Politics, Feminism and the Reformation of Gender

Jennifer Chapman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN:
  9781138978980
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134979332
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Caught between their female gender and their aspirations in a public sphere founded on the gender role of men, women face a problem that is more intractable than conventional feminist political analysis has fully recognized. In this book, Jennifer Chapman addresses both the substance of the problem and feminist strategies for change. Male dominance of political elites is virtually universal and yet there is no general theory of recruitment to account for this. Jennifer Chapman uses a rigorous comparative study of political recruitment to show why different models of the process among men produce near-identical results, irrespective of context. She then looks beyond this general pattern to its gender basis, and to strategies for change.

Part 1

1
GENDER AND RECRUITMENT THE
NATURE OF THE PROBLEM

THE GENDER PATTERN IN ELITE RECRUITMENT

In the last hundred years women in advanced societies have generally achieved the right to own property, enter paid employment, vote and hold political office. They have also gained universal access to formal education on more or less equal terms with men, thus acquiring an attribute which a long line of researchers from Lipset onwards have found to be associated with the development in men of a disposition to engage in political activity.¹

The effect of these changes on the political behaviour of women, both in absolute terms and relative to men, has been in some respects dramatic and immediate. For example, as soon as they were given the opportunity women began to vote in large proportions and the first women to win election to the national legislatures of Britain and many other western societies did so within a matter of months after becoming eligible² In some respects, however, change was more gradual. Indeed, when political scientists began seriously to study patterns of participation after the Second World War it was not the speed of women’s assimilation which they found striking, but the fact that in almost all respects they had still not caught up with the male participatory norm. It was not until the late 1960s and 1970s that the gender gap in forms of what is usually described as ‘mass’ participation was found to be diminishing rapidly.³ These changes have still, in the 1990s, not seriously impinged on men’s dominance of political elites, even though in countries such as Britain and the USA the disparity in low level participation has nearly disappeared. Two ‘almost iron’ laws of women’s elite penetration are found to be in general operation even now:

1. That wherever political rewards exist which are desirable to men, relatively few women will be found seeking, and even fewer securing them.
2. That wherever there is a hierarchy of such rewards, then the higher up the hierarchy we look, the smaller the proportion of women will be.

The operation of the first of these contemporary laws is both straightforward and obvious. At every level of contested election for public office, anywhere in the world that we choose to look, we find that female candidacies are grossly outnumbered by those of men, even after anything up to eighty years of becoming eligible to stand. Even in Scandinavia the proportion of women among parliamentary candidates has on only two occasions been reported as over a third.⁴ It was not until 1983 that women as a percentage proportion of candidacies for the House of Commons even got into double figures for the first time and that position has not yet been reached in the United States.⁵ At the local level women are usually more likely to appear as candidates in most advanced societies, but still not at all in proportion to their presence in the electorate.

It is also an almost invariable feature of competition for office, local as well as national, that the success rate of women candidates is lower than that of men. In Britain indeed, the gap between women’s aspirations to office and their success in achieving it has become more, not less pronounced with time; until 1987, the increase in women as a proportion of parliamentary candidates in post-war elections was actually correlated negatively not only, as one would expect, with the proportion who succeed but also with the absolute number of women MPs.

The resulting pattern is well known. Governments throughout the world are dominated by men, notwithstanding the occasional appearance of a personally dominant female head of government, such as Mrs Thatcher; such women rulers have to be looked at in the context of the whole population of rulers and have never been more numerous across the world than can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Norway at the time of writing, is the only, and first ever, exception to this general rule; of the eighteen Cabinet members, nearly half (including Prime Minister Gro Harlem-Bruntland) are women. In national legislatures, or their functional equivalents in one-party states, the highest female representation is also to be found in Scandinavia, but even there it lags considerably behind that of men.⁶ More characteristic is Britain, where over half the population but only 6.3 per cent of the MPs elected in 1987, were women (a female success rate of only 8.3 per cent, compared to 27.2 per cent for men).⁷ This derisory figure was not only the highest proportion of women there had ever been in the House of Commons, but represented a recovery as much as an advance. The previous highpoint of 4.6 per cent was in 1964, after which the proportion declined to around 3.6 per cent, almost exactly the proportion that was found in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union⁸ and still obtains in the United States Congress. In the case of the Labour party (which paradoxically claims to be the only party a genuine feminist should support in Britain), the last time this party reached its 1987 total of twenty-five women MPs was in 1945. Of fifty-six states cited in a recent overview, nearly half had a female presence in their national legislatures of 5 per cent or less and only eighteen had 10 per cent or more.⁹ Even after the general election of April 1992, Britain could not be numbered among the latter: at only 9.2 per cent, the proportion of women still has not made it into double figures.

The second ‘almost iron’ law—that the proportion of women will vary inversely with the hierarchy of rewards—is slightly less obvious in its operation, though no less reliable. Although in most cases it operates as straightforwardly as in Britain, where the proportion of women rises to 22 per cent of district councils in England and Wales (19.5 per cent in Scotland), in the United States only 10 per cent of mayors and local council members were female in the 1980s¹⁰ and this proportion is 3 per cent less than is found at the higher level of state legislatures. In Scandinavia, the proportion of women in local councils varies between 21 and 29 per cent, but this is not very different from the proportion to be found in national legislatures.

If we look more closely, however, and bear in mind that we are concerned with the rewards of office and not its constitutional status, it becomes clear that most if f not all cases which appear to break the rule are really illustrations of a consistent relationship between rewards and gender. In political systems like the British where the formal hierarchy of office, ranging from national to local office, coincides with the hierarchy of rewards—such as money, status and power—the hierarchy of female under-representation coincides exactly with the pyramid of office. Similarly in the Soviet Union (where the proportion of women could be as high as 50 per cent in the local soviets but real power resided in the Communist Party committees), there was a sharp decline in female representation when one moved up the local hierarchy. In fact, when the relative status of local soviet and Party office are taken into account, the British and Soviet cases are both perfect illustrations of a direct relationship between the hierarchy of office and the gender pattern. There is in both cases a strong element of service involved in local government office and for most people little or no prospect of career advancement or financial gain. Rewards must be measured in terms of power, which is severely limited by that of central government in a unitary system, (and by that of the Party in the Soviet case) and status, which reduces sharply as one moves down the formal hierarchy from national office. The hierarchical pattern is therefore perfectly straightforward. In the United States, the real distribution of rewards is rather different and local office may be prized and hotly contested by men for the power and pecuniary advantage it brings.¹¹ It is within the levels of state and local elites that the pyramid effect is to be found, with the proportion of women varying inversely with the size of the state legislature and the members’ pay¹² and with the salary and scope of the local office.¹³

We thus have a universal gender pattern in political elite recruitment which rests upon the three components of our ‘almost iron’ laws; the under-representation of women among the candidates for office; their lower success rate than that of men; and the inverse relationship of their participation and success to the rewards of the office sought. The problem is that no satisfactory explanation for the universal character of this pattern has yet been advanced.

THE LIMITATIONS OF EXISTING EXPLANATIONS

Although most socialists and some feminists have claimed to have the key to women’s political equality, the universality and durability of the gender pattern has confounded their expectations as well as those of political scientists; women have been failed not only by traditional power structures but also by socialist states and active women’s movements. The Soviet Union was committed to sex equality since its inception, with the education of women and their induction into the paid labour force being articles of public policy as well as dogma throughout its history. Yet the results of seventy-three years of Soviet power brought women no nearer the centres of political power than, for example, seventy-three years of traditional male chauvinism in Mediterranean Greece. Nor do the claims of socialist parties (or trade unions) in Western Europe to be the natural vehicle for women’s progress stand up to examination. On the other hand, where women in the USA have pioneered the modern women’s movement and made vigorous use of their own structures as pressure groups within the arena of interests, the same derisory results are found as in Britain, where no coherent and structured women’s movement exists at all, and in the Soviet Union, where feminists ‘from below’ until recently risked jail or deportation.¹⁴

There is one other aspect of political systems which has attracted such considerable attention as an explanation for variation within the gender pattern as to be treated by some people almost as an adequate explanation for the pattern itself; this is the kind of electoral system in use. However, while it is true that a cross-national comparison of national legislatures in recent times shows a definite relationship between the incidence of proportional representation and the proportion of women elected,¹⁵ this explanation does not stand up when examined over time; before the sudden improvement of recent times, proportional representation systems had already existed for decades in Norway and Denmark with the same infinitesimal proportion of women legislators as everywhere else.¹⁶ Electoral systems clearly do not offer a primary explanation in themselves but provide conditions which are more or less responsive to changes in the real, underlying causes of the gender pattern.

The theory and findings of political participation research are equally unable to explain the gender results. The most fruitful emphasis of this research has been on the centrality of socio-economic status in defining population categories which are more or less likely to participate in politics, with education identified by Almond and Verba as the crucial determinant of ‘civic’ or participatory political orientations¹⁷ and commonly regarded as the best independent ‘predictor’ of actual participation. Yet even at the level of grass-roots participation there are gender gaps which appear to resist this explanation, so that after controlling for education and any other participation-related variables they may have at their command, such analysts as Duverger, the authors of The American Voter and Verba, Nie and Kim resort in their turn to sex roles as the residual explanation for sex differences.¹⁸

The problem at the elite level is of course much greater, for the spread of education has had scarcely any impact there, with some of the worst levels of female representation in national legislatures occurring in the most advanced societies. Among the latter, indeed, it is in America, where further education is more generally available to women than anywhere else in the world apart from the former Soviet Union (there being even more college-educated women in the USA than men) that some of the worst female elite participation outcomes are recorded, even at the local level.

Empirical participation research also poses another conundrum. Cross-national study has shown that the relationship between socioeconomic status (ses) and grass-roots political participation is modified in favour of low-ses individuals when the institutional context includes redistributive institutions, i.e. institutions like trade unions, socialist parties and other organisations which seek to redistribute social goods in favour of less advantaged groups. As Verba, Nie and Kim have shown, one of the things which gets redistributed by these agencies is the pattern of grass-roots political participation.¹⁹ Where they are active, mobilising members of their low-ses constituency and providing an organisational framework for their political activity, the participation gap between the high and the low ses-groups begins perceptibly to close. That is to say, it begins to close among men; low-ses men participate at a rate closer to that of high-ses men. Low-ses women, however, do not. In fact, the existence of redistributive institutions is actually found to increase the gender gap; not only are women less likely to join the institutions concerned than are the men, but the unequalising effects of this are compounded by the fact that when they do join ‘such affiliation has less payoff in terms of increased political activity’ for women than it does for men.²⁰ Indeed, the only country where the political activity of women is found to gain as much as men’s from their affiliation to politically involved institutions is the USA, where no redistributive institutions are held to exist.²¹

Thus the empirical study of participation leads to exactly the same paradox as confronts the feminist who puts her trust in socialism: redistributive parties ought to advance the interests of women relative to men (and they frequently profess to do so) but somehow, mysteriously, they do not.

The questions the gender pattern demands, then, are why, and how, are these invariable effects produced? If the spread of education has not closed the gender gap in political elites; if a commitment to feminism, either from ‘above’ in state or party policies, or from ‘below’ in the form of the women’s movement makes no real difference; if the electoral ‘rules of the game’ can vary without an invariable effect on the pattern; and if the main conclusions of participation study (which explains so much in the case of men) do not explain the gender outcomes, there is certainly a mystery here to be solved. Small wonder that so many men have side-stepped the problem by concluding that there is something intrinsically wrong with women which accounts for it (such as their supposedly ‘apolitical’ nature) and that some women have retaliated with the counter-proposition that there is indeed something wrong, but with the nature of men, not women.

It is more constructive, however, when we fail to come up with answers, to ask ourselves if it is not the approach which has been at fault. In the following pages, a new theoretical approach to the problem is conceived, which draws on anthropological and historical as well as political science perspectives to explain the universal gender pattern. Precise hypotheses are constructed, which predict the gender outcome in vastly different settings and in subsequent chapters are put to the proof.

TOWARDS AN EXPLANATION OF THE GENDER
PATTERN

Such a universal phenomenon as the gender pattern of recruitment obviously requires an equally universal explanation. It should be equally obvious that this explanation will not be located entirely in the situation and behaviour of women themselves. Nor will a single setting suffice for its detection and demonstration. The problem demands a comparative approach, and must encompass men as well as women. There are two main reasons for this.

In the first place (as anthropologists first pointed out more than fifty years ago), although in all societies women are distinguished from men because they bear the children, and the differences in reproductive role are always the kernel around which gender roles are culturally constructed, the way these roles are constituted and the connections which are drawn between reproduction and other aspects of adult life are extremely variable. As a result, the actual content of gender roles and the degree of their differentiation vary enormously from one society and culture to another.²² What is women’s work in one place and time, is men’s in another and vice versa. Thus, for example, the medical profession is a male preserve in the industrialised west, but was predominantly female in the Soviet Union. Farm work is regarded as too physically demanding for women in most of Europe and North America, yet most of the (unmechanised) agricultural labour in many Third World countries is done by women, and the rural work-force is predominantly female in the former Soviet Union, too. Until the early years of this century, clerical jobs in all societies were almostly exclusively performed by men, yet have been regarded ever since as ‘women’s work’ in the industrialised world. The variations which existed from one primitive society to another were apparently no less startling; deep sea fishing, we are told by Lewenhak, was normally the preserve of men among Polynesians, but off Cape Horn, of all places, it was the role of women and only girls were taught how to swim.²³

The degree to which societies recognise a difference between the worlds of men and women and demand their separation varies even more strikingly. Women’s questioning of the ‘female role’ has surfaced mainly in advanced societies, yet from the perspective of institutions of sex-segregation like purdah, gender differentiation in the...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FIGURES AND TABLES
• PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART 1
• PART 2
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY