Gender inequality.  Isn’t this topic already exhausted? We have seen it in countless textbooks, discussions, campaigns, and courtrooms. Libraries are full. Honestly, what more can I contribute? But then again — has it been articulated? They say that awareness leads to progress. But has this awareness changed anything in the private lives of women?
When we hear the term gender discrimination, we likely imagine the lack of women in politics, the gender pay gap, workplace harassment, boardrooms, and businesses — the headlines. These are the visible aspects of inequality, the ones we’ve learned to measure. But what of the hidden ones, the kind so ingrained into our daily lives that even we as women fail to perceive them as oppression.
As feminist economist Vicky Pryce notes (2019)¹ , “Patterns of gender inequality today are far more subtle than they used to be, making it difficult to detect and correct for conscious and unconscious gender bias.”  These invisible acts of inequality rarely make it to the courtrooms or even our conversations despite its ingrained implications.
Catharine MacKinnon (1989)² , a pioneering feminist legal theorist, states: “Law sees and treats women the way men see and treat women.” This blindness to lived experience allows inequality to flourish in intimate, domestic, and cultural spaces,  all of which law considers “private” and untouchable. Although, the courtroom has evolved, and data has improved. But the dinner table still serves inequality in our house. The classroom still echoes gender bias. And the media continues to frame patriarchy as  a personality trait.  
This article will examine those unnoticed patterns of internalized gender inequality, where women become complicit mechanisms in their own marginalization largely due to their social conditioning, cultural practices, and everyday silence. Through a feminist legal perspective, this paper argues that meaningful reform must not be limited to constitutions or courtrooms, but should be reinforced in the “normal” practices we no longer question, where law fails to regulate and society refuses to listen.

Internalized Patriarchy: How "Normal" Becomes Oppression
While formal discrimination is quite easier to identify and confront, such internalized gender oppression hides behind familiarity. It is not loud. It doesn’t shout. It hides in the rituals, assigned gender roles, casual sexist jokes, hierarchy in dinner, praise, and the silence. It becomes so familiar that women uphold it, defend it, and exacerbate it.
So, let’s question ourselves as ordinary people about the things we  overlooked as "normal" which are actually patriarchal in experience?

A. Home as the First Courtroom: Who Gets What and Why
Let’s start with our kitchen. Who gets the bigger piece of chicken in your home? Who has a designated “charas ko thal” for eating ? Who gets served first, and who eats at last? 
In many households, choice is reserved for the husbands or the male figure and women eat after everyone else — often neglecting their own choices and their needs. These are not just traditions. They’re verdicts. Who is prioritized, who serves, who deserves — all settled, silently. What makes this dangerous is its invisibility and acceptance. Women rarely question this because they’ve been taught this as their duty, not as a larger scheme of inequality. As Tiffany Dufu (2017) points out in Drop the Ball³,  Even in economically independent households, women often feel guilty for not managing chores, meals, and caregiving tasks — evidence of internalized norms, not personal preference. Likewise, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2017)⁴   explains that women absorb harmful gender expectations from a young age, mistaking inequality for culture. Paulo Freire’s (1970)⁵  The theory of internalized oppression becomes visible here: when oppressed individuals unconsciously adopt the mindset and worldview of the dominant group, they themselves become the enforcers of their own subjugation. Legally, domestic discrimination remains invisible. CEDAW⁶  calls for eliminating harmful customs (art. 5), but such everyday hierarchies remain outside legal intervention since they are  seen as a part of culture, not control. 

B. Conditioned Compliance: The Rules No One Wrote
You certainly remember when you were first told not to laugh too loudly? Or not to go out after dark? Or not to be too friendly with boys? 
Chances are, only you were taught these rules while your brother had the freedom to express. Girls learn early to self-police — their tone, clothes, friends, movement from their childhood. It’s not the law holding them back, it’s the fear of being seen, judged, or shamed.
Girls learn to edit their personalities to fit what is acceptable. Joan C. Williams (2014)⁷  notes that women in the workplace often face a tightrope of expectations: too assertive, and they’re labelled aggressive; too friendly, and they’re seen as unserious. Jessica Bennett (2016)⁸  calls this the “Goldilocks dilemma” — women must be “just right,” and no one tells them where the line is. This dilemma starts not in offices, but in schoolyards, living rooms, and family gossip.

C. The Confidence Ceiling: Leadership Without Permission
The expectation bias also starts young. When boys are expected to be bold; girls are taught to be careful. Even when qualifications match, men are seen as leaders — while women are treated as exceptions.
Joan C. Williams⁹  calls this the prove-it-again bias: women have to demonstrate competence repeatedly to be seen as capable, whereas men are presumed to have potential. A boy who speaks boldly is called confident; a girl doing the same may be told she’s being “too much.” Vicky Pryce (2019)¹⁰  documents how one-third of employers still ask female applicants if they are or plan to be pregnant — a question that’s both illegal and indicative of ingrained assumptions about a woman’s role. Yet most of these experiences never trigger legal recourse. Discrimination laws often target hiring and pay, but not assignment bias, classroom confidence gaps, or leadership access. These micro-inequities accumulate into macro-inequality — and go entirely unmeasured by the law.

D. Cultural Curriculum: What the Screen Teaches Us
The media also doesn’t just reflect culture — it instructs it. From the South Asian films that romanticize stalking, objectification and male aggression, to ads where women are always seen as caregivers and men as the decision-makers, the gender roles are continuously reinforced. In movies, a man slapping a woman becomes a crucial climax for their budding romance. A woman challenging authority is villainized or tamed by the plot’s end. These images aren't entertainment — they’re behavioral blueprints.
Laura Mulvey’s theory of the "male gaze"¹¹  explains how women are portrayed as passive, for male pleasure. Visual and other Pleasures (1989). . Kelly Oliver (2017)¹²  extends this argument, noting that women in media are often objectified as “seducers,” never as full subjects. These portrayals normalize female submission and male control. Over time, they influence how girls see themselves and what they believe is worth aspiring to. Yet, media law rarely addresses this unless it crosses into indecency. Sexism, unless vulgar, is protected as creative freedom.

D .Rethinking the Mirror: What Can Be Done?
What do we do with patterns too quiet to protest but too consistent to ignore? With biases dressed up as compliments, traditions disguised as affection, and rules no one wrote but everyone follows. The law may not reach these places. But our questions can. 
What if change begins not with answers, but by noticing these patterns? Change, when it comes, rarely begins in courtrooms or campaigns. It starts smaller. Softer. It starts when something familiar suddenly feels strange.
When a woman who always eats at last starts wondering why. When praise like “she’s so accommodating” begins to sound less like a compliment, and more like a cage. These moments don’t shout. They linger.
This idea of what we call “normal” is quietly teaching us who deserves space — and who is expected to shrink. Alicia Menendez’s The Likeability Trap doesn’t just name the cost of being liked — it shows how deeply that cost is rooted into everyday expectations. Women are taught to please, adjust, soften, and make space often before they even realize they’re doing it. Leadership becomes less about vision, and more about balancing the delicate dance of being bold, but not too bold. Capable, but not threatening. Visible, but still agreeable. And yet, the hardest part isn’t facing society’s expectations — it’s realizing how deeply we’ve internalized them.
It’s the quiet moments. The hesitation before speaking up. The impulse to phrase something gently so others aren’t uncomfortable. The pride we swallow before it sounds like arrogance. This isn’t about blame. It’s about recognition.
To begin undoing inequality, we must first notice where it lives, not just in policies and politics, but in pauses, habits, and inherited silence.
We might not get all the answers. But we do need to feel the discomfort of noticing. To sit with this discomfort long enough that it changes something — in how we move, how we speak, how we raise children, how we write, how we lead, how we live.
Change doesn’t always look like a revolution. Sometimes, it looks like a woman finally serving herself first and not explaining why.