The “colorblind” approach doesn’t really work. it only serves to maintain social hierarchies by ignoring that there’s a problem in the first place.
By basically not having the laws which are there to promote solving the problem, it effectively ignores that there’s a problem at all. Being officially legally the same doesn’t mean society treats you the same, and at that point you’re trusting the population to just dissolve the hierarchies themselves with the law disallowing the methods which are actually effective at doing that which… doesn’t work.
Plus there’s a ton of ways to discriminate in law without mentioning gender, and having plausible deniability about it. That’s what a ton of the Jim Crow era in the US was about. That’s what much existing legislation does with women actually.
Which laws? Most institutions in pretty much every society are still largely controlled by men. If you remove laws that are meant to create more equity or to protect women from discrimination, this trend will grow stronger, as people tend to hire and prefer the company of others like themselves. Men will vote for other men and male dominated fields will continue to hire men due to explicit or subconscious bias. There are always exceptions to this, but you can see that sort of self-selection occurring even in things that are low stakes, like hobby groups.
I think this is a great place to ask this: What would be the problem, if we would ignore gender in all laws?
This should be a thought experiment, I don’t intend to attack anybody
The “colorblind” approach doesn’t really work. it only serves to maintain social hierarchies by ignoring that there’s a problem in the first place.
By basically not having the laws which are there to promote solving the problem, it effectively ignores that there’s a problem at all. Being officially legally the same doesn’t mean society treats you the same, and at that point you’re trusting the population to just dissolve the hierarchies themselves with the law disallowing the methods which are actually effective at doing that which… doesn’t work.
Plus there’s a ton of ways to discriminate in law without mentioning gender, and having plausible deniability about it. That’s what a ton of the Jim Crow era in the US was about. That’s what much existing legislation does with women actually.
☺️ thank you for that great response
Which laws? Most institutions in pretty much every society are still largely controlled by men. If you remove laws that are meant to create more equity or to protect women from discrimination, this trend will grow stronger, as people tend to hire and prefer the company of others like themselves. Men will vote for other men and male dominated fields will continue to hire men due to explicit or subconscious bias. There are always exceptions to this, but you can see that sort of self-selection occurring even in things that are low stakes, like hobby groups.
I was more thinking about legacy laws that are clearly still based on gender roles