Abstract
In 2016 in Poland, an elderly woman stood with a sign attached to pieces of cardboard. The sign read ‘I can’t believe I still have to protest this fucking shit’. She was one of the thousands of women (and some men) who protested against a proposed law that would essentially ban abortion in Poland – a country that already had very strict abortion laws. The photo went viral, probably because it summed up so well the frustrating fact that after decades of protests and campaigning, feminists still have not achieved one of their most fundamental objectives: women’s reproductive autonomy. The feminist battle against oppression may be alive and kicking but only because the structures of inequality are equally so.
Drude Dahlerup, Professor of Political Science at Stockholm University, and Mary Evans, Emerita Leverhulme Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, have written two very different but equally intriguing analyses of the persistence of inequality. Dahlerup’s book, Has Democracy Failed Women? (Polity Press 2018), focuses on women’s representation in politics, while Evans’s book, The Persistence of Gender Inequality (Polity Press, 2017), unfolds wide-ranging structural inequalities. Their starting point is the same: there is no country in the world where gender equality has been achieved. The question of why not is the subject of both books.
Evans’s The Persistence of Gender Inequality unravels the stubborn structural gender inequalities in various spheres of life. Despite more than a century of feminist resistance against inequalities and active work to promote gender equality, inequalities have managed to continue and take new forms. Perhaps the most compelling – albeit dispiriting – elements of Evans’s book are her many illustrations of the social inequalities that ‘modernity’ has not been able to erase. Gender inequality manifests, for example, in the uneven division of unpaid domestic labour not only between women and men but also between the rich and the poor. Modernization has increased many forms of individual liberty of choice, but it has also increased the requirements for constant self-improvement and self-policing, the site of which is very often the (female) body. Even many feminists have been lured by these individual liberties and reproduced the narrative of progress, ignoring the structural inequalities that remain. For Evans, gender inequality is not separate from a wider order of social inequality but an intrinsic part of it.
Dahlerup’s Has Democracy Failed Women? is an exhaustive overview of women’s political participation in global historical perspective. She draws a vivid picture of women’s underrepresentation in politics, both in terms of descriptive representation (referring to the numbers of women) and substantive representation of women (referring to the policy content). Who are included in and who are excluded from political decision making, which issues reach the political agenda and whose interests are paid attention to are the focus of her book. Women occupy less than one-quarter of the seats in the world’s parliaments and are grossly underrepresented among the world’s political leaders. Globally, there is an upward trend: women’s representation is about to move from the category small minority (10–25%) to large minority (25–40%). What is alarming, however, is that in countries that have been relatively progressive in terms of women’s representation in politics, such as the Nordic countries, the progress has stopped and, in some cases, even taken a few steps backwards. This suggests that the progress of gender equality is not continuous, but is vulnerable to setbacks.
My home country of Finland is a good case in point. Finland has been one of the forerunners of gender equality in the world. It was the first country in Europe and second country in the world (after New Zealand) to give women suffrage, in 1906. Women have promoted gender equality in close collaboration with the state, and parliamentary policy has been an important path for promoting women’s rights and gender equality. The proportion of women in the parliament grew steadily and reached 42.5% in 2011. Since then, however, the proportion of women has started to drop. Since the early 1990s, there has been parity in the gender balance of Finnish government ministers – at least 40% women or men – but currently the proportion of women as ministers has dropped to 35%.
In addition to the drop in women’s political representation, a more fundamental backlash to gender equality has taken place, especially after the global economic crisis in 2007–2008. This does not concern only Finland but most countries in the global north. The intensification of neoliberalism, conservatism and nationalism, manifested in emerging right-wing populist parties, has posed new challenges to feminism and gender equality (Elomäki and Kantola, 2018). Dahlerup points out that the new anti-immigration populist parties deliberately abstain from the newly established norms of high representation of women (see also Ylä-Anttila and Luhtakallio, 2017). Evans analyses how neoliberalism and austerity politics that have become common throughout much of Europe have been particularly damaging for women. Cuts in state spending and welfare benefits impact particularly forcefully on women, especially women who are economically in the most vulnerable positions, such as pensioners, migrants and single parents. Evans remarks, however, that austerity has not produced inequality, although it has intensified inequality (see also Evans, 2015).
Both Dahlerup and Evans highlight the continuity of gender inequality as well as its perpetual reappearance in new forms. They are highly critical of optimistic narratives of progress and emancipation, in which obtaining gender equality is just a matter of time. According to Evans, this simplistic progress narrative denies two aspects of those changes. First, they have occurred rather less through feminist campaigning than is sometimes supposed and rather more because of other events and other social needs. Second, the narrative overlooks that there have been and, indeed, continue to be strong forces that resist any alteration in the gendered status quo. Dahlerup joins Evans from a different perspective: democracy should not be seen as a straightforward track to women’s emancipation. Democracy has, in many respects, failed women because they are still not fully included in political decision making. The abandonment of these optimistic and empowering but false fantasies of progress is the starting point of both Dahlerup’s and Evans’s critiques.
Dahlerup and Evans also share the view that gender inequalities should be recognized as structural rather than individual. Women’s political representation is not an issue of individual women’s skills and aspirations but of exclusive political institutions. Many individual liberties – for example, freedom of choice between ‘career’ and maternity – are only available to those with the material wealth to support it. For this reason, feminists should not ignore collective, structural forms of inequality and turn to individual solutions. Instead, ‘any form of politics which wishes to engage with long-term, consistent gender inequality has to engage with social inequality’ (Evans p. 131).
With their critical view of the progress narrative, Dahlerup and Evans share many contemporary feminists’ concerns about how feminism in itself might become compromised or co-opted when situated within neoliberal institutions. These analyses, much like Dahlerup’s and Evans’s, tend to be rather pessimistic. While I fully agree with both authors about the dangers of reproducing the progress narrative, I would like to pose a question: What are the discursive dimensions of the pessimistic feminist narrative of persistent inequality and what might be its own blind spots? I suggest that gender inequality, as well as feminist struggles against it, are ambiguous processes and that narratives of any kind are an integral part of these processes. One example of an ambiguous process is that, while the emergence of nationalist, right-wing populist parties has increased anti-feminism in public discourses (Keskinen, 2012), it has had the paradoxical effect of strengthening feminist struggles and critique in some countries (Elomäki and Kantola, 2018). How much visibility these ambiguities are granted is, of course, a significant element in reproducing feminist narratives.
Pessimistic or not, both Dahlerup and Evans present their visions about a more gender-equal world, as well as the most critical actions that need to be taken. Dahlerup claims that political institutions need to be reformed and gender quotas implemented. She reminds us that although female politicians do not always represent ‘women’s interests’ (and what they may be requires another feminist discussion), it is mainly female politicians who have lifted the gender equality issue on to the political agenda, supported gender equality policies and, on some occasions, managed to get the whole party to embrace them. Evans’s resolution is not as straightforward, and she is much more critical of gender quotas as a solution. The arrival of individual women to positions previously reserved for men (such as political positions) has not produced significant change and does not automatically result in greater gender equality. Evans highlights instead that inequalities of gender can be addressed only by recognizing the universal conditions of social inequality.
Dahlerup’s Has Democracy Failed Women? and Evans’s The Persistence of Gender Inequality are timely analyses of structural and continuous gender inequality. Both authors remind their readers that, far from following a pre-written script, advances in gender equality depend on a multiplicity of factors and always require hard work. Although there might be progress on some fronts, new forms of inequality are constantly emerging. The books can be read as statements that structures matter and that gender equality is not ‘some special kind of inequality … but a constitutive part of that very universal inequality’ (Evans, p. 139). Although we are still quite far from full gender equality and might never reach it, I will end with a note in the name of ambiguity. As I am writing this review, Ireland has just voted to end an abortion ban – one of the world’s most restrictive ones. When that reform is signed into law by the President of Ireland, and when the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act 2013 is repealed, in Ireland, at least, women will no longer need to protest this fucking shit.