INTRODUCTION

WHAT’S YOUR VISION OF GENDER EQUALITY?

Whatever it is, it needs to take a stand on divisions of labour. Work – who does what tasks in society, and what they get in return – is at the heart of social justice. Among those concerned with social hierarchies, in which certain groups enjoy higher status and more power than others, there is a long and distinguished tradition of turning a beady eye on divisions of labour attached to the social identities people are born into.You be the serf, I’ll be the landowner, for example, does not offer fertile ground for egalitarian relations between those two social categories. Little wonder that in the general scheme of things, these are matters that can inspire philosophical treatises and political manifestos, strikes and protests, campaigns and cries of ‘Oil the guillotine, Pierre!’

When it comes to the gendered division of labour, just about everyone is familiar with the basic statistics. We know that along the ‘vertical’ dimension of prestige and pay, men remain firmly installed at the top. For example, in 2022 men still held more than 80 per cent of the top ‘C-suite’ roles in North American and European financial services firms.1 Among the world’s 40 largest banks, all but one had a man as chief executive officer at the beginning of 2024. Men also took up 78 per cent of roles as finance ministers and 87 per cent of those as the heads of central banks in OECD countries.2 (These are the countries, including the world’s richest, that are committed to market economies and democracy and are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.) But men are also overrepresented in jobs on the bottom two rungs of the occupational ladder, in roles like caretaker, garbage collector, and process, plant and machine operative.3

Clear ‘horizontal’ divisions of labour also remain. These divisions only partly line up with our stereotypes about differences between women and men in terms of traits, abilities, values and motivations.4 Females’ (modest) advantage in language abilities and supposed keen interest in people rather than things are sometimes used to explain their lower representation in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) occupations.5 Yet turn to film screenwriting, a job seemingly custom-built for stereotypical feminine skills and interests, and you will find that 81 per cent of screenwriters are men – an even steeper gender imbalance than is seen among people with PhDs in computer and mathematical science.6 Less often commented on is that these horizontal divisions are linked to men’s much higher rates of fatal work-related injuries compared to women.7

Finally, we all know there are marked differences between women and men when it comes to the amount of time spent in paid work in the market versus unpaid work taking care of the home and its occupants.8 The average woman in the UK spends about 24 hours per week doing unpaid childcare, adult care and household chores, and 21 hours per week in paid work or education. For the average UK man, the priorities are reversed, with about 27 hours of paid work or study per week and 18 hours of unpaid work. He also enjoys 3 more hours of leisure every week than his female counterpart (which gives him plenty of spare time to read this book).9 Unpaid domestic labour takes gendered patterns too. Women are more likely to do the time-sensitive chores-without-end like cooking, grocery shopping, cleaning, laundry and routine childcare. In contrast, men are more likely to do more sporadic, time-flexible activities, like playing with the kids, and tasks like mowing the lawn or mending the gate that can be held off until a convenient moment, such as the weekend, the new year or the end of time.10

These divisions are both cause and consequence of the sex-based hierarchy of status and power over resources, aka patriarchy, that we see in the advanced economies of the Global North that are the focus of this book.11 But our progress in dismantling these arrangements has been stymied by two false visions that pervade mainstream debate and discussion.12

The first is what I call the Different But Equal perspective. This reframing of gender equality emerged in the 1990s, when the steady erosion of the gender traditionalism of the 1950s hit a wall.13 The ‘Equal’ part holds that women and men now rightly enjoy equal o