Reverse sexism

Reverse sexism is a controversial term for discrimination against men and boys, or for anti-male prejudice.

Reverse sexism has been compared by sociologists to reverse racism and "reverse ethnocentrism," in that both can be a response to affirmative action policies that are designed to combat institutionalized sexism and racism, and are a form of backlash, through which members of dominant groups (e.g., men, whites, or Anglos) assert that they are being discriminated against. In more rigid forms, this stance assumes that the historic power imbalance in favor of men has been reversed, and that women are now viewed as the superior gender or sex.

Feminist theorist Florence Rush characterizes the idea of reverse sexism specifically as a misogynist reaction to feminism; men's rights activists such as Warren Farrell promote the idea of reverse sexism to argue that the feminist movement has rearranged society in such a way that it now benefits women and harms men. In the preamble to a study on internalized sexism, Steve Bearman, Neill Korobov and Avril Thorne describe reverse sexism as a "misinformed notion", stating that "while individual women or women as a whole may enact prejudicial biases towards specific men or toward men as a group, this is done without the backing of a societal system of institutional power".