The Fight for Women’s Rights Goes On and On…
Mega-Problems That Won’t Go Away, Part 3
The subordinate condition of half the world’s population is a human rights problem that cannot be ignored in any year, in any context. It seems eternal, and yet things are changing. I sometimes think of the problems of women around the world as the result when sex and caste collide. These two variables are like flashing signs pointing to out-groups, markers of the most intransigent forms of discrimination.
Sex is commonly defined as the biological and physiological characteristics that define people as male or female, while gender is the social, psychological, and cultural constructs associated with each sex. Gender and sex do not have to always correlate, and each term fails to cover all human variety (there are intersex people and people who prefer not to identify with one gender), but one thing is fairly constant: people of the female sex in most societies are expected to assume a female gender identity, and that identity puts them in a particular place in society that is usually subordinate to the other half of the world known as “male”.[1]
The term “caste” is traditionally associated with the rigid assignment of people at birth into bounded groups that are assigned specific roles and places in a hierarchical social order, as in Hindu societies. The lowest “caste” categories are typically seen as impure or subhuman by others in the social order: they are assigned the most undesirable work, subjected to the most violence, and enjoy the fewest rights. And the particular characteristic of caste is that it is constructed to be durable and impermeable. Mobility out of a low caste slot is extremely difficult or forbidden and threatens the rest of the social order more generally. Isobel Wilkerson, an American journalist, applied the idea of caste to the situation of race in the U.S.; the place assigned Jews in the Nazi ideology is another example.[2] To my mind, the subordinate status of women in most societies shares some of these characteristics — durable, nearly impermeable, associated with impurity, and regardless of class, subjected to the most violence and fewest rights. The entire social order rests on it.
The treatment of women (and sexual minorities) is the weak point of universalism in human rights. Although the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women is very widely ratified, many nations that join it qualify their intent to comply. Indeed, these legal reservations read like a Baedeker of unequal rights around the world. Sexual and gender minorities, such as LGBTQ+ persons, transgender or intersex persons, have even less formal recognition of their right to equal treatment.
Emphasis on ‘traditional’ roles for women, and denial of the rights of sexual and gender minorities, are often a hallmark of populist and authoritarian governments that promise to take their adherents back to a better past. Gains can quickly be lost when governments change, or economic progress halts, and human rights advocates need to be nimble in anticipating these changes, as we saw in 2022.
This year, women in the U.S. lost a federally guaranteed right to abortion through the overturning of Roe v Wade, thanks to an activist right-wing majority on the Supreme Court. In Afghanistan, the Taliban banned women from higher education, after ousting them from most professional employment, curtailing upper school opportunities, and restricting their mobility and access to justice services and health care, as well as protection from domestic violence. Domestic violence surged globally during the Covid-19 pandemic and seems to be continuing at extremely high levels, causing UN Women to dub the phenomenon a “shadow pandemic” that has yet to abate. Women continue to be disproportionately denied labor and educational parity as well as access to the internet and are subjected to violence when pursuing public-facing work. Even China fell short in passing an updated law against gender discrimination and harassment that required women to “respect social morals” and “family values.”
Yet there were signs of resistance. In Iran, a nationwide protest movement developed from the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a young woman detained by the ‘morality’ police for wearing her hijab incorrectly. Unable to quell the protests, which quickly encompassed other discontents, Iran abolished these police but otherwise has not liberalized its laws or ceased a bloody crackdown on protests. Reproductive rights gained protection in some US states, in Mexico, Colombia, and Spain. Women protested around the world in support of their sisters.
What empowers women to protest and to move their own governments? Information and education, above all. This may be as much the reason the Taliban has prioritized shutting them out of schools and professions as the desire to appease their most fundamentalist constituents. Subordinating women comes at a steep cost to national economic growth. Education of women and girls is a key determinant of their and their family’s wealth and health; it is a central driver of overall national development. And there is some reason for hope here: the gender gap has been closing, although the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic is still unclear.
So as caste-like as the nearly universal subordination of women is, it is not immovable. The movers are women themselves. They need even more educational access, enfranchisement, gender parity, access to capital and jobs, and media outlets that foreground stories by and about women. This is long, slow, resource-intensive work that is also “human rights” work, much different from press releases that condemn gender discrimination. Armed with information, skills and resources, women can be in the position to report, protest and litigate to shift public consciousness.
Here, the example of South Korea may prove telling. During the Covid-19 pandemic, women faced an uptick in job insecurity, domestic violence, and fertility fell globally. This also happened in South Korea, but to an extraordinary degree, leaving the country with the world’s lowest birth rate. Part of the problem appears to be a patriarchal culture and a government that supports regressive policies, leading women to conclude that there is little advantage to marrying and assuming the burdens and discrimination that working mothers face. Subordination, it turns out, is not a very stable base for modern economies, or even family economies.
Every aspect of gender inequality impacts human rights more generally in a society. The issue of women’s subordination is a costly and enduring problem, whose solution could bring enormous benefits. Grinding away at it should be a central endeavor to any human rights program.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
[1] People whose gender and sex do not align, or who change their sex to match their chosen gender identity, are also seen as subordinate and persecuted. They are judged in exceptionally harsh ways for being exceptions to the norm — but it is the norm, where female sex and gender align, that I want to mainly focus on here.
[2] Isobel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (New York: Random House) 2020.
