I was under the impression that 'witch-hunt' was widely understood to mean the entrapment & persecution of targeted citizens by the authorities: also that this procedure is unfair, irrational and sets neighbour against neighbour. I thought this was why McCarthy's 'Communist' scourge of America was called a witch hunt.
There is a similarity with the Nazi rise and subsequent Holocaust. Picking out one element of a society, labelling its members as 'less than' and as the cause of everyone else's problems, is a well-tried means of garnering popular support and unifying a group - and is what persecution means, correctly.
Mediaeval witch hunts weren't specifically targeted at women, iirc. They were more about unifying the majority against a minority, in this case labelled as those who - by blaspheming the Church - supposedly undermined the health & safety of their communities. Obviously their real crime, if they had one, was undermining the local religious leaders. They were just another means of ruling by fear.
That most of those falling foul of the witch laws were women is probably because women were most likely to practice home medicine. There also seem to have been many instances of women being denounced as witches due to sexual jealousy and other secular reasons. There were still lines of female inheritance in some areas, which the Church didn't like: a witch trial got property away from the female owner and into Church hands.
Since there were many specifically female crimes in the Dark Ages - such as 'gossiping' and 'nagging' - that carried the same punishments, it seems unnecessary to characterise the witch laws as gender-motivated.