Justice, Gender, and the Family

"This is definitely a book I recommend to men. A lot of men who have left-wing political views of one kind or another say, “Well of course I’m a feminist! Of course women’s equality is important.” They pay lip service to that goal. But being men, they do not necessarily have a visceral sense of what these questions are all about. Susan Okin has written a book which is not visceral at all. It’s an intellectual book, it’s very abstract. It engages with all of the “great men” of political theory through a feminist lens, in a very rigorous and analytical way. She shows that the exclusion of women from centuries of conversation – about what equality, liberalism and freedom mean – has had a really distorting influence. I think the main message of her book is that you can’t take a political order that’s been constructed over hundreds of years on the basis of the disempowerment of women, and then one day say, as a kind of add-on, “oh and also we’ll treat women fairly”. Once you take seriously the idea that women are equal, you actually have to rethink social and political institutions from the ground up. Yes, and everything else. The question you have to ask isn’t “How can we take these institutions that we have built up and stop discriminating in them?”, it’s “What kind of institutions would we have built if it had been an equal partnership all along?” That means a very different attitude towards family and social life. It probably means different ideas about work and workplaces. It has implications for all kinds of things. Well, we take for granted the fact that women are a minority in parliaments (everywhere except Rwanda and Andorra). That alone tells you something. I don’t think there’s any Fortune 500 company that has a female majority of directors. That’s not a coincidence, and it’s not going to change as a result of some law next year. But it will, and should, change over time. It’s something that should be taken seriously."