Faces of Gender Inequality
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Description
Inequalities based on gender are morally troubling for a number of different reasons. Consider violence against women. It is morally concerning at least partly because it places many women’s lives and health in danger. We can acknowledge this as a harm without making any comparison between women and men. But violence against women is concerning also because of the ways in which it results from, and also perpetuates, the disempowerment and silencing of women, a disempowerment and silencing that many men do not experience. So violence against women is also a problem of discrimination. And it is made possible by the persistence of gender stereotypes that work, either tacitly or explicitly, to rationalize the power relations that render women vulnerable while leaving men in a position where they can often dominate with impunity. Interestingly, even the discriminatory aspect of violence against women seems to have multiple component parts, which cannot easily be reduced to a single harm. Such violence subordinates women to men—that is, it is caused by, and in turn perpetuates, a social order in which women systematically have less power and authority than men and attract less deference than men, and in which women’s needs are often marginalized or rendered invisible. Violence against women also denies many women the freedom to shape their lives in a manner of their own choosing. And when it occurs within the family, it leaves women without access to a good that is a necessary condition for functioning as an equal in their society: namely, a home that is a place of respite, a place where one can gather one’s strength, a place where one is secure and respected. It is not obvious that these different harms—social subordination, a lack of certain important freedoms, and a denial of access to a basic good—are reducible to some single type of harm or single type of disvalue. I have argued elsewhere that they form different parts of a pluralist theory of what makes discrimination wrong. In this chapter, my aim is to sketch out this general, pluralist theory of wrongful discrimination and then explore how it might be used to advocate for women in cases of gender-based discrimination. In Section 1, I outline my theory of wrongful discrimination and explain both the sense in which it is pluralist and the sense in which it nevertheless appeals to a single, unifying ideal of inequality of status. In Section 2, I consider a number of practices that involve gender-based discrimination and use the general pluralist theory of wrongful discrimination laid out in Section 1 to help shed light on what is wrongful in these cases of gender-based discrimination. In Section 3, I present several important implications of my pluralist theory, which I think enable it to be particularly sensitive to instances of gender-based discrimination that can be left invisible on other approaches. Finally, in Section 4, I relate my theory to two of the other theories presented in this volume, explaining how it can be used together with the prioritarian approach outlined by Shreya Atrey and together with the four-dimensional approach to substantive equality laid out by Sandra Fredman, in order to help identify and combat gender-based discrimination.
Source Publication
Frontiers of Gender Equality: Transnational Legal Perspectives
Source Editors/Authors
Rebecca J. Cook
Publication Date
2023
Recommended Citation
Moreau, Sophia, "Faces of Gender Inequality" (2023). Faculty Chapters. 1092.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1092
