Sexism

• 1. Introduction

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  Sexism is prejudice or discrimination based on a person's sex or gender, and it primarily affects women and girls. On the 18th of November 1965, at a Student-Faculty Forum at Franklin and Marshall College, a contributor named Pauline M. Leet reached for a new word. Arguing against the exclusion of women, she compared the position to that of a racist. In that moment, she said, you might be called a sexist. Legal scholar Fred R. Shapiro credits her with most likely coining the term. But a word is only a label for something far older. What happened after agriculture took root that made one gender inferior to the other? Why were witches almost always women? How does a pay slip, a menu, or a baby's blanket carry the same logic? And what does it mean that the masculine, again and again, became the default standard against which everyone else is measured?

• 2. Coining A Word

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  Caroline Bird delivered a speech called "On Being Born Female" before the Episcopal Church Executive Council in Greenwich, Connecticut. Published in 1968 in Vital Speeches of the Day, it gave the term sexism its first appearance in print, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The word arrived, but the analysis came in many shapes. Psychologists Mary Crawford and Rhoda Unger define sexism as prejudice that carries negative attitudes and values about women as a group. Peter Glick and Susan Fiske coined the term ambivalent sexism. They argued that stereotypes about women can be both positive and negative, splitting into hostile sexism and benevolent sexism. Feminist author bell hooks defines sexism as a system of oppression that disadvantages women. Philosopher Kate Manne draws a sharper line. In her framing, sexism rationalizes and justifies patriarchal norms, while misogyny polices and enforces them. Manne writes that sexism often tries to make patriarchal arrangements seem natural, good, or inevitable, so there appears to be no reason to resist them.

• 3. From Field To Hierarchy

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  Historians are reasonably sure that women held roughly equal social power to men in many pre-agricultural societies. After the adoption of agriculture and sedentary cultures, the idea that one gender was inferior to the other took hold, most often imposed on women and girls. Ancient law made the inequality explicit. Women in ancient Rome could not vote or hold political office. In ancient China, children absorbed Confucian principles teaching that a woman should obey her father in childhood, her husband in marriage, and her son in widowhood. Egypt offered a partial exception. A woman's status depended on her father or husband, yet she held property rights and could attend court, including as a plaintiff. Women of the Anglo-Saxon era were commonly afforded equal status. Centuries later, that older logic of inferiority would find a darker outlet in the courts and pyres of early modern Europe.

• 4. Accusations And Witch Trials

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  Between the 15th and 18th centuries, the witch trials may have been fueled by sexism. In early modern Europe and its North American colonies, claims spread that witches threatened Christendom, and the misogyny of the period drove the persecution. Heinrich Kramer's Malleus Maleficarum played a major role in the hunts. Kramer argued that women were more likely than men to practice witchcraft, writing that a woman is "a foe to friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colors!" The pattern has not vanished. Witchcraft remains illegal in several countries, including Saudi Arabia, where it is punishable by death; in 2011 a woman was beheaded there for witchcraft and sorcery. In Tanzania, about 500 elderly women are murdered each year after such accusations. In India and Nepal, discrimination based on gender often interacts with discrimination based on caste, making these crimes relatively common.

• 5. The Law Of Marriage

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  By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law, and the legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage. That doctrine, called coverture, governed U.S. and English law until the 20th century. U.S. women were not legally defined as "persons" until 1875, in Minor v. Happersett. Restrictions lingered into living memory. French married women obtained the right to work without their husband's permission in 1965, and women in West Germany gained that right in 1977. In Franco's Spain, the permiso marital required a husband's consent for a wife to work, own property, or travel, and it was abolished in 1975. In Australia, until 1983, a married woman's passport application had to be authorized by her husband. The constraints persist elsewhere. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Family Code names the husband as head of household and requires a wife to live wherever he chooses. Financial transactions often legitimize control. Article 13 of Tunisia's Code of Personal Status says a husband shall not force consummation in default of payment of the dower, implying that, if the dower is paid, marital rape is permitted. In 2012, High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said that ensuring women have full autonomy over their bodies is the first crucial step towards substantive equality between women and men.

• 6. The Vote And The Page

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  New Zealand became the first country to grant women the right to vote, in 1893. The road since has been uneven and slow. Swiss women gained the right to vote in federal elections only in 1971, and the canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden was forced to grant the local vote in 1991 by the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland. French women were granted the right to vote in 1944, Greek women in 1952, and women in Liechtenstein in 1984. Saudi Arabia, as of August 2015, was the most recent country to extend the vote, in 2011. Winning the ballot did not end the bias. Studies in democracies including Australia, Canada, and the United States show women still represented through gender stereotypes in the press. Certain issues such as education tend to be linked with female candidates, while taxes are linked with male ones. The coverage leans on female candidates' appearance and personality, portraying them as emotional and dependent. The same default operates in everyday language, where the male becomes the standard.

• 7. The Male As Norm

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  Sexism in language exists when language devalues members of a certain gender, and researchers point to a semantic rule of the male-as-norm. The male becomes the standard, and those who are not male are relegated to the inferior. Generic masculine terms carry the bias quietly. "Mankind," "man" for humanity, the default "he" for a person of unknown gender, and the unnecessary marker in "male nurse" all assume a male center. In 2012, French Prime Minister Francois Fillon declared the word "mademoiselle" banished from administrative forms. In German, gerund nouns offer a gender-neutral path; instead of die Studenten or die Studentinnen, one can write die Studierenden, meaning the people who are studying. In written Chinese, some writers note that the character for wife is composed of a female part and a broom, considered of low worth. Calling a grown woman a "girl" rather than a "woman" implies she is subordinate or not fully mature. These markers shape how labor is valued long before a wage is set.

• 8. The Cost Of Work

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  In 2008, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development found that women on average had 20% less chance of holding a job and were paid 17% less than men. The report estimated that about 8 percent of the variation in gender employment gaps, and 30 percent of the variation in gender wage gaps across member countries, could be explained by discriminatory practices. The figures sharpen the higher one looks. In the United States, women make up 52% of the overall labor force but only three percent of corporate CEOs and top executives, a pattern called the glass ceiling effect that is especially persistent for women of color, who perceive a "concrete ceiling." Weight adds another filter. A 2009 study found overweight women badly underrepresented among company bosses, between five and 22% of female CEOs, while overweight men made up between 45% and 61% of male CEOs. Numbers also reveal the pay gap directly. Eurostat found a gender pay gap of 27.5% across EU member states in 2008, and the U.S. female-to-male earnings ratio stood at 0.77 in 2009. When the first Equal Pay Act passed in 1963, female full-time workers earned 48.9% as much as male full-time workers. Attitudes vary sharply by place. In the World Values Survey of 2005, the share agreeing that wage work should be restricted to men was 3.6% in Iceland and 94.9% in Egypt.

  Objectification, in social philosophy, is the act of treating a person as an object or thing. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum listed properties that mark it, including instrumentality, denial of autonomy, inertness, fungibility, violability, ownership, and denial of subjectivity. Rae Helen Langton, in Sexual Solipsism, added three more: reduction to body, reduction to appearance, and silencing. The logic surfaces in commerce and culture. In 1980, Kathleen Bick took a male business partner to dinner at L'Orangerie in West Hollywood and received a "ladies' menu" with no prices while her guest got one with prices. She hired lawyer Gloria Allred to file a discrimination suit under the California Civil Rights Act, saying the menu left her feeling "humiliated and incensed." Though the lawsuit was dropped, the restaurant ended the policy. Advertising carries subtler versions, and some countries respond directly. Norway's Sol Olving explained that you could have a naked person advertising shower gel, but not a woman in a bikini draped across a car. Anti-pornography feminist Catharine MacKinnon, with Andrea Dworkin, argued that pornography reduces women to tools and is a form of sex discrimination, contributing to belief in rape myths.

  Oppositional sexism is a term coined by transfeminist author Julia Serano, who defined it as the belief that male and female are rigid, mutually exclusive categories. Serano argues this normalizes masculine expression in males and feminine expression in females while demonizing femininity in males and masculinity in females. The concept supports cissexism, the norm that views cisgender people as natural and privileged compared with transgender people. Serano describes a dangerous precedent: if men are big then women must be small, and if men are strong then women must be weak. The harms are measurable. The 2008-09 National Transgender Discrimination Survey found that Black transgender people in the United States lived in extreme poverty at more than twice the rate for transgender people of all races, and over eight times the general U.S. population rate of 4%. Legal protection has shifted in steps. In June 2020, the United States Supreme Court ruled that federal civil rights law protects gay, lesbian, and transgender workers. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that an employer who fires a person for being transgender fires them for traits it would not have questioned in members of a different sex, exactly what Title VII forbids. The ruling did not protect employees in businesses of 15 workers or fewer.