Definition
Patriarchy names a social system in which men collectively hold disproportionate power across institutions — political office, property, paid labour, religious authority, the household, and the regulation of sexuality. The concept treats male advantage as structural rather than personal: it persists across cohorts, transmits through institutions, and shapes outcomes even where individual men do not intend it.
In second-wave feminism the term moved from polemic to analytic tool. Kate Millett, Sylvia Walby, and Heidi Hartmann developed accounts in which patriarchy interlocks with capitalism, the household, the state, and culture. Walby's six-structure model — paid work, household production, state, violence, sexuality, culture — is widely used in criminology to map how gendered harm is produced across overlapping sites.
Why it matters
How it works
A patriarchy analysis traces gendered outcomes back to the institutions that produce them. Wage gaps reflect occupational segregation and unpaid care work; intimate-partner violence reflects asymmetric economic dependence and norms of male authority in the household; the under-prosecution of rape reflects evidentiary rules and cultural scripts that doubt women complainants. The analyst's task is to specify which institutions are doing what, not to invoke patriarchy as a single explanation.
Critics — including some feminists — argue that the term can be too totalising, flattening historical and cultural variation in how male dominance is organised. Contemporary scholarship typically pluralises into patriarchies, foregrounds intersectional axes of power, and pairs the concept with material analysis of capitalism, race, and colonial legacies. The core claim — that gender hierarchy is structural — remains the operating assumption of feminist criminology.