It's funny that when one is used to hierarchy, equality seems like oppression. For example, when there are 17% women in a meeting or a crowd, most men perceive that as 50%. If you live in a paradigm where true partnership can't exist and somebody has to be "in charge" then women having something approaching parity seems like she's actually taken over.
My husband and I have a real partnership and it's a beautiful thing. But highly hierarchical subcultures don't really know a lot about how to go about that, which is a shame, because it's something that most women value highly and most men actually benefit from. And, more and more women are refusing to pair up with men who don't offer this.
Gerson found that when the demands of daily living and the organization of work make it hard to live out egalitarian ideals, men and women have different fallback positions. Of the young men who wanted egalitarian marriages, 60 percent said that if this was out of reach, they would choose some kind of modified male breadwinner marriage, in which they earned the bulk of family income and their partner took care of most family obligations. The reaction of young women, however, was strikingly different. Eighty percent of them told Gerson they would rather go it alone than be in a traditional or even a modified traditional marriage.
Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, a History (p. 300). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
