“When diversity, equity and inclusion become ‘threats’ to the order of society,” Judith Butler wrote recently, “progressive politics in general is held responsible for every social ill.” Authoritarians are empowered to oppress vulnerable people in the name of “the nation, the natural order, the family, society or civilization itself”.
The links between sacrificing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and upholding patriarchal white supremacy are clear. This has prompted many to fight harder to preserve DEI.
If only existing DEI wasn’t so crap.
Cordelia Fine is critical of existing DEI policies and has some evidence-based suggestions for workplaces that actually want gender equity. The problem is, she suspects many workplaces are using aspects of DEI as a veneer.
The uselessness of most DEI measures – things like self-directed mandatory gender bias training, work-family flexibility measures that encourage women into career-limiting roles, and management targets that make a handful of women wealthy but widen the aggregate gender pay gap – may be a feature, not a bug, of the contemporary system.
Fine calls this system Patriarchy Inc. Thinking more historically than Fine tends to do (understandably enough – she is a philosopher and psychologist, not a historian), we can see how this happened.
It was a smallish step from women demanding financial independence, thus reducing their reliance on marriage, to their mass entry into the workforce. For corporations, women workers were cheaper. Their mass entry helped push down other working conditions, making profits higher.
The gender pay gap, in other words, makes women workers a good deal for corporations. The surge in productivity women enabled in the late 20th century cannot be sustained indefinitely, but perpetuating workplace inequalities is a way to stretch out the profits a bit longer.
This might be why workplaces focus on DEI measures that don’t work. They need women to join their workplace, so they want the positive public relations that DEI initiatives offer. But employers also expect, even unconsciously, that men will be “higher” achievers and therefore deserve the most loot.
Fine shows that, in many segments of the economy, men (including fathers) are pressured to work long hours. The same organisations, seeking to retain women, encourage mothers to take up work-family flexibility – something technically available to men, but discouraged in a hundred unspoken ways.
Everyone misses out: fathers have less time with children than they would like, while women are subject to a “motherhood wage penalty”. By working fewer hours, women enjoy fewer career rewards.
There are wider issues at stake too. Sustaining gender inequality is not only about having a relatively cheap workforce, but the contradictions at the heart of the labour economy.
At a systemic level, someone must do the work of social reproduction: bearing and raising children, keeping them healthy, teaching them the things that will make them useful people able to replace the current generation in the workforce as they age. While that labour is crucial to the economy, employers also want those people’s productive labour at work.
Patriarchy Inc. shows that DEI policies tend to be focused on resolving this fundamental contradiction. But not by reducing inequality. The gendering of occupational norms means the consequences are borne by working women, who face a “triple bind”. They are, observes Fine, “punished if they play by men’s rules, punished if they don’t” – and then, when they lose interest in a game where the dice are clearly loaded against them, career success itself is reinforced as “men’s terrain”.
“Fixing the women” by measures like encouraging us all to “lean in”, misses the fact that the system of rewards is built to “belong” to men.
Gendered jurisdictions
That doesn’t mean all professional work is coded male. Women also have occupational spaces to which they “belong” – though these usually contribute to, rather than resolve, gender inequality.
Fine is interested in the question of gendered jurisdictions and women’s cheap labour, issues I have been exploring with Claire E.F. Wright and other colleagues for a forthcoming issue of Women’s History Review. But Fine takes quite a different approach. She concentrates on the evolution of sex-segregated work.
Divisions of labour can be productive, Fine says, even gendered ones. But she also shows that the long-term evidence across multiple cultures for the gendering of work produces such a jumble that it is hard to see labour preferences that are universally or biologically “natural” to women or men.
Even so, she still thinks there might be a place for examining gendered attributes from an evolutionary perspective.
Conceding biological aspects of gender matters in the present moment. The subject of the Judith Butler essay quoted above is the US president’s recent executive order insisting on the physical naturalness of “true” gender. This insistence is part of a wider logic that maintains women and men have distinctive talents.
Such claims have been a frequent source of misogyny. “Subscribing to evolutionary psychologists’ view on sex differences,” Fine says, “does seem to be rather strongly correlated with overconfidence and casualness when it comes to the standards of evidence acceptable for inferring that the divisions of labour that maintain men’s higher status and power have biological roots.”
Fine thinks we need to examine this anyway. Understanding the sources of gender inequality at work requires closer study of the question of “natural” distinctions, she suggests, if only to challenge the “equal but different” narrative that infuses many workplaces and perpetuates the gender pay gap.
Workplace norms within organisations and across the economy are often based on the “gender coding of occupations” (think “computer geek”, for example). Fine suggests these have indeed evolved, though she presents evidence to suggest that the evolution of sex-segregated work habits has cultural rather than physical origins.
Distinctions between what men and women typically do are still often worn on human bodies. A labourer’s muscular body seems to be an expression of their gender, for example. The same might be said for a care worker’s heart. This blurs the old-fashioned distinction between physical (environmental) evolution and cultural or ideological evolution.
This is a key contribution of Fine’s research, though it is something she might have better explained. She acknowledges, in a similar way to Butler, that sex is indeed physical. It is embodied and the inheritor of a lot of stuff, including some that is evolutionary. But this does not make its categories immutable.
Women’s bodies do not explain systemic workforce inequality. Patriarchy Inc. demonstrates that the inequality is a result of policies, written and unwritten, within workplaces and across the economy. Rather than leading us to expect that women will always be “naturally” better at low-paid, low-status work, Fine allows us to see the connection between a gendered division of labour and culturally embedded economic norms.
Remaking gender at work
“Every occupation has its own gender-coding history,” Fine explains. When women entered the workforce in large numbers they were not “equals to men”, but were incorporated “as women”. The jurisdictions over which women held authority were in turn, like magic, deemed to have lower status, power and wages.
Obviously, it isn’t actually magic. And it can be fixed. “Digging Patriarchy Inc. out of the division of labour requires careful thought and deep reform,” Fine concludes – “instead, we have DEI”.
Everyone not wearing a MAGA hat surely wants to keep diversity, equity and inclusion in principle. But it is not clear that corporations are all that keen on making DEI effective. After all, cheap women and hyper-industrious men (on the whole – occasionally, this is reversed) underpin their productivity.
But while effective DEI may not be in some employers’ short-term interests, actual gender equity is good for everyone. That means, Fine argues, it is also good for the economy.
Fine’s perspective requires a shift in definition of “the economy” away from “market thinking” towards “relational thinking”. I have enormous sympathy for this position, which re-imagines the economy as “for us” and work that supports wellbeing.
But it is magical thinking to suggest new economic language alone will liberate capitalist workplaces from the logic of extracting profit from the difference between the price of labour and the value of its outputs. The deep work of addressing occupational gender inequalities needs more material levers than Fine has suggested.
In some fields, the shift is materially necessary. Fine describes what sounds like an excellent reordering of gender norms on remote oil rigs, where hyper-masculine hierarchies were producing unsafe and therefore inefficient workplaces. In finance, similar hierarchies (but different pressures) produce career trajectories based on a woman’s “fuckability quotient” and infuse workplaces with sexual violence.
Neither are good for business, or for women, so the hard work of reworking gender norms is surely worth the investment.
Perhaps this logic can be extended to the kinds of regulations, working conditions and bonus reforms that Fine shows would more effectively close the gender pay gap. But it is hard to see how a “new vision”, inspiring though it is, will encourage employers to stop using DEI as recruitment publicity and genuinely prioritise human wellbeing over productivity.
Fine argues that “we” need to be asking questions of employers who claim to promote DEI, but only via ineffective practices. This is excellent, though it still does not offer the material levers that change will require.
We also need to ask governments why welfare applies to business more than it does to humans. And we need activism that is more industrially derived if we are ever to effectively attain gender equity. Thus, I want to add something that Fine curiously does not say: if you care about DEI, join your union.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.
{ 25 comments }
engels 06.15.25 at 8:44 am
I read in an FT report (don’t have the link now) some corporations were rebranding DEI as DEO (=opportunity) in response to the Trump challenge: reminds me of the inspirational Onion article “somehow we’ll middle manage”.
engels 06.15.25 at 1:33 pm
My own perspective on these issues, which is probably a little unpopular on left and right, comes from noting the over-representation of men among the prison population and the feeling the criminals and business leaders aren’t really that different.
dk 06.18.25 at 1:00 am
In this case, all that is solid needs to melt into air a damn sight more quickly.
Tm 06.18.25 at 11:30 am
“management targets that make a handful of women wealthy but widen the aggregate gender pay gap”
This doesn’t make sense, how can putting more women in higher paid position widen the aggregate pay gap?
In every company/organization I have worked in, there were fewer women the higher you go up the management hierarchy. Not just in top management, at all levels of hierarchy and repsonsibility there are fewer and fewer women. This is not a side issue that affects only a few privileged women. And if the answer is let’s abolish hierarchies, bullshit that. There can be no equality if women aren’t equally represented in the hierarchy. It’s also important to note that the Trumpian war against DEI very explicitly aims at removing all women and POC from leadership positions and replacing them with white men – almost always utterly unqualified ones, to add insult to the injury.
In most advanced countries, women are nowadays legally entiteled to equal pay for eqal work. In some countries, employers have to report and justify their pay gap. The justification is always, women are paid the same for the same work but somehow for totally mysterious reasons (or, some dare to claim, because of their biological preferences – bullshit of course) they tend to work in lower level, less well paid positions.
“For corporations, women workers were cheaper. Their mass entry helped push down other working conditions, making profits higher. The gender pay gap, in other words, makes women workers a good deal for corporations.”
This is begging the question why, as soon as women entered the workforce, they were paid less than men (children btw were paid even less). One answer is because employers could pay them less, but why? Why, if they could get away with hiring women cheaper, didn’t they just cut the men’s wages as well? The answer is complex and has probably to do with the general attitude of male employers that women were inferior and also the lack of solidarity from the male workers and the male run unions.
If the premise is that the pay gap is only to the benefit of employers and not of male employees, I think it’s dubious. Clearly men are benefiting from being preferentially promoted and so on. And it’s dubious to claim that employers prefer to hire women. They prefer women in some roles and professions (which are consequently lower paid) and prefer men in other roles and professions. It’s not at all clear why this segregation saves the employer money. Why not distribute the same amount of wages equally? The (perceived) advantage must have to do with factors that aren’t strictly economoc. Maybe patriarchy?
engels 06.18.25 at 12:25 pm
If the premise is that the pay gap is only to the benefit of employers and not of
male employeesPMC, I think it’s dubious. ClearlymenPMC are benefiting from being preferentially promoted and so on. And it’s dubious to claim that employers prefer to hirewomenworkers. They preferwomenworkers in some roles… (which are consequently lower paid) and prefermenPMC in other roles… It’s not at all clear why this segregation saves the employer money. Why not distribute the same amount of wages equally? The (perceived) advantage must have to do with factors that aren’t strictly economoc. Maybepatriarchymanagerial capitalism?FTFY
steven t johnson 06.18.25 at 2:22 pm
“…if the answer is let’s abolish hierarchies, bullshit that. There can be no equality if women aren’t equally represented in the hierarchy.” But hierarchy is inequality. There is a fundamental confusion here.
“This doesn’t make sense, how can putting more women in higher paid position widen the aggregate pay gap?” One way is simply that recruiting a few women or minorities (strictly speaking, women often are the majority, by the way) is an outcome with cosmetic benefits for a steeper hierarchy in pay, a cosmetic justification of seeming fairness. If a few women receive enormous executive pay, it can be passed off as fair, even though hierarchy in pay isn’t even rational, not in terms of so-called marginal revenue productivity.
“One answer is because employers could pay them less, but why? Why, if they could get away with hiring women cheaper, didn’t they just cut the men’s wages as well?” But employers most certainly have historically cut men’s wages, when they could get away with it. The proper question seems to be, why have women (or free blacks or immigrant men) been willing to take lower pay? For brevity and caution I won’t venture the definitive answer.
” Why not distribute the same amount of wages equally?” This is a classic rhetorical question…but amazingly the answer already given by this same commenter is, “bullshit on that.” Personally I disagree but then, as a socialist sympathizer, I would, wouldn’t I?
“The (perceived) advantage must have to do with factors that aren’t strictly economic. Maybe patriarchy?” Again, this is confused. I suspect the issue is a notion of the economy as some sort of crystal, composed of myriads of formula unit/unit cells indefinitely networked to make a whole. In this case, the individual psychology of an economic agent, doing marginal calculations to optimize their personal profit is taken as economically rational, therefore anything else is not even perceived as economic, but some sort of personality defect. But I don’t think the sum total of individual choices add up to the economy (much less society) in the first place. Social institutions and customs, network effects, the functions and dysfunctions emerging from groups of people, the historical consequences of social, political and economic struggles following unpredictable yet irreversible paths make this view in my opinion false, ideological.
“Clearly men are benefiting from being preferentially promoted and so on.” As a group, they most certainly are not. Some men do. As a group, men and everyone else would benefit if “preference” was abolished. (That is, to the extent that so-called preference doesn’t reflect some sort of real value. Again, brevity and caution require I don’t explain what that might be.) I’m not at all sure Patriarchy, Inc. is an ESOP where every person with a penis benefits. Even if it were, I can’t see that stockholders are equal in real corporations.
Gareth Wilson 06.19.25 at 4:35 am
You have to be cautious about arguing that employment discrimination is profitable. There was a study of Australian banks, showing that they discriminated on the basis of family structure. On commentator explained why employees without children were much better for the banks. I found his argument convincing, except that he went on to explain why employees with children were much better for the banks, and was equally convincing. Perhaps he got the report backwards and didn’t finish the edit.
Tm 06.19.25 at 7:50 am
It’s amazing how people are able to deny that men are benefiting from patriarchy, just as whites are benefiting from racism. No it’s just a few men, those at the top, who benefit, Bullshit. If that were true, patriarchy would have been abolished long ago.
stj: “If a few women receive enormous executive pay…” I made it very clear that it’s not about a few at the very top.
“The proper question seems to be, why have women (or free blacks or immigrant men) been willing to take lower pay?”
Oh sure it’s their fault that they were discriminated against, it has nothing to do with patriarchal/racist structures. You guys are beyond parody.
Reminder: “The answer is complex and has probably to do with the general attitude of male employers that women were inferior and also the lack of solidarity from the male workers and the male run unions.” That lack of solidarity from male /white workers has historically been a very important factor fopr the oppression of women and minorities. Funny how you don’t want to acknowledge that fact.
I call bullshit on abolishing hierarchies because nobody has ever run a large organization without some form of hierarchy. Certainly not socialists! Wage differences may have been smaller in socialist countries but never absent, and as long as they aren’t absent, it matters whether some groups are overrepresented in the upper levels of the hierarchy. In real existing socialism, women were underrepresented in management and leadership positions, just as in capitalist countries.
The reactions from engels and stj are totally typical for a certain brand of “class first” leftism: wo we don’t need to do anything about white men dominating leadership positions at all levels of the economy and politics because after the revolution, there won’t be hierarchies. Except of course there will be. Leave me alone with that bullshit.
engels 06.19.25 at 11:46 am
The reactions from engels and stj are totally typical for a certain brand of “class first” leftism: wo we don’t need to do anything about white men dominating leadership positions at all levels of the economy and politics because after the revolution, there won’t be hierarchies.
Where did I say that?
I would like to live in world without arbitrary authority, not one with Big Sister alongside Big Brother.
engels 06.19.25 at 12:08 pm
as long as [wage differences] aren’t absent, it matters whether some groups are overrepresented in the upper levels of the hierarchy
Genune question: what is a group?
Laban 06.19.25 at 3:50 pm
engels – well spotted – men are over-represented both at the top and the bottom of pretty much all hierarchies. We’re just not most prisoners, we’re most suicides, most bankrupts, most deaths in the wild (along with most famous explorers and mountain climbers), most murder victims.
Psychologist Roy Beaumeister wrote a book on this topic called “Is There Anything Good About Men?”. Here’s a talk transcript he gave on it:
https://web.archive.org/web/20090315041811/http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm
You won’t be surprised that he thinks the differences go back a long way, to the days when life was nasty, brutish and short, and there was always the possibility of an invading tribe coming over the hill. It’s still like that in some parts of the world. Jared Diamond in New Guinea:
“Woman after woman, when asked to name her husband, named several sequential husbands who had died violent deaths. A typical answer went like this: “My first husband was killed by Elopi raiders. My second husband was killed by a man who wanted me, and who became my third husband. That husband was killed by the brother of my second husband, seeking to avenge his murder.””
steven t johnson 06.19.25 at 4:09 pm
“. No it’s just a few men, those at the top, who benefit, Bullshit. If that were true, patriarchy would have been abolished long ago.” By this same illogic, I could incorrectly write “. No it’s just a few nobles, those at the top, who benefit, Bullshit. If that were true, aristocracy would have been abolished long ago.” Or equally wrongly, “. No it’s just a few capitalists, those at the top, who benefit, Bullshit. If that were true, capitalism would have been abolished long ago.” Or equally wrongly, “. No it’s just a few general, those at the top, who benefit, Bullshit. If that were true, war would have been abolished long ago.”
Also wrong is the assertion that more women with extremely high pay in a steep pay scale somehow doesn’t change the average. Put Elon Musk in a group of one thousand men and their average wealth rises. Put Miriam Adelson in a group of one thousand men and the gender gap in wealth reverses! It’s called arithmetic, learn it, use it.
Engels will have to speak for himself, but I explicitly wrote that for brevity and caution I would not answer the question here. Making up an answer for me, one that is dismissed as “beyond parody” is rhetorically convenient, but it is deceitful.
“… lack of solidarity from male /white workers has historically been a very important factor for the oppression of women and minorities.” Therefore it is necessary to oppose unions/unionism in the name of statistically equal representation in the social hierarchy, which will of course become perfectly fair once any random sampling of a given level in that hierarchy matches the group composition of the population at large? That implied viewpoint should be “beyond parody,” but sadly, it is not. It’s like forgetting that killer cops targeting proportionate numbers of white men would not solve the problem of police brutality!
Further, to my eye there is a motte put into this with the weaselly phrase “a very important factor.” Unions, especially not Samuel Gompers unions, have rarely had so much power one can so quickly blame them, however gratifying it may be. I think capitalist hierarchy is fundamentally unfair, unlike this commenter. It is fundamentally arbitrary. Therefore I believe it can only operate unfairly, which means systemically, despite the conscious intentions of particular individuals, the final outcomes must promote divisions in the workers. To me it seems inevitable that it is precisely the most pure and simple, so-called business unions that accept the capitalist system, tended historically to be the worst offenders against women or minorities. And the more socialist unions tended to be the most open to class solidarity with other workers.
To revert to the OP, the big takeaway, the most important conclusion at the end, where conclusions are so often to be found, is, women should join unions. I do not find this enraging, which is why I do not push back so hard against the OP.
A final suggestion? The notion that “groups” need to be represented in management and so-called leadership (meaning the highest official ranks) presumes the validity of the hierarchy. Looking past the job titles, representation of women, minorities, nationalities should also be measured by services delivered. A hierarchy that delivers what women want but doesn’t pass a statistical test could I think be justly judged as more representative of a hierarchy that doesn’t. And that’s especially true since the gender gap still exists anyhow. Class as a category in the material reproduction of social life (rather than socioeconomic status) comes first because it is the basis of effective change in the long run.
steven t johnson 06.19.25 at 4:12 pm
It occurs to me, too late, that the above is tl;dr. My apologies, I should have just noted that it is this commenter who is putting class first as well. It’s just that the class this commenter puts first is the capitalist class and it’s social, economic and political hierarchies.
KT2 06.20.25 at 1:42 am
Tm… “run a large organization”… is $19Billion large enough? Is Mondragon socialist, or just cooperative?
“The Mondragon model suggests that the optimal size of an employee-owned firm is small to mid-sized but that the optimal size of an employee-owned “business network” can be very large indeed. ” Alan Greig
Tm @8… “I call bullshit”.
No I don’t Tm.
Please refute the OP, Mondragon, Alan Greig, and or Lasagabaster & Agirretxe below, not me or opinions or arguments, with data and examples. Please.
Tm said @6 “I call bullshit on abolishing hierarchies because nobody has ever run a large organization without some form of hierarchy. Certainly not socialists!”
And please Tm, if I were to say to you, as you say to good faith commenters here; “You guys are beyond parody”, information, coordination and attention to topic is effected negatively.
(I couldn’t decide to cut this)
“Building community wealth: Are Mondragon’s cooperative ideas transferable to Australia?”
4 February 2020 at 4:46 pm
Alan Greig
“Much has been written about the phenomenal success that the Mondragon Cooperative Consortium (MCC) in Spain has been able to achieve in job creation, reducing inequality and the kind of social outcomes impact investors could only ever dream about here.
“Most studies – and there have been many – reveal that the MCC thrives as a large business because (i) it is owned by its employees and (ii) it has “capped” the gap between the highest and lowest paid employee. As well, it has built a very effective and substantial social enterprise ecosystem to base and grow its operations on.
“Founded 60 years ago in the Basque region of Spain, Mondragon has grown to become the world’s largest worker-owned enterprise. It is made up of a network of 260 cooperative businesses, employing 76,000 worker owners in 35 countries. It has annual revenues in excess of €12 billion (A$19.7 billion).
“The salary ratio between the lowest and highest paid worker is just one to nine – quite unique when you compare this to the ratio of around one to 120 for many of the largest ASX listed companies in Australia. This approach creates a formal level of equality between all employees which supports and empowers “community wealth” to be generated within the cooperative community and invested in the creation of cooperatively-owned institutions such as technical schools, a community bank, housing and a social security system for its members.
“Mondragon demonstrates that successful economic development models need not be based solely on small business start-ups and private “venture capital” investment. Economic development in the MCC works through the operation of its extensive “business network” which serves as both a local small business incubator and as solid infrastructure for ongoing service support. Its effectiveness stems from a number of innovations built into the system.
“One innovation is employee ownership. Mondragon firms avoid the costs associated with providing high returns to outside investors through employee ownership. Employee ownership means that the employees have a stake in the business and they invest their ownership share and profits towards the stability and growth of the business which employs them. By itself, employee ownership can be risky, but the risk is shared broadly in the case of the MCC amongst all the employee-investors in all of the businesses in the cooperative network.
“The Mondragon model suggests that the optimal size of an employee-owned firm is small to mid-sized but that the optimal size of an employee-owned “business network” can be very large indeed.
…
https://probonoaustralia.com.au/news/2020/02/building-community-wealth-are-mondragons-cooperative-ideas-transferable-to-australia/
Tm, here is a study to cut through some of, as Hanna says… “the long-term evidence across multiple cultures for the gendering of work produces such a jumble that it is hard to see labour preferences that are universally or biologically “natural” to women or men.”
..with data which you may want to use Tm, to assist in returning from beyond parody. Plenty more knowledge to find, yet this is from 2025…
“The gender pay gap in shared-ownership firms: Determinants, variation and parity-seeking measures”
Saioa Arando Lasagabaster, Agurtzane Lekuona Agirretxe
First published: 25 May 2025
…
“The analysis is based on 69 cooperatives from MONDRAGON, a globally recognized leader in the cooperative movement and shared-ownership business models.”
…
“The results suggest that cooperatives are not fully utilizing their governance structures to address gender pay equality and may inadvertently replicate broader labour market inequalities. To tackle these challenges, the study advocates for more targeted, enforceable and impact-driven equality policies tailored to cooperatives’ unique characteristics. ”
###
Finally Tm, I’ll use Hanna Forsyth’s last sentence and replace the last word:
“I want to add something that Fine curiously does not say: if you care about DEI, join your …” cooperative.
Tm, “Except of course there will be”… meaning attributed outside the intended.
So please Tm, Play the Ball or “Leave me alone with that bullshit.”
KT2 06.20.25 at 2:16 am
Shocking.
“In this paper, Theresa Neef and Anne-Sophie Robilliard analyze gender inequality in labor incomes and explore the following questions:
– Which share do women earn of the labor income of a country, a world region, and globally?
– How has this share evolved since 1990?
Labor income includes wages and salaries as well as the labor share of self-employment income. The inequality indicator, the female labor income share, considers gender differentials in earnings as well as labor force participation and is thus broader than usual measures of gender inequality. The authors combine employment and labor income data from the International Labour Organization (ILO), the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), and the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC).
…
KEY FINDINGS
…
https://wid.world/news-article/half-the-sky-the-female-labor-income-share-in-a-global-perspective/
Via…
“The Great Gender Divergence
Why has the world become more gender equal? Why are some societies more gender equal than others?”
By Alice Evans
https://www.ggd.world
Via…
4: Alice Evans’ Research On “The Great Gender Divergence”
“Since 2022, Alice has undertaken qualitative research in nine world regions: Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, Morocco, Italy, Spain, Britain, US, Poland, Turkey, India, Uzbekistan, South Korea and Hong Kong. Through this globally comparative analysis, she analyses the drivers and obstacles to gender equality. Gender interventions will be more impactful if they target locally binding constraints – in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, this is “the honour-income trade-off” (whereby male honour depends on female seclusion, and women tend to remain at home. Meanwhile, Latin America and the Caribbean face a different obstacle: pervasive violence elevates femicides. Over the past few years, she’s held visiting appointments at Stanford, Chicago, and Yale, while providing policy advice to the World Bank, and sharing insights with a public audience via Substack (www.ggd.world). In April 2025, she gave a TedTalk on romantic love as an under-rated driver of gender equality.”
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-grants-1-3-year-updates
MisterMr 06.20.25 at 11:15 am
I can’t comment on the book because I didn’t read it, but I have to say this about “patriarchy”: patriarchyt can be used as an explanation only if it is explained more.
Once upon a time, there were a variety of formal institutions that advantaged mens, e.g. only the first male inherited all stuff, women couldn’t vote etc.; this was the meaning of the word “patriarchy” (more on this below.
However this kind of formal patriarchy disappeared in the west a few generations ago, so that the word “patriarchy” is now used to mean loosely that men are on top, due to informal causes.
But this more genric use of the term becimes tautological when used as an explanation: men have higer incomes because patriarchy; what is patriarchy? The situation where men have higer incomes.
My guess is that the reason men have iger incomes in western countries is a mix of largely unconscious bias and self selection (women being more willing to sacrifice career to the family).
By unconscious bias I mean this: suppose that there are two companies, A and B, who hire for the same job, offewring a wage of 105(A) or 95(B).
Two persons, M and F, respond to both offers, they have the same qualification but A, because of uncounscious bias, hires M, so that F has to settle for the job paid 95.
This repeated on the whole economy can cause a significant income differentials, without anyone willingly trying to mistreat women.
If this is what is happening, males are certainly being advantaged by the gender bias: if women didn’t work, there would also be less businesses, so instead of the two businesses A and B there would be a single business C offering a wage of 100, and M would have to settle for it.
This is true while contemporaneously being true that all businesses are trying to pay both men and women the less they can.
On the general concept of patriarchy, as I said in another thread I’ve been reading some evo-psy book recently, and at least in one (Evolutionary Psychology by D.Buss, 6th edition, read in italian translation) there is expressed the idea that matriarchal society never existed anywere in the world, and specifically that Margaret Mead more or less lied in her description of the societies she described, because in those societies there is an high rate of domestic abuse (male on female) and of rapes too.
But there have been a lot of anthropologists recording “matriarchal” societies since 1800, who is lying here? The problem here depends on the definition of “patriarchy” and “matriarchy”.
In 1800, and up to fairly recent times, there were a lot of formal patriarchist institutions, which however later changed. E.G. my maternal grandfather had 5 childs, only one of them male, and left all hid hineritance to the single male child; a few years after his death, in the 70s, the law in Italy changed and now people are more or less forced to give money equally to their offsprings, plus there was a general cultural change so that today giving the money to only one kid would look like an asshole move.
When anthropologists from 1800 to 1960 spoke of “matriarchy” and “patriarchy”, they mostly meant this kind of formal patriarchy, which is what existed during their lives, and so looked at the formal institutions and spoke about that.
When other people today (in this case Buss) speaks of matriarchy and patriarchy, they often speak of informal structures of power, so that e.g. an high amount of rape counts as “patriarchy”, even if it is not a formal thing (this is also the way the term is used by many feminists), so that the societies that previously were conted as matriarchal are now counted as matrilineal and/or matrilocal (so Mead didn’t lie actually, it’s the meaning of the words that changed).
This creates a lot of confusion, which becomes even more exaggerated when we are speaking of evo-psy ipotheses such as males being more aggressive/dominant or similar, so that we should strictly differentiate personal traits and behaviours from istitutions and culture (but again, the evo-psy guys are the first who mix it up).
So in the end I really would like a better definition of what is meant by the word “patriarchy”.
engels 06.20.25 at 12:10 pm
I think “patriarchy” was renamed “the patriarchy” (possibly around the same time “sexism” became “misogyny”).
Coincidentally, I turned on the TV last night to find (the entirety of?) BBC Question Time had been given over to a discussion of an alleged crisis of British masculinity. Good thing there’s nothing else going on in the world right now…
Tm 06.20.25 at 12:19 pm
Kt2 14: Nowhere does your reference say that Mondragon is free of hierarchy. It says that the quotient between the highest and lowest pay is capped at 9 to 1, which is much better and more “egalitarian” than most corporations but still it’s far from being actually egalitarian.
There is a very bad faith straw man argument going around which goes like this: “if you demand fair representation for women and POC at all levels of economic and political hierarchy, you are justifying hierarchy and (by some absurd leap of logic) making it worse.”
I’m not gonna waste time refuting bad faith strawmanning from the usual suspects. As I said, leave me alone with your bullshit.
Tm 06.20.25 at 12:21 pm
MisterMr 16: I’m sorry but is it possible that you have never read a single line of feminist analysis about the mechanisms of patriarchy? Amazing.
Tm 06.20.25 at 12:33 pm
Engels 9: you seem to agree that hierarchies are unlikely to go away even under socialism. Then why is it wrong to demand equal representation for women and POC at all levels of economic and political hierarchy? And why are women in leadership positions immediately suspected of representing “arbitrary authority” and “big sister”?
Since you don’t claim that all authority is arbitrary, I can only interpret this as saying that authority by women – but not men – is inherently illegitimate, which is exactly the Trumpist fascist position, which in the end makes a lot of sense knowing your politics.
steven t johnson 06.20.25 at 2:32 pm
Here’s a bad faith strawman argument—“if you demand fair representation for women and POC at all levels of economic and political hierarchy, you are justifying hierarchy and (by some absurd leap of logic) making it worse.”
The absurd leap of logic is imagining that an unfair hierarchy can be made fair merely by randomizing the people at the top. Women are not representatives of women when they join the bourgeoisie, they are members of the bourgeoisie and they represent their class. The notion that having women at the top will improve the position of women is nonsense. The class hierarchy condemns the majority of the population to losing.
MisterMr 06.20.25 at 5:12 pm
@TM 19
I’ve read some (not many) feminist analysis, but this doesn’t mean I know what you (or a specific feminist) believe are the main mechanisms of patriarchy, only what are the ones that are more often cited.
In fact I think the unconscious bias and the self selection that I cited are the ones that are most common, but then of these are the mechanisms of patriarchy, then patriarchy cannot be the cause of inequality, it is just the name used for a particular kind of inequality.
engels 06.20.25 at 8:51 pm
why is it wrong to demand equal representation for women and POC at all levels of economic and political hierarchy?
Do you want to lock up a million women or free a million men?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/252828/number-of-prisoners-in-the-us-by-gender/
engels 06.21.25 at 12:43 pm
why are women in leadership positions immediately suspected of representing “arbitrary authority” and “big sister”?
Beats me.
https://www.itv.com/news/2025-06-15/first-ever-female-mi6-chief-named-in-historic-appointment
Tm 06.23.25 at 9:10 am
engels 23, So feminists are to be blamed for the US prison complex (run mostly be men of course). Congratulations, that is taking bad faith to a whole new level.
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