I would love to know how generational the denial of inequality is.
When I was young, I experienced patriarchy mostly second hand, or lacking the experience to know that's what it was. Eg I saw my mum running around after my dad and everybody being careful of his feelings.... but that was just the dynamic between mum and dad, and him being a more explosive character, right? I didn't know there were millions of other relationships out there just like that, along sex lines.
In school, girls often excel more academically, so there's not the consistent experience of being bottom of the heap.
I think a lot of the personal impact of patriarchy dawns on you gradually. When you notice you are not being promoted as fast, or paid as much, or your bright ideas are seen as aggressive, and you start learning that you shouldn't express confidence. When you have a partner move in with you, and after a few years of love-laced great feelings, like a boiled frog you realize after a few more years, your life is becoming just like your mum's.... and you start to talk to other friends, who are discovering the same..... when you have a child, and suddenly start seeing the conditioning you experienced but from the outside, towards someone you love....the sexiest toys, the stories you find yourself reading your daughter, in which the female characters are evil, or make stupid mistakes, fall asleep for most of the plot, and wait to be rescued..... when you have to start worrying about your daughters going out and not getting assaulted or raped..... and then when the guy you have, who you've still been telling yourself is one of the relatively good ones, fucks off with a 23 year old, after you've been labouring for the family for 16 years,...,, when you find yourself on online dating and see that most men your age set their age search for a decade younger than they are...... then, you start experiencing perimenopause, a huge medical issue for billions of women, that is chronically underserved, which your mum never told you about, because she'd been too exhausted to register, never mind care about her own physical health or emotional wellbeing.....
By then, I think most women believe in the patriarchy..... but, you can understand that before that, you just don't want to.... who would want to- at 17, or even 27, accept that you are a second class citizen, likely to be attacked or killed due to your sex, with less chance of achieving what you want in life, and facing resentment and backlash if you DO manage to achieve it..... and as mothers, is that really what we want to tell our daughters? Perhaps we do try to warn them- but we also want to try to programme them with something different - tell them they can achieve anything they set their mind to, that they can have autonomy over their bodies, that they are empowered to lead happy lives.
Of course it takes a long time to accept! And some prefer never to.... or to lighten the message with a belief that we can, through our own choices, rise above.....