Women’s status in many countries have significantly improved since the 1960s, with more women being employed, receiving higher education, and becoming professionals. Domestic violence and gender discrimination has been made illegal in many countries, and safe birth controls have been made widely accessible. At the same time, women have continuously been underrepresented in leadership positions, and the majority of the victims of sexual and domestic violence are women. Just when feminists are frustrated at the stalled gender revolution, anti-feminist backlash and counter-movements have fueled the global surge of right-wing politics. Some argue that a war between the genders has been waged in the 21st century, both online and offline. Is this true? In this talk, I will try to answer this question and delineate the growing tension between women’s fight for gender equality and men’s growing anxiety about what this means for their roles both in the public and private spheres.

Susanne Choi is a full professor at the Department of Sociology, and Co-Director of the Gender Research Centre at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She was also a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford, a Senior Fulbright Scholar at the University of Harvard, and a Senior Visiting Fellow at the National University of Singapore. Her research focuses on gender, sexuality, migration, family, and social movements. She is currently working on four research projects, with two projects comparing the dynamics of online cyber dating abuse and online sexual harassment in Taiwan, mainland China, Hong Kong, and Japan. Another project examines the relationship between masculinity and care, and one project examines the intersection between class, gender, and homosexuality.