Women still earn only 74 cents for every dollar men earn. So how can the economic system be reformed to make it more equitable and sustainable? That’s one big question the “Gender Equity and Capitalism: The Impact of Capitalist Development on Women’s Status and Rights” symposium will explore.
Sponsored by the University’s Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics and the Lorwin Lectureship on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, the symposium runs March 8 and 9 in Gerlinger Lounge and the Knight Law Center. The symposium will examine how capitalist systems affect gender from a multidisciplinary perspective.
Gender equity may seem like something distant, vague and unreal to some, but it is a reality, even in the 21st century, that many women deal with and that economic policy and discussion largely ignores. One thing to remember, as college students, is that this is something we are graduating into.
“When you look at it from a student perspective,” said Shehn Datta, third-year law student and graduate teaching fellow for the Wayne Morse Center, “it’s daunting when you think this is the job market that you’re entering, where the job market is shrinking as it is. And then to know that women aren’t getting equal recognition in the labor force.”
You’ve probably heard a girl friend repeat the joke, “Oh, well, I guess I’ll just stay home and raise kids if I can’t find a job.” But what if that’s not an alternative or what you want? As a young woman and a college graduate, you have spent time and money on qualifications that exceed this “fallback” position.
“You say, ‘I have these qualifications and I want to use them,’” Datta said. “But how do you use them when the economy continually seems to be shifting, but it at the same time doesn’t recognize women as equal?”
The symposium will address this issue and other closely related topics, looking at the state of current policy, media portrayal and possible solutions.
“There’s a real problem in the way that women’s work is valued and organized under a capitalist system, where everything becomes part of the market,” said Wayne Morse Center director Margaret Hallock, a co-organizer of the symposium. “People sell their labor on the wage system to earn an income. So what happens with all of the other kinds of work that have to be done in a society?”
Other kinds of work include caring for others, be it children, those with disabilities or those who are sick. In capitalist systems, caregivers — traditionally women — are penalized simply by the way the economy works. The United States, for instance, is the only industrial country in the world that doesn’t have paid parental leave. New parents in Sweden, in contrast, are entitled to 16 months of paid leave per child.
“People that take care of other human beings in our society earn less money, have less flexibility and have more responsibilities than they probably should,” Hallock said. “We want to examine how women’s unpaid labor can be better acknowledged and how women can be better served.”
The symposium will also focus on international aspects of gender equality and how capitalism in developing countries affects women and their traditional lifestyles. For instance, the pay gap and care penalty have been connected to the visible patterns of immigration from poorer to richer countries.
“Gender Equity and Capitalism” will consist mainly of keynote addresses and panel discussions, in which boards of panelists will speak on a topic of their expertise and then generate discussion with the audience.
“There are a lot of academic conferences and there are a lot of academic journals on the topic of gender,” said Barbara Pocock, co-organizer of the symposium, director of the Centre for Work & Life at the University of South Australia and visiting professor at the Wayne Morse Center. “But less frequent is an open conversation with people from the community and a range of disciplines, where you put your ideas out there and then think about what they mean for action. So that’s a really attractive thing about something like this, to have that conversation.”
The symposium will feature three keynote lectures. The first, “Gender Equality and Capitalism: An International Perspective,” will be given by Pocock on Thursday at 2:30 p.m. in Gerlinger Lounge. Others include care penalty from Nancy Folbre, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Caribbean feminism from Alissa Trotz, associate professor in Women and Gender Studies and Sociology at the University of Toronto.
Another event of note at the symposium is the pre-conference panel discussion “9-5? Women’s Work in Popular Culture,” hosted by Bitch Media on Thursday, March 8 at 12. p.m. in Gerlinger Lounge. This panel will examine how the economy affects women’s work, the image of women’s work and what choices are open to women.
“I think it’s important to deconstruct the messages that are in popular culture, to really look at them,” Hallock said. “Sometimes these images just wash over you, and you don’t give them much thought.”
Another panel of note is the closing panel, “Alternatives: Rethinking Development, Capabilities, and the Economy under Capitalism,” on Friday, March 9, at 3:15 p.m. in 175 Knight Law Center. This panel will examine how people can organize in their communities in a non-market way to provision themselves.
“I think we’re going to end with these young, hopeful, optimistic alternatives,” Hallock said. “And they may be small kernels but, you know, those are important … those are the stories on the margin of the big system that drive our lives.”
For a full schedule of the “Gender Equity and Capitalism” symposium, visit http://WayneMorseCenter.uoregon.edu/gender_equality.