When Sheryl Sandberg and Jill Abramson—women leading powerful institutions in male-dominated industries—ignite our most robust media conversations about gender equality, we feminists face a quandary. Of course feminists want women who are tantalizingly close to the top to break through, and of course we know that the paucity of women leading our institutions is a glaring symbol of enduring gender hierarchy. But women will not succeed in dismantling one hierarchy by climbing to the top of another. It’s not nearly sufficient for us to become leaders without forcing our institutions to value all who have been undervalued. The vast majority of women, in America and worldwide, are ill-served by today’s economic paradigm. It is a paradigm that is founded on a steep hierarchy of value for everyone and everything (say, when a retail cashier’s hourly labor is deemed worthy of $7.25 and her boss’s $10,000). With hierarchy so essential to our economic system, it should be unsurprising that businesses exploit society’s undervaluation of women—as well as that of immigrants and people of color who are still mainly stuck at the bottom of our social and political hierarchies. — Heather McGhee, Demos President. More: thenation/blog/180031/does-feminism-have-class-problem
Posted on: Wed, 11 Jun 2014 21:08:13 +0000
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