SO478 - week 12

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These are my notes from January 09 for SO478 at the London School of Economics for the 2017-2018 school year. I took this module as part of the one-year Inequalities and Social Science MSc program.

The usual disclaimer: all notes are my personal impressions and do not necessarily reflect the view of the lecturer.

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Gender and inequality

Readings

I don’t have notes for this week.

Economic Pathways to Women’s Empowerment and Active Citizenship

A paper by Naila Kabeer from 2016.

Closing the gender pay gap (PDF)

A report by the International Labour Organization (ILO, with a weird mismatch of American and British spelling) in 2016.

Defending Equality of Outcome

A paper by Anne Phillips from 2004.

Lecture

This lecture was given by Diane Perrons.

• quote from Nancy Fraser on how feminist ideas are now in the mainstream, and yet they’re not always in practice
  • McKinsey report on women’s equality adding $12 trillion to the global economy, omg lmao
• the concept of thought starvation, a form of inequality that can persist even if economic inequality is addressed (if women have less influence on society)
• ILO report defining equality vs equity
  • equality: rights/responsibilities/opportunities don’t depend on gender
  • equity: fairness based on gender, equivalent (not necessarily the same)
  • Fraser on equality of outcome
    • things to consider include antipoverty; exploitation; income; leisure time; respect; antimarginalisation; antiandocentrism; equality between women (not just male/female equality)
  • Anne Phillips is pro-equality of outcome, recognising that opportunities themselves can be biased
    • there can be illegitimate processes of exclusion occuring that “equality of opportunity” alone can’t address
  • (my thoughts: example of the former would be giving women “opportunities” to enter tech and thus get high salaries. example of the latter would be a much more radical overhaul of salary and the fact that certain activities which we’ve historically associated with maleness are deemed more “valuable”. if the “market distribution” produces an unequal outcome, then rather than reifying the process and assuming that inequality is natural, perhaps we should consider that the very process is flawed and should not be relied on)
  • on the idea that women “choose” to, say, not enter high-paying fields as often
    • “choice” as a semantic choice (lol) obscures the extent of complicating factors
    • “decisions based on a pragmatic adjustment to conditions” might be a better way of understanding the process
• that incredibly trite and misguided Christine Lagarde quote about “Lehman Sisters”
  • EY report echoes that: more women -> more stability
  • (me: obscures structural reasons behind financial crisis + furthermore robs women of agency by assuming they can’t be evil or corrupted the way men can)
  • Julie Nelson’s book Gender and Risk-Taking trying to dispel the myth that women are more risk-averse
    • statistically significant differences are very small; there are biases in reporting/publishing that emphasise sensationalist claims
    • (idk why it really matters tbh, surely we can move beyond the idea that excess returns are “compensation” for risk)
  • (my thoughts: McKenzie Wark makes some good points on representation in A Hacker Manifesto. it’s tolerated by the ruling classes as it doesn’t challenge the existing order)
• lots of neoliberal propaganda lately on how gender equality is good for the “economy” lmao
  • we’re shown that truly awful “girl effect” video (YouTube)
  • some classic tropes: de-emphasising structural oppression in favour of individual empowerment; seeing gender equality as a means to an end of improving economic efficiency
  • on the slightly less neoliberal end of the spectrum, but still highly flawed, we have this idea that women should be paid wages for housework/carework (we need LESS commodification not more omg)
  • somewhat surprisingly, the World Bank has suggested a quite radical set of policies: mandatory quotas with frequent tracking and sanctions for noncompliance
• on the gender pay gap
  • in toto it’s around 15% worldwide
  • David Cameron, in 2015, voted to end the pay gap in a generation lol
  • recall that the gender pay gap is different from the (illegal) practice of paying women less for the same job
  • this figure takes into account all work, and thus obviously has to deal with different employment patterns and job title distributions

Seminar

My seminar was run by John Hills. Question: how has gender inequality been changing lately?

• gender equality is changing: visible representation (e.g., politically) has gone up overall, but underlying inequalities have not been fixed
  • remember that various forms of inequality weren’t being measured until recently, which should affect how we interpret measurements
  • are things getting better? the overall consensus seems to be yes
    • (my point, otoh, is that we shouldn’t assume a linear or even teleological element to this—we’re already seeing backlash in the form of MRA crap, James Damore suing Google, etc)
• on equality of outcome as a test of opportunity (whether the opportunities are themselves biased)
  • (me: in which case, perhaps we need to change distribution mechanisms so that they’re not based on flawed mechanisms)
• on pay inequality at the top of the scale (e.g., with the BBC pay gap scandal)
  • is there a symbolic effect to closing the gap at the top level that could help narrow the gap at other levels too?
  • interesting point raised about athletics and how women are almost universally paid less even if they are working/training at similar “levels” from most perspectives (soccer, tennis, basketball, etc)
  • (me: men will always invent some sort of ex post justification to legitimate the existing system of inequality … measures of “worth” are slippery and ultimately arbitrary)
  • (also me: questions of gendered income inequality is always, always entwined with questions of overall inequality … do the men at the top of the pay scale deserve that much money? no. neither do the women. otoh, until the men start making less it’s silly to demand women to ask for less as well, so idk what the solution in this very limited scenario)
• on minimum wage increases
  • bigger impact on women
  • phenomeon of men resenting women as wages of minimum wage work (cleaning, etc) catches up
• on the value of slicing out gender and implementing gender-based policies rather than more explicitly intersectional policies
  • yes, because the gender pay gap is, at least partly, a symptom of socially constructed ideas of what’s valuable and what’s not which is always gendered
  • we can think of gender as a vanguard issue, where the fight for women’s rights spurs the development of other gains in equality
• on the dilemma of women in the Soviet Union (should look into this more to confirm the accuracy of these claims)
  • women had to do regular work as well as domestic work (which men didn’t do as much?)
  • which illustrates the failure of emancipation along class lines alone
  • I guess the question here is: is it then necessary to emanicipate along all lines at once? is that even possible? or do you have to do one at at time
• on economic inequality and how we can’t address that in isolation
  • if you try to fix it by fiat (by forcing equal pay, for instance), it’ll leak out in other ways instead unless you look at the structural underpinnings of power
• on the dialectic (?) between adaptive preferences/false consciousness vs respecting the choices of the “oppressed”
  • should there be a set of topics where democratic vote is overruled given historical reasons for distrusting beliefs of the majority?

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