International Women’s Day
Since today is International Women’s Day, I figured I would write something to note the occasion.
A really obvious fact whose implications are systematically under-noticed and under-realized is that women are slightly more than half of the world’s population. The first thing this realization leads to is putting into sharp relief gender disparities in all sorts of consequential fields , especially politics and business, where women are heavily underrepresented. There is reason to believe that, in both fields, society at large would benefit from a political and corporate system that was able to reach something closer to gender parity.
Inasmuch as women are excluded and are in the upper echelons of these fields in low numbers — whether due to blatant discrimination, institutional sexism, or a prevailing notion among women that they would rather not go into those fields — we all lose. Even if you don’t think there is something about women that makes them better, say, traders (even though there is evidence that women are much less risk hungry, which might be nice in finance) it is quite simply the case where 50% of the population is for some reason not getting into a certain field or line of work, we are missing out on some of the most talented people out there.
The other major takeaway from the simple numerical predominance of women is to scramble our ideas of what “women’s issues” are. In American political discourse, advocating for women in politics in general or for specific policies aimed towards female advancement and protection is viewed as “identity politics” as something akin to policies to benefit specific racial or ethnic groups. And while the latter types of policies may very well be required by justice or just good ideas, the case of women as a political or interest group is of a different kind.
Because of a long history of social and institutional patriarchy, we tend to see women as a group whose political power is quite small and so we talk about them as if their numbers are small. But this, of course, is not the case, and if you can think of policies that benefit women specifically, you are not only fighting back against centuries of injustice and unfair treatment, you are ipso facto benefiting a huge number of people.
