Does equality mean simply that men and women make up about half of those in any given institution? What about the continuing differences in the types of majors men and women choose, with women particularly underrepresented in engineering and the natural sciences? Or that female college graduates still make less than male college graduates? Even among men, attendance rates vary greatly by race and class.
This is a question I've been interested in for a while, because it seems that how you define equality in any aspect of social life has some pretty massive implications. For example, if you've got a very narrow definition of inequality that more or less comes down to pay inequity or occupational segregation, then as women and men approach parity on these issues, you might believe that feminism is no longer necessary (and I expect many readers will have heard this refrain in the past).
As I've written about before, I believe that this is too restrictive a view of a concept like inequality. For one thing, it totally brushes aside any consideration of intersectionality, and instead assumes that "women" and "men" form homogeneous social categories. For another, it reduces inequality to one dimension of social life and thus ignores continuing cultural sexism. Finally, any train of thought that leads one to believe that feminism is obsolete is probably based on some kind of zero-sum thinking, whereby any gains made by women have to mean corresponding losses for men.
Challenging these narrow conceptions of inequality seems to be the key to getting fauxgressive people on board with feminist projects (a realization which many have come to long before me).
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