Progress toward greater gender justice began with a shift in awareness in the course of the emancipation of an increasing number of population groups toward becoming citizens who are an active part of democratic processes. This shift in awareness was carried into the breadth of society by a bourgeois public sphere. It took some time before the media took up the concerns of suffragettes, labor leaders, and education reformers (first women’s movement of the 20th century), or of advocates for the right to abortion, equal pay, quotas in parliaments and supervisory boards, the creation of women-only spaces, and much more (second women’s movement). At first, women took to the streets, spoke up in the male circles of the 1968 movement in Western Europe, organized congresses, and joined together in initiatives. As part of the New Social Movements of the 1970s in Western Europe, even the public debate of their concerns first had to be hard-won. Forty years later, quite a few of the actors were able to gain influence through positions especially in politics and administration, and to institutionalize what had once been the demands of a citizens’ movement. The changed, current situation produces some paradoxes, which in turn affect the acceptance and implementation of gender justice.

There is the “gender trouble” (Judith Butler) widespread especially in conservative and politically right-wing circles, but also in parts of politically left-wing groups. This is often accompanied by criticism of genuinely creative efforts toward gender-sensitive language and problematizes gender equality as a “top-down” strategy or ‘coercion.’ Such a backlash also reflects the social polarizations that have again been increasingly observed in Western Europe over the past decade.

The precarization of working conditions, housing situations, and future prospects relativizes the socio-economic prerequisites for economic independence and full equality for women. At the same time, due to stronger social stratification, men in precarious living conditions may feel set back relative to ‘successful’ women with significantly higher incomes, since this conflicts with their role model as ‘strong’ men heading a household. However, this social dimension is barely addressed. This, of course, is also part of the political strategy of helping an economic and social paradigm to power: economic liberalism, or the neoliberalism of the Chicago School. The systematic implementation of insecurity also includes the de-thematization of the social as a reality that is politically constructed. What is discursively pushed aside usually expresses itself by other means. Questions of gender can be reduced to linguistic quarrels and culturalized in this way. They thus serve, as it were, as a projection screen for blanked-out social and economic issues. One can also discuss it under this thesis: the linking of neo- or economically liberal strategies with feminist concerns promotes social divisions, even though these divisions should be rendered superfluous by greater gender justice and gender diversity. The demand for gender parity at leadership levels will therefore find broad social acceptance especially when it is embedded in efforts toward ‘social democracy,’ that is, in a high degree of social balance.

It would be worth discussing whether this — among other factors — has favored the success of equality efforts in the Scandinavian countries, whose societies are significantly more egalitarian than those of other welfare state models.[1]

Reference

^[1]Esping-Andersen, Gøsta, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Princeton 1990