Quiet quitting the patriarchy

I have a friend who, every time a dad says he's "babysitting" his own kids, gently responds: "Oh, so you mean you're just parenting?" She never raises her voice. She doesn't lecture. She just plants the thought and moves on. This is what quiet quitting the patriarchy looks like. Not marches or manifestos (though those have their place). Just small, daily moments where women quietly withdraw the labor, energy, and politeness the system expects from them. Lately, more of us seem to be doing it.

The phrase borrows from "quiet quitting," that workplace trend where people stop going above and beyond for employers who don't value them. Apply the same logic to patriarchy, and you get something quietly powerful. Women refusing to over-function in a world built by and for men.

In 2024, a creator named Ashley Chaney posted a video¹ sharing her small acts of resistance, like always putting female assistants' email addresses before male CEOs' when scheduling meetings. The video got millions of views. Thousands of women chimed in with their own versions. Like a real estate agent commented that she always puts the wife's name first on contracts, even when husbands grumble. "It makes zero difference to the contract," she wrote. "Just their ego." Another woman said she now emails "like a man"—direct, no exclamation points, no unnecessary niceties. A midwife also described her quiet rebellion: when a woman arrives in labor, she asks the male partner for crucial medical information. Most can't answer. So she follows up with, "Oh sorry, who are you to her?" The men then have to participate, hold their partners, and actually know things. It's small. But it's something.

Some of these acts happen in public spaces, where women have been conditioned to make ourselves small. Research on pedestrian behavior has documented gender differences in how people navigate crowded spaces; studies² show that women are more likely to adjust their paths to accommodate oncoming pedestrians, while men tend to hold their course. One researcher's personal response to this data? She stopped moving aside. She holds her ground now and waits for men to navigate around her, the way women have always done for them. It feels uncomfortable at first. That's probably the point. There's even a name for this: "patriarchy chicken³," a term coined by journalist Charlotte Riley in 2019. You walk toward each other, and whoever flinches first loses. Except for centuries, women have been the ones flinching.

At home, the resistance continues; some people are reading bedtime stories to their children but change all the pronouns. The owl, the elephant, and the tortoise are all female now. The animals still scratch their heads with concern and stretch their legs. But now they're she. Another woman told me she deliberately calls the father first when a child needs to be picked up from school. The school always calls Mum first. She's trying to rewire that default.

I know what some people might think: does any of this actually matter? Does putting a woman's name first on an email change anything real? But small acts accumulate. They shift norms. Over time, they create the foundation for bigger change. When you start to adjust society's expectations, even in tiny ways, it has a lasting effect. Conscious and subconscious.

For women themselves, these small rebellions can also be healing. When you're worn down by everyday sexism, watching others push back, or pushing back yourself, reminds you that the problem was never you. It's not going to change the world overnight. But it is of great comfort. And sometimes, that's where change begins.

But we should not forget that none of this replaces organized activism. Policy still matters. Voting still matters. Collective action still matters. In the longer term, we need some of these acts of resistance to become more structural, more systemic. That's how real change takes hold. But microfeminism isn't trying to replace those things. It's more like a gateway, small, accessible acts that get people thinking, questioning, and eventually engaging more deeply. You start by holding your ground on the pavement, and maybe next you're showing up to a meeting or signing a petition or having a harder conversation with someone you love.

And right now, these small daily refusals feel urgent. They remind us that feminism isn't just about laws. It's about how we move through the world. How we refuse to shrink. How we show up, day after day, quietly quitting the parts of this system that ask too much and give too little.

Take the woman on TikTok who described her version of quiet quitting: she no longer moves aside on the pavement. She holds her ground and watches what happens. The first time she did it, a man walked straight into her shoulder. He looked shocked, genuinely shocked, that she hadn't moved. She kept walking. It's small. It's not going to end patriarchy. But it's something. And maybe that something, repeated thousands of times by thousands of women, starts to feel like a shift. Like the ground beneath us, finally, beginning to move.