Abstract
Lynn Cooke’s pioneering monograph Gender–Class Equality in Political Economies addresses the intersection of gender and class across time and place in six industrial states. The author explores the important question of why gender equality remains elusive after decades of equal opportunity measures. Cooke approaches her subject by (taking) a broad intersectional approach, sketching out the confluence of structural mechanisms at work in a number of gender- and class-related policy areas. These structural intersections are understood as inhibiting a straightforward solution to the problems of inequality.
Innovative chapters on population and education policy and on unpaid labor in Spain, United States, Australia, United Kingdom, and East and West Germany (pre- and post-unification) contribute to the larger scholarly literature on gendered employment rates and wage differentials. Through the inclusion of education and population policies, Cooke is able to shed light on significant and continuing linkages between seemingly more peripheral policy areas and the core concern of paid and unpaid work. Her book goes beyond the narrower focus taken by the majority of comparative studies in political economy and opens our perspective to the broader web of class and gender inequities.
The central concept through which Cooke organizes her analysis and explains specific outcomes is the nationally distinct “institutional equality frame,” which is similar to what other authors have called a “gender regime” or an “equal employment regime.” These institutional equality frames developed with the emergence of modern states in the early nineteenth century and still determine social hierarchies, which remain deeply embedded in core institutions, such as schools, workplaces, and families. The following chapters then concisely present the different policy areas in a historical-comparative manner, covering their evolution in each of the six states.
The thesis of the book, somewhat surprisingly, argues, “the march towards greater equality stalled because its pursuit is a zero-sum exchange” (p. 4), understood as the result of trade-offs between different kinds of inequalities. Cooke argues that every improvement for one group (women, workers) is invariably and largely offset by losses for other groups (working-class women, immigrants, etc.). This broad thesis enables the author to connect a number of policy areas in interesting ways (such as population and employment policies) and to demonstrate the ambivalence and complexity of intersecting interests and demarcations.
However, such a sweeping argument for apparently automatic trade-offs between efforts for more equity for women and the negative effects for other groups are not always persuasive. That every advancement in equality offsets another in a general and universal equilibrium is not entirely convincing, particularly in the case of education—a sphere in which women have undoubtedly made significant advancement but one in which the author claims reforms have mostly institutionalized existing inequalities. According to Cooke, educational access profited few women and was offset by a loss of women’s class cohesiveness—a class cohesiveness that, in my opinion, did not uniformly exist prior to such access.
The author’s materialist approach offers insightful historical and economic perspectives on the nexus of gender and class. Methodologically, she utilizes primary databases, such as the Luxemburg Income Study, to impressively demonstrate certain trade-offs between class and gender inequalities. The case selection is unorthodox with three states sharing a British legacy, two being continental ones (Spain, West Germany) and one being a former communist state (East Germany). Such a selection needs to be thoroughly explained, but theoretical references to influential works (e.g.: Esping-Andersen’s 1990 The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Hall and Soskice’s 2001 Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Competitive Advantage, Jenson’s 2009 article in Social Politics, and Pierson’s 2000 piece in The American Political Science Review) are only loosely established. Thus every case is presented as historically “unique” (p. 11) and essentially put forth as an example of capitalism’s failure to produce more equity. As a result, culture, norms, and social agency emerge as rather peripheral factors for equality.
Since the author argues that no simple solution to gender-class inequality exists—a thesis with which most gender scholars readily agree—Cooke’s conclusion is bleak albeit possibly realistic. It aptly summarizes the predicaments that many women and men face, especially the effects of double-earner families facing a “care void” and resultant “time poverty.” In her conclusion, Cooke suggests the introduction of a social investment approach to minimize human capital differences among groups and an increase in taxes. The former has been criticized by feminist scholars, such as Jane Jenson in Social Politics (2009) and it is doubtful that a social investment approach could break the firm structural web laid out earlier by the author.
The main contribution of this well-organized book is its comprehensive and successful attempt to systematically take the intersection of gender and class into account.