MUCH OF our country's constitutional, political and social framework has been couched in the work of Enlightenment thinkers, who provided a language of rights indispensable to American democracy -- rights such as equality of opportunity. The philosophies of these thinkers, diverse as they were, were tied by the general ideal of bettering the human condition. In this respect, contemporary satisfaction with merely providing a de jure equality of opportunity is a disappointing departure from Enlightenment ideals. By focusing strictly on providing an equality of opportunity for women in the workplace, society has forgotten that legal changes don't necessitate social and cultural changes.
Women have all the explicit legal rights guaranteed specifically to men in the workplace. The result of this achievement has unequivocally been a more just society: today, according to Catalyst, 50.3 percent of all management and professional positions are held by women.However, women comprise only 7.9 percent of Fortune 500 top earners and 1.4 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs. A research survey by Catalyst indicates that both genders consider men to be "significantly more superior to women at 'take charge' behaviors."
This indicates that society's presuppositions on gender traits are not rogue residual beliefs from a time nobody remembers -- a time when women had little legal rights in the workplace. Rather, the legal rights guaranteed to women continue to be permeated and constricted by an unfounded yet sturdy predilection towards men as leaders.
A myriad of evidence, both extreme and tacit, exemplifies this constriction on women. According to The New York Times, on Oct. 6, Neil French, "a well-known advertising executive and worldwide creative director" of WPP Group, was asked why high-ranking female creative-advertising directors were virtually non-existent. He responded, bluntly, that women are "crap" and "don't deserve to make it to the top" because of the valuable time they spend as care-givers for their children.Many people point to French's resignation as an indication that the days in which sexism was tolerated in the workplace are nevermore.
However, French was a highly respected executive who happened to be imprudent enough to voice his opinion. Many male executives with similar opinions, even if less belligerent or conscious, are still holding positions that allow them to control promotions into high-paying and executive positions.
There are more subtle examples of how society's approach to women disadvantages them, even in something as commonplace as language. The two definitions of the word "virago" provide an interesting window into society's perspective on women leaders. According to Merriam-Webster, definition one of the word virago is "a loud overbearing woman." Definition two is "a woman of great stature, strength, and courage."
That the term virago applies both to a loud overbearing woman and a woman of great strength is certainly indicative of how men approach women leaders. Just as definition one of virago is inextricably linked to definition two, so too are women of great stature and courage thought of as overbearing and arrogant. Today's woman can't be a virago without being a virago.
Hundreds of years ago, some of the Enlightenment philosophers, incredibly ahead of their time, analyzed their societies and detested obvious injustices. Many of them loathed the arbitrarily hierarchical societies that surrounded them. In response to these injustices and in interest of bettering the human condition, they constructed a language of rights that highlighted concepts such as equality of opportunity as naturally important.
The power of this language, while a faithful server of humanity for hundreds of years, has considerably curbed.Those who cling on to equality of opportunity as the preponderant value of a just society fail to understand that the ultimate goal of political philosophy is not to create an elegant yet ineffective framework of ink. The use of a social framework based on the legal equality of opportunity to justify or excuse social conditions that disadvantage women or any group of individuals disappointingly misunderstands political philosophy in general.
Sina Kian's column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at skian@cavalierdaily.com
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