Reading Richard Reeves’ thoughtful work on how boys are falling behind in school in America has me reflecting on the changing, and increasingly complex, nature of gender relationships and equality in the USA and similar societies.
The USA, most of Europe, and much of the rest of the world have made massive changes in favor of gender equality in recent decades. What does this mean for second and third wave feminist criticisms of patriarchy? Well, that depends in part on what we mean by the term. Let’s define patriarchy, simply, as systematic inequality for women. This is a simple gloss on a complex topic but it will serve our purposes here. There was indisputably pervasive patriarchy in the USA (and many countries) through the mid-twentieth century. What about since then?
In so far as there is still patriarchy, or enduring and difficult to rid gender inequality, it is more subtle and less extreme than 1950s style patriarchy, or that which endured through the 1970s-1990s. And as women now outperform men on standardized tests and out-graduate men at all levels of education, including BA and PhD programs, things get more complicated. The professional classes, in academia, government, media, and the corporate world, are increasingly women-friendly, increasingly defined by gender parity, and maybe even moving in a direction where they are somewhat dominated by women. So, is there still patriarchy? As I see it, there are three main ways in which women, broadly speaking, are still not equal to men:
- Partner violence. Men do suffer plenty of violence. But in the US at least, they generally don’t have to fear intimate partner violence. The horrifying reality is that many murders, perhaps approaching half of them in the US, are male partners killing their current or former female partners. This is a nightmarish danger from those supposed to love you that men, generally, don’t have to fear. And that is not counting the physical and emotional toll of domestic abuse that is short of death. This is oppressive. It is unequal for women. (The answer of course is not simple parity. Partner violence is an evil. We need to equalize it in one way only—completely eliminating it for everyone).
- Domestic work. It has probably become much better than in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, when many women first joined the workforce and still did almost all the housework (leading to the idea of the second shift—see Arlie Hochschild’s excellent The Second Shift). But even in the 21st century evidence suggests that women do more domestic work, including chores and child-rearing, than men, even if both work full time. This is more a norm, internalized and enforced in ways subtle and not, than a direct result of laws. And as more women join the professional class we may see the norms of office life, time off, domestic work, parental leave, and so forth slowly change. I hope we are. But this is an obvious case where women are in a worse, unequal position. The best news is that the latest research shows men are doing much more domestic work than they used to but still not an equal amount.
- Pay and job prospects. Again, as the professional classes come to reach gender parity this may/will recede but women do earn less than men for a variety of reasons. Liberals harp on pay discrimination and conservatives deny the problem, but it is real, just subtle. Women work slightly fewer hours, they tend to take on more part-time jobs because they have assumed more domestic responsibilities, they often can’t commit to higher-pay, higher-hours jobs for these reasons, they miss time and advance more slowly up the ladder once they have kids (the motherhood penalty), and at the lowest end of the economy, some of the worst jobs, like maids, cleaners, and careworkers, are dominated by seriously underpaid and exploited women. So it’s subtle but it ain’t a free choice. Women, writ large, have less power in the labor market than men, although this again seems to be changing as many men struggle to get into or complete college and many women succeed into the professional classes. But ultimately the best answer here has to be not simple gender parity but full equality, i.e. we don’t need more poor men and more women CEOs. What we need, rather, is democratic socialism, where there are no poor people (of any gender), no CEOs, and firms are owned and run by the workers themselves on an equal basis. Otherwise you get lean-in feminism and neoliberal bullshit that sees a female boss as liberating or some confused identity-empowerment perspective where seeing professional women thriving is supposed to be some great gender triumph for poor maids.
To sum up, and briefly setting aside concerns for class, race, and other issues, women have not achieved full equality with men in our society (the same goes in many similar countries) because they are much more likely to experience partner abuse and violence, they do more housework, and they have less power on the labor market. Because our neoliberal polity is so class-stratified, all of these experiences vary widely depending on the people involved, and if or how they are experienced will differ from person to person.
But we are in a strange position. The US (and many other places) has made tremendous progress on gender equality. The reaching of parity in education, the massive role of women sports, broader cultural changes, the role of MeToo in exposing abuses, the slowly percolating changes in gender norms since the 1960s and 1970s— there have been so many contributing factors moving us towards political, cultural, and economic equality. Patriarchy ain’t what it used to be. Indeed, in education there is now a massive gap with boys, not girls, falling behind at every level! This is clearly a new problem and signals we are not in the old world.
At the same time, key areas of inequality persist between men and women. Call it patriarchy, call it what you will, we still don’t have full gender equality. How to make sense of this world, in which women have not yet reached full equality with men, while at the same time many men are struggling more than women to get educated and employed, is a key challenge for the years ahead. As a final thought it should go without saying that full gender equality is a requirement for those of us on the democratic left.