“Canon” is a weird concept. It’s primary issue is obvious: it excludes the historical women who accomplished things as great as any man living at the time, thereby giving the impression that there just weren’t women doing anything important at the time due to strict gender gender roles. However, it goes deeper than just their erasure from official records. Their accomplishments may have rivaled that of their male counterparts, but the effort that they would have had to put in to get to that point, and the glass (or perhaps concrete) ceilings they would have faced in centuries gone by make their achievements arguably more impressive than the men doing the same things.
Thankfully we have progressed in leaps and bounds to get to where we are today, but as demonstrated by Caroline Criado-Perez’s Invisible Women, there remains a multitude of barriers around the world that prevent women, both directly and indirectly, from enjoying the same benefits that society has to offer men (1).
We have, of course, overtly misogynistic behaviour: FGM, femicide, lack of access to birth control/abortion services, and the prevalent dichotomy of female slut-shaming versus the acceptance and even celebration of male sexual prowess (3). Though these things can quite easily be explained as unfair to anyone who agrees that men and women are and should be equal, they persist.
It’s the hidden barriers, however, that Invisible Women surprised me most with. The things that aren’t intentional, but merely a result of a world where male-centric behaviours are so normalized that the insinuation of inequality sounds radical and disruptive (1). I kind of understand it, because the data around the sexism of Swedish snow-clearing needs an explanation, so much so that Criado-Perez dedicated an entire chapter to it.
There’s a fine line to walk between being branded as a brave feminist and an irritating “feminazi” (a term popularized in 1992 by conservative radio host Riush Limbaugh) (4). Arguing that women should be allowed to work, and vote, and own property? In the West, these aren’t controversial views, even among those with conservative leanings. You’d have to get reasonably deep into the world of the right-wing to find people who really think women holding jobs should be illegal, at least to the point they’d be willing to admit. However, propose allocating money to remove the misogyny from something as unbiased and objective as housing, or public transport, or any sort of physical infrastructure? Not so easy. The bias is undoubtedly there when you look at the numbers, but 1) a lot of people don’t look at the data because they don’t have the training to understand it (I certainly don’t but thankfully Criado-Perez is an excellent explainer), 2) it’s hard to encompass that scale of the issue in an attention-grabbing headline, but much easier to do so with a headline bashing liberals, and 3) in too many cases, the data simply doesn’t exist, which leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy (2). It’s easier to omit gender-segregated data, but without it, there’s no proof that (unintentional discrimination is occuring (1). Understanding is growing and eventually being taken into account by city planners, but the time it will take to convince everyone that sexist infrastructure is real, combined with the eventual re-vamp of said infrastructure is unlikely to be a quick process.
References
- Criado-Perez C. Invisible women. London: Chatto and Windus; 2019.
- Chen Y, Conroy N, Rubin V. Misleading Online Content. Proceedings of the 2015 ACM on Workshop on Multimodal Deception Detection [Internet]. 2015 [cited 25 March 2021];:15-19. Available from: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2823465.2823467
- Endendijk J, van Baar A, Deković M. He is a Stud, She is a Slut! A Meta-Analysis on the Continued Existence of Sexual Double Standards. Personality and Social Psychology Review [Internet]. 2019 [cited 25 March 2021];24(2):163-190. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7153231/
- Hesse M. Rush Limbaugh had a lot to say about feminism. Women learned how to not care. [Internet]. Washington Post. 2021 [cited 25 March 2021]. Available from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/rush-limbaugh-feminism-feminazis/2021/02/19/3a00f852-7202-11eb-85fa-e0ccb3660358_story.html