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Notes -
I don’t think that’s true. There’s the radfem meaning, where patriarchy is the all-powerful, primary ordering of society (you describe its supposed mechanisms in your comment), that needs to be radically overthrown, and there’s the watered down, pop culture version, where it means almost nothing, just that there’s an overrepresentation of men in boardrooms. Similar to how a communist and a neoliberal don’t mean the same thing by ‘capitalism’.
Modern feminism is usually divided in radical feminism, marxist feminism and liberal feminism.
Marxist feminists are more reluctant to talk about the patriarchy, because for them sexist oppression, although part of the system, is not the defining characteristic of it, which would be the oppression of the poor by the rich.
Liberal feminism, also called women’s rights feminism, has no need to postulate an all-powerful patriarchy to achieve its moderate demands of legal equality.
Again, biological essentialism doesn’t have much to do with the fundamental radical feminist position. Radfems can go either way. The definitional borders of womanhood are peripheral to the central claim, the oppression of women by men(‘s system).
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