Friday Notes, April 26, 2024
Dear Friends —
Gender was a hard topic. Then it was an easier topic. Now it’s a really hard topic.
Gender was a hard topic in the non-profit world and public policy before about the mid-1990s — or, as I’ve heard the kids say these days, the late 1900s. At that time, a few women who identified as feminists spent intellectual energy and social capital knocking on the doors of power, pointing out the ways in which systems that discriminate against girls and women manifest in education, the labor market, politics and other domains. Think about the wage gap between men and women, and the underrepresentation of women in elected and appointed office. In global development, this was the era when poverty, high fertility, and ill health started to be explained by the low social status of women, relative to men.
Many cite the Fourth World Conference on Women, also known as Action for Equality, Development and Peace, held in Beijing in 1995, as a turning point in the promotion of what came to be called “gender equality.” The underlying system didn’t change quickly, but bias against women became widely discussed, and a lot of ideas and programs were created to tackle it. Girls’ scholarships, widespread adoption of quotas for the number of women in legislatures and on corporate boards, the creation of Ministries of Gender, gender policies, inclusion of gender-related aims within international development goals. Pretty much everyone involved in social and economic policies and programs became fluent in concepts around the ways in which rigid gender norms limit the life chances of women and girls.
This era — something like the turn of the century to the mid-2010s — was when gender was an easier topic. There was a shared understanding: when you’re talking about gender, you’re actually talking about girls and women. (Yes, men do have as much of a gender as women, but they were not the object of this attention and everyone understood that.) If you had expertise on gender, it meant you could see the ways in which the social construction of men’s roles and women’s roles manifested. Arguments were often framed in terms of scale: women hold up half the sky! And there were lots of powerful people and mainstream organizations, including male heads of state all over the world and multilateral institutions — who demonstrated attention to women’s status and rights in their rhetoric, as well as by building dedicated units to inform and influence decision making. Gender, as understood then, went from outside to inside.
Then, in 2014, Facebook permitted users to choose from among 58 gender identities and state their preferred pronouns. Reflecting a growing appetite among young people to hold and express identities beyond the binary, the shift in that social media platform heralded what has turned out to be a fast-moving and complex upending of a shared understanding of both the word and the concept of “gender.” While gender used to connote the experiences of a particular half of the population, now it means something fragmented and dynamic: gender identity separate from sex assigned at birth, multiple gender identities, shifts over time in gender identity, unpredictable relationships between gender and sexual orientation, and fuzziness about what is inborn and what is chosen. (If you’re poly, is that a state or a trait? Does it matter?) This change is liberating for many, and may permit more nuanced understandings of the human experience. It also has made gender a very hard topic.
It is not easy to figure out how to simultaneously hold onto the gains obtained during the earlier eras, while accommodating and changing with newer and more complex concepts. We’re challenged to recognize that the systemic gender bias — the stuff that leads to the wage gap, for instance — is about the traditional binary, while at the same time putting energy into highlighting and combatting the social, economic, and political exclusion of people who do not hold the identity of man or woman in traditional ways. Many people who have worked on gender issues for decades are now facing this challenge — or maybe are trying to avoid it because we’ve only recently figured out how to open the doors of power. It was just getting easier and now we’re signing up for very hard.
If we are to advance new ways to think about the liberation of people from rigid gender norms, we have to do so without relying on the well-rehearsed arguments that we used during the easy period. We have to dig deeper to reveal the ways in which discrimination against women and hate toward people with non-traditional gender identities, sexual orientations, and gender expressions come from the same root — the same desire to dominate and the same anxiety about losing. We have to recognize what common cause really looks like. The self-same people and groups seeking to stigmatize and criminalize people across the gender spectrum are trying to roll back the hard won (and still not good enough) gains feminists have fought for over decades, and even centuries. In the complexity and the challenge of new ideas — in this very hard new moment — we have to stick together. We are all being pushed into boxes, and we need the strength of us all to open them up.
Just catching up with reading from late March, I was delighted to see the blog post “Who Will Double-down on MacKenzie Scott’s Giving?” by Ella Gudwin and Bradley Myles. (They saved me the trouble of writing something with a similar message.) Organizations receiving MacKenzie Scott grants have had the opportunity to make investments in their capacity, test out new models, refine their pathways to make change in the world. But the Scott grants were one-time, meant to catalyze not to sustain. This is the perfect moment for other funders — individual philanthropists and staffed foundations — to realize that there are a set of remarkable organizations that are now primed for even greater impact, with far less risk than would otherwise have been the case.
This reminds me of one of my absolute favorite videos of all time, about the importance of being the second one in a movement. I know I’ve shared it with you before, but I cannot resist doing it again. It’s three minutes of joy.
Have a good weekend,
-Ruth