Gender

In World Perspective

Raewyn Connell

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509539017
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de género

How can we understand gender in the contemporary world? What psychologicaldifferences now exist between women and men? How are masculinities andfemininities made? And how is gender entwined in global politics and debates over trans issues?

Raewyn Connell – one of the world's leading scholars in the field – answers these questions and more. Her book provides asophisticated yet accessible introduction to modern gender studies, covering empirical research from allparts of the world, in addition to theory and politics. As well as introducing the field, Gender provides a powerful contemporary framework for gender analysis with astrong and distinctive global awareness. Highlighting the multidimensional characterof gender relations, Connell shows how to link personal life with large-scaleorganizational structures, and how gender politics changes its form in changingsituations.

The fourth edition of this influential book brings the statistical picture of gender inequalities up to date, and offers new close-focus case studies of gender research. Like previous editions, it examines gender politics and global power relations, but with added discussion around contemporary issues of intersectionality, populism, gender-based violence, trans struggles and environmental change. It also speaks at the intimate level, about embodied gender and personal relationships.

Gender moves from personal experience to globalproblems, offering a unique perspective on gender issues today.

1
The question of gender

Noticing gender

In 2020 the world was swept by a previously unknown but deadly virus, soon named COVID-19. As individual cities and then whole countries went into lockdown, economies slowed and hospitals were flooded, governments around the world intoned ‘we are all in this together’.

In one sense we certainly were: no group was immune to this infection. In other ways the epidemic and the policy responses immediately reflected social divisions. The rich were able to get tested when they wanted, and had easy access to respirators, hospital beds and well-funded medical teams. The poor did not. The prevention strategies of social-distancing and frequent hand-washing were good for prosperous suburbs. They could hardly be applied in the huge and crowded informal settlements in the world’s largest cities.

As information about the epidemic piled up, other divisions came into view. Globally, men and women seemed to be infected at roughly equal rates, but more men were dying of the disease. Medical opinion suspected that the physical impact of men’s higher rates of smoking and drinking – involving masculine norms of behaviour – were involved. Women were affected in other ways. The well-known medical journal The Lancet summarized the situation in April 2020:

Women carry a different kind of burden from COVID-19. Inequities disproportionately affect their wellbeing and economic resilience during lockdowns. Households are under strain, but child care, elderly care, and housework typically fall on women. Concerns over increased domestic violence are growing. With health services overstretched and charities under-resourced, women’s sexual and reproductive health services, as well as prenatal and postnatal care, are disrupted. (The Lancet, 2020)

A United Nations policy brief in the same month spelt this out in more detail. In slowing economies women, who are less likely than men to have secure jobs, would lose their income faster. Lockdowns, or ‘Shelter at Home’ policies, were fine if the home was safe, but if the home was violent or abusive, it would be a trap. Most severe family violence, including murder, is by men assaulting their wives or partners. From early in the epidemic the number of calls to police or domestic-violence agencies in many countries began to rise. Large numbers of women are front-line workers against COVID-19, as women are about 70 per cent of the health and social service workforce. The Global Health 50/50 ‘data tracker’ on COVID-19 in April 2020 found four countries with disaggregated data on health workers. In all four, women made up about 70 per cent of the health workers infected by the virus.

An emergency that seemed at first to have nothing to do with gender, thus turns out to have a lot to do with the situations of women and men. We can follow this further. The Internet is the key source of information about COVID-19 for huge numbers of people. But the Internet is far from gender-equal. The 2018 Wikipedia Community Engagement Insights survey found that 90 per cent of Wikipedia editors were men. Access to the Internet is also unequal. In 2015, a World Wide Web Foundation study of Internet use in nine developing nations found that women are 50 per cent less likely to use the Internet than men.

In political decision-making, including decisions about the epidemic, women continue to be the minority. Every year a ‘family photo’ has been taken at G20 meetings where heads of government and their senior finance and central bank representatives meet to discuss the international financial system. In 2019, two women stood among the twenty national leaders in the photo; they represented Germany and Britain. The woman Prime Minister of Britain was soon removed in a party coup. There has never been a woman head of government in modern Russia, China, France, Japan, Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa, the United States or Mexico. There has only been one each in the history of Brazil, Germany, India, Indonesia and Australia. Statistics from the Inter-Parliamentary Union showed that in 2019, 75.7 per cent of members of the world’s parliaments were men.

Among senior ministers the predominance of men is even higher. In 2019, only nine countries in the world had women making up half of a national ministry (Spain, Nicaragua, Sweden, Albania, Colombia, Costa Rica, Rwanda, Canada and France). More typical figures for women in ministerial roles were 23 per cent (Fiji, India, Senegal), 12 per cent (Russia, Tuvalu, Pakistan), 6 per cent (China, Iran, Yemen) and 0 per cent (Iraq, Papua New Guinea, Thailand). The few women who do get to this level are usually given the job of running welfare or education ministries. Men keep control of taxation, investment, technology, international relations, police and the military. Every Secretary-General of the United Nations and every head of the World Bank has been a man.

Women’s representation in politics has changed slowly over time, and with difficulty. French lawyer Christine Lagarde was the first woman ever to head the International Monetary Fund, appointed in 2011. The world average number of women in parliaments has increased from 10 per cent in 1995 to 24 per cent in 2019. In Australia the first woman Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, served for three years with a record eight women in ministry and five in cabinet. She was then thrown out of power in a party coup. The new right-wing government elected in 2013 had only one woman in cabinet. That cabinet minister, Julie Bishop, was Deputy Prime Minister. During an internal party leadership spill, she was the first women to stand for the top job in her own party. She garnered only 13 per cent of the vote and resigned shortly after.

What is true of politics is also true of business. Of the top 100 businesses listed on the London stock exchange in 2019 (including those that publish the mass-circulation magazines), only six had a woman as CEO. Of the 500 giant international corporations listed in Fortune magazine’s ‘Global 500’ in 2019, 33 had a woman CEO. Such figures are usually presented by saying that women are now 6.6 per cent of the top business leadership around the world, and isn’t that wonderful progress? It’s more informative to say that men compose 93.4 per cent of that leadership.

Lower down the hierarchy, women are a substantial part of the paid workforce. They are mostly concentrated in service jobs – clerical work, call centres, cleaning, serving food, and professions connected with caring for the young and the sick, i.e. teaching and nursing. In some parts of the world, women are also valued as industrial workers, for instance in microprocessor plants, because of their supposedly ‘nimble fingers’. Though the detailed division between men’s and women’s work varies in different parts of the world, it is common for men to predominate in heavy industry, mining, transport, indeed in most jobs that involve any machinery except a sewing machine. Worldwide, men are a large majority of the workforce in management, accountancy, law and technical professions such as engineering.

Behind the paid workforce is another form of work – unpaid domestic and care work. In all contemporary societies for which we have statistics, women do most of the cleaning, cooking and sewing, most of the work of looking after children and elders, and almost all of the work of caring for babies. (If you don’t think childcare is work, you haven’t done it yet!) This work is often associated with a cultural definition of women as caring, gentle, self-sacrificing and industrious, i.e. as good mothers. Being a good father is rarely associated with cutting school lunches and wiping babies’ bottoms – though there are now interesting attempts to promote what in Mexico has been called paternidad afectiva, emotionally engaged fatherhood. Normally, fathers are supposed to be decision-makers and breadwinners, consuming the services provided by women and representing the family in the outside world.

Women as a group are less likely to be out in the public world than men, and, when they are, have fewer resources. In almost all parts of the world, men are more likely to have a paid job. Conventional measures of the economy, based on men’s practices, exclude women’s unpaid domestic work. By the conventional measure of paid employment, the world ‘economic activity rate’ for women has crept up over the decades, but is still only two-thirds of the rate for men. In 2018, the rate for men, globally, was 75.0 per cent, and for women, 48.5 per cent. The main exceptions are Scandinavia and parts of West Africa, where women’s paid labour force participation rates are unusually high. But in some Arab states women’s participation rates are one-quarter the rate for men, and in much of South Asia and Latin America they are about half the rate for men.

Once women are in the paid workforce, how do their wages compare? Over thirty years after the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (1979), nowhere in the world are women’s earned incomes equal to men’s. Women are often hired in low-wage jobs, and still receive 21 per cent less than men’s average monthly wages. In some countries, the gender pay gap is much bigger. Pakistan has the largest gender pay gap at almost 51 per cent, followed by South Africa and Armenia with 30 per cent. These gaps are calculated with factor weightings to control for the clustering of women and men in particular positions in labour markets. Part of the overall gender gap in income can be explained by women being more likely to work fewer hours and more likely to be unemployed or precariously employed. Other reasons relate to discriminatory wage practices and to women’s overrepresentation in low-paid jobs.

Therefore in economic terms most women in the world, especially women with children, are wholly or partly dependent on men. Some men believe that women who are dependent on them must be their property. This is a common scenario in domestic violence: when dependent women don’t conform to demands from their husbands or boyfriends, they are beaten. This creates a dilemma for the women, which is very familiar to domestic violence services. They can stay, and put themselves and their children at high risk of further violence; or go, and lose their home, economic support, and status in the community. If they go, certain husbands are so infuriated that they pursue and kill the wives and even the children.

Men are not beaten up by their spouses so often, but they are at risk of other forms of violence. Most assaults reported to the police, in countries with good statistics on the matter, are by men on other men. Some men are beaten, indeed some are murdered, simply because they are thought to be homosexual; and some of this violence comes from the police. Most of the prisoners in gaols are men. In the United States, which has the biggest prison system in the world, the prison population in 2016 was 1.5 million, and 93 per cent of them were men. Most deaths in combat are of men, because men make up the vast majority of the troops in armies and militias. Most industrial accidents involve men, because men are most of the workforce in dangerous industries such as construction and mining.

Men are involved disproportionately in violence partly because they have been prepared for it. Though patterns of child rearing differ between cultures, the situation in Australia is not unusual. Australian boys are steered towards competitive sports such as football, where physical dominance is celebrated – from an early age – by their fathers, by schools, and by the mass media. Boys also come under peer pressure to show bravery and toughness, and learn to fear being classified as ‘sissies’ or ‘poofters’ (a local term meaning effeminate or homosexual). Being capable of violence becomes a social resource. Working-class boys, who don’t have the other resources that will lead to a professional career, become the main recruits into jobs that require the use of force: police, the military, private security, blue-collar crime, and professional sport. It is mainly young women who are recruited into the jobs that repair the consequences of violence: nursing, psychology and social work.

So far, we have listed an assortment of facts, about mass media, about politics and business, about families, and about growing up. Are these random? Modern thought about gender starts with the recognition that they are not. These facts form a pattern; they make sense in terms of the overall gender arrangements, which this book will call the ‘gender order’, of contemporary societies.

To notice the existence of the gender order is easy; to understand it is not. There are conflicting theories of gender (see chapters 3 and 4), and some problems are genuinely difficult to resolve. Yet we now have a rich resource of knowledge from decades of research, and a fund of practical experience from gender struggles and reforms. We have a better basis for understanding gender issues than any previous generation had.

Understanding gender

In everyday life we take gender for granted. We instantly recognize a person as a man or woman, girl or boy. We arrange everyday business around the distinction. Conventional marriages require one of each. Mixed-doubles tennis requires two of each, but most sports require one kind at a time.

Most years, the most popular television broadcast in the United States is the Super Bowl, a strikingly gendered event: large armoured m...