The motherhood penalty by the numbers (and four other stories)
Five reads on feminism and gender equality to end your week.
To my new subscribers, thank you for joining. To my older ones, hello again. How was your week? Mine has been long, so I am diving straight into the reads…
1) Further evidence of the Gen Z gender divergence
Last week I linked to a column on the great Gen Z gender divergence, a.k.a. the fact that young women and men today are apparently, increasingly, split politically, with young women leaning liberal and men conservative. A new survey out this week provides more evidence for this trend, on attitudes to gender and feminism. The poll found significant youth gender gaps in whether “toxic masculinity” is a helpful term; in whether women or men have it harder; in attitudes to mysogynist influencer Andrew Tate (one in five British men aged 16-29 think he is a-okay); and in whether feminism has been good for society. On the latter, for instance:
Among those aged 16-29, 46% of women think feminism has done more good to society than harm – 10 percentage points higher than the share of young men who feel this way (36%).
And within this age group, one in six (16%) men say feminism has done more harm than good, compared with one in 11 (9%) women.
Gaby Hinsliff has written a sharp column on this in the Guardian, which ties in the Barbie movie, Donald Trump and Taylor Swift.
2) Abortion and the surveillance state
In the latest issue of The Dial (a beautiful themed magazine — here’s a link),
reports on the rise in criminal investigations of women seeking abortions in Britain, and how search history and personal data are being used to build cases against them. She recalls a case from last year:On June 12, 2023, British High Court Judge Sir Edward Pepperal, presiding judge of England’s Midland Circuit, sentenced mother of three Carla Foster, 44, to 28 months in prison. Her crime: accessing an abortion after 24 weeks of pregnancy, the legal upper-time limit in England and Wales. Foster spent one month in prison before being released on appeal.
The evidence against Foster included a tranche of her own digital data: her online search history, texts, and phone records had been presented to the court. In his sentencing remarks, Judge Pepperal cited specific messages found in Foster’s data, saying: “messages found on your phone indicate that you had known of your pregnancy for about three months on 1 February 2020,” he wrote. “By mid-February, you were conducting internet searches on ways to induce a miscarriage. By the end of February, you were searching for abortion services. Your search on 25 February indicated that you then believed that you were 23 weeks pregnant. Your internet searches continued sporadically through March and April 2020.” In one online search, conducted on April 24, 2020, Foster typed, “I need to have an abortion but I’m past 24 weeks.”
After Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022 there was a slew of pieces asking how far period tracking apps and other personal data would be used to prosecute women seeking abortions in the US. Here is a Business Insider report from last year on how data has been used in post-Roe prosecutions.
3) A world where rape is not a weapon
Following last week’s protests against femicide in Kenya, Dr Norah Obudho and Lizz Ntonjira write in The East African on the scale of gender-based violence globally, and how to stop it. Recalling the extent of such violence in ongoing conflicts in Sudan, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, they write:
Imagine a world in which no girl or woman ever has to live in fear of experiencing sexual harm. A world in which rape and other forms of gender-based violence such as femicide, female genital mutilation (FGM), child marriage, trafficking, and psychological abuse, are not wielded as weapons.
Regarding action:
Femicide’s magnitude demands that we confront not just the perpetrators, but also the failures in leadership that allow the dehumanisation of women through physical, sexual and emotional abuse.
The female body and mind cannot and must not be allowed to become a battleground. Failure to protect women from all forms of violence is both a failure in leadership and a profound violation of women’s agency and human rights. It is a stain on our collective conscience.
Relatedly, earlier this week, UN representatives travelled to Israel to look into the many reports of sexual violence in Hamas’ 7th October attack.
4) Feminist empathy gaps
In my final newsletter of 2023, I put four key questions on gender equality to various writers and thinkers. Asked what the most urgent issue in this struggle is,
wrote something that stayed with me:This is impossible to answer, because so many important issues are interlinked, and also worsened by our tendency not to listen to women, and not to believe their accounts of their experiences if they're politically inconvenient. So perhaps that authority gap, or empathy gap, is the big issue underlying so many other conversations — about sexual violence, medical negligence, or sexual harassment at work.
Empathy gaps are a characteristic of polarised and very online discourse (see: almost any internet discussion of the Israel-Gaza war). And in Britain, there are few matters of public discourse as divided as the sex vs. gender debate. A recent article and letters responding to it give a useful introduction to these opposed points of view. The piece, by Susanna Rustin in the Guardian, is about a number of recent cases where employment tribunals found that women were discriminated against because of their gender-critical beliefs. She writes:
There were more than 7,000 employment tribunals in the last quarter for which figures are available, and cases concerning gender-critical belief make up a tiny fraction. Gender politics is well known to be a fraught topic. But it is a cop-out to treat experiences such as [Jo] Phoenix’s and [Rachel] Meade’s as collateral damage while the issues are worked through. Whatever their views on sex and gender, liberals should be curious about why women are being ostracised and punished for their conviction that sex differences are important. So should trade unionists, whose job it is to protect people’s rights at work.
And here is a link to the letters, some of which agree with Rustin, and some of which challenge her views. The piece and the responses serve as a reminder that some empathy and constructive conversation could do much for public discourse on feminism (and maybe even feminist progress?) in this country
5) The motherhood penalty by the numbers
The Economist covers a 134-country study on how motherhood impacts women’s labour participation, with some beautiful charts. Here’s a snippet:
Whereas around the world 95% of men aged between 25 and 54 are in the labour force, the figure for women of the same age is just 52%. Little has been understood about how much of this gap is explained by mothers leaving formal work after giving birth. But a group of academics from the London School of Economics (LSE) and Princeton University has now amassed a trove of data to measure the effect in 134 countries, home to 95% of the world’s population. Building on the work of Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economist who was awarded last year’s Nobel prize in economics for her research into gender inequality in the labour market, the authors compare mothers and fathers with childless people of similar age, education, marital status and so forth. Mothers’ labour-market participation falls after childbirth in almost every country in the study.
Bonus: Barbara Kruger exhibition in London | BBC podcast on Spain’s split over feminism |
on the joy (and calm) of women who live aloneThank you for reading. See you next week.