Gender Equality in Changing Times: Multidisciplinary Reflections on Struggles and Progress

By Angela Smith

This edited collection explores issues of gender equality in the global context. Campaigns to achieve gender equality throughout the twentieth century brought about huge changes in westernised countries. In particular, the achievements of second-wave feminism with regards to gender and sexual equality benefit many people today. The famous 'seven demands' of the second-wave movement form the basis of the chapters of this book, probing the advances made legally, socially and culturally. Contributors to this collection acknowledge the advances brought about by the second-wave movement, but highlight the work which still needs to be done in the twenty-first century, including the changes in society that have resulted in shifts in masculinity. Gender Equality in Changing Times is divided into two parts, following an overview of theoretical debates and social contexts that lead us to the current period of gender and sexual relations. Part One looks at gender equality by exploring the 'experience' of being part of a group where gender boundaries still exist, drawing on auto-ethnographies of those in key groups that are central to this debate, as well as interviews with members of such groups. Part Two investigates wider representations of these groups, offering an insight into the geopolitical world of gender relations in Saudi Arabia and China. Ultimately, this collection shows how much has been achieved, yet how far is also left to go. Students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including gender studies, history, education, sociology, media studies, politics, business studies, cultural studies and English literature and linguistics, will find this book of interest.        

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Sep 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9783030265700

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© The Author(s) 2020

A. Smith (ed.)Gender Equality in Changing Timeshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26570-0_1

1. Introduction

Angela Smith¹  

(1)

Department of Media and Communication Studies, University of Sunderland, Sunderland, UK

Angela Smith

Email: [e-mail]

This book offers a collection of chapters that explores and interrogates gender equality issues, through both the personal experiences of people themselves and the representation of gender and sexuality. Gender equality has been at the heart of feminist campaigns throughout the twentieth century. The early First Wave Feminist campaigns had crystallised around the call for universal suffrage, with most Westernised countries achieving this by 1930. This gave women the platform to raise issues of equality from inside the political system, a process that continues to this day. As Karen Boyle (2019) points out, at the time of writing this book, we are in a moment when feminism’s popularity is once more resurgent. At the same time, Sarah Banet-Weiser (2018) has argued that this coincides with popular misogyny. And it is not only the binary male/femalebacklash that is apparent, as other issues of gender and sexuality show a tension between liberation and oppression.

By the 1980s, the political activism of feminists spanning the twentieth century appeared to achieve the goals of equality. Laws were in place in Westernised societies that gave women and men equal rights to employment, education and legal powers. A vocabulary of empowerment and choice crystallised into what became known as post-feminism, a term which implied we no longer needed feminism: we were beyond that. However, many feminists challenged this post-feminist utopia. For example, Angela McRobbie (2009) challenged the basic assumption that feminism had ended in a scathing critique of the myth of female empowerment that post-feminism apparently offered. The various strands of post-feminism shifted in dominance from the ladette who apparently embraced the opportunity to behave as a young man would in terms of drinking, socialising and general rowdiness to the retraditionalisation of femininity that offered women the choice to be domesticated and traditionally feminine. This fluctuation between aspects of post-feminist choice can be seen in action in reality TV programmes such as the internationally franchised Ladette to Lady (2005–2008) (see Smith 2011). Diane Negra (2009) has also explored the concept of having-it-all post-feminism of popular culture, with the underlying dissatisfaction in the consumerisation of female aspiration. As we will see later, the demonisation of feminism in the post-feminist concept led to the assumption that feminists are joyless and anti-men, contrasting with the deluded post-feminist woman who has been conned into believing that the sexualising of her body is empowering (Whelehan 2000). Stéphanie Genz and Ben Brabon (2010) offer a more nuanced view of post-feminism, suggesting that it does have scope to be celebrated and at the very least that it is a transitional point between the political gains of Second Wave Feminism and what is yet to come. It is this transition that chapters in this book explore.

One-hundred years after some women first gained national suffrage in Britain, gender equality is firmly back on the agenda. The attention given to issues of gender equality achieved international recognition through the #MeToo social media campaigns of 2017 and 2018, which saw the arts and entertainment industries rocked by accusations of sexism and sexual harassment. These claims were led by women, but included the stories of gay participants too, who felt that they had been exploited or assaulted by powerful men in the industry. Gender equality in the twenty-first century now encompasses multiple sexualities in its reach, offering evidence of how far equality campaigns have actually come in that there is now a general acceptance of non-binary sexuality, both legally and socially. That said, there remain parts of the world, including the Westernised world, where attitudes, if not the law, continue to discriminate against those who are not binary, heterosexual identified. This book seeks to explore how these attitudes persist, despite decades of legal changes towards inclusivity, particularly over the last 50 years.

Legislation towards gender equality has been enacted throughout the twentieth century but most recently since the 1960s. The Second Wave Feminist movement in Westernised countries saw campaigns that were broadly grouped under seven goals as outlined by the UK’s Women’s Liberation Movement:

Equal pay now

Equality education and job opportunities

Free contraception and abortion on demand

Free 24-hour nursery care

Financial and legal independence

Equality irrespective of sexuality

End to all discrimination against lesbians and women’s rights to define her own sexuality

It is telling that, half a century later, there is still legislation being developed even in Westernised countries to act on these goals. For example, from 6 April 2017 employers in Great Britain with more than 250 staff were required by law to publish statistics detailing staff pay by gender, annually on their own website and on a government website. The first full report of this appeared in April 2018 and showed that even 48 years since the passing of the Equal Pay Act (1970) in the UK, women consistently lag behind their male counterparts when it comes to pay. According to the Office for National Statistics, in 2017 the gap between what UK male and female workers earned, based on median hourly earnings, stood at 18.4%. This had risen from 18.2% in 2016.

This is against a background of more women being in paid employment than ever before. As Myra Macdonald (1995) and many others have pointed out, this leads to a double bind where women are damned if they go out to work (implicitly neglecting their domestic duties) or damned if they stay at home (implicitly rejecting the hard-fought-for rights for women in the workplace ). Whilst Second Wave Feminist campaigns led to equality in terms of the legal obligations of employers, cultural expectations also needed to change. For example, in her 2017 autobiography, UK Labour MP and former Minister for Women, Harriet Harman, recounts that her mother, who had qualified as a barrister in the 1940s, had felt obliged to give up work when she had her children in order to fulfil the role of housewife. Harman laments that her mother’s barrister’s robe and wig ended up in the dressing-up box, and uses this ignominious act to highlight the inequality in pre-1970s’ society that deprived the world of the brains and skills of highly educated women purely on the basis of the compulsion to conform to domestic gendered expectations (Harman 2017). It is not just the university-educated women whose skills and knowledge were confined to the family on marriage through cultural expectations. My own mother had qualified as a nurse in 1961, becoming one of the youngest women of her generation to be promoted to the rank of ward sister when she was just 21. However, like Harman’s mother, on giving birth to her first child, my mother also gave up her profession, and the costume associated with her job—her nurse’s watch, registration badges and silver-buckled belt—also found their way into our dressing-up box. The inequality of the system affected women at all points of the social class scale, although working-class women were less prominent during the Second Wave Feminist movement. Bridget Cooper explores this in her chapter.

It is now commonplace for women to continue working after becoming mothers, and in many European countries the State has increasingly stepped in to fund childcare (although in post-2008 austerity Britain, this has been sadly diminished). According to the Office of National Statistics data in the UK, the female employment rate has increased steadily from 52.8% in 1971 to 70.8% by the end of 2017 (ONS 2018a). This contrasts with the statistics for male employment over the same period, with 92.1% of men in employment in 1971 (overall employment rate of 72.2%) falling to 79.8% in 2017 (overall employment rate of 75.4%) (ONS 2018b, 2018c). These statistics alone show how far we have come from the social context of the Second Wave Feminist movement which pushed for equal pay legislation and equal access to employment opportunities across Westernised countries. A greater parity in the employment of both men and women is used by some to claim that women are taking over and doing men out of work, but this argument seemingly ignores the parallel decline in heavy industry over this period, an area where vast numbers of men were employed prior to the 1980s. Statistics also show that women are now more likely than men to go into higher education (the UK University Admission Service reported young women were 36% more likely to start a degree course than their male peers in August 2017), a trend that emerges across Westernised countries (PA, The Guardian 2017), and 2018 saw the ban on female soldiers serving on the front line lifted from all UK armed services. This is a pattern that extends across many Westernised countries, yet the gender pay gap is also prevalent.

The converse side of the legal acceptance of women in traditionally male occupations, and in the public sphere more generally, has been an increase in sexual harassment. In the context of post-feminist culture, where certain strands existed to endorse the self-sexualisation of women as a means of empowerment, this was largely unacknowledged. To do so, it seemed, would be too close to the killjoy legacy of the perceptions of the Second Wave Feminism. Second Wave Feminism is coded as angry, humourless, ugly but, most importantly, ineffectual and unnecessary and so most post-feminist texts represent a battle of wits between the older feminist woman and the young post-feminist girl . As Imelda Whelehan and others have argued, the epitome of self-sexualisation is the deluded embodiment of the ladette, or in US culture, riot girl.

The ladette offers the most shallow model of gender equality; it suggests that women could or should adopt the most anti-social and pointless of ‘male’ behaviour as a sign of empowerment. The Wonderbra, unsurprisingly, remains the essential style statement for a wannabe ladette . (Whelehan 2000, p. 9)

This self-sexualisation as a means of exhibiting gender equality is an extension of the broader aims of the Second Wave Feminism for women to achieve equality by essentially adopting male behaviour in the workplace. In other words, women are misguided, or misinformed, about just what gender equality is. The ladette of the 1990s was rejecting the feminist ideals of her mother a generation before as children have always done in their desire to rebel from parental influence. As with Whelehan’s argument, dissatisfaction with this state of affairs developed into anger and eventually protest. Initially, this was articulated through the voices of established feminists.

The first decade of the twenty-first century saw increasing attention paid to the notion of feminism. Susan Faludi’s Backlash (1992) has been an early warning of the demise of feminism as a desirable or necessary political force. It appeared to exist at the level of common sense: it was hegemonic. A survey of 1000 readers of Cosmopolitan in the UK in 2007 reported the vast majority (96%) of respondents believed in equal pay and the right to a career over motherhood, and only slightly fewer (85%) believed women should have the right to choose an abortion. However, the same survey found that only 25% of respondents said they would describe themselves as feminists. Thus the adult women responders of this and many other similar surveys at this time show that the feminist aims of the 1970s have largely been achieved and equality exists, but they were alienated from the movement that had fought to achieve these. Moseley and Read had highlighted this in 2002 when they pointed out:

[t]he lucrative, 18-34 female market, a generation that has grown up taking for granted the feminist victories won by their mothers and thus for whom feminism exists at the level of popular commonsense rather than at the level of theoretical abstraction. (Moseley and Read 2002, p. 238)

Coupled with this, the 1990s had seen the emergence of a new social emphasis on individual gains at the expense of social collective action that had seen the Second Wave Feminists achieve so much a generation before. Women were growing up with the opportunities won for them in Western societies but in an increasing consumerist and work-obsessed world where a good work/life balance is desired. As Moseley and Read commented,

This is a generation who have found that despite the best efforts of feminists, you cannot just wish femininity away, relegate it to the dustbin of history as the bad ‘other’ of feminism. This is a generation for whom ‘having it all’ means not giving things up but struggling to reconcile our feminist desires with our feminine desires. (Moseley and Read 2002, p. 238)

Thus it would seem that for the Cosmo readers, feminism as a concept is both taken for granted and over and also associated with anti-feminine tropes such as hating men, dressing in an androgynous (unfeminine) way and often linked with social collectives that are last century. Writing in her Guardian column in 2003, Zoe Williams argued that feminism was as noble and important as any other civil rights movement, and yet we seem to take no pride in it. We are crazy to disown it like some sort of embarrassing old aunt (Williams 2003). Unlike the participants in the Cosmo survey, Williams was highlighting the importance of feminism and its relevance in the twenty-first century. If the collective voice Williams’ Guardian readership implies is that of the older age group who would have emerged from the cohort Moseley and Read highlighted in 2003, then what of the younger age groups, the so-called millennials? In the same year, 2007, Girlguiding UK found that 65% of their members would describe themselves as feminists (Ward 2007). This offers more hope for the future of feminism and in fact is what we have come to see as Fourth Wave Feminism from around 2010 onwards.

Judith Williamson (2003) observed that the problem is that sexism didn’t go away, we just stopped talking about it. Sexism had come to be mocked or hijacked by the media with the close associations of perceptions of unfashionable Second Wave Feminism.

By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, gender relations in Westernised societies were starting to re-emerge with issues of political and social relevance. Throughout this first decade, there had been a developing argument that was highlighting the gaps in gender equality. Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune had set up The F-Word blog in 2001, making the most of emerging forms of social media. This blog explores contemporary UK feminism and continues to be edited by young British feminists to this day. Ten years later, Laura Bates set up the Everyday Sexism blog to collect and disseminate stories of the minor, seemingly routine examples of sexism that she and other women encountered on a daily basis. The arrival of Twitter had allowed the individual voices of women to be heard in a much wider context; thus, the individualism that Redfern and Aune (2010) claim had seemed to deter women from engaging with feminism in the early part of the century became instrumental in the formation of what became known as Fourth Wave Feminism. This appears in popular culture with increasing frequency, including in 2014 Beyoncé’s performance against the giant, illuminated word FEMINIST at the MTV Music Video Awards, and actor Emma Watson’s speech at the UN Women #HeForShe campaign launch (Banet-Weiser 2018). The inherent sexism in the film world in particular came to public attention in late 2017 through the use of the #MeToo hashtag and saw unprecedented changes occurring in that business as seemingly untouchable sexual preditors at the top of the industry found nowhere to hide. Harvey Weinstein in particular became symbolic of the lack of tolerance of sexist behaviour that had previously been treated as common knowledge without anyone paying much attention to the implications (legitimised sexual abuse) or consequences (patriarchal power enacted through the threat of sexual abuse).

Gender equality is not just a Westernised nations’ issue. It is a global issue, and as mentioned above in relation to Emma Watson, this was explicitly recognised in the United Nations’ formation of the HeForShe campaign in 2014. This has the mission statement:

The world is at a turning point. People everywhere understand and support the idea of gender equality. They know it’s not just a women’s issue, it’s a human rights issue. And when these powerful voices are heard, they will change the world. The time for that change is now.

HeForShe is inviting people around the world to stand together to create a bold, visible force for gender equality. And it starts by taking action right now to create a gender equal world.

Unlike previous campaigns, this one explicitly aims to recruit men, as reflected in its title. Whilst the earlier Second Wave Feminist campaigns had relied on collective voices through co-present demonstrations, HeForShe makes effective use of social media to reach more people than ever attended even the largest feminist rally. However, the very name of the campaign has been the focus of criticisms of its ethos, with Cathy Young (2014) in Time magazine arguing that the He for She is actually drawing on stereotypes of stronger men needing to support female victims. She further argues that this campaign sidelines men and in fact discriminates against them at the expense of gender equality. This article was accompanied by a series of quotations from women in the entertainment industry, responding to the question, would you call yourself a feminist? Most of the responses were positive, but several were along the lines of actor and environmental activist Shailene Woodley’s response:

No, because I love men. I think the idea of raise women to power, take the men away from power is never going to work out because you need balance. … My biggest thing is really sisterhood more than feminism.

This reflects the misunderstanding of feminism as man-hating (triggered here by I love men as a statement which appears to reflect the assumption that feminists hate men) and the associated assumption of women wanting to gain power at the expense of men. In other words, it is a view that rearticulates equality as disparity. However, this is not entirely without an element of truth, as is commonly found in such rejections of equality arguments. As Kim Gilligan’s chapter here shows, the perception of men as being inappropriate primary school teachers is one that runs deep into the culture of British schools. This is based on the underlying stereotype of the caring, nurturing women who is best suited naturally to be responsible for young children. This gendered stereotype then is conflated with the male sexual predator who we see emerging in the #MeToo campaign, someone who can’t be trusted around vulnerable young people. Such is the complexity of issues relating to gender equality, it is difficult to entirely dismiss the misguided assumptions about gender equality that are embodied in Shailene Woodley’s comments above.

The use of social media to campaign for recognition or equality for disadvantaged or invisible groups is not just a Western phenomenon. In parts of the world where gender equality issues have a very different history, social media is hastening change. For example, as Wjoud Almadani shows in her chapter, in Saudi Arabia the ultra-conservative laws governing gender in that part of the world led to women being confined to the domestic domain and patriarchal rule, unable to leave the house without the explicit permission of a (male) guardian. With the arrival of a new ruler, Prince Salman Bin Abdul Aziz, in 2016, the slow move towards a more Western notion of gender equality has been hastened, and social media has proved a very interesting source of data relating to these changes. This is not least as it is one of the few places where women’s voices can be found in an unmuted context. Similarly, in China, there is a very different approach to gender equality than is found in the Western world. Xiaoping Wu offers us a brief history of gender in modern China before exploring the way social media has been deployed to denigrate women’s rise in the public domain. The responses on social media to such objections have many similarities with what we find in Western society when equality issues receive public attention (see also Smith 2018). Again, we see that social media has enabled the disadvantages and discriminated against to gain a voice in ways that our grandmothers could never have imagined possible.

Book Structure

This book is roughly structured around two basic concepts: the experience of gender equality issues in the contemporary world and the representation of gender equality as an ongoing battle.

In Part I of the book, we find experiences of equality and inequality being discussed. This includes some accounts that are built from their authors’ personal reflections on their own experiences and circumstances. Such accounts are at the heart of much feminist research, where the personal is political. This allows for first-hand accounts of the changes in society that are at the heart of this book’s focus. Whilst there are risks attached to such accounts, researchers such as Hammersley (2006) point out that the perils of such methodology are generally outweighed by the potential for great rewards to be gleaned from such data. With this in mind, the experiences of two women who have lived through the fight for gender equality since the 1960s are recorded in the chapters by Bridget Cooper and Stephanie Atkinson.

Atkinson in Chap. 2 offers a unique view of someone who has been a role model for women throughout her working life. As the first female woodwork teacher in England, she has worked in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects all her life and witnessed the incremental balancing of gender participation in these traditionally masculine fields. With more than half a century’s experience of this, Atkinson reassesses the part role models have to play in encouraging young women into STEM-based careers. Cooper in Chap. 3 offers an historical view of the issue of inequality in general, and gender in particular, in respect of her own life experiences. She argues for the inclusion of geographical location in any discussion of gender equality and ultimately offers the view that we learn nothing from history when it comes to tackling inequality.

Linking into Cooper’s call for geographical location to be included as a factor in discussing gender equality, Chap. 4 by Juila Nobari and Paul-Alan Armstrong explores place as a factor in identity. Their conversation explores their identities in terms of spirituality and humanism, questioning the place of gender in this framework.

The occupational stereotyping that Atkinson writes about in Chap. 2 highlights her own experiences. We return to the context of education in Chap. 5, with Kim Gilligan’s study of the experiences of primary school teacher training. Like the female politicians McKay discussed later in her chapter, who are out of place because of their gender, here we find that male trainees in a stereotypically female occupation face a number of complex challenges and their own version of the double bind that McKay and others have highlighted as part of the experience of women in politics.

All four of these chapters explore gender equality in terms of its position in relation to traditional gender stereotypes and expectations. Chapter 6 investigates this in the context of sexuality, with Katie Ward looking at the lives of people in the trans community, in particular how they identify themselves.

Part II of this book explores gender equality in terms of its representation. The first three chapters look at how the campaigns of gender equality are fought in different international fronts. Chapter 7 by Angela Smith looks at the Western HeForShe campaign and its links with political correctness where it is challenged by those who see any change to gender imbalance as being a step too far. Whilst the focus of many of the chapters in this book is on Western issues of gender equality, Wjoud Almadani in Chap. 8 and Wu Xiaoping in Chap. 9 look at active campaigns of gender equality in other parts of the world. Wu’s chapter explores the rejection of gender equality activism in China, where straight man cancer is roughly synonymous with male chauvinist pigs in Western culture. She discusses the ways in which this anti-feminist trope is found in popular culture, despite there being a very different history of gender equality in China than we find in the West. Almadani focuses on the recent liberalisation of gender relations in Saudi Arabia, exploring the Twitter arguments about specific changes in the liberalisation of the Saudi women’s lives.

One of the issues that recurs in these chapters is that women are out of place in the public sphere. Chapter 10 by Fiona McKay explores the phenomenon of there being two leading female politicians in the UK at one time: Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland and Theresa May in England, as prime minister of the whole UK. McKay’s chapter looks at how these two powerful women are reported in print media and how the concept of the double bind sees them criticised for being either too feminine or not feminine enough.

Finally, Chap. 11 by Janet Pearson discusses the concept of fashion and asks the question: can fashion ever be gender neutral? Against a backdrop of encroaching equality in employment, and advances in technologies that