We Can Do Better by David Camfield

Author:David Camfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
Published: 2017-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Why Do Women Still Face Sexism?

INTERNATIONALLY, FLAT-OUT DENIAL THAT HUMAN society is causing the climate to change is fading; Donald Trump and his cronies are outliers, though denialist groups and individuals are still being funded by fossil fuel firms and right-wing foundations (Klein 2014: 44–45). Sadly, the same is not true when it comes to the refusal to face up to the reality that women around the world are still oppressed on the basis of their gender.1 So before answering the question that forms the title of this chapter, we need to briefly survey the evidence. Because some people in rich Western countries are sure that women in the Global North are doing fine but women in the Global South are not, I will focus on gender inequality in the advanced capitalist countries.

Far from Free and Equal

Let us begin with the most extreme manifestation of sexism: the killing of women by men. Everywhere women are much more likely to be killed by their male partners than vice versa. When men kill, it is usually the culmination of a history of abuse or after a woman ends a relationship. In contrast, women who kill their male partners usually do so in self-defence (Taylor and Jasinski 2011: 345). The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that globally up to 38 percent of murdered women are killed by their partners. Women are more than six times more likely to be killed by male partners than vice versa (WHO 2013: 26).

Non-fatal violence by men against women is also more common than violent acts by women against men. When men are violent to their female partners, they are much more likely to inflict serious injury than vice versa (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2013). The WHO calculates that three in ten women globally have experienced violence (including sexual violence) from an intimate partner. On top of that, 7.2 percent of women around the world are reported to have been forced to perform an unwanted sexual act by someone other than a male partner when they were over the age of 15 — please note that this does not count sexual assaults against younger girls (WHO 2013: 16, 18). Such assaults, along with the higher frequency of sexual assaults carried out by men against their female partners, are at the heart of rape culture (discussed in Chapter 4), which is all too real in advanced capitalist countries.

The fact of male violence makes threats and hateful words uttered by men against women fundamentally different from any anti-male comments that might be directed against men.2 It is impossible for women in rich countries to avoid hostile, demeaning words and images, whether offline or online. Women’s self-worth and self-confidence suffer as a result. These also suffer because of the many ways in which women are pressured to treat men’s preferences as more important than their own and to behave and appear in ways that appeal to men.3

Women face barriers when it comes to deciding for themselves if and when to become pregnant and have a child.

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