The yawning wealth inequalities between men and women (and four other stories)
Five reads about gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism to end your week.
On Wednesday last week, a 15-year-old schoolgirl, Elianne Andam, was stabbed to death by a 17-year-old boy on her way to school in south London, apparently while defending her best friend, who had reportedly refused to accept flowers from the attacker.
The previous evening, on the GB News channel, the actor-turned-politician Laurence Fox launched into an on-air diatribe (which has to be seen to be believed) about why he wouldn’t sleep with a particular female journalist. Fox’s outburst was roundly lambasted as offensive and sexist. He and host Dan Wootton were suspended from GB News after the channel received 7,300 complaints from Ofcom, the regulator, about the segment. (NB see
’ excellent coverage of the various allegations against Wootton in its #MediaToo series)Following Elianne’s murder, there has been much discussion about the danger posed to women and girls by incel culture, and why women can be “scared to say no to men”. Some denizens of the manosphere, including Andrew Tate, have responded to this somewhat defensively.
And this week, in fact, Fox tweeted that he was joining none other than Tate on his “Emergency Meeting” broadcast on Rumble, in the aftermath of the GB News debacle. These two incidents are clearly very different, but they are related, and by more than Tate’s online activity. Both Elianne’s murder and Fox’s very public sexism tell us something uncomfortable about the misogyny that bubbles away — and not always under the surface.
And now to the reads…
1) A yawning gender wealth gap is hurting the British economy
Today (Monday 2nd October), the Women’s Budget Group think tank released analysis revealing stark wealth inequalities between men and women in the UK. I covered their findings for my day job. They said that:
A gender wealth gap of 3 per cent between men and women aged 35-44 rises to 42 per cent on average by the age of 65, according to analysis of the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Wealth and Assets Survey by the Women’s Budget Group (WBG) think tank. On average, men have £92,762 more in total wealth than women – a gap of 35 per cent. The data also revealed a 90 per cent gender gap in private pension wealth, with men on average having £83,879 more than women, and a 177 per cent disparity in the average value of UK shares held by men and women.
And while, for most men, a private pension is their main source of wealth, women’s wealth is more precarious and less independent. On average more than 50 per cent of a woman’s wealth comes from property, household possessions and vehicles typically shared with other members of her household. The data analysed covered April 2018 to March 2020, and included private pension wealth, financial wealth, physical wealth (household possessions and vehicles) and property wealth.
“Wealth inequality is gendered because of the unequal distribution of unpaid care and structural discrimination against women,” says the WBG’s report, released today.
What is the reason for these gaps? Mary-Ann Stephenson, director of the WBG, told me motherhood is part of it:
“You see the gap start to widen when women start looking after children. It’s the point at which the pay gap and earnings gap gets bigger.” Women tend to reduce work because of the costs of care. There is evidence too, Stephenson added, that when a heterosexual couple “spends down” their savings because of care costs, it is often the woman’s savings that go first.
Ultimately, Stephenson said that “unpaid care is at the heart of women’s economic inequality.”
2) The evaporation of “lean in” feminism
As this piece in Jacobin points out, girl boss feminism appears to be on the decline. Liza Featherstone argues that the “lean in” approach looks increasingly like the wrong answer to the problems most women face. She writes:
Today we are more likely to use terms like “liberal feminism” or “girl boss feminism,” but the meaning is the same: a vision of women’s liberation available only to the one percent. It hasn’t gone away, but its once-toxic intensity seems to have lifted. And its worst manifestations have apparently faded, including the worship of rich, powerful female politicians and CEOs, and the political habit of deploying feminism against the working class or the Left.
Maybe — if we’re feeling optimistic — a more democratic, working-class vision of women’s liberation is even gathering strength.
And also
In our century, bourgeois feminism has been hopelessly linked to an oppressive workaholic culture, in which people are expected to sacrifice family life, social activities, interests, and their physical and mental health. One of the few positive outcomes of the pandemic is that even many relatively well-off workers have been rejecting that culture. Once you’ve decided that there is more to life than work, Lean In feminism doesn’t have much appeal.
3) UN Security Council urged to press Taliban on “gender apartheid” in Afghanistan
Pressure for the Taliban’s repression of women to be considered gender apartheid is increasing. Last week, Roza Otunbayeva, the UN Secretary General’s special representative for Afghanistan, told a meeting of the UN Security Council that Afghanistan has “issued over 50 decrees with the explicit aim of erasing women from public life”, including banning women from schools and universities. Human rights expert Karim Bennoune called on the UN to codify “gender apartheid” in international law to pressure the Taliban, according to a VoA report:
Codifying gender apartheid in international laws, Bennoune said, would make it clear that there can be no recognition of the Taliban government by any member state, and that the country should not be granted a seat at the U.N.
Hundreds of Afghan women who participated in a UN survey in July voiced a similar sentiment, saying that any recognition of the Taliban government should be contingent on concrete improvements in women's rights, including access to education and the ability to work.
If you want more detail on the legal context, last year, Bennoune wrote an article in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review making the case for adapting the international legal framework that helped end racial apartheid to address gender apartheid. At last week’s UNSC meeting, all members, apart from Russia and China, condemned the Taliban’s persecution of women.
4) Fatal gender inequalities in cancer care
A commission on Women, Cancer, and Power by The Lancet is calling for a feminist approach to cancer treatment. According to a report by the medical journal, which used research from 185 countries, 800,000 deaths of women from cancer could be prevented across the globe every year if gender inequalities that harm women’s access to cancer prevention, care, and treatment are addressed. As per London’s Evening Standard:
One of the report’s author’s and King’s College London Professor Carlo Caduff said: “Cancer in women often goes unrecognised and has far-reaching consequences for families and to society more broadly.
“Gender norms, roles, relations, and their intersection with other power hierarchies influence women’s exposures to cancer risk factors, access to quality health services, and impacts their experiences with cancer, whether directly, or indirectly, as caregivers.”
5) The backlash to China’s very online feminism
Rest of World has a beautifully produced long read by Wanqing Zhang (with embedded translated social posts and a glossary of feminist slang — e.g. “Fumeiyi, a play on ‘military duty,’ means ‘beauty duty’ — the labor women do to meet society’s appearance standards”) about how feminism in China has grown online and the backlash against it. Here is a snippet:
The government is also clearly on one side. Coordinated anti-feminist trolling aligns with its own crackdown on women’s rights activism, said Hong Fincher. “It’s all very consistent with the government’s feeling that feminism, in general, is a threat to the government and that these feminist voices can become dangers and can be bad for social stability,” she said. In recent years, government policies have promoted traditional family values, including a reversal from the one-child policy to overt support for couples having more children.
And also, there are Chinese nationalists who claim that “the US is playing the gender card against China”:
…Ziwu Xiashi, a prominent nationalist influencer,…became popular after he made a series of posts alleging that Chinese feminists, including Lü Pin, the Feminist Five, and #MeToo accusers, were puppets of nebulous “Western forces” bent on bringing China down.
Bonus: TikTok’s gender memes are decidedly heteronormative | Dianne Feinstein’s feminist legacy | Clashes over gender segregated prayer in Tel Aviv
Thank you so much for reading. See you next week.