Gender equality: core principle of modern society?

Gender equality is sometimes claimed as a core principle of ‘modern’ society, in ways that encourage complacency about how far societies have progressed, but also feed into hierarchies of countries and cultures. From this perspective, the 1918 Representation of the People Act, which enfranchised women over the age of thirty, would appear as a key moment in the unfolding of the principle of women’s equality with men. But equal voting rights was not the major driving force in the legislation, and the story of the subsequent century has not been one of steady progress. Drawing on evidence from women’s political representation and material about the increasing gender differentiation that accompanied the so-called birth of modernity, this article argues against the attribution of a logic to modernity that will eventually deliver gender equality. It is through politics, not the unfolding of some core principle, that change occurs

Cultural skepticism and 'group representation'

Arguments for group representation have commonly faced three objections: (1) that representing people via their membership of a group promotes sectionalism, parochialism, and the pursuit of vested interests; (2) that it raises impossible questions about which groups qualify for group representation; (3) that it falsely presumes the existence of a group with sufficiently shared interests, perspectives, values, or concerns for some of those group members fairly to represent the others. I have some sympathy with each objection, but am also convinced that group based inequalities cannot be adequately addressed by practices that treat people solely in their capacity as individuals. When the (legitimate) worries about group representation are taken as a basis for refusing any claim for group-based measures, they return us to an agenda of exclusively individual representation. This leaves untouched the systemic inequalities that continue to undermine fair representation. The challenge is to formulate genuinely transformative policies that begin to break cycles of disadvantage and exclusion, but to approach these in ways that recognise and engage with the legitimate concerns. I do not pretend that I achieve this in this essay, but hope at least to clarify the issues to be borne in mind

Gender and modernity

In contemporary renderings of modernity, it is patented to the West and assumed to include gender equality; a commitment to gender equality then risks becoming overlaid with hierarchies of country and culture. One way of contesting this, associated with alternative modernities, takes issue with the presumed Western origins of modernity. Another, associated with feminism, subjects the claim the modern societies deliver gender equality to more critical scrutiny. But the first is vulnerable to the charge of describing different routes to the same ideals, and the second to the response that evidence of shortcomings only shows that modernity has not yet fully arrived. The contribution of the West to the birth of modernity is not, in my argument, the important issue. The problem, rather, is the mistaken attribution of a “logic” to modernity, as if it contains nested within it egalitarian principles that will eventually unfold. Something did indeed happen at a particular moment in history that provided new ways of imagining equality, but the conditions of its birth were associated from the start with the spread of colonial despotisms and the naturalisation of both gender and racial difference. There was no logic driving this towards more radical versions. It is in the politics of equality that new social imaginaries are forged, not in the unfolding of an inherently “modern” idea

Confronting gender inequality: How far have we come in the UK?

On Tuesday 13 October the LSE Commission on Gender, Inequality and Power will present their Final Report at a public debate. Professor Anne Phillips, a contributor to the Commission, reflects on the group’s findings below and considers how far the UK has come in confronting gender inequality since the early twentieth century