@jaen, @eyelidlessness — I was the one who made the mistake of citing dictionaries as a meaningful source of authority there, which was fairly silly, as @jaen pointed out. But I’m with @eyelidlessness on the bigger picture: the word may be misused sometimes, but the underlying concept it identifies is one that’s real, and has huge impacts on the lives of a substantial minority of people. At the risk of another questionable appeal to authority, it’s a concept that’s sufficiently accepted in academia that it appears in the title of hundreds of journal articles (via a quick google scholar search at https://goo.gl/hjmE7Y). I think the word “oppression” sometimes gets misused in similar ways; that misuse doesn’t mean that either the word or the concept it represents are inherently faulty.

(also at the risk of beating a decaying horse)

Well, like I said before it might just be me soured to the usage of this word due to it being abused and trivialised by being used as a weapon. I might also have a bias against treating things like social sciences as real science. So yeah, part of that is on me.