As I said clearly in my post I don't think people should vote based on their demographic. I'm well aware that a large amount of people greatly dislike Hillary Clinton. That is the reason why Trump is president. Thanks to non-white women, Hillary Clinton did win the women vote overall. Let's not forget she won the popular vote by around 3 million as well.

Nikki Haley is a horrible politician and a hypocrite. She was an embarrassment at the UN. I hope her political comeback fails. She was nothing but a Trump lackey who betrayed all of her principles. If Trump-style republicanism fails this election you will see so many of his stooges run away from him. I hope Haley, Pompeo, Cruz, and Pence all suffer for their spinelessness.

My mother is black and pretty happy, including a lot of other women in my family.

Black women are doing alright, no need to be saved from something white people decided they need to be saved from.

Thanks for the study. It's interesting. But it, so far as I can see, doesn't address the possibility that women are generally happier than men (which doesn't seem to be the case in the US at least but may be the case generally). Or the possibility that men in Japan are extra miserable for some reason, and you can close the gap without women being less happy.

More significantly, is collective happiness the ultimate objective? For instance, if we had slavery in this country, but slavery was made in such a way that the slaves would were generally happier than the non slaves would that justify slavery? I personally think the freedom for each person to pursue the life they choose is more important than average happiness.

There are other meaningful differences. Simplifying things to two sexes(which is not accurate but a necessary fiction for the sake of such conversations), women and men have different brain structure, different hormone levels, and different anatomy. 

Just for instance, suppose I run a football stadium and decide to do away with gendered bathrooms. The bathrooms I do have each have 20 urinals and five bathroom stalls. This would be a situation that is theoretically equal (everyone has access to the same bathrooms), but one group's needs are not being met.

As a general thread warning, let's not discuss politics in this topic EXCEPT to the extent that it's relevant to the issue of treatment of women. For instance, whether or not a particular politician is treated differently based on their gender is relevant. Your opinions on the position of a particular politician probably are not.

While I believe in some countries, especially poor countries, women are definitely treated as lesser human beings and suffer a lot of prejudice and need to have their future shaped by society, I believe in most of western rich countries this process have already finished and now feminists are chasing the wind. Women will never be equal to men because, well, they are biologically and mentally different and that is a good thing as it brings different views, aspirations and attitude to the world. And although the media in general wants to paint a different frame, men and women have a tendency to excel at certain activities.

Feminism today is not looking for equality anymore but rather to privileges. You want to be a mother of 3, a wife, a high tier management position in a large company and be beautiful and in shape at the same time? Sorry but probably you won't be able to do it at the same time and this is not sexist, it's just common sense.

Yes women are treated plenty unequally in Pakistan and much more needs to be done but as a believer in resolving social issues through class politics, I hold the view that if we resolve the issues if capitalism and move on to a better system and educate people to view the world through class lens instead, then these other issues will slowly resolve over time through our efforts but if we don't get rid of the root causes, which I believe are economic related, then these inequalities will never end. Sorry but I don't believe having more women oligarchs and presidents and dictators and prime ministers is gonna solve the problems of the world. Like that evil basitch in Bolivia for example or Kim Jon Un's suspected successor. Both are women but that doesn't help women in any which way. Similarly having Hillary Clinton be president wouldn't have helped women in the US and having Benazir Bhutto be Prime Minister didn't help women in Pakistan solely because of that fact. It did help that the PPP was somewhat working for the working class that did help women so again, class politics not identity politics. Having Barack Obama be president didn't help the mass incarceration of African Americans or police shootings.

Thank you, you're most welcome.

It's pretty much just the field where I have the most knowledge of women's experience due to it being my area, (both in terms of my occupation and my neurology) and the fact that through both work and friends it's an issue I frequently come into contact with and have received a great deal of education about.

As a result, for a lot of the women I know that's been one aspect of inequality that has significantly affected their lives; for most of them, getting a diagnosis was a moment of great clarity and validation that really helped them to understand and accept themselves, but it was something a lot of them didn't get until they were adults, whereas most males I know on the spectrum were diagnosed in childhood.

This also leads to women lacking access to support services compared to men, which can have a considerable impact on one's quality of life.

Like I say though, there's a wave of positive change currently in progress, spearheaded by some truly amazing autistic women, several of whom I have the privilege of having worked alongside.

Responding to these:

1) Most feminists get called sexists often just because. I have a thick skin about such claims, so no worries! I also have no interest in apologizing for voicing rational concerns.

2 & 3) I've recently discussed my opinions about abortion at some length over on the morality thread and don't really feel up for a tense and exhausting repeat of that same convo here, so I think I'll just leave the abortion topic be.

4) Here you've touched on something I agree is valid: so many American women today consider themselves feminists that the term has become almost meaningless and unhelpful by itself. It's probably more useful to discuss specific ideas at this point than it is to discuss feminism conceptually in the abstract.

That said, to at least try and clarify the complexities of the various feminist waves a bit if I can, let me here momentarily focus on the contours of the second feminist wave, which we might consider essentially the politics of '70s era women's activists or Baby Boomer feminism if you will. That wasn't/isn't just one thing, one school of thought. It might in fact be most accurate to think of that era's feminists as being composed of two largely separate and distinct movements: the liberal feminists on the one hand, who were mostly older, wealthier, and mainly concerned with advancing the interests of women in the legal arena, especially, though not exclusively, as it pertained to providing women with more economic opportunities...and the radical feminists on the other hand, who were mostly younger, more middle class, and mainly concerned with the culture (questions like rape, marriage and family, religion, lesbians, abortion, beauty culture, sexual objectification, that sort of thing) because their aim was to create a revolutionary climate rather than to simply try and reform the existing institutions of society. Within both of these concurrent movements there emerged a multitude of different little schools of thought too. There was no one thing that "liberal feminism" was per se and no one thing that "radical feminism" was either. Anyway, with respect to these two general movements, your wife sounds to me like someone who would fall into the first overall category (which would indeed represent a conservative viewpoint by today's standards; like these women were generally against abortion, against lesbians, against divorce, etc. etc.) while I'm more the latter type.

On a different tip, what's called third wave feminism, which we might essentially think of as '90s era, or Generation X feminism, is more the variety I personally grew up seeing because I grew up in the '90s. I've learned enough at this point to recognize that there was a general difference of ideals and tone. Where the second feminist wave generally featured a kind of collectivistic ethos, the kind of feminists I met in the 1990s were a highly individualistic bunch. There was almost a kind of demoralized, quasi-defeatist, non-idealistic vibe to it, much like there was to the larger youth culture of that era, as anyone who grew up back then can likely attest to. My early experience with the movement specifically was around a scene known as riot grrrl, which was a feminist underground punk scene that revolved around making and/or distributing stuff anarchist-type zines and music. My original discovery of this scene stemmed from news reports about the original Dyke March in 1993, which was my first exposure to the concept of lesbianism...and hence the first time I learned of words to describe myself. Anyway, getting back to riot grrrl, it's hard to capture what it was about because I don't think we really knew ourselves. Part of us wanted to be feminist revolutionaries, but part of us were realists and extremely skeptical about the prospects of our petty efforts yielding results, so we didn't take ourselves that seriously. Anyway, riot grrrl was just one component-part of a MUCH larger thing that was going on in society in the '90s (especially the early '90s), but it's the part I latched onto at the time. I became more disenchanted with the concept of feminism for a while after like the Spice Girls and Sex and the City took over the world in the late '90s because to me the movement had been about authenticity, being able to be myself, more than anything else and this stuff just smacked of cosmopolitan, consumerist glamorism that turned me off. I came back around in a different form much later on thanks to the internet enabling me to discover spaces like Feminist Current and "crazy" movements like Femen.

I may try and discuss my thoughts (which are mostly criticisms and objections) on the current fourth feminist wave in this country, i.e. essentially Millennial feminism, a bit later but I'm tired and want to go to bed right now.

5 & 6) I might address later. I'm exhausted right now and need to go to bed. Sorry!

So I never did answer my own query from the OP, did I? Well, to do so, I think there's a lot of room for improvement here in this country and that that's especially clear when you think about the consequences of this pandemic. It's mostly women who have lost their jobs, and many of those who weren't laid off have had to "voluntarily" quit their jobs or scale back hours to stay home and take care of the kids since schools have been closed and there's been little to no child care available. Theoretically, fathers could quit their jobs instead to provide for these needs, but...fathers tend to make the most money, so it makes more financial sense for the family most often for the mom to make the sacrifices. The result? We're seeing an absolute explosion of exhaustion, anxiety, depression, and other mental illnesses among women that have taken root among men to only a fraction the extent. Also, women were often trapped with abusive partners during the lockdown period, so wife-beating, rape, domestic violence in general skyrocketed. And good luck safely giving birth in the middle of a pandemic! Or terminating a pregnancy as a result when "elective surgeries" have been banned due to covid!

And that's all just been this year! On a more fundamental level, I could talk a lot about how we badly need free child care in this country, about our need of addressing the sexual objectification of female bodies in our culture if we don't want to keep hearing "Me Too" stories all the time indefinitely, about how serious the implications of our collective decision to redefine womanhood as simply a state of mind rather than a material reality could become in the next decade or two if we keep going down this road, about how socially obligatory beauty regimens aren't just expensive and time-consuming, but can severely restrict a woman's lifestyle options, and many, many other things too numerous to list here down to things like why women are still expected to forfeit their family names upon marriage despite how supposedly equitable the institution has become here in the Western world, but it would take far too much time and effort really. The bottom line is that while the U.S. isn't exactly Saudi Arabia, it's also not exactly Iceland either, and even Iceland has real room for improvement.

Interesting note, although only partly on the topic of this thread (I don't think this article is enough to justify it's own thread, but it's data provides a little light on current developments in politics in the US regarding congresswomen):
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/more-women-than-ever-are-running-for-office-but-are-they-winning-their-primaries/
This is a data-based article that shows, that the number of women who won their primaries for seats in congress has improved this year, even over 2018 which saw a record number of congresswomen. This time around not only female democratic candidates improved, but also on the republican side more female candidates won, although it still is far behind democrats (47% of democratic candidates are women now, but only 22% of republican candidates).

The article goes on to explain, that data also shows that the support of Emily's list is helpful here, and that the republican side the new organisations E-PAC and Winning for Women may have influenced that result as well.

So, this is not saying everything is fine now, but that we see in one area - political representation - signs of improvement and how specialized endorsing organizations have helped here.