March 8 marks International Women’s Day. But with many young women now believing feminism has either achieved its goals, or is irrelevant to their lives, Raia Prokhovnik asks if the day is something to celebrate or not.
Women’s football, rugby, and cricket in the UK is top class, and women’s boxing is rapidly gaining in popularity. You could also argue that young women want to throw off the censorious attitudes of second-wave feminists and wear make-up and high heels without needing to feel they are being objectified by men – and that women as well as men enjoy pornography.
What’s the case for? Well, the Daily Mail had a shocking article just a few days ago with the headline recently ‘Street gang girls now see group rape as “normal”. The conviction rate for rape still lies at around 6%, and 12% of recorded rape cases are listed by police as ‘no crimes’. Two women a week die in Britain as a result of domestic violence.
And despite the Equal Pay Act of over 30 years ago, women as a group still earn well below what men as a group earn for the same job. Maternity pay may give women time to be with their babies for a few short months, but women take maternity pay at the high risk of losing out in career progression. And While girls do better than boys at school and in higher education, the proportion of men to women in good jobs rapidly changes in men’s favour in the workplace, with a scarcity of women as high earners and in company boardrooms. A recent Guardian article reports calls for change by German female journalists, who face a workplace in which ‘only 2% of the editors-in-chief of 360 German daily and weekly newspapers are women’.
Stepping back from these headlines, feminists have put forward two really important points which are still relevant today. One is about the level playing field. Can women really be considered equal if they aren’t operating under equal conditions with really equal opportunities? The evidence above suggests that the playing field is not level or, in other words, there remain structural barriers to women’s equality. And is the value of ‘political correctness’ really to be dismissed so long as women aren’t situated on a level playing-field?
The second point is about distinguishing between how women want to see themselves and how they are seen. Women want to see themselves as individuals, as different from each other, and as in solidarity with other women, a Woman, whatever that might mean to them. They want to be equal but also different. But the absence of a level playing-field means that there are still strong social values circulating which assume that biological sex immediately tells you all sorts of things (negative things) about how any particular woman thinks, feels, behaves. There is still a lot of evidence that people make negative assumptions about what women are capable of in the workplace on this basis. This lowers expectations about what women can achieve, and women internalise that sense of inferiority. Or in other words, when women are essentialised – viewed not as individuals but only, and negatively, as part of a group defined primarily through their biology – inequality is seen as natural.
Another example of the disjunction between how women are seen, and how they want to see themselves and be seen, is found in the recent Slut Walks – in cities around the world women have protested against the view that it is OK to think that every woman wearing a short skirt is asking to be raped.
It's important, too, to remember that International Women’s Day is not only, or even primarily, about the situation for women and girls in the UK and other wealthy countries. It’s also about highlighting the importance of education for girls (denied in some countries), helping women directly with micro-credit schemes (giving women an independent earning potential), and working to eliminate the practice of female genital mutilation (prevalent in some countries).
Then there are vexed issues like Muslim women wearing the veil – should we see this as a cultural choice which women should be free to make, or as a patriarchal practice that takes away women’s independent identity? Is it about culture or about individual rights? All these are issues which need to be discussed and debated, and International Women’s Day marks a time which encourages reflection on them.
On balance, I think that it's well worth celebrating ‘Connecting Girls, Inspiring Futures’ , the theme of International Women's Day on 8 March.
If you are interested in the questions raised here, you might be interested in the Open University course, Living Political Ideas, where ideas about gender are considered in a debate over abortion in the US, and in a whole section of the course devoted to ‘The Body in Politics’.
Raia Prokhovnik, 6 March 2012
Dr Raia Prokhovnik is a Reader in Politics at the Open University.
Cartoon by Catherine Pain
