Its 3014, and we have achieved gender equality…

[Thistledew]

Men and women are seen as true equals. They are equally represented in positions of power; there is no pay gap; there is no differentiation or stigma in terms of job roles, hobbies or in respect of domestic responsibilities. Men and women are seen as equally capable of and responsible for all aspects of child-raising (apart from breast feeding). The way people choose to dress and behave is completely fluid, with things like clothing, personal grooming and wearing of makeup seen as being solely the choice of the individual. Gender based violence is seen as primitive behaviour, beyond which the human race has now evolved.

Do we still have a need for gender designation?

The biological function of reproduction still throws up obvious gender differentials. Assuming that we still largely operate in a pair-bonding system, both expectant parents would have the same rights to take time off work to attend ante-natal appointments, to take time off after the birth to care for the post-natal care, and to flexibility in employment for care for children, the disabled and the elderly.

However, it does not make sense for all employment rights to be equal. For example, the right to be able to avoid heavy lifting, long hours standing up, exposure to chemicals etc only applies to those people who are actually pregnant with the child, and not the non-pregnant partner. Is it still therefore useful to designate people as ‘men’ and ‘women’, as a short hand to saying “women are entitled to additional pregnancy-related employment rights”, or would it be sufficient to say “these employment rights apply to anyone with medical proof of pregnancy”?

Could we do away with male/female designation altogether, on birth certificates, employment records and other official documents?

Is competitive sport the only time at which it would be unfair not to differentiate?

NB I’m not saying that doing away with gender designation would bring about proper equality, which I think has to come first before we can be truly gender neutral. This may be a completely pointless musing, but I thought it might be a fresh way to consider gender and what it actually is.

NB ii. It may be 3014, but we still don’t have hover boards. Sorry.

This gender equal society seems to be based on resolving three issues - pregnancy, heteronormativity and the division between work which is paid and work which is not (mostly reproductive work - childcare. care of the sick and elderly etc).

There are always going to be some children who have no contact with the birth mother due to wished for surrogacy and not wanted death of mothers. But most mothers will want to do some childcare of their own children (be that 10, 20 or whatever percent). The only way of getting rid of the vast majority of mothers doing some childcare is to create a society in which most women, for some reason, wish to give birth to children who they don't want a relationship with. What would be the other reason most women would get pregnant for? A public service?

If no such reason has come into existence for mothers to do this, then they will still be doing some childcare. For men to do the same amount of childcare, each mother must find a man (or a number of men) and make a private arrangement with them to carry out the same amount of child care of her children as she is doing. The proposed method here is through heteronormative pair bonding, although it could also be done through friends, brothers, uncles etc. But what if no such men are to be found by the individual mother? What if she doesn't even want to find such men, as huge numbers of women, both straight and gay, currently don't? Why is her pregnancy and childcare only compatible with gender equality if she makes such arrangements?

Such a scenario seems to reinforce some of the major modes of oppression of women - that their relationship to children is secondary in the organisation of society to romantic relationships, and that her equality and access to social position is dependent upon her ability to negotiate private arrangements with a man or number of men in her personal life.

These problems are a consequence of making a division between paid work (which has a set of rights, status and payments in the proposed utopia) and reproductive work (which is unpaid and seems to have no status), and importantly that the division is to be reinforced spatially and temporally You are either at paid work or you are having time off for childcare but the possibility of doing both in the same place at the same time will be exceptional (which it isn't, in many parts of the world now).

Rather than attempt to either convince lots of women to go through all the difficulties of childbirth or pregnancy to provide children for men who don't have access to the pair bond (i.e. a woman agreeing to be his sexual partner) or to devise a society where most women must pair bond with men to gain equality, wouldn't it be better to simply accept there is no just and egalitarian way of ensuring private caring responsibilities are equal?

Which leaves two options - a. get rid of unpaid childcare and pay mothers (or mother plus uncle, brother, partner, sister grandmother if any of those people are sharing care with her and/or b. provide high quality childcare through the state (and if 50/50 childcare between males and females is wanted, then most of those employees would be male to balance out the paid mothers).

But for a female descendent of mine to have to make private arrangements with anyone (be they male or female) to do childcare if she wants both children and gender equality, well that isn't equality. It is telling women they can only have kids under private contract with men.

Hmm, I would say that enabling (paying) women to raise their own children individually and in isolation from others makes no sense from an economic or societal viewpoint. Yes, traditional "women's work" should be valued. But sorry, I disagree that "reproducing" falls under "useful work". It's really not - it's a personal choice, which, until we get population growth under control, is inherently selfish.

Caring for children has always been done in groups, allowing mothers (parents) to get on with other tasks that benefit society/the community. Each mother sitting around looking after only her own child is a pointless waste of human resources. Community supported childcare, great. Individuals paid to raise own children, not great. I'm always puzzled when people try to compare the worth of a SAHP with a nursery worker. I look at it like farming. Proper professional farmers raise crops that feed a vast number of people and benefit the economy. This would be like the nursery worker who has excellent training and is looking after a number of children, freeing parents to work and make their own contribution to society. SAHPs are like people with an allotment. Fine for you if you have the time and money to grow your own food (or raise your own children), but only really of any great benefit to you and your family - not to anyone else. So why should society financially support it?

I would agree that childcare would be free (state-funded), of excellent quality, and readily available in this utopian future, and that no-one should have to have a partner to ensure that childcare could be shared. I doubt any of us intended it that way. I think we were looking at it more from the angle that when a couple choose to have a child together, there will be no expectation that the woman will be the one who sacrifices her career and does the bulk of the childcare. A couple will be absolutely free to choose to divide the childcare or both continue to work. Or if one parent really wants to take on the bulk of the childcare and take a career break, to be able to do so and hopefully not face obstacles or prejudice on his/her return to work. Equally, lone parents will not have to face any additional financial burden of childcare. But I still maintain that single or lone, only the financially independent should get to stay home with their children. I see no benefit to the state supporting parents to stay home beyond the first year.

I really don't understand a lot of your post. What do you mean about mothers having children but not wanting a relationship with them? What do you mean about women providing men with children? And about work and childcare being spatially and temporally divided? Are you talking about parents being more free to take their children to work? Also a good idea, if practically possible. I certainly don't get what you mean about women still being oppressed by having to form a romantic relationship with a man or their relationship with their children being secondary. I'm certain that's not the angle most of us are looking at this from.

"single or lone"? I meant single or partnered.

I am not going to get drawn into a debate over whether single mothers, SAHM mothers or mothers in general are selfish. The arguments are well rehearsed elsewhere. I am also not going to get into a critique of global farming compared to women's small holding.

This is a matter of simple probability.

Let's say women's childcare time is green balls in a bag, men's childcare time is yellow balls.

Most women choose to go through childbirth and pregnancy because they want to have a relationship with their baby. Having a relationship involves spending time with someone, if that someone is a child that time is childcare (if you are uncomfortable with referring to what birth mothers do as childcare, then call it looking after children or whatever you are happy with, but I'm not typing that out each time).

So in selection of childcare, we almost always start off with a green ball preselected.

If you want ten childcare workers, so that each person does 10% of the childcare time, you randomly select another nine balls from the bag, that may be either green or yellow. But because you always have one green ball to start with, the probability is that most of the ten balls will be green. So most childcare is done by greens.

To make it simpler arithmetic, if you want two childcare workers, and you have preselected a green ball, you then randomly select a yellow or green ball from the bag to make it up to two balls. The probability is then that 50% of your pairs will be green yellow and 50% will be green green. That means that 75% of the childcare balls are green.

The are two ways around this:

1. Don't preselect any green balls. This means convincing all women to give birth to children that they have no intention of spending any time with, and then randomly allocating newborn babies to people.

1. Preselect a green ball every time but also preselect a yellow ball. This means convincing all women that they must, by their own means or by allocation by their state or their parents, find a man to share childcare with if they want a child.

2 is a. a patriarchy and b. absolutely dependent on society forcing couples together based on gender. Which means gender would have to be at the very heart of their society, and the whole question the OP was asking, would gender cease to matter... Well, no. Gender would matter more than ever before.

I will say in answer to you not understanding my post, that is because you are assuming that I am talking about SAHMs or women individually looking after their own children, and you have then responded with a SAHM vs WOHM debate.

I am not suggesting women stay home. I am suggesting that almost all women who choose to have a baby will do so because they want to spend some time with that baby. That does not make them SAHMs.

If gender does not matter outside of pregnancy, the gender of the other people providing childcare would be totally random. There would be no reason for there to be any such thing as a 'father' at all.

Nope, still no idea. Sorry.

1. Women choose to have babies because they want to spend some time with them.
2. The default childcare arrangement is therefore a mother and some other people (this has nothing to do with SAHMs).
3. If gender did not matter, the other people would be equally likely to be male or female.
4. The only way of making the amount of childcare done by women as a class and men as a class equal is to either a. stop birth mothers spending any time with their own children or b. make up a male role that is considered equivalent to that of birth mother, and insist each birth mother has such a male around. That is patriarchy.

i think this thread has moved beyond my intellectual capabilities, but could i just ask, what about the men who choose to be involved with a woman who is pregnant because they want to spend some time with them? or by green balls are you talking about the post-birth activities that only the birth mother may be able to undertake, such as breastfeeding, and the physiological and psychological impact of birth on her personally?

i realise we also then move into the realms of whether a father's genetic relationship with the child would still be relevant in this fantasy world.

I am sorry if this is too intellectual. I was trying for the opposite but am clearly failing. I am trying to address the situation described in the first post.

The OP asked if gender designation would be required (other than for pregnant people) in a gender equal society.

I am not talking about physiological tasks like breast feeding or recovering from birth.

I am saying that when women choose to become pregnant, they almost always do so because they want to spend some time with that child. That may be all day or it may be one hour a day. If we are talking about the OP's gender equal society, the default of children coming into existence must be women's choice (not forced pregnancy, as that would not be equal).

So the default arrangement is that a child is looked after by the mother - who is a woman, and some other people.

If gender does not matter, childcare is the other people who are 50/50 male female plus the mother.

If the OP also wants her gender equal society to have men doing equal amounts of childcare to women, she would need gender to exist to create a role for the men so as to even up the effort put in by the mother.

There will of course be some couples who are heterosexual, love each other and do 50% of the childcare each. They have an equal (1 green 1 yellow) relationship and childcare arrangement.

But many, many women don't want to be in a heterosexual relationship with a father or have any father around at all. So in society as a whole you can't use compulsory heteronormativity to create gender equality for all mothers.

almond why is childcare 50/50 plus the mother? After childbirth, why not 50/50 mother and father + other people of whatever sex where necessary or desired?

Because lots of children are brought into existence by women who neither want nor need a father around.

OK thanks, I see what you're getting at. Would it need to be engineered as 50/50 women and men for childcare or would it just not matter who was doing it?

I think there are lots of ways you could socially engineer it so that men as a group did 50% of all caring work. You could, for example, make it the norm that men were the default people responsible for the elderly. Or you could have quotas for people going into childcare, to make sure lots of men went into that job.

But to do any of that, there would always have to be such a thing as gender recognised by society.

The OP's premise is that gender would not be needed because the mechanism for gender equality would be (usually) heteronormative pair bonding. I am pretty certain that in the absence of gender, long term heteronormative pair bonding would be very rare.

Unless men have started giving birth, I do think we need gender designations. Because gender equality can only be achieved if the impact that pregnancy and lactation takes on women is recognised and compensated for.
It is also important for adequacy of medical assistance.

But I agree that we could do away with Mr/Miss/Mrs designations. At the very least there should be only one for women.

And sorry, I kind of didn't answer your question.

I personally think that one of the reasons many men are unhappy is because they don't spend enough time caring for others. I think one of the reasons many women are unhappy is because they spend too much time caring for others. So I think care should be more equal than it is now, because I think the division is pretty dysfunctional. But that is personal opinion.

almond I think the OP was talking about after equality / liberation was achieved rather than the means to get there. I'm not sure about whether long term heteronormative pair bonding would be rare although I expect it would be less common. I also agree with your last post about the dysfunctional division. Just to be clear, are you talking about gender as in sex roles or male / female sex classification?

ok thanks, i do understand much better now. i agree about the heteronormative thing and what people would choose in a society free from the that being the default option - i said sort of similar further up but less coherently.

and i definitely agree with this "I personally think that one of the reasons many men are unhappy is because they don't spend enough time caring for others. I think one of the reasons many women are unhappy is because they spend too much time caring for others. So I think care should be more equal than it is now, because I think the division is pretty dysfunctional."

i suppose the question for me in terms of the OP's idea of a society with true equality of the sexes is "under what circumstances does it really matter that my sex is identified?", and within that, how important is it to me that my sex is identified at all? i don't think i can answer that latter question because of my own socialisation and society's structure which makes it very clear that outward identification of me as a woman is an intrinsic part of my identity

Flora in Thistledew's society, the continuation of gender equality after it has been reached is dependent on gender roles continuing to exist and these roles must be based on bio sex.

A father (gender role) is defined as a person who is the loving companion of a reproductive female who does as much child rearing as her.

That father (gender role) must be based on bio sex- an adult male whose sperm has been in the female.

If large numbers of women go , actually my companion is nobody, my sibling, three women I went to school with, because I don't care about gender roles, the whole mechanism by which Thistledew's society maintain's equality collapses.

Which isn't to say she can't modify how it would work!

i'm trying to work out how to say this without sounding like an MRA troll, so apologies if i do and that's not my intention. i'm genuinely trying to think this through but i don't htink i'm as quick as others here

almond in that case, in this gender equal society, how do men who would like child caring responsibilities access that? because if women are calling the shots about who they live with and how much time they spend with their children (which is absolutely no bad thing), how would those men who would like to increase their caring responsibilities in terms of children that are genetically related to them manage to achieve that? or would the genetic relationship not matter, and those men could be childminders or nursery staff or whatever the various options are in this society?

i realise i'm probably not thinking this through in as sophisticated a way as i should

"calling the shots" was the wrong phrase to use, as it sounds pejorative and i don't intend it to

Petula, I don't feel that my sex should be considered important in the vast majority of situations.

But for that to be the case, the structural inequalities have to be dealt with.

I don't want to have a pronoun that tells people I identify as asthmatic. But I do want people to deal with structural inequalities by recognisingthe issues faced by people who have long term health conditions.

In terms of constantly dealing with the possibility of inequality arising, pregnancy is not like having blue eyes. It will always need to be looked at structurally, but that doesn't mean it defines me as an individual person.

manlyalmondcakes

But for a female descendent of mine to have to make private arrangements with anyone (be they male or female) to do childcare if she wants both children and gender equality, well that isn't equality. It is telling women they can only have kids under private contract with men.

But men would (barring adoption) only be able to have a baby through a private contract with women.

What you seem to be asking for is a society where women can have a child by themselves (as is currently the case), but without having to do all of the childcare. But men won't get to have a child, unless they can find a willing woman. Not sure that is equality at all.

Petula, that is a fundamental inequality unless we all live in a commune. The only way anyone who can't get pregnant can usually get access to children is through the pregnant person (obviously this changes once that person has established a relationship with the child and the courts would insist it continues for the child's benefit).

One of the consequences of women choosing their own sexual partners and living arrangements is that many men will never be bio parents and will not get to be social parents of any child either.

But most men do get access to family structures as a step father, a brother, an uncle and so on, as well as simply friends of the mother and child.

thinking about it it can only really be that way, because otherwise the other option seems to be controlling women's choices... and we're back to square one

I've often wondered if we really need gendered pronouns in language. Shouldn't there just be one word instead of he/she?
Doesn't having two different words only facilitate gender discrimination?

Many languages don't have more than one third person pronoun, including my father's mother tongue. And despite being a very accomplished English speaker, he still often uses 'he' and 'she' interchangeably, as do his fellow speakers, and sometimes even uses 'it'.

It startles acquaintances sometimes, but we're used to it. It doesn't actually cause any difficulties. So while I don't know if it would change attitudes (his society of birth is firmly patriarchal), I think we don't need to have different words.