Gender Equality in a Global Perspective

Anders Ortenblad, Raili Marling, Snjezana Vasiljevic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317274223
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Women in Business
• Index: Business

Gender Equality in a Global Perspective looks to discuss whether Gender Equality can be adopted as it has been defined in international documents anywhere, or whether it needs to be adapted in a more local context; discuss which factors and perspectives need to be taken into account when adapting Gender Equality to specific contexts; suggest research approaches for studies on whether a universal (Western) concept of Gender Equality fits in certain specific contexts; and finally suggests challenges to the existing interpretation of Gender Equality (e.g., theory of intersectionality); and the development of legal and policy framework.

This book is situated within the tradition of comparative gender studies. While most other such books take up and compare various ways of implementing (or not implementing) gender equality, this book studies and compares whether or not (and to what extent) a specific definition of Gender Equality (GE) could be adopted by various nations. Thus, all chapter contributors will engage with the same definition of GE, which will be presented within the book, and discuss the possibilities and constrains related to applying such a definition in their particular national context.

The readers will learn about the problems of applying a universal concept of Gender Equality and the possible reasons for and modes of adapting Gender Equality to different contexts. Gender Equality in a Global Perspective looks to maintain a critical and reflexive stance towards the issues raised and will seek to present multiple perspectives and open-ended answers. As such it hopes to contribute to the international discussion of human rights more broadly and Gender Equality specifically.

The intended audience is not limited only to but will include policy makers, scholars and students with an interest in Gender issues, Organizational Theory, Political Science, Human Development, Policy Analysis, Globalization and other management sub-disciplines.

Part I
Background and Introduction

1 Introduction

Different Dimensions of Gender Equality in a Comparative Perspective

Snježana Vasiljević, Raili Marling and Anders Örtenblad

Introduction

This comparative book gathers ten case studies from different cultures to interrogate whether a universal (Western) concept of gender equality (GE), such as expressed in different international documents (in our case specifically in the UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women [CEDAW]), can be applied in different specific contexts according to the same broad legal definition or whether local adaptations are needed. Primarily, we highlight the need to discuss factors and perspectives that need to be taken into account in such location-specific adaptations, especially in the application of laws and international norms. International norms may be added to national legislations but they need not be enforceable in exactly the same way. Slogans of universal human rights, including GE, need to be supplemented with localized discussions of adaptation and application. The book will also highlight challenges to the existing interpretation of GE in the context of intersectionality. We hope that the results of this comparative research can be used as a basis for further recommendations in the development of legal and policy frameworks in different countries and international organizations. The articles included in the volume also suggest avenues for further research.

To create a sound basis for the following volume, the present introduction will try to detect and critically assess crucial changes in concepts of equality on the doctrinal as well as the institutional, pragmatic level. The introduction will first describe the conceptual difficulties related to the notion of GE in different waves of feminist thought. Special attention is given to the concept of intersectionality and transnational feminist challenges to the previous universalist language of Western feminism. The introduction provides an overview of feminist legal theory and an in-depth look at the CEDAW definition of gender equality and the EU gender equality framework that have both had an immense role in shaping international GE discourses. Finally, we outline the starting point for the discussion in the subsequent chapters and explain the choice of countries analyzed.

Gender Equality

The feminist and legal questions of gender equality cannot be separated from broader social developments in the 20th century, such as changing patterns of labor force participation, technological innovations, changes in social ideologies, including gender ideologies. It is these changes that frequently guide interpretations of the concept of equality and equal rights. Gender is in this study treated as a social construct, the social meanings given to biological sexual difference. It is gender that defines the roles, rights, responsibilities and obligations of women and men. The role of women and men has always been interpreted in terms of social expectations about behaviors that are considered appropriate for both genders. The norms are not biologically but socially determined. In other words, one becomes a man or a woman fitting their society’s expectations in the process of socialization. As famously posited by the French feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (1972, p. 267), “one is not born but becomes a woman.” According to Mikkola (2011, p. 68), “females become women through a process whereby they acquire feminine traits and learn feminine behaviour.” The same applies to men as well. In other words, women and men are the “intended or unintended product[s] of a social practice” (Haslanger, 1995, p. 97). There are scholars who argue that biological difference is also socially constructed (e.g., Butler, 1990; Laqueur, 1990).

Men and women, however, are not just socialized into different roles, but their roles have a different social status, as noted already by de Beauvoir. Gender difference is also a hierarchy in which practices and behaviors associated with men have historically been valued higher than those linked to women, resulting in women’s disadvantaged status in all spheres of society. Feminist authors have called attention to this for centuries, but most emphatically in the 20th century when different strands of feminist politics and philosophy have offered different explanations of gender imbalance and equally different visions for correcting it.

Feminism has been on the legal agenda for over a century already, and has gone through several phases, focusing first on sameness, then differences and finally diversity. The first and second phases are characterized by the discussion on differences between men and women, and the third phase by focusing on differences between women, multiple identities and multiple oppression. It seems that feminism has come to its fourth phase, which is characterized by thinking about goals, subjects and feminist strategies. The core question of today’s debate in feminism is whether women are still the only object of feminism, whether the goal of feminism is achieving substantive equality for women and how to achieve it. In other words, feminists grapple with the question of whether the focus of feminism is the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women (like it is legally described in the CEDAW, the document we use extensively in the book) in order to avoid gender imperialism and the false universalism which produces distortion and marginalization of female experience in cases of minority women and strengthens the binary understanding of gender identities.¹

Feminist legal theorists have produced numerous criticisms of existing laws but there is no one single interpretation of what the transformation of law and legal standards should look like. Therefore, it is not surprising that different countries in the world have different understandings of gender equality as well as different interpretations of national law and policy measures adopted within the general international gender equality framework (e.g., defined by the CEDAW). In general, in feminist theory, there is also no joint standpoint on how the internationally adopted policy measures should be interpreted and implemented. Different approaches have been offered by liberal, cultural, radical, postmodern and intersectional feminists.

The focus of liberal feminism was the removal of discriminatory practices in everyday life as well as from legal documents. Despite the fact that in the 1960s and 1970s, liberal feminists created some positive changes in the position of women, certain obstacles in achieving substantive equality also became obvious. Liberal feminism, also known as equality feminism, believes that men and women are born equal and thus deserve equal treatment without any hindrance. This is the type of feminism that has been most vocally associated with GE in the public sphere, from suffrage struggle to the fight against gender discrimination in the workplace. Liberal feminism does not seek to challenge the current social structures and practices, but to open them to women. As the Australian ecofeminist Val Plumwood (1993, p. 27) has suggested, this position “attempted to fit women uncritically into a masculine pattern of life and masculine model of humanity and culture which is presented as gender neutral.” An additional challenge was the lack of attention to differences between women, especially race and sexuality, as critical race theorists, postcolonial and lesbian feminists pointed out. The mainstream liberal feminists were frequently blind to their own privilege (see e.g., Lorde, 1984).

While the liberal feminist strategy was very successful in questioning discriminatory laws and irrational classifications, that strategy was unsuccessful in challenging laws that provided justification for a different treatment of men and women on the grounds of biologically determined differences. For example, the principle of equal treatment is hardly applicable in a situation when there is no man as a point of comparison, such as in cases of pregnancy. To put it more plainly, liberal feminists insisted on gender neutrality. However, if the law mirrors mainly male experiences, women will not benefit from gender-neutral laws. In other words, equal treatment in such cases does not lead to a substantive equality; actually in most cases it results in more inequalities.

Legal concepts are imperfect, mostly subjective and partial. Feminist legal scholars believe that the subjectivity and partiality of legal concepts mirror male dominance. In other words, gender-neutral rules are created to maintain male dominance over women (MacKinnon, 1989, p. 114).² Sameness does not mean equality but male dominance and female subordination (MacKinnon, 1989, p. 33). The legal system that pretends to be gender-neutral does not necessarily serve the needs of both sexes equally well. This is reflected in women’s distrust in the justice system and, for example, their reluctance to report sexual violence. Carol Smart (1989, p. 69) also claims that women should be careful in the application of law since it is not gender-neutral and advantages men. Therefore, she insists on feminism as a new form of knowledge which will offer a new reality for women, without the legal methods created by men.

Cultural feminism appeared in the late 1970s as a reaction to the failure of liberal feminism to achieve substantive equality. The idea of cultural feminism was not to assimilate women into a male-dominated society and adjust them to the male-oriented norms. Instead, the goal was to strengthen the institutional structures to support women’s needs. However, cultural feminism was criticized because emphasizing differences as valuable sometimes may lead to discrimination (e.g., part-time work agreements or genuine occupational requirements justified by the protection of women’s supposedly sensitive nature indirectly discriminate against women and perpetuate women’s subordinate position).

For many contemporary feminists, even the definition of the concept of the woman is problematic. Although the concept of woman is a central point of departure for all feminists, different schools of feminist thought interpret it differently. Starting from the 1970s, there has been increasing discomfort with the universal definition of the woman and the “overdetermination of male supremacy” (Alcoff, 1988, p. 405).

A new approach is offered by postmodern feminists who do not place women in the center of feminist theory or political action. Postmodern feminism, as a reaction to previous feminisms, does not represent a single theory and does not believe that there is a unique solution for the oppression of women. Instead, postmodernists believe that individuals consist of multiple identities which “overlap, intersect and even contradict each other” (Bartlett, 1994, p. 14). “Postmodern feminism made its entry into the law by way of the critical legal studies movement (CLS), a loose coalition of left-leaning academic scholars who, beginning in the 1970s argued that law is intermediate, non-objective, hierarchical, self-legitimating, overly-individualistic and morally impoverished. … Feminist scholars have incorporated ideas of CLS and tried to transform them into the core of a constructive feminist practice” (Bartlett, 1994, p. 13). However, they also criticized the CLS movement for its failure to develop a positive program that could survive its own critique.

Intersectionality offers an alternative challenge to the universalist approaches to gender and thus invites us to look critically also at GE and whether and how its definition is adaptable to local contexts not just de jure but also de facto. This is extremely important from the standpoint of different experiences and different identities (e.g., black women, gay people of different ethnic origins, women with disabilities, etc.) who face multiple discrimination and whose position needs to be analyzed intersectionally (Crenshaw, 1991). In her work in critical legal theory and critical race theory, Crenshaw (1989, p. 149) argued that “because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated.” Crenshaw’s (1994, p. 1244) utilization of intersectionality “highlights the need to account for multiple grounds of identity when considering how the social world is constructed.” Courts are usually using the so-called single-axis approach, which makes the hierarchy of equality visible and actually shows that some groups enjoy preferential treatment while others remain marginalized or even invisible. Black feminists criticized existing feminist theory and critical legal studies for race essentialism in feminist theories and lack of gender awareness in critical race theories (Crenshaw, 1989; Harris, 1990). Black women have traditionally worked outside the home and their number had significantly exceeded the share of white women in the working class. The fact that black women must work is in conflict with the norms that women should not work, which often created personal and emotional relationship problems. Minority women who fail to adapt to “appropriate” gender roles and who do not fit social stereotypes are described as a threat to mainstream society’s system of values. This is only one aspect of intersectionality which cannot be understood by analyzing the traditional patriarchal patterns rooted in the white experience.

The theory of intersectionality mostly criticized existing feminist theory for being founded on white women’s experience. However, white women also have multiple intersecting identities and feminist theory recognized only the part of women’s identity common to the majority of the female population. Previous feminist thought did not recognize the experiences of disabled, lesbian, ethnic or immigrant women. For example, focusing on two dimensions of male violence against women—battering and rape—proves intersectional discrimination on grounds of sex, race or ethnicity.³ If we focus on the European context, the examples can be found in recent European history of Balkan wars (1991–1995). Frequent ethnic rape was proof of “superiority” of the army, which dominated over someone else’s territory (Vasiljević, 2009, p. 175). Such rapes are never shown from the multidimensional experience of women’s oppression, but only as sexual violence.

As can be seen from above, the meanings given to gender difference vary greatly even in feminist theories and the theories approach the fact of gender inequality differently. However, what hinders the political and legal attempts at securing GE is frequently the wide misinterpretation of the word “equality” itself. Many of the problems arise from the application of the principle borrowed from Aristotle according to which “justice consists in treating like cases alike and different cases differently” (Jaggar, 1990, p. 239). In the case of men and women the question of similarity and difference has been anything but solved, as can be seen from the brief introduction to divergent feminist views above. Gender difference exists, yet it can be equally perilous to overemphasize it or ignore it (Minow, 1990, p. 49).

The question is not an innocent academic disagreement but also plays an important role in politics. As Joan Scott (1990, p. 144) has argued:

Placing equality and difference in an antithetical relationship has, then, a double effect. It denies the way in which difference has long figured in political notions of equality and it suggests that sameness is the only ground on which equality can be claimed. It thus puts feminists in an impossible position, for as long as we argue within terms of discourse set up by this opposition we grant the current conservative premise that since women cannot be identical to men in all respects, they cannot expect to be equal to them.

This has derailed many national efforts at creating gender equality legislation (e.g., famously in the case of the US Equal Rights Amendment). The only way we can overcome this bind is to deny the false opposition of equality and difference, and to remind the public that the antonym of equality is inequality.

Two (interrelated) conceptions of equality have been important in the legal context: one in which equality is defined in terms of equal formal rights to men and women; and the other in which equality has been related to equal access to welfare and equal opportunities. The first conception is formal and legal, the second mainly material and social. Other authors have differentiated between the equality of outcome and equality of opportunity. In the first it is assumed that women and men should have equal political representation and equal salaries; the second that they should be guaranteed equal opportunities to compete for political positions or jobs that would give them equal salaries. While GE policies initially sought to address the former, they have increasingly started to stress the latter (Kantola, 2010, p. 6). Johanna Kantola (2010, p. 6) also perceives a shift “from theories of distributive justice to theories of recognition as fundamental to equality.” In other words, while the initial GE policies sought to ensure the just distribution of social resources between men and women, they have increasingly moved towards identity politics. Fraser (2010) suggests that both redistribution and recognition were crucial in addressing inequality. However, in her recent work, she believes that the change ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Contributor Presentations
• Preface
• Part I Background and Introduction
• Part II Examining Gender Equality in a Global Perspective
• Part III Comments and Conclusions
• Index