Kate Manne b. 1983

Kate Manne is an Australian moral philosopher, associate professor at Cornell University, whose work has reshaped contemporary feminist analytic philosophy of misogyny and patriarchy. Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny distinguished sexism, the cognitive ideology that makes women out to be inferior, from misogyny, the system of policing and punishment that enforces patriarchal expectations on women, and showed how the two work together in contemporary public life. Entitled and Unshrinking have extended her analyses to entitled male privilege and to fatphobia as a form of moral injury, and have made her one of the most widely read public philosophers of her generation.

Kate Anne Manne was born in Melbourne in 1983, the daughter of two professors of medicine. She read philosophy at the University of Melbourne, took her doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2011 with a thesis on internalism in the philosophy of practical reason, and was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows from 2011 to 2013. Since 2013 she has taught philosophy at Cornell University, where she is now associate professor.

Her books are Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (2017), Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women (2020), and Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia (2024).

Manne argues that misogyny is not the inner attitude of men who hate women but the social and political function of policing and punishing women who do not provide the feminised goods of attention, affection, and care that patriarchy demands; sexism is the corresponding ideology that justifies that distribution. She has popularised the term 'himpathy' for the disproportionate sympathy accorded to powerful male wrongdoers and has extended the framework to entitlement, fatphobia, and the social treatment of bodies.