Feminism in the Free Market

In this week’s WAPPP seminar, “Feminism Triumphed and Tamed: The Politics of Knowledge in Gender and Development,” Elisabeth M. Prügl, a Professor of International Relations and Political Science at the Graduate Institute of Geneva explored a critique of what some have come to call “free market feminism.”

While there have been many gains in the fight for gender equality in recent years, there is concern among some feminists that feminism itself has been co-opted by major institutions and by the forces of global capitalism. These scholars worry that feminism is no longer critiquing but rather supporting the existing power structures that have long disadvantaged women.

To analyze this deeper, Professor Prügl narrowed in on the largest global development institution, the World Bank. After conducting a close reading of World Bank documents from 2001 to the present, she argued that there are three dimensions of what happens to feminist ideas when they enter the neoliberal discourse: (1) integrations and instrumentalizations, (2) slippages, and (3) silences.

Firstly, feminism has been integrated into many institutions and into the idea of capitalism itself. To demonstrate this, Prügl used what she refers to as “the business case,” or the argument made by institutions that have a core mission apart from gender equality that more equality creates better economic outcomes. The narrative is not unique to the World Bank; it has become increasingly common in global institutions and on far-reaching development campaigns. 

Prügl posits that by focusing on the business case, we narrow the political imagination of what policies will actually improve women’s lives. We may ignore reproduction and childcare policies or oversimplify issues by making heteronormative assumptions and commitments.

Prügl argues that the problem definition is hugely important, as definitions are very tightly linked to solutions, and might even be defined after the solution has been found. She says that this is especially true in the case of neoliberalism, where it has already been decided that the market can solve everything.

Preferences also become an issue when discussing integration in the push for equal economic opportunity. Under conditions of equal opportunity, inequality results from preferences. Yet Prügl argues that it’s also possible that the outcomes an individual has experienced for her entire life shape her idea of what is and is not possible for her – and therefore actually change her preferences.

Prügl argued that slippages of feminist ideas occur in neoliberal institutions, with direct effects on markets, such as business registration and labor law. The idea of agency can also move away from its feminist definition in these circumstances. While those in the economic development sphere often define agency as the power and opportunity to take risks or seize opportunities, gender experts discuss it as the capacity to make decisions about one’s own life free of violence, retribution or fear – factors not always considered by economists.

Silence on feminist issues in the realm of global capitalism is also a concern for some. Prügl argued that gender expertise largely remains at the level of microeconomics, while the macroeconomics of equality are not discussed, and modernization, growth and globalization are taken as unquestioned goods. 

Prügl concluded by stating that gender mainstreaming has been both a failure and a success in recent years. She argued that the world changes due to the impetus from the knowledge and power we as individuals participate in validating, stressing the importance of a feminist critique of the current state of affairs. 

French Feminism Revisited

The Woman: Muriel Rouyer, Visiting Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School

The Talk: A Transatlantic Perspective on the Strauss Kahn Affair: French Feminism Reexamined

The Question: Did the Dominique Strauss Kahn affair alter French feminism?

To answer this question, the jury is still out. The Dominique Strauss Kahn (DSK) affair of 2011 challenged more than the cultural ideals of French feminism; it exposed the intimate relationship between journalists and politicians, and unraveled the social fabric protecting French political elites. At its root, the affair and the reactions to it, challenged French feminists to reflect on what Rouyer calls the “culture of rights” found in the US and European Union.

Seduction, conspiracy and indignation

Professor Rouyer began her talk with images from French Newspapers two days after the DSK affair became public. Photos of a distraught and upset DSK were interwoven with quotes from prominent intellectuals and journalists about the flippant nature of the accusation. Ranging from seduction (“He is a seducer, not a rapist) to conspiracy (“Why would a presidential candidate do this? He would have to be crazy.”) to outright indignation (“How is it legal to subject an innocent man to the indignities of the ‘perp walk’?!), French critics of DSK were at first seemingly few. But they were not alone. A poll of the French public two days after the arrest found 57 percent believed DSK was the victim of a conspiracy. But why?

“Malestream discourse” vs. “Culture of rights”

The ability of French reporters to investigate and publish personal information about public officials is strikingly limited compared to the US. In France, two strict libel and privacy laws restrict papers from publishing information that could be loosely defined as “private”. What happens, says Rouyer, is that “French journalists often lack journalistic courage. The interests of the powerful are still embedded and protected by the press.”

The inability to report on personal affairs creates a culture of silence and prevents journalists from writing critically. Moreover, this sentiment permeates the greater public discourse as it becomes socially and culturally taboo to hold politicians accountable for seemingly “private” matters. In essence, “Many in France did not seem to realize this was a serious matter, that bodily integrity is part of your individual rights.”

She believes American and European laws reflect a more profound “culture of rights” for the individual. “There is a deep sentiment in American democracy that this was her right [to report the sexual assault]; many in France did not appear to believe this. They seemed to be entangled in the hierarchies of the old social order.”

Paradoxically, Rouyer finds the same culture of omertà that contributed to DSK’s ultimate fall could have saved him. She asserted, “Had journalists been allowed to keep him ‘in check’, then these women would not have been subjected to this [sexual assault], and ironically, JSK would have been protected from himself [and thus able to run for president].”

It appears the DSK affair challenged many French feminists to re-evaluate what they consider sexist in French political culture. Ideally from this discourse, perhaps a third-wave of transatlantic and transnational feminism will occur.

Melissa Sandgren is a MPP1 at the Harvard Kennedy School and a participant in WAPPP's From Harvard Square to the Oval Office program.

* Photo taken on International Women's Day 2008 in Paris, France; courtesy of Looking4Poetry.

Feminism, now stalled (Harvard Gazette)

Law Professor Nancy Gertner says Second Wave needs a second wind

Reposted from the Harvard Gazette

By Corydon Ireland

Harvard Staff Writer

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Nancy Gertner is a former federal judge, the author of a recent memoir (“In Defense of Women”), a professor of practice at Harvard Law School, and an authority on sentencing, jury system discrimination, forensic evidence, and other legal areas.

But go back to June 1971, the month she had a loud argument with her mother in their kitchen in Flushing, Queens, N.Y. Gertner was about to graduate from Yale Law School and assume a prestigious clerkship in Chicago. But her mother wanted her to take the test to be a Triborough Bridge toll taker — just in case.

For a young woman lawyer at the time, “just in case” wasn’t a bad idea. The law was a man’s world. But just a decade later, the culture seemed to swing toward what feminists worked for: parity. By the late 1980s, first-rate law firms were hiring men and women in equal numbers. “We thought the numbers would do everything,” Gertner said during a lunchtime talk on Feb. 23 that was sponsored by the Women and Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. (Weekly talks there are part of the program’s mission to create gender equality.)

But faith in the raw numbers turned out to be “dramatically wrong,” said Gertner. “Advancement has stalled.” Half of all new lawyers are women, she said, but only 16 percent of equity partners in law firms are female. And of lawyers who leave the profession, most are women — and most do it because of family and social concerns.

Gertner used the lens of the legal profession to speculate why, after earlier rapid advances, feminism’s cultural agenda seems to have stalled. (Universities, she said, are in an analogous position, with plenty of women graduating as Ph.D.s, but few getting to the top of the academic game.)

During her years on the bench from 1994 to 2011, Gertner got used to being trotted out at events as an example of progress. “You’re supposed to say: ‘Things are fabulous,’ ” she told her audience at the Taubman Building’s Cason Seminar Room. But they are not. The women’s movement was not just about having more choices, she said, but about “revolutionary” changes in the workplace and at home that have not happened yet.

In today’s “imperfectly transformed world,” said Gertner, it is social expectations and an “unfriendly workforce” that mean a woman — if anyone — usually will stay home with the children. (She called this reality “the maternal wall.”)

Gertner cited one study that showed 30 percent of women leaving the law, including 15 percent of equity partners, those with a financial stake in a firm. Another study, she said, showed that 34 percent of female law graduates have worked part time, compared with only 9 percent of their male counterparts.

So without a corresponding transformation of family responsibilities, feminism is likely to stay stalled, she said. “We’ve hit a wall.”

It’s not a situation that discrimination lawsuits can correct, said Gertner, because so many women are “leaning out” of their professions — that is, anticipating future pressures and so choosing career paths that enable them to leave the workplace more readily. (She gave as an example the woman who chooses a small family-practice firm over a larger one that presents more challenges and opportunities.) “If women are leaning out” of their own volition, said Gertner, “then their failure to advance can’t be the subject of a lawsuit.”

Besides, she added, overt gender discrimination in the workplace has gone the way of discos and bell-bottoms, “a world that no longer exists.” What is left, said Gertner, is “implicit bias,” which has the same stalling effect on feminism as the maternal wall.

There is also an issue with executing the law itself — a denial of the power of context. The gender discrimination lawsuits that do make it to court are weakened by a tendency to “slice and dice” the circumstances of alleged discrimination, said Gertner. “You don’t look at them as a course of conduct,” but as separate events. “Discrimination in the real world does not fit into the legal models we have.”

One way to counteract this tendency in the law is to have judges on the bench who are aware of the way the world works. “I had an appreciation of context,” said Gertner of her time as a judge. “I never saw the law as legal rules on the page.” (That appreciation, in part, was biographical. Her judicial tenure was influenced by her early childhood in a tenement on Manhattan’s lower East Side, by championing unpopular clients as a young lawyer, and by becoming a mother at age 39.)

In the absence of overt gender discrimination, it is hard to get legal redress, said Gertner. For young women in the workplace today, “it’s the opacity of discrimination” that makes advancement difficult, she said, instead of the stark realities of discrimination in the 1970s. Gertner said, “It was easier for me.”

With feminism stalled by social pressures at home and the workplace, she offered a radical idea. “The government needs to step up to the plate,” Gertner said, beginning by providing incentives for day care that would make it easier for women to combine career and work.

After all, there is a “business case” to be made for gender equality in law firms and workplaces, “beyond the obvious need to tap a rich vein of talent,” said Gertner. In a diverse world, workplace diversity adds to “the texture and the richness of the dialogue,” she said.

In the end, feminism’s mission of workplace parity has been stalled by the three factors of the maternal wall, implicit bias, and the opacity of discrimination, Gertner said.

She said advocates have a list of things to do: parse workplace discrimination by collecting the right data; engage in collective action; and challenge the government to underwrite day care and other engines of cultural change.

But all this is not enough. “The most important thing is: We have to be unsatisfied,” Gertner told her largely female, professional audience. “We have to not believe that this was the accomplishment of the women’s movement — that I’m here and that you’re here is somehow all we can achieve.”

Reflections on the Second Wave of Feminism

The Woman:Judge Nancy Gertner, Professor of Practice, Harvard Law School
The Talk: Is the Cup Half Full or Half Empty: Reflections on the Second Wave of Feminism
The Question: How can women achieve parity? Demand more; Never settle.

When Judge Nancy Gertner interviewed for her first clerkship as a Yale Law School graduate in the spring of 1971, the judge asked her, “Do you plan to marry and have children?”. Now, four decades and two children later, Gertner reflects in her new book, In Defense of Women: Memoirs of an Unrepentant Advocate, how she challenged the male-dominated law profession, upset the status-quo, and continues to inspire parity in the field.

Forty years ago, Judge Gertner believed that when women achieved 50 percent of law school degrees, they would become 50 percent of law firm partners and federal judges. But woman attained 50 percent of law school graduate degrees in the early ‘90s -- almost 20 years ago -- and yet they hold only 19 percent of law firm partner positions and are less than 30 percent of federal judges.

"The Leaky Pipeline"

Gertner’s research, coupled with similar undertakings from the nonprofit, Catalyst, found that women are more likely than men to leave firms or drop down to part-time employment. When these women left their firms, they did not switch positions; instead, they went home. Family and personal responsibilities were the number one reason women left their firm jobs. She refers to this dropout as "The Leaky Pipeline".

More strikingly, however, her talk mentioned an even greater phenomenon coined by Facebook CEO, Sheryl Sandberg: Women lean out, not in.

"Young women lean out right away, knowing that they are going to have children. They choose a career path that enables them to have children," says Gertner. "Instead of choosing the partner route at a large firm, they choose a medium-sized firm; instead of corporate law, they choose family practice… and this is changing attitudes." It appears that the first wave of feminism -- where women donned shoulder pads and briefcases -- is being met with the reality of the infamous, and seemingly unattainable, "work-life balance". As long as women continue to be (or are believed to be) the main caregiver, the percentage of women in the upper echelons threatens to remain static. To contrast this, women need to lean in, not out.

"The Opaqueness of Discrimination"

But Gertner finds another pressing issue in the work place: discrimination is no longer explicit, it’s implicit. Unconscious biases slip into judgments, stereotypes, and decision-making, and it prevents women from attaining top positions. “If the only discrimination is the one where a boss says, ‘I hate women’, we’ re not going to see this,” explained Gertner.

A study from the White House Project emphasizes this same conclusion: “..the largest barriers to women’s progress in the legal profession come from systemic and subtle bias rather than overt discrimination. Unconscious stereotypes, inadequate access to support networks, inflexible workplace structures, and sexual harassment are widely-cited factors.”*

What can be done.

Gertner gave two solutions for those in attendance: government incentives and personal perseverance.

For example, imagine if families received a tax credit for childcare? Or if paid corporate maternity -- and paternity -- leave were reimbursed? Or if companies had a fiscal incentive to create a corporate culture balancing work and familial responsibilities for both women and men? This would not only encourage more balanced gender norms, but would begin to institutionalize it.

And finally, says Gertner, to achieve parity at the highest levels, women need to demand more. They need to be unsatisfied with the status quo, because while the status quo may be “better” than 20 years ago, it is still not equal.


*White House Project Report: Benchmarking Women’s Leadership (2009). http://www.benchmarks.thewhitehouseproject.org  


Melissa Sandgren is an MPP1 candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School and a participant in WAPPP's From Harvard Square to the Oval Office program