Happy to be your ally and to offer support and carrots to those who are really actually trying - but as someone noted below, this is not our work to do - it's yours. We've been working hard for literally thousands of years to try to claim our equality and our humanity - against incredibly odds, and with incredible bravery. We've had to face our own programming and socially imposed gender boxes along the way, and we expect to see you doing the same.
And for the record, many of my white female friends are actively confronting the ways that they have inadvertently marginalized women of color in the fight for women's equality. We're listening and learning and taking responsibility even if we never personally did any of those things. And of course, not all white women are doing that. A huge number of them voted for Trump, desperately clinging to their position as power adjacent to white men. So, I'm not pretending it's a universal thing, but right around the time of George Floyd I saw a huge uptick in white progressive men showing their asses because they aren't willing to do that same level of introspection and work that my white female friends have been doing for years. They really, really, really do not want to let go of their privilege - all the while becoming apoplectic if anyone mentions that they even have such a thing. I don't think they really actually do want equality - at least not a lot of them - not really. Some to be sure, but not most... or more of them would realize all the ways that gender inequality is still rampantly going on - despite some improvements.
I'm happy to gently encourage the guys who really are trying. I just think those guys are decidedly in the minority and I'm not going to coddle the rest. They need to show up and do the work. They need to ask for help with skills they weren't socialized into. There are some great guys in my life and I've met quite a few here on Medium as well, but they aren't asking the women in their lives to do this work for them. Isn't self-responsibility supposed to be what "a real man" does? Let's see some more of that, and then we'll talk.
As Martin Luther King noted, "Loose and easy language about equality, resonant resolutions about brotherhood fall pleasantly on the ear, but for the Negro there is a credibility gap he cannot overlook. He remembers that with each modest advance the white population promptly raises the argument that the Negro has come far enough. Each step forward accents an ever-present tendency to backlash."
That feels all too familiar to me (and to most of the women I know).
