Beyond Add-Women Politics

In addition to summarizing the main findings, the conclusion also sets forth additional key features of women’s inclusion. This includes how the Global South continues to outpace the Global North in pursing policies aimed at women’s inclusion. It also explores the backlash women face as a result of these policies seeking to destabilize male dominance, in which violence is endemic rather than epiphenomenal to women’s inclusion. It also challenges the formal/informal institutional dichotomy, as informal dynamics impact all formal institutions in very gendered ways. It emphasizes the need to focus on men and masculinities, not just women, when promoting gender equality. And it offers some possible policy alternatives that would promote a more critical feminist idea of gender equality, including marriage equality, reproductive justice, transgender rights, marginalized identity rights, and disarmament.

The “Problem” with Recognizing Women’s Economic Rights

This chapter focuses on efforts to recognize and increase women’s access to economic goods like employment, credit, and inheritance. Women’s economic rights are considered central to bettering their own lives, the lives of their families, and their states, illustrated in the phrase that women are “smart economics.” But issues like work-sector segregation, persistent wage gaps, household responsibilities, and informalization strongly impact women’s access to economic goods. Despite that more women participate in the economy today, they are not necessarily “better off” as the world order produces unstable work environments. This is further interrogated through an examination of microcredit, the “productivity” trap, and the recent economic crisis. Ultimately, global organizations’ emphasis on women is counter-productive in a world order that relies upon gender difference to operate and devalue particular forms of labor.

The “Problem” with Women’s Representation in Government

Focusing on efforts to increase women’s representation, this chapter explores “what we know” about how to promote women’s inclusion in government. It explores research on women’s bureaucracies, sex quotas, and efforts to promote more women in government positions—including as cabinet ministers, judges, and national leaders. It then critically engages key issues with all of these policies and practices, including poor implementation; informal limits and bounded agency; persistent gender roles; lack of intersectionality; and the co-optation of these efforts by neoliberal institutions. Women are affected by the size of the institution, their over-qualifications, and ideas of competency. Ultimately, women’s representation is treated as a panacea for state development and governance, in which women are promoted based on essentialist assumptions that they are more honest, trustworthy, and reliable.

Add Gender and Stir

This chapter provides an overview—including the central argument, explanation of key terms, and objectives—of the book. It outlines the central argument that efforts to include more women through the adoption of woman-centered policies like sex quotas, violence against women laws, and employment and credit laws will not create gender equality. It identifies how, despite the last forty years of efforts made by countless states to include more women, women remain primarily excluded from government and the economy, and continue to be situated at the receiving end of violence. It offers an alternative framing of women’s inclusion to expose five key issues in how these policies do little to destabilize gender or promote equality. The chapter then introduces the reader to “analytical gender” as a framework for illustrating the issues with policies and practices of women’s inclusion.

The “Problem” with Protecting Women from Violence

This chapter explores policies aimed at addressing violence against women, including domestic violence, sexual assault, trafficking, and sexual harassment. Most states criminalize all or some of these, thanks primarily to active feminist movements within and between states. However, violence against women remains an epidemic, in part because of gendered beliefs about violence. These include notions that violence against women is a “women’s issue”; it is not really violence; it is a private affair; and it is a woman’s fault. These pervasive beliefs mar efforts to prosecute violence though a “leaky” justice pipeline in which women are discouraged from seeking redress. Global organizations that promote women’s empowerment as a way to eradicate violence ignore how neoliberal economic order is destabilizing gender roles. Paradoxically, women’s cheap, temporary, and informal labor are preferred, undermining men’s gender roles that are reinforced with violence.

Dual and Dueling Gender in Global Narratives

Through a tracing of key international documents, one can better understand how gender equality emerged as a specific set of politics and how “gender equals women” was a key development in this process. This chapter focuses on two narratives about gender that remain in tension with one another. One is radical and critical of the world order, while the other treats gender as a “technocratic” shortcut—treating women as a means to an end. Through a careful reading of the Geneva Conventions, reports on the World Conferences on Women, the Vienna Declaration, the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the Declaration on Violence Against Women, and United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325), a dual and dueling set of global narratives emerges. These narratives are reproduced in a neoliberal world order that prefers and promotes liberal feminist women’s rights and inclusion that adds women without challenging or radically destabilizing gender or the gendered institutions that exclude women in the first place.

Gender Equality and the Illusion of Progress

This chapter outlines the central ideas engaged throughout the book. It begins by exploring the data on women’s inclusion. This includes efforts to promote women in government through the creation of women’s bureaucracies, adoption of sex quotas, and promotion of women as leaders, cabinet members, and judges. It then introduces women’s economic rights, including employment, credit, and inheritance laws. It further discusses how states are addressing violence against women. It then explores and problematizes how gender equality is used in research. It introduces women’s inclusion as a liberal feminist norm and its constitutive elements, including representation, recognition, and protection. It links these efforts to the hegemonic power of liberal feminism, in which there is a global campaign to “add gender and stir.” This phrase is a critique that such efforts to add women to the agenda do not necessarily challenge gender binaries or alter gendered institutions.