THE TWO FACES OF FEMINISM

4 9 R T H E T W O F A C E S O F F E M I N I S M F R A N C E S M c C A L L R O S E N B L U T H ‘‘Today the combat takes a di√erent shape: instead of wishing to put man in a prison, woman endeavours to escape from one.’’ – Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex From where she sat in Paris in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir thought victory in the ‘‘battle of the sexes’’ was within sight – for both sides. Previously, woman chafed against inferior status by ‘‘mutilating, dominating man . . . she contradicts him, she denies his truth and his values.’’ Seducing where possible and haranguing where not, women often coped with male domination by way of emotional manipulation and belittlement. Male-directed hostility gave rise to innumerable defensive acts and small triumphs of self-assertion without bringing about systematic change. If women could break out of prison rather than shackle men, dealings between the sexes would no longer have to be so disagreeable. In modern diplomacyspeak , there would be a win-win outcome. Beauvoir painted a grim picture of the status of women in postwar France, but she was far more optimistic about the possibility of greater equality for those who would come after her. Despite the tenacity of social norms that kept women in the home 5 0 R O S E N B L U T H Y (only 36.5 percent of French women were in the labor force in 1946, dropping slightly to 34.6 percent in 1954 as men returned to civilian labor markets), French women had gained the right to vote in 1944. Because their second-class citizenship was a social construct that rested not only on men’s false understandings of women’s ‘‘true nature’’ but also on women’s resignation to their lot, Beauvoir hoped that the natural confidence and buoyancy of a new generation of girls growing up with the expectation of equality would become self-fulfilling. ‘‘It seems almost certain that sooner or later they will arrive at complete economic and social equality,’’ she wrote in the conclusion to The Second Sex. More than half a century after Beauvoir wrote those expectant words, that day has not yet come. In France as in other Western countries, to say nothing of the developing world, women lag behind men in positions of authority in nearly every realm of human life. In rich democracies education is now virtually equal across the sexes, and more women now work outside the home than ever before, but the ratio of men to women in positions of political and economic leadership remains starkly skewed. Women earn between fifty and eighty cents for every dollar earned by men, depending on the country and sector of the economy. If Beauvoir were alive today, she would no doubt have turned her attention, as her feminist heirs have done, to the ‘‘glass ceiling ’’ against which women still seem to be bumping their heads. If career success resembles a pyramid for men, it is for women a truncated one because fewer women than men make it to the peak in virtually every profession. Beauvoir would have noticed that two kinds of arguments have been advanced to explain this invisible ceiling, from which follow two sorts of solutions. One kind of argument focuses on the unconscious bias that infects people who have grown up accustomed to seeing women in inferior roles – that is to say, the unconscious bias lodged within everyone on the planet, including women themselves . Countless associations of women with lower levels of authority translate unconsciously into assumptions about less competency , ambition, and capacity for leadership. Social scientists have found, for example, that people (women and men) asked to judge a fictitious C.V. give lower scores on competence when the C.V. bears a female name. Although measurement has proved elusive T H E T W O F A C E S O F F E M I N I S M 5 1 R and scholarly opinion remains divided on the magnitude of unconscious bias, there...