United States of Women Summit on the Gender Pay Gap

At the United States of Women Summit, women speakers addressed the issue of gender as it pertains to the economy.  However, taking a neoliberal feminist approach that is all too common in contemporary feminism, many speakers left out the importance of putting the pay gap into context.  A historical contextualization of the pay gap would not be based on exclusively gendered terms where statistics of women in the workforce are cited; it would examine the economy as it has developed over the past 35 years under neoliberal policies.  Unfortunately, political economy is rarely incorporated into mainstream feminism.  Gender is the only factor when discussing issues.  At the Summit, speakers such as actress Patricia Arquette and economist Heather Boushey are guilty of delivering trite remarks on women in the workforce, employing a paradigm of men v. women, measuring women only as they relate to men.  This regressive approach permeates contemporary feminism, and it is time that we, as feminists, begin to be critical of these problematic applications.

Patricia Arquette spoke about women and men in the workforce, describing the gender pay gap and the intersections of race and gender in order to elucidate how Black, Native American, and Latina women earn even less than the 79 cents that a white woman makes to a man’s dollar.  Some form of intersectionality is applied.  But only to women.  This is how contemporary feminists approach intersectionality.  By categorizing people into boxes along the lines of identity politics, a hierarchy of oppression becomes clear.  However, where women receive some form of complexity, men remain one homogenous group.  No neoliberal policies are invoked, although these policies have decimated worker’s rights across all genders and races.

Intersectionality as it pertains to identity politics and discursive trends in feminism is worth mentioning. Jennifer C. Nash, professor and scholar on African-American studies and Black women’s issues, writes about how some groups such as Combahee River Collective, a Black feminist group active in the latter 1970s, posit that radical politics come directly from one’s identity, a view Kimberle Chrensaw would advocate when she coined the term “intersectionality theory” a decade later.  Nash argues against such a limited outlook that tends to categorize people, fixing identity within intersectionality, and instead advocates for a “political community.” Rejecting identity politics, Nash argues that a political collection of people drawing from their affiliation must take the place of a cultural category of imagined sameness based on race.¹  The imagined sameness of each identity group that is perpetuated by contemporary feminism is something to further critique in our movement.

Economist Heather Boushey spoke at the Summit as well.  She discussed how women’s added hours of work has grown the economy 11 percent since 1979 and has boosted family income.  Boushay also cites that “women are not only their families’ care-givers, they are also their families’ breadwinners… 2 out of every 3 mothers earn so much that she’s actually the primary breadwinner or co-breadwinner for her family.”²  Again, a contextualization of these statistics within historical reality is absent.  The neoliberal State under which labor and gender has been acting since 1979 is not coupled with Boushey’s preferred talking points.  It is surprising from an economist to ignore the economic factors.

Lisa Adkins and Maryanne Dever deconstruct the rise of the category of “female bread-winner” and suggest that it has been misinterpreted in regards to the advancement of women in society and gender issues because of the fragility of a neoliberal system which places many workers in vulnerable position, especially women.  Women have increasingly entered into the workforce, outnumbering men in many industries, earn more Master and PhD degrees than men, and are steadily closing the gap between male and female earners in married households.  However, it is pointed out that with all of these advancements, the financial market has made homes more vulnerable. They are tied to deregulated financial institutions.  Wages have stagnated, employment has become less permanent and more scarce, and employment contracts offering social provisions such as insurance for health and unemployment have been cut, which then affect not just the worker but their dependents.³  The home life has been disrupted and placed in a very tenuous position because of these policies.  Following this, the focus on comparing the amount of men and women in the work force and/or the fact that women are increasingly becoming the “bread-winner” in the family misses the point.  This is because women actually are finding it more difficult to achieve the mobility to become “bread-winners” not because they are women, but because the position of “bread-winner” has been eroded as a result of neoliberal policies and the dismantling of provisions that made the position possible.⁴

A more critical analysis must be applied if we want to truly empower women.  Contemporary feminism must be critiqued as it is evidenced that there are numerous flaws in the current framework.  Focusing exclusively on gender runs the risk of missing the core problems.  The neoliberal economy must be studied as it relates to gender and women.  After all, gender is operating under a neoliberal State.  It would be unwise to not address this factor.

1. Jennifer C. Nash, “Practicing Love: Black Feminism, Love-Politics, and Post-Intersectionality,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, 2013, Vol 11 Issue 2, 14-19.
2. Heather Boushey, The United States of Women Summit, accessed at http://www.theunitedstateofwomen.org/livestream/.
3. Lisa Adkins and Maryanne Dever, “Housework, Wages, and Money: The Category of the Female Principle Breadwinner in Financial Capitalism,” Australian Feminist Studies, 2014 Vol. 29 No. 79, 50-51.
4. Ibid., 54.