The Persistence of Gender Inequality

Despite centuries of campaigning, women still earn less and have less power than men. Equality remains a goal not yet reached. In this incisive account of why this is the case, Mary Evans argues that optimistic narratives of progress and emancipation have served to obscure long-term structural inequalities between women and men, structural inequalities which are not only about gender but also about general social inequality. In widening the lenses on the persistence of gender inequality, Evans shows how in contemporary debates about social inequality gender is often ignored, implicitly side-lining critical aspects of relations between women and men. This engaging short book attempts to join up some of the dots in the ways that we think about both social and gender inequality, and offers a new perspective on a problem that still demands society’s full attention.

Acknowledgements vii Preface viii 1 What is Gender Inequality? 1 Making Inequality 5 What Has Changed? 10 Changing Conditions 12 2 Worlds of Inequality 23 Exploiting the Feminine 25 Problems at Work 30 Problems of Agency 35 Locations of Inequality 38 3 Problems of Subjectivity 47 Imagining the Female Body 48 Other Bodies 53 How the Body Matters 58 Questions of Order 61 4 Enter Feminism 76 Conditions for Feminism 76 A Secondary Sex 82 Changing Times 87 Unchanging Times 97 5 Making Gender Equality 120 The Rights of Women 122 The Limits of Liberalism 130 Notes 140 Bibliography 152 Index 166