Not sure what exactly you use "patriarchy" to mean here, but the idea that positions of power and prestige in society are occupied more by men than by women is kind of just a statistical fact. Look at the gender ratios of CEOs in the Fortune 500, or the gender ratios of US presidents, or any number of other positions of power
This is a motte and bailey fallacy. The reason this difference has an ominous-sounding name, or a name at all, is because there's an implicit "this is a global conspiracy against women" attached.
What many misunderstand about the patriarchy is in thinking its an agreed, secret, organised system of ensuring male dominance. That perspective is so easy to refute, this refutation gets equated with the non-existence of the patriarchy itself.
But the patriarchy is simply an unagreed, mostly transparent and organic coincidence of male dominance. There is no mysterious cabal of men saying let's pay men more than women, but men are paid more than women anyway. Likewise there has never been a female US president, or chess world champion, or F1 champion, which does not actually point to talent but to inequality.
You might say the patriarchy is not a diagnosis, but a symptom.
The facts of male advantage in society are irrefutable, and if you consider that they permeate every sphere from public to private, social to corporate, across age and culture for many thousands of years, it doesn't hold water to claim this symptom doesn't exist.
> What many misunderstand about the patriarchy is in thinking its an agreed, secret, organised system of ensuring male dominance. That perspective is so easy to refute, this refutation gets equated with the non-existence of the patriarchy itself.
This confusion is a deliberate outcome of the name "the patriarchy".
> Likewise there has never been a female US president, or chess world champion, or F1 champion, which does not actually point to talent but to inequality.
This is weasel words, though. "Inequality" covers outcome and opportunity. You're pointing at unequal outcomes to imply unequal opportunities, due to a giant anti-female conspiracy. Women in chess even have easier-to-attain rankings (WGM is basically equivalent to IM for men and women). There's nothing unfair about chess rankings or the game, other than women having easier-to-access rankings. It's just outcomes based on population preferences and aptitudes.
> You might say the patriarchy is not a diagnosis, but a symptom.
You might say that the dominance of black players at the top levels of the NBA is not a diagnosis, but a symptom as well. But to say either is still to imply a conspiracy.
