No Shortcut to Change

An Unlikely Path to a More Gender Equitable World

Kara Ellerby

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781479815159
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política pública

A critical examination of the weaknesses inherent in international gender policy. Gender equality has become a central aspect of global governance and development in the 21st century. States increasingly promote women in government, ensure women’s economic rights and protect women from violence, all in the name of creating a more gender equitable world. No Shortcut to Change is a historical, theoretical, and political overview of why the common, liberal-feminist-driven ‘shortcut’ approach has not actually improved the status of women throughout the world—and why a new approach taking social, racial, and political hierarchies into account alongside gender is sorely needed. This innovative book unites several streams of international relations and feminist theory in pursuit of a practical solution to global gender inequality. She gives an overview of what ‘add-women’ policymaking looks like and has (or has not) accomplished, examining three key policy areas:
· Women’s representation- including policies and practices to include more women in all branches of government, such as legislative quotas, which in many countries have been established to ensure enough women are represented in legislative bodies;
· The recognition of women’s economic rights, like the right for a woman to own property and gainful employment
· Combating violence against women, through domestic violence and rape laws, which remains a major problem throughout the world. Ellerby explores how poor implementation, informal practices, gender binaries, and intersectionality remain key issues in addressing women’s inclusion policy around the world. Ultimately, she concludes that all of these efforts have been co-opted by global neoliberal institutions, often reinforcing gender differences rather than challenging them. A much-needed critical text on the weaknesses inherent in international gender policy, No Shortcut to Change is an eye-opening overview for anyone interested in gender equality.

1

Add Gender and Stir

“The twenty-first century must be the century of inclusion and that has to include women’s equal leadership and participation. We will not realize our goals for building true citizen democracies, ensuring peace and a development that is sustainable and for all, if we fail at inclusion.”1

—Michelle Bachelet, UN Women

The last forty years have been marked by unprecedented changes regarding women’s rights. States all over the world have adopted and continue to adopt policies to include more women in governments, economic activity, and legal codes, often in the name of promoting “gender equality.” This includes the adoption of sex quotas in parliaments to ensure greater representation; the creation of bureaucratic agencies dedicated to women’s issues; and the implementation of efforts aimed at increasing numbers of women as national leaders and judges. States are also adopting more women-friendly property laws to ensure single, married, and widowed women have access to land and livelihoods on their own terms. Finally, states are passing laws criminalizing acts of gender-based violence, including sexual assault, domestic violence, human trafficking, and sexual harassment. The scale by which such policies have been adopted is impressive—the result of the tireless efforts of women activists working to pressure governments, international organizations, and their own “fellow” citizens to acknowledge the importance of gender equality.

But even as states have adopted so many woman-centered policies, and amid a growing awareness of and support for “gender equality,” some troubling global consistencies remain. In practice, nearly all of these policies have yet to be fully and adequately implemented. Globally, women still account for just 22 percent of parliament members, only slightly higher than ten years ago. Only 14 percent of current prime ministers or presidents are women. One in three women worldwide have experienced, or will experience, assault and domestic violence in their lifetimes, and there is evidence to indicate that violence against women may actually be increasing.2 Despite significant progress, women still account for the majority of the world’s poor and consistently lack access to land, credit, and higher-paying jobs in both developed and developing countries. Why then—despite numerous efforts made by states and global international organizations to promote policy shifts to better include and protect women—does women’s exclusion, lack of prosperity, and lack of security remain so pervasive? Why has a growing global awareness of “gender equality” not yet translated into significantly more women in government, greater economic well-being for more women, or less violence against women at global levels? Equally important, why are all these policies situated as policies for “gender equality”? This book seeks to address these questions.3

The central problem of this book is the problem with “gender equality,” as it is used in international policy and political practice. I seek to engage the word “problem” in two ways. Crucially, this is not a book arguing that gender equality is bad or should end. Rather, it means to problematize the idea of, and policies and practices framed as, gender equality. When something is a “problem,” it does not necessarily mean it is an issue to be resolved; it can also mean to “unsettle” or to more deeply consider, understand, and thus explain. In this case, the goal here is to problematize—or better understand and explain—gender equality and how it has become taken for granted in the context of policies aimed at including more women. To problematize gender equality means to ask: How did gender equality come to be the “catch-all” for any policy meant to address discrimination against, and exclusion of, women?

Using a more conventional understanding of “problem,” this book illustrates that the “problem” with gender equality is that woman-centered policies do little to disrupt and challenge gender (as ranked patterns of masculinities and femininities), or facilitate substantive equality (as valuing femininities and masculinities equally, or significantly promoting women’s emancipation). The promotion or adoption of sex quotas, women’s policy agencies, greater employment and property rights, and violence against women legislation are normalized as part of “gender equality” to end discrimination and better include women. But, a more accurate description for what is happening is a global “add-gender-and-stir” campaign based on liberal feminist logics of individuality and anti-discrimination, and sex-based, essentialist ideas of “gender.” This campaign has pursued and promoted policies that add women to exclusionary institutions such as governments, legal codes, and state practices. But through analyses of these policies and practices and their implementation, it becomes clear that an accurate understanding of what “gender” really is remains an issue.

To call this a global add-gender-and-stir campaign is to highlight four central issues: 1) these policies all work within a liberal feminist framework of emancipation of women; 2) these policies treat women and gender as substitutable terms; 3) these policies and practices have been co-opted by and work within a neoliberal world order; 4) these policy efforts should be studied in conjunction. In regard to the fourth issue, it is important, for example, to assess sex quotas alongside changing credit laws and sexual assault policies because, when one begins untangling the research on the status of these policies, similar patterns emerge among them all. The next several chapters build the case for why it is time to stop using the phrase “gender equality” in reference to any woman-centered policy adopted by states and promoted by global institutions.

It is an important moment for women’s rights. It has been over twenty years since the monumental Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action on Women in 1995. We have seen the “end” of the Millennium Development Goals in 2015 and the start of the Sustainable Development Goals, and it has been over fifteen years since United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security was adopted. Thus it seems like an opportune time to critically engage this global effort to promote women in particular ways. To be sure, many women have benefited from the changes in policies and practices that were sparked by these landmark initiatives—and the world is a better place because more states are doing more to address women’s issues and needs. But this book challenges the assumption such policies engage gender or promote equality by elucidating how gender—understood as socially constructed and differently valorized scripts of masculinities and femininities—is not sufficiently challenged or destabilized by policies focused primarily on women. And equality is not sufficiently achieved by simply “adding” some or a few women to male-dominated institutions.

Part of the reason for this can be found in the language used for such policy prescriptions—essentially, what we call them and how we talk about them. For example, if a “gender” quota in parliament is considered an indicator of gender equality, then having the quota becomes a satisfactory benchmark for a “gender-equal” state. And in this process, two important patterns have emerged: gender has become a “shortcut” expression, a way to acknowledge the socially produced, differently valorized realities of men and women, without the deeper critical analyses explaining why such realities persist. Additionally, “gender” and “women” have become synonymous terms, often used interchangeably as though they have the same meaning. In order to critically engage these policies, we need a new way of thinking and talking about what is going on in efforts to promote women.

In this capacity, this book offers a critical renaming and reframing of gender equality policies and practices by engaging these efforts as part of a liberal feminist norm of women’s inclusion. The goal in renaming and reframing gender equality as women’s inclusion is to offer a cohesive yet critical examination of woman-centered policies. By challenging (implicit and explicit) assumptions that any effort to include more women is an effort to advance gender equality, one begins to see how gender is actually women and equality is actually inclusion and women’s inclusion has inherent limits.

Critical feminist conceptualizations of gender and equality inform the analyses in this book, which focuses on the global adoption and diffusion of multiple policies and practices in the pursuit of women’s rights and interests—women’s inclusion—and how such rights are pursued within a rubric of “gender equality.” This movement for “gender equality” relies on a narrative in which gender and women are interchangeable terms. It also relies upon a liberal feminist logic of emancipation through addition. But liberal feminist policies are insufficient to fully engage women’s subjugation (and the subjugation of many men and other marginalized groups). Indeed, liberal feminist policies are actually (re)enforcing gendered binaries that other feminisms see as the root of oppression and subjugation.

The reality is, despite significant changes in state-driven approaches to address women’s exclusion and subordination, pervasive gendered logics continue to inform and shape policy adoption and implementation. Furthermore, equality has come to mean a variety of thresholds that do not necessarily call for equal numbers of women and men or equal access to material and symbolic power. By introducing “women’s inclusion” as an alternative naming for these global policy shifts, later chapters in this book present an alternative discourse and assessment. It is my hope that this will facilitate the work of scholars and practitioners to illustrate for larger (and especially non-feminist) audiences why it is a problem to call any policy promoting women “gender equality.”

The following sections of this chapter layout the main arguments, key terms, limits, and organization of the book. The next section explains the meanings of “gender” in this book. Then, I turn to the framing of analyses, centered on five interrelated reasons that efforts to promote women’s inclusion, evidenced in these policy practices, have limits in emancipating anyone.

Add Gender and Stir

Cynthia Enloe advocates for a “feminist curiosity” in understanding how gender operates in global politics: this means to look deeper at the lived experiences of women (and men) and begin to understand how a particular idea or practice becomes taken for granted.4 While this study engages primarily with global ideas and how they are promoted as state-level policies, it still uses a feminist curiosity to understand an array of policies and practices aimed at improving women’s lives. It is through careful examination of how gender shapes policies, how different women experience such efforts, and how scholars make sense of the conditions under which these policies work, that one begins to understand how including more women in gendered institutions has been normalized to mean “gender equality.”

While often policies, including legislation criminalizing violence against women, sex (gender) quotas, and legislation affecting women’s property rights, are treated distinctly in academic work (and as part of different subfields), a central argument here is these policies all embody liberal feminist sensibilities regarding causes of women’s subordination and solutions to fixing it.5 As further examined in chapter 2, liberal feminism identifies women’s oppression to be rooted in institutionalized discrimination and legal barriers that deny women access to the same rights and opportunities as men; once these barriers are removed women can then be fully equal. Such policies are pursued via the state, as the state plays a central role in becoming “the neutral arbiter to ensure women’s equality.”6 This approach is often referred to as the “add-women-and-stir” approach because it treats women’s oppression like a recipe: one does not need to change the whole recipe, just add women to it. In other words, liberal feminism assumes one can change the composition of the institution without needing to also change the way said institution operates. Because women and gender are now often used interchangeably (and problematically), I argue what is happening is actually an add-gender-and-stir campaign, in which gender is used as a shortcut, a technocratic term for including women without really discussing how gender shapes the experiences of both women and men within such institutions. Gender, as a shortcut, became a way to acknowledge power without talking about the production of power.

As other forms of feminism have identified, there are limits to just adding women, particularly in how liberal feminist approaches do not focus on the power of gender or gendered social structures as a central cause of women’s oppression. While “patriarchy” is often the term used to illustrate gender as a male-dominated and identified social structure, this term does not adequately engage how systems of subordination are not just about male domination, but also about racist, imperialist, and heterosexist forms of domination as well. To engage how social structures promote domination through multiple yet intersecting systems of oppression, I use the term “kyriarchy,” defined as “interlocking structures of domination” to name the sexist, racist, heterosexist, and imperialist system(s) of subordination central to understanding how gender equality has come to represent add-women/gender policies.7 Given the neoliberal world order in which such policies are being pursued, adding women and calling it an effort to advance gender equality actually works with an already powerful liberal narrative of individuality, universality, rights, and anti-discrimination. Discussions of kyriarchy and structural oppression are marginalized, and critiques of liberal feminist pursuits and policies are treated as counter to the feminist movement.

This norm of “women’s inclusion,” as an alterative naming and framing, situates these efforts to better include women within a neoliberal world order of the last forty years, under which woman-centered policies have been promoted. Three key aspects of women’s inclusion focused on in this book include: an emphasis on women’s representation in government, recognizing women’s economic rights, and protecting women from violence. These ideas are central to understanding how gender equality has been normalized to embody “adding women” as “addressing gender” because it elucidates the trade-offs in promoting liberal feminist policies centered on women without adequately disrupting masculine/feminine (and other) binary logics and practices. Neoliberal world order relies upon the subordination of women and other marginalized groups to function, and policies normalized as gender equality construct a narrow narrative in which including some women becomes “enough.” Liberal feminism seeks to reform existing institutions by addressing the sex composition of them. More radical discussions by critical feminists (among other critical thinkers and activists) of dismantling neoliberal capitalism have been artfully silenced or marginalized through state and international organizations’ recognition of liberal feminist efforts to reform sexist institutions.

What this means is that while formal barriers are being systematically addressed, informal practices and sexist (as well as racist, heterosexist, and imperialist) beliefs limit the effectiveness of removing such barriers; and thus, women’s exclusion and marginalization persist. And these informal practices and ideas are endemic to these formal institutions and practices excluding and marginalizing women. It also means many policies, feminist in origin, have actually been co-opted and promoted in troubling ways by powerful global institutions and states because women’s inclusion is considered paramount to better state development and progress. To say it differently: when global organizations and states argue for sex quotas, property rights for women, and ending violence against women, they do so, not necessarily for social justice, but because women’s inclusion is considered important to neoliberal economic growth, development, and prosperity. Inclusion has become a strategy for reinforcing gendered binaries and is complicit in neoliberal world order through the reproduction of difference.

According to this rhetoric surrounding efforts to increase women’s inclusion, women are an important means to a more just, prosperous, and secure end. But the trade-off is that these policies, and the discourse surrounding them, do not adequately engage persistent exclusion and marginalization of many women or subordinated groups other than women. In thinking of this norm as one of women’s inclusion, along with critical engagement with such policies, one may begin to broaden the possibilities and discourse around what gender equality actually means or could mean. In order to understand how women’s inclusion has become such a powerful norm, one must first engage with the slight-of-hand in which gender and women have become synonyms, obscuring the radical origins and intentions of gender in global practices.

Gender = Women

One of the most powerful ways in which the limits of add-women policies are obscured is via the “gender = women” narrative. As many feminists have argued, gender is not synonymous with women.8 But despite a consistent reminder that gender is not ...