Class is a deep dividing line in feminism for two, mutually compatible, reasons: One is about the strategic use of limited time and energy in the feminist movement. The interests of poor and working-class women often diverge from the interests of the more privileged, hence the need to set priorities. This is what my previous post was about.
But the more important reason – captured these days by the agenda of the Feminism for the 99% movement – is that the problems of women who make it to the top are parasitic on a structure of the labour market and schedule of rewards that should not exist in the first place. This second complaint against lean-in feminism (sometimes and, I think, mistakenly, identified as “liberal feminism”) is not merely about misplaced priorities, but about identifying feminism with the gender cosmetisation of deeply unjust existing arrangements. The worry with the upper class feminism is, as Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser put it, that “[i]ts real aim is not equality, but meritocracy. Rather than seeking to abolish social hierarchy, it aims to “diversify” it, “empowering” “talented” women to rise to the top.”
The mistake, then, is to be meritocratic about top end positions. Meritocracy is wrong because the very top positions to which women have less access then men – CEOs, executive boards etc. – are compensated way beyond what any position would be in a just society. The compensation is partly material – pay and other benefits – and partly in terms of status and power. No just society would accept inequalities in money, prestige and authority as wide as those between people who occupy today’s top positions and today’s worse-off individuals.
In a forthcoming paper, and elsewhere, I use two hypothetical cases to trigger the intuition that no one can have a moral claim to social positions that are themselves unjust. First, imagine a society where some people hold slaves but women have no right to property – perhaps some ancient societies were like this. The ban on women holding slaves was sexist and in one sense wrongful (more about this below); yet, because morality forbids the holding of slaves, no woman in that society had a claim to slave-holding.
Second, think about successful thieves (and assume they operate in a just society.) If they contribute equally to robbery, but then give women a lesser share of the loot, we’re right to call them sexist. But this doesn’t give the women in their group any claim to more loot. They have no claim to any loot at all. Indeed, in our world women are well represented amongst celebrities in the entertainment industry and in sports, but, every now and then, it turns out that they are payed significantly less then their male counterparts, often merely on account of being women – that is, with no economic reason to explain it. I believe that complaints against the sexism which leaves them with less pay is no basis for a claim to higher salaries.
But then, what’s the moral significance of sexism, that leads to discriminating against women holding slaves or being CEOs, against getting promotions to unjust positions and against receiving the same share of the loot as male thieves? These women do have a grievance, namely that sexist discrimination is an expressive wrong. It marks them as second-class citizens whose interests are less important than men’s. If so it’s all women who have a grievance in such cases, because the sexist message is a message about all. Women, of course, have a general claim to equal opportunities for jobs and promotions, and equal rewards, as men. It’s just that the claim is to much lesser rewards than even discriminated women at the top end of the payscale end up with. The special claim of women who suffer sexist discrimination is to levelling down, not to levelling up. Acknowledging this is not enough to unite, on the same platform, the feminism for the 99% and the feminism for the most successful women. But it might be a solid bridge across the growing gulf between the two.--Anca Gheaus Feminism and the top end of the payscale @Justice Everywhere
Should one not pursue aims that are "parasitic on a structure of the labour market and schedule of rewards that should not exist in the first place?" Gheaus, one of our most thoughtful and fascinating contemporary ethicists, offers us two compelling thought experiments. Even so, while I share her intuition, and even her (recall; and here) qualms about meritocracy, I think, upon reflection, the situation is not so obvious as she makes it out to be. In particular, Gheaus seems to lack sympathy, and what is more important, moral space for the constrained choices by and aspirations of subordinated groups in the real world.
In her analysis, Ghaeus focuses on the wrongs that are the effects of structure, and she suggests that meritocracy within a fundamentally unjust context is not worth having. I want to return to that below, but it is notable that her position implies -- and she is silent about this in the blog post (perhaps it's in the paper) -- that the aspirations and desires of "these women" (hereafter, members, perhaps elite members, of subordinated groups) are immoral or at least have no standing in virtue of being contaminated by and rooted in unjust structures. In my habitus, this is an instance of the problem of adaptive preferences. And, in particular, when one challenges such preferences, and now I am drawing on (recall) Serene Khader's work, Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethics, one needs to pay moral and political attention to transition costs of vulnerable and subordinated populations before you insist they conform to one's ideals.
So, with that in place, let me try to articulate three reservations about Gheaus framework (the first two are broadly ethical, the third more political). In what follows, let's stipulate, nearly all societies exhibit the kind of structural inequalities such that to aspire to belong to their upper or upwardly mobile classes is to navigate a deeply flawed status quo. I have explored this history, in part, under the rubric of Platonic feminism, by which I mean the cluster of positions that often simultaneously (i) deny structural equality (and so defend forms of aristocracy, economic hierarchy, or elitism); and (ii) insist that any privileges /rights and obligations given to men based on some quality/property must also be offered to women who have this quality/property. Platonic feminism often presupposes claims about (iii) meritocracy, but need not require these. It is compatible with (iv) commitment to moral equality of all (as is clear in Christian and Muslim platonic feminists). Because (i)-(ii), if you are like Gheaus (I hypothesize) it's pretty clear this is no feminism at all. (Platonic feminism anticipates features of lean-in feminism, after all.)
Even so, Platonic feminism is a natural response to structural inequality and, while its aims are pursued, it also has the capacity to (a) reinforce that structure and make it more durable and (b) to transform it. Ghaeus naturally focuses on the former, but changing elite and would-be-elite composition often presages broader social changes. To give an example from the history of Jewish emancipation (recall my piece on Toland's Lockean account), and as Arendt notes in her On the Origins of Totalitarianism, in many places that started with the welcoming of Jews into upper classes first. In our own life-time, something like this has -- pace Nancy Fraser -- occurred imperfectly with gays and lesbians and other identitarian politics.
Okay, but at this point, Gheaus would object that Jewish emancipation in eighteenth century England was primarily male emancipation into a slave-holding and deeply unequal, even imperial society. What they should have wished is entry into England so they could join (ahh) the proletariat (as many did, of course). And there are critics (including Nancy Fraser) that suggest that gay marriage merely reinforces the bourgeois capitalist state, even if they acknowledge that there are some positive distributive effects.
So, first, it follows straightforwardly from Ghaeus' approach, that many emancipatory projects are misguided if they do not simultaneously entail a structural reformation of society. But why should individuals belonging to subordinated groups have to give up on the development of their capacities to meet some structural ideal for society? Compared to the world's poor, professors in Europe and America are part of the global elite. Should we then tell aspiring academics from subordinated groups, yes, you have some claim to equal opportunity here, but not to what the academic (heteronormative, white etc.) men have? Yes, you are discriminated against -- women disproportionally carry the burdens of care in society and may suffer workplace discrimination -- but don't aspire to become an academic Mandarin until we have gotten rid of the professoriate.
If I were to say that, it would be transparent that it would be a mechanism of lowering expectations; a means of splitting a coalition of the historically marginalized and subordinated; yet another rhetorical trick not to make equality in the academy a genuine possibility. I can't speak for feminism; but I can diagnose, not wholly unfairly I hope, if feminism were wholly subordinated to class politics, that not much would be left of feminism understood as opposition to sexist oppression.
Second, and more subtly, many important life goals (in arts, culture, sports, status, etc.) are automatically disqualified as ambitions worth having in virtue of coming of the expense of structural inequality. And if you think, as Ghaeus seems to do, that social and economic revolution takes precedence over everything else, that's obvious. But if you think there are many important values to be pursued in life that should not be delayed until after the revolution, then it seems one-sided to place the burden of change on the oppressed not on the main oppressors. And, while, of course, Ghaeus thinks men should also level down, in effect subordinated groups carry the main burden to do so.
As an aside, it can be useful to think of existing structural inequality in terms of slavery and looting. But it is also a means of effacing genuine distinctions between different forms of structural inequality. So, while I admire the thought experiments, i think we are not in an ideal society and so we may well come to admire a female Robin Hood or Oceans 8.
This is not to deny the significance of the harms consequent of structural inequality. And it is worth asking how one can simultaneously increase opportunities and reduce structural inequality; and how one should think of the potentially painful trade-off this may involve. And, perhaps, nothing that such an exercise generates will satisfy those that long for a class-less, or, more fairly, genuinely egalitarian society. But it seems perverse to deny the aspiring members of the subordinated classes chances for advancement as they see it given social institutions. Why should members of oppressed groups be the ones to limit their aspirations and so carry the burden of any social change? One reason why I am sympathetic to history's platonic feminists, and worth reflecting on them, is that their intellectual compromises reflect the reality of navigating imperfect social conditions.
Okay, finally, third, I also suspect that Gheus' approach tactically recycles some of the failures of the old European social democratic left; this recall, could not convince upwardly mobile minorities and women entering the workplace that it really protected their aspirations; it failed to be perceived as a vehicle of emancipation. (See Melinda Cooper's criticism of Streeck in Family Values.) But maybe I am wrong. Maybe beneath the winds of populism and authorianism, and the pandemic, there is a winning political program that starts with recognition that one must sacrifice one's personal ambitions altogether.
History suggests, however, that if given the choice between leveling down or having a subordinated stake near the top of the social hierarchy, many, including some of the most noble, choose the latter. And while that may be problematic, perhaps, one should not frame the opportunity space to this binary choice.* But maybe that's my liberalism speaking, and we've blown our historical opportunities.
*I thank Serene Khader for discussion.
Thanks for such serious engagement with my post and paper Eric! I am merely arguing that people (in general, not only women of course) don't have a claim to certain positions, not that they should never seek to occupy those positions. My work is not about the ethics of seeking such positions, or of occupying them; it's only a push-back against the (I think widespread) view that people have a claim to opportunities for the positions in question as a way of buttressing such an ethics. Moreover, I think that as long as the positions in question exist, it is better for them to be occupied by diverse people, and I certainly want people from disadvantaged backgrounds to occupy many of these positions unless and until they're abolished. But not under the banner of meritocracy. It's one thing to say: we should have quotas for women, and fill these positions with women who meet a certain threshold of competence selected by, for instance, lotteries. And another one to say: we should organise competitions for these positions because everybody should have an opportunity for them.
If in practice I am supporting the access of disadvantaged minorities to the top, then why the fuss, you may ask? That's because some feminists appeal to the ideal of equal opportunities for positions of advantage in order to criticise some policies that would benefit the worse off women (a basic income; homemakers' wages; some forms of parental leave.) I've done this myself in the past, and now I think it was misguided, morally and politically.
Posted by: Anca Gheaus | 06/09/2020 at 09:02 PM