile, had been trailing in the rear with a hunted expression on his face. He had the unmistakable look of a man about to be present at a row between two women, and only a wet cat in a strange back yard bears itself with less jauntiness than a man faced by such a prospect. A millionaire several times over, Mr Pett would have cheerfully given much of his wealth to have been elsewhere at that moment.

P.G Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim (1918), 57 

Women say this sort of thing carelessly, with no wish to wound; but that makes it none the less hard to bear

'Oh, I am glad you have begun to take an interest in cricket. It is simply a social necessity in England. Why you ever made such a fuss about taking it up I can't think. You used to be so fond of watching baseball, and cricket is just the same thing.'

A close observer would have marked a deepening of the look of pain on Mr Crocker's face. Women say this sort of thing carelessly, with no wish to wound; but that makes it none the less hard to bear. 

P.G Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim (1918), 39-40

He seemed to see, ranked indomitably behind her, all those bold, outspoken, competent, middle-aged women whose kind is peculiar to the higher levels of the English bourgeoisie

He invariably found Miss Parry's efficiency a little daunting. He seemed to see, ranked indomitably behind her, all those bold, outspoken, competent, middle-aged women whose kind is peculiar to the higher levels of the English bourgeoisie, organizing charity bazaars, visiting the sick and impoverished , training callow maidservants, implacably gardening. Some freak of destiny into which he had never enquired had compelled Miss Parry to forsake this orbit in search of a living, but its atmosphere still clung to her.

E. Crispin, Love lies bleeding (1948), 8

[intended family friendly] policies ultimately led to a 22% decline in women’s chances of gaining tenure at their first job. Meanwhile men’s chances increased by 19%.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, a number of US universities adopted what was intended as a family-friendly policy: parents would receive an extra year per child to earn tenure. But it isn’t gender-neutral ‘parents’ who need this extra year. It is specifically mothers. As the University of Michigan’s Alison Davis-Blake drily noted in the New York Times, ‘giving birth is not a gender-neutral event’. While women may be (variously) throwing up, going to the toilet every five minutes, changing nappies or plugged into their breast pump during this extra year, men get to dedicate more time to their research. So instead of giving a leg up to parents, this policy gave a leg up to men, and at women’s expense: an analysis of assistant professors hired at the top fifty US economics departments between 1985 and 2004 found that the policies ultimately led to a 22% decline in women’s chances of gaining tenure at their first job. Meanwhile men’s chances increased by 19%.

At close to 80% by 2016, Sweden has the highest female employment figures in the EU.94 It also has one of the highest levels of paternity-leave uptake in the world, with nine out of ten fathers taking an average of three to four months’ leave. This compares with a more typical OECD level of one in five fathers taking any parental leave at all – falling to one in fifty in Australia, the Czech Republic and Poland.96 This disparity is unsurprising: Sweden has one of the most generous (and, when it was introduced, innovative) paternity-leave policies in the world. Since 1995, Sweden has reserved a month of parental leave (paid at 90% of earnings) exclusively for fathers. This month cannot be transferred to the mother: the father must use this leave or the couple lose it from their overall leave allowance. In 2002, this increased to two months and in 2016 it was further increased to three months. Prior to the introduction of the ‘use it or lose it’ leave for fathers, only about 6% of men in Sweden took paternity leave, despite the fact that it had been available for them since 1974.

C. Criado-Perez, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men (2019), kindle loc. 1,663 and 1,677

You have to pretend that individual women were more important than they were

“Often, if you want to write about women in history,” the novelist Hilary Mantel has said, “you have to distort history to do it, or substitute fantasy for facts; you have to pretend that individual women were more important than they were or that we know more about them than we do.” But when it comes to Wilder, we don’t have to pretend. 

...

That is always a problem, in writing about poor people. The powerful, the rich and influential, tend to have a healthy sense of their self-importance. They keep things: letters, portraits, and key documents, such as the farm record of Thomas Jefferson, which preserved the number and identity of his slaves. No matter how far they may travel, people of high status and position are likely to be rooted by their very wealth, protecting fragile ephemera in a manse or great home. They have a Mount Vernon, a Monticello, a Montpelier. But the Ingallses were not people of power or wealth. Generation after generation, they traveled light, leaving things behind.

C. Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (2016), 5 and 28