Equality is Not Sameness: International Women’s Day
Thoughts on International Women’s Day March 8, 2016 #IWD2016 #PledgeForParity
“Globally, with individuals pledging to move from talk to purposeful action — and with men and women joining forces — we can collectively help women advance equal to their numbers and realize the limitless potential they offer economies the world over.” ~~ http://www.internationalwomensday.com/Theme
In 1994 I went back for my Masters Degree. My area of specialization was in Women’s Development. During my first year I read two books that made a huge impact on me personally and have informed my current work with women in leadership.
Elizabeth Minnich’s Transforming Knowledge (1990)[1] and The Mismeasure of Woman by Carol Tavris (1992)[2]
In her book, Elizabeth Minnich endeavored to answer her question: How can meanings of humankind exclude the majority of us and still stand as sound, adequate and truthful?
What ways of thinking keep us from making changes even when we see that they need to be made? Basically she explored how we created meaning of our existence and how that meaning informed our lives.
Carol Tavris (social psychologist) [3]examined why women are not inferior, superior, or the same as men. Comparisons have led to labeling men as “normal” and women who do not perform physically, sexually, mentally, or emotionally like them as “abnormal.” Tavris argues that the costs of these measurements have been, and continue to be, substantial for women.
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On this celebration of International Women’s Day on March 8, 2016 I want to pose these questions — Equal to What, Who and Why and How?
In 1984 Simone de Beauvoir wrote:
“We are being given the illusion that woman can accomplish anything today and that it is her fault if she does not. It all goes hand in hand with this so called new femininity — with an enhanced status for traditional feminine values, such as woman and her rapport with nature, women and her maternal instinct, woman and her physical being…This renewed attempt to pin women down to their traditional role, together with a small effort to meet some of the demands made by women, — that’s the formula used to try and keep women quiet. And, unfortunately, as one can see from the tragic results, it is a really successful approach. Even women who call themselves feminists don’t always see through it. Once again women are being defined in terms of “the other”, once again they are being made into the “second sex.” — -Simone de Beauvoir, 1984 was a Frenchwriter, existentialist philosopher, feminist, Marxist,[1] and social theorist. (1908–1986)[4]
That was back in 1984. Given some of the rhetoric I hear in politics and the images I see today in our society I wonder what has changed.
In her landmark book, The Mismeasure of Woman, Carol Tavris[5] reveals The 3 Myths of the Universal Male
- Men are normal: women, being the “opposite” are deficient. Masculine is good, feminine is bad (or anything attributed to male/female traits, qualities). Sets up an untenable polarity. Men become the repository of culture, intellect and strength. Women are the repository of nature, intuition, and weakness.
- Men are normal: women are opposite from men, but superior to them. Proponents of this view emphasize aspects of female experience or nature (childbirth, spirituality, pacifism, compassion, empathy) as morally superior to men’s experiences and qualities. In this view, man is still the standard against which women’s behavior is judged, even if the judgments are kinder.
- Men are normal: and women should be like them. This would appear as an antidote to the fundamental school of differences. It ignores that differences do exist between men and women — in life experiences, resources, power, and physiology — and it assumes that it is appropriate to generalize from the male standard to all women.
These 3 errors have done serious harm to women’s feelings, sense of worth and their position in our society — and to men’s feelings and position in society as well.
Equality is not Sameness
Carol Tavris distinguishes between gender equality and gender sameness — the idea that to be equal is to be the same. But the sexes do differ. They differ in the kinds of work they do, in reproductive processes and most importantly in their access to power, income and other resources worldwide.
So what is Equality?
“Equality is a platitudinous concept that practically everybody supports because it can be given any meaning we like…Formal agreement on equality as a value masks the fact that we haven’t a clue as to what is supposed to be equal to what, and in what way, or to what degree.” — Phillip E. Johnson[6], Stanford Law Review
Questions to Ponder
Why is pregnancy still considered a disability?[7]
Why are domestic violence victims still condemned for staying with their abusers?[8]
Why is most medical research still conducted on males?[10]
Why is heart disease the leading cause of death in post-menopausal women?[11]
Why are affordable and secure childcare options[13] or paid maternity leave[14]so limited?
Efforts to achieve equality through equal treatment are doomed to fail because men and women are not starting at the same place. We are inherently different. To deny those differences compromises women; to accept the (white) male model as the standard of measurement for all is to forever remain deficient and “less than”.
How do you make pregnancy equal to something else? Is it a disability to carry a child in your belly? What can it be likened to? The answer is nothing. Pregnancy is pregnancy. There is nothing else like it; it is unique. Against the male norm — which most of corporate America embraces — pregnancy is seen as a disability rather than an additional ability. How then does this uniqueness fit into an equality model?
“As a concept equality suffers from a mathematical fallacy that is, the view that only things that are the same can ever be equal.” Christine Littleton, Professor of Law at UCLA. [16]
Ms. Littleton advocates for equality as acceptance rather than equality as sameness.
Equality as acceptance means that instead of regarding cultural and reproductive differences as problems to be eliminated we would aim to eliminate the unequal consequences that follow from them.
We would ask how to achieve equality while accepting gender differences not how to achieve equality by ignoring or eliminating gender differences. We would no longer accept the prevailing male norm as the legitimate one, while trying to find circumstances to accommodate women (and minorities) who are trying to measure up to it. We would stop labeling women’s experiences as the deviant ones. The real goal of equality should be to reduce the emotional and financial cost of our differences. We must acknowledge that this cost is shared by everyone not only women.
Let’s look at some areas where power, resources, legal and government policies and support are based on traditional male norms as the standard of measurement.
Motherhood and Childcare:
Women who choose to have families should not need to compromise their career achievement and earning potential. In Anne Crittenden’s[17] provocative book The Price of Motherhood,[18] she shows how mothers are uniquely disadvantaged economically. Unlike most other nations, the United States systematically refuses to value or support unpaid caring labor. As a result, mothers, children, and society as a whole pay an enormous price. This situation means that the average college-educated woman will lose more than a million dollars in lifetime income if she has just one child. Most mothers who divorce suffer a dramatic drop in income and standard of living, far greater than the loss suffered by most fathers.
The social safety net does not protect divorced or single mothers from poverty. Those who do unpaid work at home are officially “not in the labor force.” A mother earns zero toward her Social Security for every year she works at home[19]. Unless a mother is employed full-time she is not eligible for first class health insurance. She is not eligible for unemployment insurance if she works part-time or at home; and she is not eligible for disability insurance; ie: workman’s compensation. The government leaves her economic contribution out of the GDP.[20]
Child-care is devalued, it is classified as “unskilled”.[21] This treatment of those who care for children is justified on the grounds that it is women’s “choice.” The Price of Motherhood attacks this rationale, by making the case that women choose to be mothers, but they do not choose the adverse consequences of that decision. Mothers didn’t write the rules that govern how their work is treated — and rendered invisible — by employers, by the law, or by government.
Healthcare and Benefits:
Most research dollars are allotted to men’s health issues using men as the biological and research norm. According to a study of gender disparities among adults age 65 and older, women with acute myocardial infarction (AMI) or congestive heart failure (CHF) do not receive the same care as men[22]. Yet heart disease is the number one killer of women over the age of menopause. Women’s health issues are still marginalized in our everyday experience, often being told that our symptoms are just stress or real concerns are pathologized into something that fits a medical treatment model designed for men.
Business:
We see the imbalances of power and income dramatically in business. Despite the fact that women represent 46.9 % of the workforce women hold only 20 or 4% of CEO’s positions in our Fortune 500 Companies.[23] Nearly half of the workforce are women and often the primary breadwinners in their families.[24] Job-sharing, on site childcare and flex time, programs that help support women in their roles as primary caretakers and that keep developing career track individuals are still rare and practically non-existent for women in non-management positions.
In a world of equality by acceptance, corporations would embrace the value of women in leadership by re-evaluating salaries, career-pathing and benefits to keep women on viable career paths during important child-rearing years.
What to do
We must challenge the assumptions behind women and men’s roles in our societies. Equality as acceptance would affirm the equal validity of both women’s and men’s life experience, protecting and rewarding nurturance and community as well as self-reliance and autonomy in ways that enrich all of us. Our gender narrative has to be rewritten for the sake of both men and women, for the benefit of our collective communities.
There will come a day when women will no longer be measured against the male norm and the shadow of gender and its cultural implications.
What internal process must occur within each of us that will allow for a shift in mindset for women and for the world at large?
What can we now offer our daughters, and our sons, in the way of making this shift?
Both men and women need to stop polarizing our attributes and invalidating our unique experiences and differences and bring the best of who we are to the game. We must engage life and work, relationships and results, similarities and differences holistically and inclusively in order to thrive in this diverse and fluid world in which we find ourselves.
We need a unitive approach to caring for our collective community and advancing women and diverse populations into parity of power, influence and resources that allow self-actualization. Shifts in organizations, societal values and the elimination of stereotypes and assumptions will finally bring us to equality by acceptance and better results than equality as sameness.
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(c) 2016 Alicia M. Rodriguez, President, Sophia Associates, Inc. www.sophia-associates.com We help executive women, visionary leaders, creative and social entrepreneurs and global change agents develop the leadership skills and create the organizational cultures that meet the challenges of the 21st century.
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Reprinted from Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/thoughts-international-womens-day-2016-equality-alicia-m-rodriguez?trk=prof-post
