Knowledge production refers to the ways in which information is gathered, studied, deemed to be credible, and disseminated throughout society. Some ideas are deemed to be more valid and credible than other ideas, which causes systemic and institutional biases to develop which reinforce those ideas in society.

https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-ways-of-knowing/

An obvious example of this might be the idea that men are privileged and women are oppressed, along with the validity of feminist ideology more generally. The idea that men don't have to worry about being harassed or discriminated against is an epistemic bias. It's something that everyone knows and believes to be true without questioning it.

As a result, men don't contextualize their experiences as harassment when it's probable that they should. And likewise, women contextualize non-harassing experiences as harassment because society tells them to see everything through that lense. It's a cognitive bias similar to confirmation bias.

These biases go deep enough that when conducting research, whether on purpose or by accident, the research itself may be biased in such a way to inflate findings for women, and downplay those same findings for men.

That research can then come back and add credibility to those same perceptions: women are under constant attack, men have nothing to worry about, and the feedback loop continues.

Well this is exactly what happened in a 2018 study titled "The Facts Behind the #MeToo Movement: A National Study on Sexual Harassment and Assault" by the women's health and rights program at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. In the study, 81% of women and 43% of men met the criteria for having experienced "sexual harassment".

But there are a couple problems with the study. To begin with, most of the statistic comes from "verbal harassment", which according to the methodology really just boils down to being called a bitch or a whore at least one time in your life. Similar to women, most of the men in the study also fell under the same category for "verbal harassment".

More importantly, all of the questions and examples are worded for women and from the female perspective. Being called a whore is included, but not a creep, virgin, or incel. Being called a bitch is included, but not a bastard. Having someone comment on your breasts is included, but not on your penis size. Asking to exchange sex for favors is included, but only from the female perspective. Even though we know this is common the other way around. Both as a form of blatant solicitation to use sex to get things for free, and as a specific fetish that gets played out to the dismay of tradesmen in the real world who are trying to get paid and go home to their wives and families.

Here's the methodology for anyone who's interested:

http://www.stopstreetharassment.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Survey-Questions-2018-National-Study-on-Sexual-Harassment-and-Assault.pdf

And a popular NPR article about the results:

https://archive.is/Dp1zh

Since it's about the #MeToo movement, and survey respondents were advertised for on Twitter, I'm guessing a lot of the people who responded to the survey were radical Twitter feminists who were ready to answer yes to everything anyway, thus further biasing the study.

But this is what people think is true. This is what men and women see and then interpret in their own lives. And then this is what they see being published and talked about in a formal matter in academia and in the media, thus further cementing these traditional gender biases in people's minds.