“Ein Gespenst geht
herum in Europa---das Gespenst des Feminismus.” The topic of gender
equality is lively discussed in politics, mainstream media (TV,
newspapers) as well as on the social web (Facebook, blogs). The
predominant version of feminism in these debates is different from
traditional feminist positions aiming at equal (civil) rights and
chances (voting, financial and sexual autonomy, education, and so
on). The first line of argument is based on the observation that
women often find themselves in an overtly or secretly sexist culture
(“#MeToo”), and that this culture needs to be changed. I agree
with the diagnosis and the general conclusion. The second argument is based on the
observation that although women have, in Western societies, equal
rights and chances as men, they are apparently still discriminated
against: they earn less than men (the famous “gender pay gap”),
and they are underrepresented in leading positions (“glass
ceiling”, “gender bias”). As remedies to these perceived
injustices, the feminists in question recommend quota for women in
leading positions or similar affirmative action measures aiming at
achieving equal power for men and women, as soon as possible. I would
like to call this version of feminism “empowerment feminism”
(EF). EF will be the target of my argument in the remainder.
Putting
things a bit provocatively, I find the EF cause---unlike the #MeToo cause and initiatives against domestic violence etc.---illiberal,
intellectually wanting, parochial, hypocrite, and unreasonably
impatient. I will argue my case below and in the end, sketch an
alternative form of feminism that is, in my view, more aligned with
the needs and chances of women in society. I will take most
examples from academia since it is an environment where EF is
vigorously discussed (and endorsed) and I happen to know it well.
Illiberal (freedom vs. equality). Independent of whether or not there is genuine
discrimination going on in academia, politics and business, a large
part of the actual or perceived disparities is due to free choices.
EFs have a hard time to accept the intrinsic tension between freedom
and equality; they deny that disparities are acceptable if people
choose to have it that way.
An example: people
usually have to make important life choices in their late 20s or
early 30s. Do they decide to put all weight behind their career,
making long hours at the office? Or do they prefer to have a family
and to spend time with their kids, perhaps working part-time in a
decent position below the top level? What will, in the long run, make
you happy? As a matter of fact, women choose the second option more
often than men. This has partly biological and partly socio-cultural
reasons. But in the end, each woman or each couple decides for
themselves, and there is no reason why society should not accept the
outcome.
In my experience,
talented women who want to pursue a career in academia, business or
politics can reach the top level as easily as men. The problems start
when they want to have kids, especially when their partner is not
enthusiastic about doing the major part of the household work. Then
they tend to reconsider what really matters for them. Or they have to
leave early from the office because there is nobody else to pick up
the kids, and they miss the important informal meetings where
alliances are forged, strategies are conceived and promotions are
discussed. This is without doubt an important issue---but it is not
only a gender issue, but an issue for anybody, man or woman, who
wants to combine family and a professional career. More on this at
the end.
We also observe that
gender percentages vary widely across academic disciplines. There are
lots of women in, say, developmental and social psychology, lots of
men in, say, formal philosophy. Is this a problem? If yes, why so? As
far as we know, men and women have similar cognitive capacities, but
they tend, on average, to develop different (academic) interests. Why
should we, as society, intervene and have more male social
psychologists and more female philosophers of science? You often hear
the word “diversity”, but this is rather a political slogan than
an argument. The scientific literature does not indicate that a gender-mixed
team of psychologists conducts better experiments than a predominantly male or female
team. This is also to be expected because the real benefits of
diversity lie in character traits that are only weakly correlated
with gender, if at all (i.e., different ways of thinking). But this is something that the EF camp fails
to acknowledge.
Lastly, a policy
where formative events (e.g., summer schools) are accessible to women
only, or where positions are reserved for female applicants, is in
itself discriminating and at odds with the liberal ideal of a
society. Everybody should be able to enhance their knowledge, and
positions should be are assigned on the basis of merit rather than
non-essential properties (gender, being a friend on the boss, etc.).
We should be wary to undermine this liberal ideal for the sake of
equality-related windowdressing.
Intellectually wanting. The evidence base for EF consists in studies or statistics
that seem to suggest a systematic bias against women. The argument usually runs like this (I
take an example from academia): “Look, statistics show that only
10% of all full professors are women although they are 50% of the
cohort of PhDs. This shows that discrimination is going on and that
we must do something.” Similar arguments are put forward for arts
(e.g., the Bechdel test for movies) and politics as well.
Unfortunately,
almost no EF writer I have read takes the effort to look at the
statistics in more detail. For the above case, the most trivial
explanation is the scarcity of Full Professor positions, which are
also seldom replaced due to their long tenure. So even in a perfectly
gender-blind society, we could not expect to have an equal rate of
men and women right now (though we will so in the future).
Nonetheless, news headlines compare the rates of female professors
across universities, female board members across companies, and so
on.
For whatever it is worth, in
my own experience in academia, most superiors are happy to support
ambitious and talented women, and to fill the higher ranks with them. I
have seen no single case where a woman was discriminated against for
gender-related reasons.
Studies in cognitive
psychology have also often found that while men and women are equally
intelligent on average, the variance of IQ for men is higher than for
women. Supposing that intelligence is a relevant characteristic, it
would then, ceteris paribus, be normal to expect slightly more men
than women in top positions. Of course, the relevance of such results is up to debate, but it is characteristic
that they are not even discussed or outrightly dismissed as probably
biased. Perhaps because they don’t fit the desired conclusion.
Another example for dismissing alternative explanations is
the notorious “gender pay gap” (where statistics are also often
presented in a misleading way, e.g., by not correcting for level of position). What is at
stake here is perhaps not discrimination against women. Sure, it could be that senior managers are slightly more inclined
to fulfil the demands of a male subordinate, compared to a female
subordinate. This is an empirical question, but even if the answer
were positive, it could scarcely explain the amount of the pay gap.
More plausible, and
in line with evidence from other sources, is that women tend to be
less assertive and demanding and more respectful in negotiations. The
“gender pay gap” is in reality a pay gap between more and less
cunning negotiatiors. Some women will be as successful as men, but gender is probably correlated with the relevant
character traits. What needs to be changed are thus not
gender-related issues, but a negotation system that punished
employees for their modesty and acquiescence (e.g., by making all
salaries public). And indeed, some expectations on women and girls to
“behave nicely”. But this is something different than bias and
discrimination.
Similarly, the
underrepresentation of female main acts in Hollywood movies may have
to do less with gender bias than with the following simple reasons:
(1) Many movie plots
adapt novels, stories or plays which predominantly feature men,
either because of the content (e.g., historical novels or fantasy
novels such as “Lord of the Rings”), because of the time of
writing (e.g., classical literature adaptations). The screenplay
author can do little about this.
(2) Money. It seems
that certain patterns sell to the audience and mainstream movies are,
after all, commercial products. I don’t want to deny that Hollywood
is a pretty sexist business, but some EF writers seem to mistake it
for a charity institution. When movies with strong and courageous men
and beautiful and caring women sell, it says more about society than
about the movie business itself.
Parochial and hypocrite. Top positions in society are predominantly distributed
among a specific social class: the daughters and sons of architects,
lawyers, doctors and engineers. EF claims that there is a gender bias
at work in this specific subclass of the population. This may well be the case, though its extent is probably not too large. However, almost
nobody seems to ask the question: How can we make sure that middle
and working class people can reach the top of society? How can we
encourage the descendants of migrants to pursue a career in academics
or politics? Usually, these people don’t know the implicit
communication norms; they speak a different language, listen to
different music, have different habits in their free time.
There was
a time when a saddle-maker was the widely respected first president
of the Weimar Republic (Friedrich Ebert), but these times are gone.
Nowadays, we give important jobs to somebody, with whom we would like
to open a bottle of Barolo, go to the theater and talk about the
latest trip to a Mediterreanean seaside resort. (I am certainly no
exception here.) Whatever the effects of (implicit) gender bias are,
they are certainly much less pronounced than the above effects, about
which almost nobody seems to care.
My impression is, in
a nutshell, that EF activists are not intellectually honest in their
cause for economic and social empowerment, but rather parochial and
centered around their own interests. If we assign resources to remove
biases and to establish equality between different groups, they
should not go to removing a minuscule gender bias, but to make sure
that the above layers are well represented in leading positions, that
the Rawlsian promise of “equal chances for everybody” is
fulfilled. All arguments about role models, social justice, long-time
benefits for society, and so on, apply there equally well, and the
case is surely more urgent. But of course, white upper-class women
(and men) with university degrees make themselves much better heard
than sons and daughters of factory workers---especially if they have foreign and hard to pronounce names. It is fair enough to
fight for its own cause, of course, but then one should just say so
instead of occupying the high moral ground.
A concluding
example: in the humanities, there are many young scholars from
Eastern Europe, who are often highly talented, but have much tougher
starting conditions as a result of the underfinanced academic system
in their home countries. I have seen several summer schools in
philosophy for women only, but not a single one for Eastern
Europeans, although they are an obvious target group for a socially
concerned academic policy. Such examples suggest that
decision-makers at universities are concerned with what is politically fashionable,
but not with social justice itself.
Intolerant. The ways
quite some EF activists deal with dissenters in personal conversation
and web discussion is notable. Denial of one of their premises or conclusions is met with rage and emotion. They have little
tolerance for diverging views and see them as socially harmful and
morally unacceptable. The idea that a different viewpoint could be
interesting or relevant is, in spite of all emphasis on diversity,
completely alien to them. Of course, there are laudable exceptions,
but...
Even “serious”
projects exhibit an astonishing degree of intolerance. For example,
there is a pretty prominent watchdog website which observes the rates
of female keynote speakers at philosophy conferences
(https://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/gendered-conference-campaign/).
Obvious nonsense from a statistical point of view, since most events
feature just three or four keynote speakers, and in some
subdisciplines 80% of all potential invitees are men. In addition, women decline invitations more often than men (family reasons). In spite of
claiming not to be in the “business of blaming conference
organizers”, the website also lists, on its front page, conferences
which have failed to comply with their demands, and who are thus
continuing “harmful practices”. Such name-and-shame practices are
more reminiscient of totalitarian states than of liberal Western
societies, but they are not untypical of EF activists.
Unreasonably impatient. Resolving social disparities is always an endeavor that
demands patience and that is unlikely to be finished in the short run. The reasons are usually deeply engrained in the DNA of
society, and this takes time to change. 100 years ago, women did, in many countries, not have the
right to vote, to possess private property, or to attend university.
50 years ago, they were still largely excluded from the workforce or
could divorce less easily than men. Fortunately, these disparities
have mainly disappeared nowadays. There may still be some male
bastions to fall, but there is no reason to suspect that this will
not happen in due time. Is it really worth to give up, say, the meritocratic principle in academia just to accelerate this process? EF activists and their political
allies usually give a positive answer, followed by the remark "we have waited long enough".
This impatience reminds me of a small child which starts crying and shouting unless it gets a candy.
Concluding on a
constructive note, I would like to say that things can and should be
done to improve women’s career prospects---and in the long run, to
make gender distribution more balanced at the top level. I am
thinking of a principal cause of the current disparity: the challenge
of getting and raising kids while at the same time pursuing a career.
This is usually more disruptive for women than for men. Large
companies should be forced, or at least incentivized, to offer
affordable childcare to their employees. Flexible working times
should be encouraged, and working part-time in leading positions
should be commonly accepted. Negotiation procedures and salary scales need to
be transparent. Mentoring for young employees (of both sexes) needs
to become more standard to make sure that nobody is excluded from
relevant networks.
I think that
adopting such measures would tackle the causes of gender disbalance,
and that the disparities would slowly vanish. Such measures would also benefit a larger share of women in society---namely those that will never make it to the boardroom or the lecture hall. The proposals are also
in agreement with the liberal principle of providing equal chances
and opportunities without promising an equal outcome. What EF
proposes, by contrast, is to cure the symptoms without treating the
disease.
