I appreciate Laurel Weldon and Mala Htun’s thoughtful comments, although I challenge their underlying assertion that I want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The authors claim my main argument “discounts feminist history and undervalues the struggles—and important successes—of feminists all over the world.” However, I went to great lengths to note the effectiveness of many of the policies of which I am critical. I was careful to assert that women’s inclusion should not be abandoned, is not doomed, and is creating (some) meaningful social change. Rather, my major assertion is that these add-women policies are not enough to actually create gender equality. My research is informed by my concerns that because gender equality today almost entirely focuses on women’s inclusion, “we” have limited the opportunity for more radical approaches to emancipation in favor of those that seem to work within the status quo, rather than dismantle it.

For example, I know and believe that having women in public office matters, and the research solidly confirms quotas work. But my issue is that women-in-government has become one of the central objectives/measures to promote gender equality (as I note when I address how gender equality is measured and discussed across the policy and academic world in Chapter 2). Defining gender equality by the number of women in government obscures quotas’ limits in radically altering masculinized patterns of behavior. Do institutions change because women are there? Of course. But is promoting some more women in government going to drastically alter gendered patterns of relations in societies? No, it will not.

The authors write that I argue that policies aimed at including more women are “gender shortcuts,” but this is a misreading of this term as I use it. My claim is not that the policies themselves are gender shortcuts, but that our focus on these policies as gender equality requires and reproduces shortcuts in understanding the underlying causes of women’s oppression. My argument is that policies aimed at including more women via increased economic rights and violence against women laws are not sufficient to create gender equality; these policies themselves are not shortcuts, but the way they implicitly and explicitly engage gender = women is the shortcut.

For example, Weldon and Htun assert that economic rights are hardly realized anywhere, that I show a “First World bias” in not understanding that women have gained more economic rights because of feminist struggle, and that these rights matter. Again, I state that they matter and that I am aware of the struggles to promote such rights, but this does not diminish the need to complicate the logics informing the promotion of women’s economic rights. States and feminists have aligned to promote more women in formal labor because it boosts economies and (some) women’s autonomy, but this has coincided with a large scaling back, in both developing and developed states, of social safety nets that many women rely/relied on. So the “gender shortcut” here is the underlying message/belief that alleviating poverty anywhere means women need to work and have access to sometimes predatory capital systems. The shortcut means skipping vital discussions about what constitutes work, how we value and monetize people and places, and how poverty is created and remedied.

The authors took issue with my assertion that violence against women may actually be increasing in the world, stating this was based on World Health Organization data from 2013. Although I did assert violence against women is increasing, it was not based on this data. All I asserted from the data was that levels of violence against women are surprisingly uniform across the world, at around 33%, with regional variation ranging from only 25–37% (pp. 40–41). My argument that violence against women is increasing is based on Jacqui True’s award-winning book, The Political Economy of Violence against Women (2012), that argues violence results from destabilized gender roles, which have increased as a result of neoliberal globalization.

Although I think it is vital to continue women’s inclusion, I also think it is productive to acknowledge that women’s inclusion is necessary but not sufficient for gender equality. I recognize that there are different pathways to promoting gender justice, but these pathways have similar roadblocks and pitfalls, which are also worth acknowledging. Although it is important to focus on improving woman-centered policy design, adoption, and implementation, this should not replace more critical engagement with the limits of adding women or the radical potential of future ideas about gender equality less tethered to liberal feminist and neoliberal ways of thinking.