"The freedom I found when I stopped calling myself a feminist."

I used to be a feminist. When I graduated high school ten years ago, I was right on the feminism bandwagon. As a fresh-faced, doe-eyed eighteen-year-old, I felt invincible. The world was at my fingertips, regardless of my gender, and nothing or no one was going to stop me.

But as I got older, I noticed not all women felt the same. Whenever I gleefully insisted I was going to be rich one day, my slightly older girlfriends rolled their eyes, and muttered cynically about some sort of ‘pay gap’. I was party to endless conversations about how misogynistic a male co-worker was because he criticised one woman’s typing skills, and how terrible it was that men used sexist terminology every single day. These venting-fests always ended with the phrase, “See? This is why we need feminism. Women need to be empowered!”

However, the modern-feminist message I took wasn’t one of empowerment. By my mid-twenties, my youthful audacity was replaced by a burning frustration that the world was allegedly dominated by straight white men, whose sole purpose was to make life as difficult as possible for women. In order to succeed, or even to survive, I had to be tough and aggressive – just like a man.

But here’s the thing; women aren’t men. Regardless of the feminist rally against gender norms, there are some characteristics men and woman have that you can put down to biology. These variants, however small, inform many of the differences in male and female behaviour, as well as the life choices they make. And somewhere deep inside me, I knew it. I knew the ideology I was buying into was, on some level, fake.

I became increasingly uncomfortable with feminist articles popping up in my Facebook news feed, admonishing men for seemingly trivial things like ‘manspreading’. I couldn’t take seriously the notion that a gentleman sitting with his legs spread slightly too wide was a deliberate misogynistic act of male oppression, or some form of gross inequality. Especially as women in Saudi Arabia aren’t allowed to drive, can only exit the house if they have a male escort, and can be arrested and whipped for not wearing a hijab. And when feminists started inventing even more words to agonise over, like ‘mansplaining’, ‘manterrupting’, and ‘male privilege’, I knew something was up.

But the feminist billing I was most skeptical of was the legendary ‘gender pay gap’. In Australia, that equates to about 84 cents to every dollar a man makes. Surely, I reasoned with myself, in a developed country, employers simply wouldn’t be allowed to pay their female employees sixteen cents less? That would mean nobody would ever hire men, because women would be far cheaper to employ. So I did what any self-respecting millennial would do; Googled it. And I’m embarrassed I didn’t do it sooner.

Turns out, from what I have researched I think the pay gap is a total myth. Women are not getting short-changed for the same work as men (which is fantastic news). The confusion lies in how it’s usually presented. Rather than a comparison of wages, calculating the pay gap is just a lump sum average of what women and men earn in total, across all professions and all work types. It doesn’t take into account the fact women leave the workforce to have babies. Or that many end up working part-time, and tend to boycott time-consuming but lucrative professions such as law, engineering, and politics. Why? So they have more time for their children, which they have a biological drive to produce.

If you ignore these variables, of course it’s going to look like women make 84 cents to the dollar. However, that’s not because women are being paid less than men for the same work; they’re just working less hours, and in lower-paid vocations. The only (very small) discrepancy is that men have more testosterone, which makes them generally more assertive when negotiating a raise.

Given this, and the many incentives to help women overcome hurdles at work (such as affirmative action, and support programs for women in notoriously male-dominated fields like STEM), it doesn’t seem like there is a looming patriarchal plan to subjugate women. There is more awareness of gender inequality in the workforce than ever before, and a genuine push, by men, to combat it.

So, my mind officially blown by the busting of probably the biggest feminist narrative of them all, I wondered why, if the playing field is level, were women still choosing to step away from work and pop out kiddies? Feminists by and large insist it’s because traditional gender roles still have us in a stranglehold. While this obviously has some credence, I found that overall, most women choose to be mothers simply because it makes them happy. And that is a wonderful thing.

An Open Universities study in England revealed mothers were happier with their lives than anyone, including women without children. Most tellingly, when deciding on the most important person in their lives, almost 60 percent placed their children at number one, ahead of their male partner. Not only that, a 2016 Gallup poll reveals 54 percent of American working mothers would prefer to stay at home. Aside from anything else, it’s no coincidence all the happiest people I know are stay-at-home mums, and all the unhappiest are mothers who work full time. There is no patriarchal conspiracy to keep women in the home; women make that choice on their own terms.

As such, the feminist narrative of Women vs. Patriarchy is largely a work of fiction. It does not reflect the life experiences of most women, a fact I have been coming to terms with for the past two years. This is why only nine percent of British women, and eighteen percent of Americans, adopt the label of ‘feminist’. The reason is not that women are capitulating to men; it’s because modern feminism has sadly lost its way. Rather than equality, the central message now seems to be retribution. It’s too extreme, too concerned with man-hating, and too out of touch.

Look, nobody is denying misogyny exists. However, every negative thing that happens to you is not necessarily its by-product. The minute you start believing you are inhibited by a mysterious, invisible force called ‘The Patriarchy’ is the minute you surrender control.

You’re tougher than that. You’re not a victim. You don’t need to be a feminist to find empowerment. Trust me, after dropping the label, I’m more empowered than I’ve ever been.