Today is International Women’s Day, and I am observing it in accordance with my own personal tradition: by dissecting a decade-old television episode to understand the persistence of gender inequality.

In the second episode of “The Americans,” the excellent FX spy show that ran from 2013 to 2018, there is a moment that is a near-perfect encapsulation of how unjust systems perpetuate themselves.

It begins with Nina Krilova (Annet Mahendru), a young employee of the Soviet Embassy in Washington, perusing apples at a farmer’s market when Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich), an F.B.I. agent, sidles up next to her. Speaking softly, he informs her that he knows she is trading stolen embassy caviar for electronics to sell on the black market back in Russia. Now, he tells her, she must become an F.B.I. mole, or he’ll report her crimes and have her sent to a Siberian prison camp.

The camera holds on Nina’s face for a few agonizing seconds, fear and anger flickering across her features as she tries to think of a way out of this trap. But she can’t. A minute earlier, she had been a promising young official with a minor sideline in victimless crime. Now she is a traitor whose only hope is that Stan will protect her from discovery and certain execution.

In other words, it’s not just that she is aiding the enemy. To stay safe, she needs to make sure that he keeps the same power and privilege that he used to put her in a subordinate, vulnerable position — a dynamic that plays out over three and a half seasons, with profound but unequal consequences for the two characters.

Stan did not necessarily target Nina because she was a woman, but her forced complicity has echoes in a lot of my reporting on gender issues. So that scene came back to me as I was thinking about how to write about the big question that International Women’s Day demands we consider: why is gender inequality so persistent?

The most obvious explanation is personal prejudice: too many people still believe that women should restrict their lives to unpaid work in the home, that people undervalue traits seen as “feminine” and that men are uncomfortable with women in power.

That’s undoubtedly part of the story. But it misses the bigger systemic pattern: patriarchy creates incentives and pressures that draft even the ideologically unwilling to its cause.

That is the central tension of Nina and Stan’s relationship: she wants independence, and is desperate to escape his control, but also needs him to be successful and powerful so that he can protect her. And he comes to care about her deeply on a personal level, but he fears that he will lose her, or leave her in terrible danger, if he stops taking advantage of his more powerful structural position. (No spoilers as to the ultimate resolution of that dynamic, but let’s just say that the show is not a comedy.)

Swap spying for marriage and you have, more or less, the argument of Deniz Kandiyoti’s famous 1988 article Bargaining With Patriarchy. She analyzed the ways that women in India and the United States are first pressured into accepting the “bargain” of becoming reliant on a man in exchange for the promise of his support and protection, and then become invested in preserving the patriarchal system, because they fear that any threat to it would mean men are released from their obligations under those traditional rules.

Feminism and the release from patriarchal norms can benefit younger generations, Kandiyoti writes. But for “the generation of women caught in between, this transformation may represent genuine personal tragedy, since they have paid the heavy price of an earlier patriarchal bargain, but are not able to cash in on its promised benefits.” Those women are often deeply opposed to feminism, and fearful of the changes it can bring. (This is a theme of another great TV drama, “Mrs. America,” about the rise of the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, in case you’re looking for another series for your gender inequality watch party.)

Last spring, I interviewed Angie Maxwell, a political scientist at the University of Arkansas who studies voting patterns among white, Southern women. She found that the Republican Party managed to build support among that group partly by connecting to their fears that the women’s movement would leave wives and mothers vulnerable to abandonment by their husbands.

“If you’re financially dependent and people are saying that you’re going to have to fend for yourself, that if you get divorced your husband won’t have to pay child support, that’s terrifying,” she told me.

It’s a pattern that shows up in more subtle ways too, even among people who do support women’s equality and feminism, but whose individual choices are constrained by the realities of an unequal world. A new report from Price Waterhouse Coopers, a consulting company, found that “The motherhood penalty — the loss in lifetime earnings experienced by women raising children — has become the most significant driver of the gender pay gap.” And the main reason for the motherhood penalty, it finds, is that mothers take on most of the burden of child care in almost every country around the world. In the United Kingdom, the report found, the high costs of child care cause many women to leave the work force entirely.

It is of course possible for men to share child-care duties equally. My husband and I both work, and he does at least half, and often more, of the care for our two children. And I’d like to believe that’s because of our firm commitment to equality within the relationship. But I know that it probably helps that there has never been a time when our family was more reliant on his earnings than on mine. There has never been any practical incentive to preserve his career at the expense of my own.

But when men to out-earn their partners, as they often do, the incentives look different. I’ve watched many of the high-achieving women I know drift out of the work force after having children because their husbands’ salaries were much higher. It starts early: paternity leave is often largely unpaid, and when the husband is the higher earner the costs of taking unpaid paternity leave can seem insurmountable when the family is facing the added expenses of a new baby.

From there, small decisions snowball into bigger ones: the choice of who should take the day off to stay with a sick child looks different when one spouse’s salary is much higher, for instance, but a lot of sick days can turn into needing to go part-time, or forego a promotion, which then makes the family even more reliant on the higher earner.

Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economist, has found that in highly paid professional fields like law, medicine and finance, people are paid disproportionately well for working long hours and weekends — a schedule that is usually impossible for parents to maintain unless they have a partner who works much less, or not at all.

Over time, families can find themselves on a glide path to traditional gender roles, with the male partner’s career taking priority and the female partner doing the bulk of housework and child care, even if she still has a job.

So that is one depressing way to answer the question I posed at the top: that patriarchy, like other unequal systems, has a way of conscripting people to its service. And once there, they add power to the system, creating a self-reinforcing cycle that preserves inequality — despite many of the participants’ desires for a better world.

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