Gender norms are still caught up in highly unequal, excessively dimorphic gender roles. Women are still seen as nurturers who do more household and emotional labour, whereas men are doing more physical and cognitive labour, at least in certain fields such as in construction, brick laying and ‘tradie’ work, and in medicine and engineering, and there is the glass ceiling in the higher levels of the legal profession. Women tend to dominate carer roles which are less well paid than the male dominant arenas.
Interestingly, gender studies is currently female dominant, which, at this point, is understandable given feminism’s and pro-feminism’s current power-base. Certainly, trends in masculinist organisation have lacked comprehensive engagement with gender as a historical and present day multi-disciplinary enquiry and reproduce overly reactionary gender politics and tend to be wholly dismissive, as cursory, of feminist philosophy. This has been unfortunate. Female dominant sectors of society and education are viewed by some as a ‘corrective’ to male dominance in many fields. However, I proffer the only stable and sustainable solution to gendered dominant practices is to institute extensive and expansive “50/50” gender quotas (inclusive of trans men and trans women): in vocation, profession, and university specialisation and fields of educative institutional study. This will correct gender identity deficits and prevent the genders from competing against each other.
This would correct the negative and unnecessarily unequal gender role socialisations. Gendered identity would be forced to change in the realm of being equal breadwinners. Other differences such as in fashion, for instance, may remain, although subverting these kinds of differences should not be met with disapproval or social exclusion. Freedom in the realm of identity and expression must be defended.
I feel the counter-arguments to the gender quotas are weak, as quotas are the only truly foolproof method of correcting gender role sub-optimality socialisation.
Some feminists and masculine pro-feminists have submitted that until we treat women and men more equally in a substantive sense, we will not likely be able to discern their true differences. For example, Mill, in 1869, stated:
“Until we treat men and women the same socially then we have no way of telling what natural differences there may be between them”1.
I tend to disagree, as we have scientific study of biological difference, e.g. of brain and cognitive functions. I would concede, however, that we be careful about how we attach meaning to those differences socially, in our practices and praxis. I believe that there are stark biological and biosocial differences between the genders, but it is a non-sequitur that we should not further equalise gender roles, and thus we eschew crude biological determinism. One key difference is in greater brain proclivity for empathy in women (larger and more active anterior cingulate gyrus theory); this would be no rationale to pay women less nor to retain female and male dominant fields and the lingering pay-gap thereof. I would like to conclude that it is a genuine socialist mandate (‘teleological target’) that individuals in all the fields of work should substantially be paid the same wage, outmoding and overcoming the corporate division of labour and its economic and workplace inequality.
- Mill, JS 1869, The Subjection of Women, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Subjection_of_Women ↩︎
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