Kara Ellerby’s book aims to illuminate a key problem with the term “gender equality” as “it is used in international policy and political practice,” namely the tendency to use “gender” or “gender equality” and “women” interchangeably (p. 2). She claims that this tendency blunts the transformative impact of the concept of gender by reducing it to a focus on women, a move that reinforces gender binaries. But gender equality cannot be reduced to fixing women through policies that seek to remedy their inadequacies, taking men as the reference point for equality-as-sameness. Gender interacts with other systems of domination to define social groups and position them in relation to each other.
The book argues that many policies that purport to be about gender equality—such as those that address representation, economic rights, and violence against women—are really just policies to advance women’s inclusion. Advancing women’s inclusion is necessary but not sufficient for gender equality: more is needed, meaning policies that advance gender justice and challenge “kyriarchy,” defined as “interlocking structures of domination” (p. 6). For Ellerby, liberal feminists adopting a “discrimination” frame have pushed for these limited (and limiting) policies and in so doing have inadvertently reinforced neoliberalism.
For example, the World Bank has recently adopted the position that gender equality is good for business. It has appropriated feminist language to justify policies aiming to bring more women into financial, land, and labor markets. As a result, the book seems to conclude, liberal feminists have contributed to the legitimacy of market-oriented, individualistic, achievement-oriented policies. Real gender justice policies, in contrast, will not contribute to the legitimacy of neoliberal agendas, but will simultaneously work to undermine neoliberalism and other interlocking structures of domination that comprise kyriarchy. What seems like a “shortcut” to gender equality, Ellerby argues, is really a dead end for social justice.
A major contribution of this book is that it explores through empirical analysis the shortcomings of contemporary feminism or perhaps, more accurately, feminist-inspired policies and initiatives in the financial and corporate world. Ellerby seeks to elaborate and apply theoretical and normative arguments by Nancy Fraser and others about the dangerous liaison between feminism and neoliberalism to a broader discussion of issues of gender equality. She adds new perspectives to the growing controversy over efforts by governments, international organizations, and private corporations to include women in “positions of power” and bring them more fully into markets.
Ellerby’s broad claim about the risks of using “shortcuts” or simplified understandings of gender is important. Why does this happen? Is gender too complex for practitioners (or even some political scientists) to understand? Why do people equate gender and women when they clearly know better? Many scholars have pointed out that analyzing gender means analyzing social relations, not counting bodies, and many international organizations specifically define gender as being about more than men and women. So why do we keep coming back to “women”? The greatest strength of the book is that it asks that question. The answer the book offers is not entirely convincing, however. In addition, the book inadvertently privileges some faces of oppression over others and adopts the gender-blind approach to justice that feminists have rightly been wary of. In the process, the argument discounts feminist history and undervalues the struggles—and important successes—of feminists all over the world.
Taking a global perspective, Ellerby argues that the adoption of policies that promote women in elective office, address violence against women (VAW), and expand women’s economic rights are liberal antidiscrimination policies, with no transformative potential. There is a long-standing criticism of “add women and stir” politics in many areas, but this argument has not been applied to VAW before. It should not be, because the concept of VAW itself is transformative: it did not exist before feminists proposed it. It is a feminist creation, the product of discursive power struggles both among women and between women and men, and an important product of feminist activism and history.
Ellerby’s critique of formal liberal equality, of feminist antidiscrimination policies, might seem to apply most obviously in the realm of equal economic rights. Still, it is odd to characterize women’s equal access to land, labor, and capital—which is at best partially realized in 90% of the world’s economies, and is often thought of as the linchpin of power in a capitalist system—as a superficial or easily accomplished goal, as a “shortcut.” It is certainly not the only aspect of gender inequality that needs to be remedied, but it is hardly inconsequential. Dismissing women’s equal access to property rights, a bank account, or a loan as an “easy” goal reveals a First World bias, because it is in wealthier countries that such equality of access is greatest, though again, achieving these equal rights has been a product of feminist struggle.
Another version of the argument might be that, although in principle policies on VAW or economic rights are transformative, in practice these policies tend not to spark social change because of problems arising at the stage of implementation. Indeed, Ellerby argues that, despite their wide adoption, most gender equality policies have not been transformative, at least in part because of policy implementation failures or processes. But this argument is unsupported in critical respects.
Specifically, the book contends that efforts to redress VAW have not reduced violence against women, have not changed attitudes, and have been accompanied by increasing violence. But these claims are wrong. The main evidence the book cites for this claim is a 2013 WHO report describing global variation in patterns of violence across regions, but not over time. This excellent analysis cannot (and does not claim to) examine over-time trends within countries, because it draws on reports covering a wide range of dates across countries. Indeed, the report points out that data gathered before the mid-1990s are unreliable and incomparable across countries. In fact, we do not have the data needed for a global, comparative impact assessment of the policies adopted to address VAW. Most national policy adoption in the area of VAW occurred after 1995, and many national governments adopted VAW policies well after the dates of the studies used in the WHO study. Such policies can hardly have caused, contributed to, or reduced, violence that occurred before they were enacted.
As this example suggests, looking at global rates is not a very good way of evaluating the effects of policies adopted by individual national governments. Evidence from those countries, such as Canada and the United States, that were early to adopt policies on VAW and that had a fairly comprehensive policy by 1995 does not support the claim that comprehensive policies have been accompanied by stasis or increased rates of violence. In fact, Eurobarometer data and data from Mexican national surveys show that changes in attitudes and norms have accompanied the expansion of national VAW policies. The continued persistence of VAW as a global problem thus tells us little about what national policies work or do not work to reduce violence or change attitudes. The evidence we do have is inconsistent with the claim that attitudes have not changed and that violence has increased, or has not decreased, in the states with the most comprehensive and longstanding policies.
There is more to the argument of this book than the claim that gender equality policies have made no difference. Ellerby claims that the problematic aspects of gender equality policies—the way “gender equality” comes to mean “inclusion for women”—arises in the process of implementation. This is an important idea. However, in many cases the focus on women comes from design, rather than implementation. For example, Ellerby criticizes quota policies because they focus on women as a group, rather than on dismantling kyriarchy. Such policies, Ellerby argues, “only” challenge male elites, leaving larger structures of power intact. However, these policies are often designed to address women, so it is not a puzzle that they end up focusing on women. Indeed, different designs benefit different groups of women and men and leave structures of power intact to greater or lesser degrees (Melanie Hughes [2011], “Intersectionality, Quotas, and Minority Women’s Political Representation Worldwide.” American Political Science Review 105(3): 604–20).
Similarly, the US “Violence Against Women Act” (VAWA) is focused on women. If the argument is that these policies should not be written to focus on women (which Ellerby sometimes seems to be claiming), then this is a problem of design, not implementation. And again, in the United States, there is at least some evidence suggesting that violence has decreased over the period since the adoption of VAWA in 1994, in spite of the explicit focus on women.
Ellerby also argues that in their implementation, policies to address VAW focus too much on “protection” for women or on women’s safety, a move that reinforces gender binaries at the same time as it challenges them. But arguing that policies cannot focus on “women” (rather than that we need an inclusive reading of such policies) results in a gender-blind approach that has proved problematic in the past, which is one reason for the current insistence on policies targeted to women. What is more, the idea that protecting women from violence flows from the principle of market supremacy ignores the fact that the violent sexual exploitation of women has been and still is compatible with unbridled capitalism and free markets. Nor is the idea that women need protection from male violence, and that the state ought to provide it, the traditional idea of the role of the state with respect to male violence, as Ellerby acknowledges. The difference between policies on VAW that come closer to feminist ideal and state action that embodies the traditional idea of the role of the state with respect to sexual violence has less to do with whether or not these policies aim to protect women and more to do with who these policies count as a woman, more to do with whether these policies also aim to empower women, and what the consequences of these policies are for women’s security. But arguing that women-focused policies should adopt an inclusive notion of “woman” that includes a wide range of people situated as women sounds like it circles back to women and inclusion, the approach the book seeks to eschew.
Ellerby argues for an approach to gender that draws on social justice as an ideal, taking account of the multifaceted nature of oppression. But insisting that all progressive policies directly confront neoliberalism is actually an account of social justice that denies the multidimensionality of oppression, that privileges one face of oppression above the others. Similarly, although gender binaries are part of the structure of gender, gender injustice (or class or racial injustice, for that matter) cannot be reduced to the creation of binaries: there are other aspects of gender justice. Social justice advocates should call for policies to address the full range of dimensions of oppression, but this does not require us to reject or dismiss hard-fought progressive victories just because they are incomplete nor to eschew the socially and politically meaningful categories of “women” and “men” in our analyses and policies (though it does require us to take care as to how and when we use these terms). What it does imply is the need to confront the complex, intersectional, even messy nature of struggles for gender justice and to devise strategies for broadening and deepening the struggle. Reducing complex, multidimensional systems to a single concept, “kyriarchy,” in which all axes of oppression move smoothly and functionally in the same direction, working as one interlocking system, is the real shortcut. There are multiple pathways to change.
