The Persistence of Gender Inequality

Mary Evans

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780745689951
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Despite centuries of campaigning, women still earn less and have less power than men. Equality remains a goal not yet reached. In this incisive account of why this is the case, Mary Evans argues that optimistic narratives of progress and emancipation have served to obscure long-term structural inequalities between women and men, structural inequalities which are not only about gender but also about general social inequality. In widening the lenses on the persistence of gender inequality, Evans shows how in contemporary debates about social inequality gender is often ignored, implicitly side-lining critical aspects of relations between women and men. This engaging short book attempts to join up some of the dots in the ways that we think about both social and gender inequality, and offers a new perspective on a problem that still demands society's full attention.

1
What is Gender Inequality?

Debates about gender have existed in both print and daily life for generations, and heated discussions about the state of relations between men and women show little sign of decreasing. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, issues about gender and sexual identity have become the subjects of increasingly complex debates, whilst the actual lived experience of gender can still be defined by rigid and often non-negotiable assumptions derived from biological difference. For example, debates arising out of the politics of transgender have called into question the very meaning of the terms ‘male’ and ‘female,’ whilst in certain parts of the world these very definitions of identity constitute mandatory forms of social existence. Discussions about gender exist universally; it is the nature of the debate, and certainly the degree to which it is a matter of public debate, that differ. But apart from these debates – about the implications of biological difference – there is a considerable degree of consensus that women, both born and made, have less access to power and privilege than men. Hence, although we speak of ‘gender inequality’, the term here has a more specific focus. It refers to those various social inequalities which are more often experienced by women than men. Those inequalities take forms which will be the basis of the discussion here and in later chapters: those of material and political disadvantage and of various forms of abusive representation.

At that point, and through the use of the apparently inclusive term ‘women’, we encounter a potential minefield: a minefield in which much of the strength of that binary division between women and men is disrupted. Questions of class, of race, of sexual identity, of age, of ethnicity all disrupt any simplistic view that gender ‘inequality’ is solely a question of all men having more power and privilege than all women. There are two reasons for this: one is the point that the American academic Kimberlé Cranshaw made in 1991 when she wrote about the ‘multiple grounds of identity’ – of gender, race and class - which we all occupy. In doing so she articulated the concept of ‘intersectionality’, the recognition that all human beings are located within conditions of class and race as well as that of gender.¹ The second reason is that the terms power and privilege are no less problematic. In the second decade of the twenty-first century it is becoming demonstrably clear that power and privilege, in terms of access to material resources and control over the lives of others, are not just as concentrated as they have been in the past but are becoming both increasingly so and at the same time distant from any form of public, democratic scrutiny. The vast majority of men and women are, in this context, united by living outside that tiny minority where wealth and power are situated.

Yet amongst that majority of the world’s population which lives outside the world of substantial wealth there are important differences which divide us. Many of those differences have until recently been expressed in a distinction between the ‘global north’ and the ‘global south’. This division – between worlds of material plenty and worlds of material poverty – has lost some of its resonance as we have come to recognize that these categories have less homogeneity than has been supposed, and that neither poverty nor wealth is exclusively the preserve of particular geographical areas.² This is not to evade or obscure the very real differences that exist in the lives of the world’s population, but it is to recognize that one of those straightforward divisions between ‘the west’ and the other parts of the world has often been supported by comparisons between the situation of women in the industrialized world and elsewhere. In this, what has been assumed is a distinction between the ‘emancipation’ of women in the ‘modern’ west and the lack of emancipation in other parts of the world. It is an assumption that has played its part in the global politics of the legitimization of militarized engagements. For example, taking ‘emancipation’ to the women of Afghanistan was presented as part of the justification of the twenty-first-century military campaign led by the United States and the United Kingdom against the Taliban. Largely ignored was what was described in 1984 by Edward Said as the problem of ‘travelling theory’, the western practice of imposing on other countries its templates for social existence, not the least of which was the asymmetry between the dominant and the subject races.³ In this instance, the introduction of a legal framework for gender equality did not (in Afghanistan as elsewhere) immediately produce that reality. The assumptions, habits and culture of patriarchy, as women throughout the global north have discovered, do not automatically disappear with changes in the law or other forms of institutional rearrangement.

The part that ambitions about progress towards greater equality between men and women can play in legitimizations of western military interventions is an important instance of a widespread contemporary view about gender relations, namely that there was a steady progress towards equality in the twentieth-century west. It is an assumption which has appeared in various forms, perhaps most vividly in the infamous slogan used in a cigarette advertisement campaign in 1968: ‘You’ve come a long way, baby’. What this campaign did was to position an account of the past (for example, in one advertisement, the statement that ‘In the past a man allowed his wife one day a week out of the house’) against what was suggested as contemporary reality. The fictional man and the equally fictional woman of the present day (who could still be addressed by advertisers as ‘baby’) were presented as equally independent, urban, young, white and autonomous. The ‘new’ woman of the latter part of the twentieth century was the woman who took a full part in what was assumed to be the norm of modern existence. That life was one of paid work, financial independence and sexual choice. In these contexts, it was assumed, gender equality had been achieved. But perhaps most important about this advertisement was the way in which the very judgement about women, and their changed status, came from a masculinized voice. It was not women who were naming their own situation; it was being defined by men.

This book does not reject the view that there have been important changes in the lives of women and men in the past one hundred years. But what it does reject is the idea that these changes can easily be assumed as ‘progress’ and that equality between men and women now exists. Thus, although important alterations have taken place throughout the world in the legal status of women and men, many of the various contexts within which we ‘do’ gender changed remarkably little in the twentieth or the first decades of the twenty-first centuries. Perhaps most centrally what has not changed is the relationship of women to the work of care. That category involves not just the sometimes recognized (if not rewarded) work of the care of dependents but the more subtle assumption that part of the social meaning of womanhood is that of the caring human. The associative strength of this connection has endured for centuries. It remains intact and as such is responsible for much of the radically unequal way in which all women (with or without dependents) exist within the world of paid work. But this world is increasingly precarious and socially divided. The place of women in this context is structured through not only the habits of the past but also the specific inequalities of the present.

Amongst these inequalities are those which, as suggested, unite rather than divide women and men. For example, the British geographer Danny Dorling writes of the growing disparity between ‘the rich’ and ‘the rest’ in terms of the dramatic slogan, echoed in the rhetoric of the Anglo-American Occupy movement, of the ‘1%’.⁴ In this there are no distinctions of gender. This is important to notice, not just because of the absence of a gendered analysis, but because no discussion about gender inequality can ignore or overlook other forms of inequality. Hence the question of gender inequality has to be seen not in terms of static and idealized forms of achieving ‘equality’ but in terms of the ever-changing and evolving meaning and reality of overall social inequality. The comfortable – although mistaken – assumption of the achievement of gender equality leaves unanswered questions, for example, about the way in which the global pay gap between women and men contributes to the accumulation of that wealth which is constitutive of patterns of growing social inequality.

Making Inequality

The view that we should be highly sceptical about the achievement of gender equality has become more generally current for two reasons. The first is that it has become increasingly apparent throughout the world that new media of communication provide a form through which women, both generally and specifically, can be threatened and derided. High-profile cases of these kinds of instances have been the internet attacks on (amongst others in the UK) the academic Mary Beard and the campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez. Mary Beard had challenged the attacks on women who voiced political opinions; Caroline Priado-Perez had suggested that Jane Austen might appear on UK banknotes. The second reason is that the austerity politics that have become common throughout much of Europe since 2010 have impacted in especially damaging ways on women; Ruth Pearson and Diane Elson are amongst those who have set out particularly clearly the impact of financial austerity on women.⁵ Others, such as Linda Tirado for the United States and Lisa McKenzie for the UK, have discussed more general aspects of austerity’s impact.⁶ In these two circumstances women have raised questions about the forms of inequality which women globally encounter. Jacqueline Rose, for example, in her 2014 book Women in Dark Times, wrote that ‘Women are not free today – not even in the West, where the inequalities are still glaring.’⁷ A central thesis here, shared by Rose and other writers such as Laurie Penny and Laura Bates and by groups in the UK such as the Women’s Budget Group, is that we live in what has been described (in the words of Rose) as both a time of ‘unprecedented violence against women’ and one where new conditions of paid work and ‘austerity’ politics have been damaging to millions of women.⁸ These neoliberal policies have not of themselves created material poverty amongst women – women’s average pay has always been lower than that of men, and women have consistently been a marginal presence in public politics – but they have enlarged the contours of gendered inequality through, amongst other policies, the decrease in jobs traditionally taken by women in the public sector and i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 What is Gender Inequality?
• 2 Worlds of Inequality
• 3 Problems of Subjectivity
• 4 Enter Feminism
• 5 Making Gender Equality
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement