Gender

* Book: Gender. By Ivan Illich. Pantheon, 1982

URL = https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ivan-illich-gender

Description

"The break with the past, which has been described by others as the transition to a capitalist mode of production, I describe here as the transition from the aegis of gender to the regime of sex. In this book I sum up the position I reached in a conversation with Barbara Duden, and which grew out of a controversy between us."

Contents

II. Economic Sex

The Reported Economy

The Unreported Economy

Shadow Work

The Feminization of Poverty

III. Vernacular Gender

Ambiguous Complementarity

Socio-Biological Sexism

Social-Science Sexism

IV. Vernacular Culture

Gender and Tools

Gender, Rent, Trade, and Crafts

Gender and Kinship

Gender and Wedlock

V. Gender Domains and Vernacular Milieu

Space/Time and Gender

Gender and the Home

Gender and the Grasp of Reality

Gender and Speech

VI. Gender Through Time

Gender and Transgression

The Rise of the Heterosexual

The Iconography of Sex

Review

Extended book and background notes by Fabio Milana at https://journals.psu.edu/illichstudies/article/view/60133/60063

History

(of the manuscript)

Fabio Milana:

"It is known that Illich brought Gender to completion during a long stay at the Wissenschaftskolleg in West Berlin (October 1981 -- April 1982), planned expressly in view of this commitment. A first draft of the essay already existed, however, co-authored with Lee Hoinacki in the summer of 1981, as the author tells us in the foreword to the first edition. It was documented “in real time” by Valentina Borremans in her “Tecno-Politica” series with the title, Vernacular Gender (“as of July 1981”). It was just the start of another of those swarms of temporary or collateral publications that normally accompanied the appearance of one of Illich’s major titles and which makes his bibliography a kind of brain-teaser. Preserved in them, though, is a trace of the circumstances and the way in which he prepared his campaigns of intellectual agitation. Opening this first known draft, for example, it is immediately clear how the author aimed to complete and formally present his research at the seminar in Berkeley, only expected for the end of the following year, probably taking into account also the prestige of that location. In the meantime, adhering to the customs of “Tecno-Politica,” he authorized his text to be reproduced in any kind of journal (ample excerpts came out in CoEvolution Quarterly in March 1982, for example), or even in volume form up to a maximum of 250 copies, in view of some preliminary penetration of the theories of the essay. Thanks to a piece of news in the editorial note of Vom Recht auf Gemeinheit (1982; in Italian Lavoro ombra, 1985), we know that in November 1981 the text was already in the hands of Ruth Kriss-Rettenbeck, who used it in a seminar at the University of Munich and at the same time was translating it into German. In all likelihood it was this version that was discussed at the faculty of theology of the University of Marburg in the first months of 1982, to which the author refers in the foreword to the 1995 German republication. However, we do not know exactly what stage of development the work was at. The original draft is entirely used in the final version, but whereas in the first part (corresponding to the current chapters I and II) the concordances are both ample and literal, in the second one (current chapters III-V) integrations and changes of position gradually increase, while in the last one (chapters VI-VII) they become preponderant. We can say with relative certainty that the long chapter on religious history that embraces the theme of penitence and then all of The Iconography of Sex, as well as the theory of a transition period under the system of “broken gender,” both belong to a later stage of development of the essay. But it is also more interesting to observe the “high definition” of this first, though partial draft, which became part of the final text with few adjustments, mostly in the margins of the paragraphs, mainly to confer more brilliance to the endings of the sentences. Right from the start, the author has in mind a handy and engaging pamphlet, able to circulate autonomously from that apparatus of glosses that will only be added subsequently, as a second supporting text and counterpoint, this time aiming at a generally academic audience. That the long stay in Germany was chiefly destined toprovide an in-depth bibliographical analysis, as would be deposited in the very rich “titled footnotes,” is also borne witness to by the beautiful recollection of those months left by Gesine Bottomley, librarian at the Wissenschaftskolleg,"

(https://journals.psu.edu/illichstudies/article/view/60133/60063)

Roots of the book in Illich's mother's: Die Frau vor der Zukunft

Fabio Milana:

"it is precisely such a position as “mediatrix” and “co-redemptrix,” according to God’s plan of redemption (and by now also according to Church awareness, after the developments of Mariology and after the introduction of the apostolate of the laity), that authorises women to take on the role of guides (“Führerinnen”) in the current crisis, to exercise their mission of natural and spiritual “bringing into the world” of humanity that, in the present hour, takes on the characteristics of an authentic Reintegration.

But this will only be possible for them provided that they reclaim awareness of their own essential diversity. Moreover, it is precisely “the Judeo-Christian tradition that tells us that man and woman are different, because God made them different, with different vocations and different missions, though with the same aim of loving God,” opposing that neutralizing process (“Neutralizierungsprozess”) that assimilates men and women more and more into a “uniforme Indifferenz,” especially in the West. And provided that women fully recover their practical authority and autonomy in the “domain” that traditional societies had always recognised as theirs and no man had ever dreamed of contending. Of course, it will not be easy for men, even those with the best intentions, to recognise now not only the absolute equal rights of women as women in their integral difference (“in ihrer ganzen Verschiedenartigkeit”) but even their superiority within the sphere of action that belongs to them (“ihre Uberlegenheit im eigensten Wirkungskreis”). Whereas other men, as “scientific experimenters,” intervene more and more heavily to devastate once-protected areas such as education, nutrition, “psychohygiene.” In the ecclesial field, however, “as long as a better intelligence of women’s needs hasn’t become common domain, the self-help of women among themselves will be one of the main tasks of the female apostolate of the laity, and through this the most autonomous and expert ones will help their sisters, so confused and unhappy today, to ‘understand themselves.’” It is not possible here, neither would it always be enlightening, to follow Maexie in her illustration of female diversity. It is not even possible to relate in detail her criticism of the totalitarianism creeping into the “free world,” conducted on the basis of a mainly Anglo-Saxon “critical thought” (Orwell, Huxley, Packard, Galbraith, Mumford, Riesman, Lippmann), but framed in the atmosphere of Soloviev’s Antichrist. It would be relevant for us on several points, for example, where she 82 introduces a contrast between Heim and Wohnstätte, home and residence, or denounces the pressure of the Volkskapitalismus on housewives, proclaiming the need for a Konsum-askese organised by them (here in the footsteps, though rather more delicate, of Dorothy Dohen). One cannot even relate in depth, her argument against scholastic philosophy and the hoped-for “return to the fathers” by the “Christian gnosis,” which would mean Roman Catholicism renewing relations with eastern spiritual trends, with mystic experience and with the rabbinic tradition. Neither can one linger on the ecclesial geography that the author outlines (with a group of “radical postmodernists” wedged between progressives and conservatives) on the eve of a Council already called but never named in a book that, perhaps, owes the broadness of its horizons and the boldness of its reformatory intentions to the climate of expectation aroused by that announcement. On the other hand, it is not to be believed that such a vast subject integrates itself effortlessly or without leaving large areas of shadow. Neither can it be believed that the perpetual assertiveness of the author, so similar to that of her son but without his brilliance, never sounds naive or fanciful. Besides, we should not overlook the fact that Maexie’s theories, just because they are theories, are inconsistent with a “traditional” female universe which in fact she had never really been part of, if for no other reason than her “class privilege,” as her abandonment of the marital home after only few years of marriage shows. This theme has never been touched on in a book that does not hesitate to deal with far more thorny topical questions, and always from a conservative position driven to mysticism. As far as we are directly concerned, it would be above all gratuitous to let readers believe that the theories in the book were simply Ivan’s theories, or derived directly from him, and that he had complete awareness of them, then or later on."

(https://journals.psu.edu/illichstudies/article/view/60133/60063)

Discussion

The negative reception of the book by feminists

Fabio Milana:

1.

"It is not surprising that the development of gender studies, which thrived quickly (the overtaking of the competitor sex in the list of academic titles in the English language dates from 1987), managed without Illich’s contribution. In none of their variations and nuances would the concepts of gender and sex, even when contrasted, be represented as both corresponding to a social/historical formation—neither when thought of as cultural constructions would they have retained the character of mutual antitheticity. This does not necessarily destine our text to infertility in this field of thought and studies (the claim in the queer area recently put forward by Jennifer Levi is striking, for example)."

2.

"It is known that after the last of eight sessions of the Berkeley seminar, in autumn 1982, the unease of the female audience, or at least a good part of it, found expression at the symposium called by seven women scholars, six of whom were lecturers at the same university (“Is he taking us for a ride?”). The author of Gender, invited and contested, had no more than fifteen minutes to respond to the criticism of the speakers; they considered that he had had twenty-four hours to spread his doctrines, and the count was still heavily in his favour. We don’t know how he got through in these circumstances because, as was his habit, he did not allow hisintervention to be recorded (it seems he said “To be taped is to be raped,” to the bewilderment of the onlookers). The opponents limited themselves to publishing only their own interventions in the March 1983 edition of “Feminist Issues.”

The fortunes and misfortunes of the book persistently attached themselves to this episode, feeding each other for a long time in the ambiguous light of a “scandal” both denounced and claimed. Illich himself procured about a thousand copies of the journal with the intention of distributing it to anyone he wished to make aware, in such a paradoxical way, of his own position, as he explained in the Conversation with Cayley (in a passage (p. 186) that cannot be read in any of the available translations). He held back at the last minute for a “gender” scruple: “No, a gentleman doesn’t do this.” Though with differing tones, those first criticisms were total and head-on, a prior obstruction of a book, or a signature, which they showed they considered seriously dangerous. Of course they expressed an immediate rebuff on behalf of a recent and winning movement of women, little prepared to be told from above or from the outside what their mindset should be. But it was also the reaction of an academic system that felt challenged (not simply in its Women’s Studies, but in the whole range of disciplines involved in them, each one with its own “scientific” framework, technical language, specialized literature, happily exempt from any suspicion of bias). And along with that, it was the comforting redress of the democratic, progressive, lay, modernizing etc, self-evidence. In this different balance sheet of the resources in the field, the “tables” were more than turned, and Illich could be victoriously brushed off as a champion of the male-chauvinist reaction in progress, a socio-biologist suspected of having Nazi sympathies, a charlatan in the guise of a scholar, a nostalgic of the good old days that actually never existed, and finally a priest. The reception of Gender does not finish here: it was a little more favourable where it was a question of specific prehensility of certain of its categories, for example in H. T. Wilson’s theoretical sociology; making a double exception is the friendly, timely welcome, in Italy, by Anna Del Bo Boffino, an essayist for the general public. But the tracks retraced more often by critics had been definitively laid. On the other hand it would not be fair, polemic excesses aside, to deny that many of the objections originate from one or another of the effective vulnerabilities of the text. Here it is worth lingering on what only after decades can be perceived better: the fact that, ultimately, Illich’s speech remains a speech on gender but not a “gendered” one ... not “inside” gender. Neither the insurmountable “complementarity” of the two paradigms, nor the alleged impossibility of expressing it other than by “metaphor,” prevent him from speaking of his “object” from a “central” and superordinate point of view. It is the viewpoint of the critique of political economy and ideologies connected to it, ultimately a “neutral” one—or rather, if only partial—conducted from a different “biased” perspective: the part of reason against the darkness of superstition, modern superstition, according to a radically “laical” and “Enlightenment” approach that later Illich himself would judge as having been unequal to the challenge. In this sense it is not a coincidence, and does not let itself be reduced to the (mis)fortunes of the book, that the theme then eclipses from the consideration of the author and, even more so, of his followers."

Excerpts

Ivan Illich:

I. Sexism and Economic Growth

"Industrial society creates two myths: one about the sexual ancestry of this society and the other about its movement toward equality. Both myths are unmasked as lies of humans who belong to the “second sex.” In my analysis, I begin with women’s experience and try to construct categories that allow me to speak about the present and the past in a way that is more satisfactory to me.

I oppose the regime of scarcity to the reign of gender. I argue that the loss of vernacular gender is the decisive condition for the rise of capitalism and a life-style that depends on industrially produced commodities. Gender in modern English means “… one of three grammatical kinds, corresponding more or less to distinctions of sex (or the absence of sex) into which nouns are discriminated according to the nature of the modifications they require in words syntactically associated with them.” (OED, 1932.) English nouns belong to masculine, feminine, or neuter gender. I have adopted this term to designate a distinction in behavior, a distinction universal in vernacular cultures. It distinguishes places, times, tools, tasks, forms of speech, gestures, and perceptions that are associated with men from those associated with women. This association constitutes social gender because it is specific to a time and place. I call it vernacular gender because this set of associations is as peculiar to a traditional people (in Latin, a gens) as is their vernacular speech.

I use gender, then, in a new way to designate a duality that in the past was too obvious even to be named, and is so far removed from us today that it is often confused with sex. By “sex” I mean the result of a polarization in those common characteristics that, starting with the late eighteenth century, are attributed to all human beings. Unlike vernacular gender, which always reflects an association between a dual, local, material culture and the men and women who live under its rule, social sex is “catholic”; it polarizes the human labor force, libido, character or intelligence, and is the result of a diagnosis (in Greek, “discrimination”) of deviations from the abstract genderless norm of “the human.” Sex can be discussed in the unambiguous language of science. Gender bespeaks a complementarity that is enigmatic and asymmetrical. Only metaphor can reach for it.

The transition from the dominance of gender to that of sex constitutes a change of the human condition that is without precedent. But the fact that gender might be irrecuperable is no reason to hide its loss by imputing sex to the past, or to lie about the entirely new degradations that it has brought to the present.

I know of no industrial society where women are the economic equals of men. Of everything that economics measures, women get less. The literature dealing with this economic sexism has recently turned into a flood. It documents sexist exploitation, denounces it as an injustice, usually describes it as a new version of an age-old evil, and proposes explanatory theories with remedial strategies built in. Through the institutional sponsorship of the United Nations, the World Council of Churches, governments, and universities, the latest growth industry of career reformers thrives. First the proletariat, then the underdeveloped, and now women are the favored pets of “the concerned.” You can no longer mention sex discrimination without creating the impression that you want to contribute to the political economy of sex: Either you want to promote a “non-sexist economy,” or you are engaged in whitewashing the sexist economy we have. Although I shall build my argument on this evidence of discrimination, I do not want to do either. To me, the pursuit of a non-sexist “economy” is as absurd as a sexist one is abhorrent. Here I shall expose the intrinsically sexist nature of economics as such and clarify the sexist nature of the most basic postulates on which economics, “the science of values under the assumption of scarcity,” is built.

I shall explain how all economic growth entails the destruction of vernacular gender (chapters 3–5) and thrives on the exploitation of economic sex (chapter 2). I want to examine the economic apartheid and subordination of women and yet avoid the socio-biological and structuralist traps that explain this discrimination as “naturally” and “culturally” inevitable, respectively. As a historian, I want to trace the origins of women’s economic subservience; as an anthropologist, I want to grasp what the new gradation reveals about kinship where it occurs; as a philosopher, I want to clarify what this repetitive pattern tells us about the axioms of popular wisdom, namely, those on which the contemporary university and its social sciences rest.

It was not easy to spell out what I have to say. More than I realized when I began, the ordinary speech of the industrial age revealed itself as both genderless and sexist. I knew that gender was dual, but my thinking was constantly distorted by the genderless perspective that industrialized language necessarily enforces. I found myself caught up in a distracting web of key words. I now see that key words are a characteristic feature of modern language, but clearly distinct from technical terms. “Automobile” and “jet” are technical terms. And I have learned that such words can overwhelm the lexicon of a traditional language. When this occurs, I speak of technological creolization. A term like “transportation,” however, is a key word. It does more than designate a device – it imputes a basic need.

An examination of modern languages shows that key words are strong, persuasive, in common usage. Some are etymologically old but have acquired a new meaning totally unlike their former intent. “Family,” “man,” “work” are familiar examples. Others are of more recent coinage but were originally conceived for specialized use alone. At a certain moment they slipped into everyday language and now denote a wide area of thought and experience. “Role,” “sex,” “energy,” “production,” “development,” “consumer” are well-known examples. In every industrialized language, these key words take on the semblance of common sense. And each modern language has its own set that provides that society’s unique perspective on the social and ideological reality of the contemporary world. The set of key words in all modern industrialized languages is homologous. The reality they interpret is everywhere fundamentally the same. The same highways leading to the same school and office buildings overshadowed by the same TV antennas transform dissimilar landscapes and societies into monotonous uniformity. In much the same way, texts dominated by key words translate easily from English into Japanese or Malay.

Universal technical terms that have become key words, such as “education,” “proletariat,” and “medicine,” mean the same thing in all modern languages. Other traditional terms with very different word fields, when used as key words, correspond almost exactly to each other across different languages. Examples are “humanity” and “Menschheit.” Therefore, the study of key words calls for some comparison between languages.

To explain the appearance of a dominance of key words in a language, I learned to distinguish vernacular speech, into which we grow through daily intercourse with people who speak their own minds, from taught mother tongue, which we acquire through professionals employed to speak for and to us. Key words are a characteristic of taught mother tongue. They are even more effective than the mere standardization of the vocabulary and grammatical rules in their repression of the vernacular because, having the appearance of a common sense, they put a pseudo-vernacular gloss on engineered reality. Key words, then, are also more important for the formation of an industrialized language than creolization by technical terms because each one denotes a perspective common to the entire set. I have found that the paramount characteristic of key words in all languages is their exclusion of gender. Therefore, an understanding of gender, and its distinction from sex (a key word), depends on the avoidance or wary use of all terms that might be key words.

Linguistically, then, I found myself in a double ghetto when I started to write this essay: I was unable to use words in the traditional resonance of gender, and unwilling to repeat them with their current sexist ring. I first noticed the difficulty when I tried to use earlier versions of this text in my lectures during 1980–82. Never before had so many colleagues and friends attempted to dissuade me from a task on which I had embarked. Most felt that I should turn my attention to something less trivial, less ambiguous, or less scabrous; others insisted that, in the present crisis of feminism, talk about women was not for men. Listening carefully, I came to see that most of my interlocutors felt uneasy because my reasoning interfered with their dreams: with the feminist dream of a genderless economy without compulsory sex roles; with the leftist dream of a political economy whose subjects would be equally human;[4] with the futurist dream of a modern society where people are plastic, their choices of being a dentist, a male, a Protestant, or a gene-manipulator deserving the same respect. The conclusion about economics tout court, which my perspective on sex discrimination revealed, upset each dream with equal force, since the desires that these dreams express are all made of the same stuff: genderless economics (see chapter 7).

An industrial society cannot exist unless it imposes certain unisex assumptions: the assumptions that both sexes are made for the same work, perceive the same reality, and have, with some minor cosmetic variations, the same needs.[5] And the assumption of scarcity, which is fundamental to economics, is itself logically based on this unisex postulate. There could be no competition for “work” between men and women, unless “work” had been redefined as an activity that befits humans irrespective of their sex. The subject on which economic theory is based is just such a genderless human. Then, with scarcity accepted, the unisex postulate spreads. Every modern institution, from school to family and from union to courtroom, incorporates this assumption of scarcity, thereby dispersing its constitutive unisex postulate throughout the society. For example, men and women have always grown up; now they need “education” to do so. In traditional societies, they matured without the conditions for growth being perceived as scarce. Now, educational institutions teach them that desirable learning and competence are scarce goods for which men and women must compete. Thus, education turns into the name for learning to live under an assumption of scarcity. But education, considered as an example of a typical modern need, entails more: It assumes the scarcity of a genderless value; it teaches that he or she who experiences its process is primarily a human being in need of genderless education. Economic institutions, then, are based on the assumption of scarcity in genderless values, equally desirable or necessary for competing neuters belonging to two biological sexes.[6] What Karl Polanyi has called the “disembedding” of a formal market economy, I am describing, anthropologically, as the transmogrification of gender to sex.

Relentlessly, economic institutions transform the two culturally embedded genders into something new, into economic neuters distinguished by nothing more than their disembedded sex. A characteristic but quite secondary bulge in the blue jeans is now all that differentiates and bestows privilege on one kind of human being over the other. Economic discrimination against women cannot exist without the abolition of gender and the social construction of sex.[7] This I shall attempt to establish with my argument. And if this is true – namely, that economic growth is intrinsically and irremediably gender-destructive, that is, sexist – the sexism can be reduced only at the “cost” of economic shrinkage. Further, the decline of sexism requires as a necessary, albeit insufficient, condition the contraction of the cash nexus and the expansion of non-market-related, non-economic forms of subsistence.

Up to now, two major motifs have emerged that impel us to adopt negative growth policies: environmental degradation[8] and paradoxical counterproductivity.[9] Now a third urges us: Negative growth is necessary to reduce sexism. This proposition is hard to accept for the well-meaning critics who have tried during the past year to divert me from my present line of argument; they feared either that I would make a fool of myself or that their dreams of growth with equality would appear to be fantasies. I believe, however, that this is the time to turn social strategies topsy-turvy, to recognize that peace between men and women, whatever form it might take, depends on economic contraction and not on economic expansion. Up to now, no goodwill and no struggle, no legislation and no technique, have reduced the sexist exploitation characteristic of industrial society. As I shall show, the interpretation of this economic degradation by sex as just more machismo under market conditions will not wash. Up to now, wherever equal rights were legally enacted and enforced, wherever partnership between the sexes became stylish, these innovations gave a sense of accomplishment to the elites who proposed and obtained them, but left the majority of women untouched, if not worse off than before.

The ideal of unisex economic equality is now dying, much like the ideal of growth leading to a convergence of GNP north and south of the equator is. However, it is now possible to invert the issue. Instead of clinging to the dream of anti-discriminatory growth, it appears more sensible to pursue economic shrinkage as the policy along which a non-sexist or, at least, a less sexist society can come into being. Upon reflection, I now see that an industrial economy without a sexist hierarchy is as farfetched as that of a pre-industrial society without gender; that is, without a clear division between what men and what women do, say, and see. Both are pipe dreams, regardless of the sex of the dreamer. But the reduction of the cash nexus, that is, of both commodity production and commodity dependence, is not in the realm of fantasy. Such a cutback, however, means the repudiation of everyday expectations and habits now thought “natural to man.” Many people, including some who know that rollback is the necessary alternative to horror, view the choice as impossible. But a rapidly growing number of experienced people, together with an increasing number of experts (some convinced and others opportunistic), agree that cutting back is the wise choice. Subsistence that is based on a progressive unplugging from the cash nexus now appears to be a condition for survival. Without negative growth, it is impossible to maintain an ecological balance, achieve justice among regions, or foster people’s peace. And the policy must, of course, be implemented in rich countries at a much higher rate than in poor ones. Perhaps the maximum anyone can reasonably hope for is equal access to the world’s scarce resources at the level currently typical for the poorest nations. The translation of such a proposition into specific action would require a multi-faceted alliance of many diverse groups and interests that pursues the recovery of the commons, what I call “radical political ecology.”[10] To bring those aggrieved by the loss of gender into this alliance, I shall here establish the linkage between shift from production to subsistence and the reduction of sexism.

To demonstrate that this kind of relationship between sexism and economics does indeed exist, I must construct a theory. This theory is a prerequisite for a history of scarcity.[11] Throughout the essay, the theoretical argument is frequently highlighted with examples, rather than massively encumbered with data. The former are inserted in order to illustrate the theory and stimulate research, and the latter – when they exist – are integrated into the thematic footnotes. Because of the newness of this theoretical outlook and the paucity of empirical studies from this perspective, I occasionally found it necessary to use new language. Whenever possible, however, I used old words in new ways to say precisely what both the theory and the evidence demanded.

My theory allows me to oppose two modes of existence, which I call the reign of vernacular gender and the regime of economic sex. The terms themselves indicate that both forms of being are dual and that the two dualities are very different in kind.[12] By social gender I mean the eminently local and timebound duality that sets off men and women under circumstances and conditions that prevent them from saying, doing, desiring, or perceiving “the same thing.” By economic, or social, sex I mean the duality that stretches toward the illusory goal of economic, political, legal, or social equality between women and men. Under this second construction of reality, as I shall show, equality is mostly fanciful. The essay, then, is cast in the form of an epilogue on the industrial age and its chimeras. Through writing it, I came to understand in a new way – beyond what I had seen in Took for Conviviality (1971) – what this age has irremediably destroyed. Only the transmogrification of the commons into resources can be compared to that of gender into sex. I describe this from the perspective of the past. About the future, I know and say nothing.

II. Economic Sex

Proof of economic discrimination against women does not have to be established here. The evidence is already overwhelming. Fifteen years of feminist research has removed all doubts. However, two major tasks remain. First, we must learn to distinguish three separate arenas in all modern economies. In each of these arenas women are economically discriminated against, albeit in different ways. The three forms of discrimination were heretofore confused. Second, we must grow to understand the difference between this threefold economic discrimination against women and the patriarchal subordination of women in societies not yet penetrated by the cash nexus. Thus, sexist discrimination will serve as a speculum that mirrors what is called “economy” in advanced industrial societies. Any economy based on formal exchanges between the producer and the consumer of goods and/or services is first divided into a statistically reported and an unreported sector – the arenas of reported and unreported discrimination against women on the job. And then there always exists another economy, the shadow of the former, which is the third arena of discrimination against women: that found in the nether sector of shadow work.

The Reported Economy

Over the years, discrimination against women in paid, taxed, and officially reported jobs has not changed in severity but has grown in volume.[13] Presently, 51 per cent of U.S. women are in the labor force; in 1880 only 5 per cent were employed outside the home. Today, women comprise 42 per cent of the U.S. labor force; in 1880, only 15 per cent. Today, half of all married women have their own income from a job, while only 5 percent had outside, paying jobs a century ago. Today, the law keeps all curricula and careers open for women, but in 1880 many of both were closed to them. Today, women averagely spend twenty-eight years in employment; in 1880, the average was five. These all seem like significant steps toward economic equality, until you apply the one measuring stick that counts. The median yearly earnings of the average full-time employed woman still hovers around a magical ratio (3:5) of a man’s average earnings: 59 percent, give or take 3 percent – the same percentage as one hundred years ago.[14] Neither educational opportunities nor legislative provisions nor revolutionary rhetoric – political, technological, or sexual – have changed the magnitude by which women, in their earnings, stand below men.[15] What at first sight looks like so many steps toward equity is, in the perspective of the average woman, only a series of events by which more women have been quietly incorporated into the population that is economically discriminated against on grounds of sex. The current median lifetime income of a female college graduate, even if she has an advanced degree, is still only comparable to that of male high school dropouts.

When I was first faced with this evidence I could not believe it. I reacted as I had years earlier when confronted with other evidence – when I was studying the effectiveness of the medical establishment. I had been unable to believe that since 1880 the probable lifetime remaining to a middle-aged male in the U.S. had not appreciably changed. I also could not believe that a twenty-five-fold increase in constant dollars for medical care, of which a disproportionate amount now went for the treatment and prevention of diseases affecting people in the fourth quarter of their lifespan, had resulted in no important increase in adult life expectancy. It took months for the significance of this information to sink in. It is true that the survival rate of infants has increased enormously; more people live to be forty-five. Bodies mangled in accidents can be reconstructed with plastic and aluminum; many infectious diseases have almost been wiped out. But the probable remaining lifespan of an adult man has not been significantly altered. And the increase or decrease that has occurred around the timeless threshold of death has little to do with medical efforts. Knowledge about the impotence of money, surgery, chemistry, and goodwill in the struggle against death is constantly repressed in our societies. It belongs to those facts that must seemingly be denied by ritual and myth.

Although totally different, economic discrimination against women as a group constitutes a reality that is equally unpalatable to most non-cynical contemporaries. As polio and diphtheria have almost disappeared, so has the exclusion of girls from grammar and high schools. Just as we have seat belts to protect us against crashes, so we have TV monitors to protect against rape. Just as we have affirmative action for the health of the poor, so we have special scholarships to get women to the top.

It is hard to face the fact that no program whatsoever has changed either average adult life expectancy or the wage differential between the sexes.

The unchanged wage differential between the sexes is just one aspect of the economic discrimination practiced against women on the job, just as the unchanged male adult life expectancy is only one aspect of modern medicine’s failure to improve “health.” It can also be argued that the enormous exertions of the modern health establishment have added significantly to adult life expectancy. Without these efforts, some argue, life expectancy in a world of smog and stress would be even further below that of adults in many poor countries. In the same way, it can be argued that the concerted struggles of legislators, unions, feminists, and idealists have prevented the wage differential from increasing in a progressively commodity-intensive and therefore sexist society. It can be argued that such a pessimistic view of industrial society is entirely appropriate. There is good evidence that the decline of life expectancy at all ages that has been observed over the last twenty years in the USSR[18] is only the forerunner of a similar trend to be expected in most industrialized countries, and that the cancellation, due to the present job crisis, of many so-called advances toward equal opportunity is actually a movement that will not be reversed.[19] However, whether you take the optimist’s or the pessimist’s stance, one thing seems empirically clear: the proportion of earnings withheld because of sex from half the total population seems a factor as fixed as the remaining lifespan of adult males; or, as others argue, as fixed as the incidence of cancer as a herd phenomenon in the human race.

During the sixties, women’s research dealt mostly with two themes: physical violence against women by rapists, husbands, or physicians; and working conditions for wage labor. The patterns discovered by both kinds of research are extremely uniform, and depressing. In every country, discrimination and violence spread at the same rate as economic development: the more money earned, the more women earn less – and experience rape.[20] Seldom has such an injustice been ignored for so long and then, within ten years, been so smugly acknowledged. Research on work during this first wave of women’s studies at American universities dealt primarily with wage labor: low pay, limited opportunities, degrading roles, misrepresentation on union boards, and precarious job security. Worldwide, most women work in non-unionized urban jobs, and in only a few categories; when they do belong to a union, they are seldom taken into account in contracts. Even when the union is made up primarily of women, men are the key representatives for it during contract negotiations. However you look at it, new research on the fact that economic progress increases economic discrimination is pointless. Such research could only result in sterile redundance, more academic degrees for would-be careerists, and more smugness by those who would use it to bolster their hand-me-down explanatory theories.

Most of the early postwar feminist research was movement-borne and action-oriented. Some of its proponents followed liberal rhetoric calling for equal opportunity-cum-affirmative action; others busied themselves with holy writ, chewing on Marx, Freud, and Reich to get another establishment’s approval. Reproduction was discovered.[22] Women’s rights and workers’ rights then seemed compatible with industrial development and progress. In spite of its weakness and dullness, this research remains fundamental for our understanding of how industrial society works. It revealed a surprising homogeneity of discrimination against women at work in socialist and capitalist, rich and poor, Latin and Anglo, Catholic, Protestant, and Shinto societies; at equal levels of income, women in such different places as France and Japan got more or less the same kind of bad deal. The pattern of women’s exclusion from privileged wages is more uniform than what is practiced against blacks, Koreans, Malaysians, or Puerto Ricans and Turks. In addition, nowhere are women establishing a female regime; there is a Tanzania for Nyerere, and Israel for Begin, but no Amazonia in sight. The nation-state is invariably sexist.

The Unreported Economy

There are many kinds of economic activities on which governments and their economists cannot or do not report. In some cases, they cannot get the data; others they could not name or measure, even if they cared to record them. A plethora of names has been given to this accumulation of activities, which economists exclude from their usual statistics. Some call it the informal sector, others the D-sector, others the fourth sector, which they add to the primary “extraction”, the secondary “manufacture,” and the tertiary “service” sectors of the economy. Others speak about the household economy, the modern barter economy, the economy of “transfers in kind,” or the non-monetary market. Still others speak about the area of self-service, self-help, and self-initiated activities. Marxists[23] have no difficulty labeling this kind of work; they call it “social reproduction,” and then they themselves divide into sects, each of which claims to know best what that means. To complete the confusion, among feminists during the mid-seventies it became fashionable to call all these activities “women’s work,” and to describe men who do it, in a fem-sexist epithet, as male housewives.

The volume of this unofficial economy is not easy to measure. It is made up of a hodgepodge of gainful activities for which no legally recognized salary is paid and for which no social security accrues, as well as of activities remunerated in kind. Much of it consists of unofficial trading, in the barter of favors or in cold cash, all of which elude the tax collector and the statistician. In Yugoslavia you must bring the government doctor a chicken if you want his attention, and in Poland eggs for the clerk are appropriate to obtain a marriage license. In Russia more than three-fourths of all eggs, milk, cheese, and fresh vegetables purchased by individual households come from the black market; books circulate on the sly or through self-publishing. In the U.S., this market includes the marijuana grower from California who raises and markets a multi-billion-dollar cash crop, and the import agent of Afghan heroin, together with the policeman who is on his payroll. It also comprises the wetback who harvest the grapes, the lawyer for whom you cut the grass and who in exchange sees to it that your illegally constructed house passes county inspection, the mechanic who puts a new carburettor into the car of the accountant who, in turn, fills out the tax return for the gas station. All these clean-cut transactions, each a money-measured trade between contracting partners, are part of the unreported economy. Some of these activities actually use money as a medium of exchange; others barter; all are clearly economic transactions, and on none are statistics properly kept. Some of them are legal, others criminal. Some victimize the client more than professional services, others much less. For both parties, some are more monetarily advantageous than formal, bureaucratic proceedings, while others constitute outright exploitation. But all of them are explicit exchanges of services, products, or currency that fit a market model.

Some attempts have been made to measure the size of this underground economy, at least by comparing it to the gross national product. The British government assumes that it loses an amount equal to 7.5 percent of GNP (and not just of salaries!) through tax evasion.[24] This is probably only a small fraction of the market it cannot record. The Internal Revenue Service in Washington, D.C., estimated that in 1976 activities generating 135 billion dollars in personal or corporate income were not reported to federal agencies. This is from a report on tax evasion, not on legally ambiguous tax dodging via business expenses, fabricated loss, and the like, which might account for an equal amount of revenue. Recent estimates suggest that in the U.S. this forgotten economy is growing much faster than the formal economy, outdistancing even inflation.[25] If the monetary (but statistically unreported) and the non-monetary markets of the U.S. are added together, their value certainly rivals the non-military economy on which economists base their overall indicators, predictions, and prescriptions. And, while in the formal, taxed, and statistically reported economy the labor force is to a large measure engaged in the artificial creation of pseudowork, producing useless articles, unwanted services, futile social controls, and costly economic intermediation, the real efficiency of the unreported economy is on the average much higher. The thriving black-market economy is the reason why countries like Italy have survived ten years during each of which economists confidently predicted impending bankruptcy, and why the people’s democracies of Eastern Europe have survived theoretically impossible levels of mismanagement.

Throughout, one thing is certain: Even if we carefully exclude from the unreported market all subsistence activities and all typically female housework (both of which, in their own ways, do not fit the market model), this formerly unobserved economy, growing proportionately faster than the reported GNP, contains a share of discrimination against women that has only occasionally been dealt with as an issue. Yet, in this sector of the market economy, where new jobs are created as reported unemployment rises, women might be getting an even worse deal than in the sector the economist’s data dragnets can filter and measure. Here, no anti-discrimination or equal-opportunity laws apply. In contrast to male moonlighters, drug dealers, and bribe takers, whose pursuits are lucrative if sometimes unlawful, women are left with the shoddy consolation of prostitution, puny extortions, and fencing. Women who attempt moonlighting typically wash dishes next door or do typing at home – or, more recently, cover the night shift on the text composer.

Most of the proponents of the Chicago-bred discipline that calls itself “new home economics”[27] and most recent policy studies focusing on the unreported economy have at least one feature in common: They recognize that both black-market labor, which evades taxes, and unpaid housework (for which some demand payment out of tax funds) make a major contribution to the GNP. But new studies on the hidden economy also have led to a new confusion between hitherto unreported market activities and unpaid female housework. The inability to draw a clear distinction between unreported and unpaid work constitutes the theoretical weakness of the new economic school and makes the “new home economics” treacherous for women.[28] Women know that they are excluded from the desirable jobs in the growing arena of illegitimate work – even more so than from taxed wage labor – while their housework is a form of bondage. Drawing a formal distinction between “unreported” economic activities, from which women are unequally excluded, and others, to which women are unequally bonded, is crucial. Taking housework as a paradigm of an “ideal type” of economic activity, it has two characteristics that distinguish it from black-market labor: Its value is imputed and its performance cannot be disintermediated.[29] It is part of the modern nether economy that all contemporary money implies and that money therefore cannot measure.

Shadow Work

By the mid-seventies, the orientation of women’s research on women’s work and its economic analysis had changed. Studies began to struggle with insights that could not be properly expressed in the categories to which we had become accustomed in the fields of history, economics, ethnology, or anthropology. For their kind of research, the point was not women’s smaller bite into the salary cake. Something quite different was of greater significance: how to explain that in every industrial society women are discriminated against in employment only to be forced, when off the job, to do a new kind of economically necessary work without any pay attached to it. It was obvious to all concerned that women regularly lose out when they apply for a job, when they seek advancement, when they try to hold on to a paying position. But outside of and along with wage labor, which had spread during the nineteenth century, a second kind of unprecedented economic activity had come into being. To a greater extent and in a different manner from men, women were drafted into the economy. They were – and are – deprived of equal access to wage labor only to be bound with even greater inequality to work that did not exist before wage labor came into being.

The best evidence of the existence of the new nether economy comes from historians of housework. Their writings made me understand that the difference between housework past and present cannot adequately be put into traditional language, nor satisfactorily expressed in the categories of class analysis or social-science jargon. What housework is now, women of old did not do. However, the modern woman finds it hard to believe that her ancestor did not have to work in a nether economy. Irrefutably, the new historians of housework describe the typical activity of the housewife[32] as something unlike anything women have done outside industrial society, as something that cannot be suitably accounted for as just one more facet of the unreported economy, and as something the dogmatic categories of “social reproduction” simply cannot meaningfully signify.

Looking more closely at the phenomena anthropologists and historians of housework study, I began to see that the contemporary labor market, both reported and unreported, constitutes only the tip of the iceberg. True to this metaphor, most of the toil that supports the visible tip is below the waterline, work done in the nether economy. As employment in the various kinds of wage labor increases, the submerged drudgery must expand even faster. And modern housework is a typical, but not exclusive, part of that nether world’s reality – work that is not only unreported but also impenetrable by the economic searchlight. And, since no commonly accepted nomenclature has yet been devised to make the distinction between housework and unreported market activities explicit, I shall contrast the spectrum of remunerated work done in the reported and unreported economy with a nether economy of shadow work, which forms its complement.

Unlike the production of goods and services, shadow work is performed by the consumer of commodities, specifically, the consuming household. I call shadow work any labor by which the consumer transforms a purchased commodity into a usable good. I designate as shadow work the time, toil and effort that must be expended in order to add to any purchased commodity the value without which it is unfit for use. Therefore, shadow work names an activity in which people must engage to whatever degree they attempt to satisfy their needs by means of commodities. By introducing the term “shadow work,” I distinguish the procedure for cooking eggs today from that followed in the past. When a modern housewife goes to the market, picks up the eggs, drives them home in her car, takes the elevator to the seventh floor, turns on the stove, takes butter from the refrigerator, and fries the eggs, she adds value to the commodity with each one of these steps. This is not what her grandmother did. The latter looked for eggs in the chicken coop, cut a piece from the lard she had rendered, lit some wood her kids had gathered on the commons, and added the salt she had bought. Although this example might sound romantic, it should make the economic difference clear. Both women prepared fried eggs, but only one uses a marketed commodity and highly capitalized production goods: car, elevator, electric appliances. The grandmother carries out woman’s gender-specific tasks in creating subsistence; the new housewife must put up with the household burden of shadow work.

Changes in housework reach far below the surface. Rising standards of living have made it more capital-intensive by providing numerous machines and gadgets. The investment in the household equipment of a median Canadian family – and the same would be true in every other modern home – is now higher than the median plant investment per factory job in two-thirds of all nations. As a result, housework has become more sedentary, and the incidence of varicose veins has decreased. For a minority of women, this has meant an interesting, well-paid part-time job and free time “to write their books or go fishing.” But the “new” kind of housework most present-day women perform has also become more lonely, more dull, more impersonal, more time-polluting. Valium consumption and addiction to TV soap operas have often been regarded as indicators of this new, muffled stress.[35] But, much more fundamentally, housework has become the paradigm for the new unpaid economic activity that in a computer-policed and microprocessor-equipped society is economically more fundamental than productive labor, whether this production is recorded by economists or not.

Shadow work could not have come into existence before the household was turned into an apartment set up for the economic function of upgrading value-deficient commodities. Shadow work could not become unmistakably women’s work before men’s work had moved out of the house to factory or office. Henceforth, the household had to be run on what the paycheck bought – one paycheck for the engineer and almost inevitably several to feed the hod carrier’s family, whose wife took in piecework, while his daughter hired out as a domestic. The unpaid upgrading of what wage labor produced now became women’s work. Women were then defined in terms of the new use to which they were being put. Both kinds of work, wage labor and its shadow, proliferated with industrialization. The two new functions, that of the breadwinner and that of the dependent, began to divide society at large: He was identified with overalls and the factory, she with an apron and the kitchen. For the wage labor she was able to find as a sideline, she received sympathy and low pay.

While, during the nineteenth century, technological change revolutionized work outside the household, at first it had little impact on housework routine, except for tightening the enclosure into which each housewife was locked. Tap water put an end to her carrying the jugs to and fro, but also to her meeting friends at the well. While women’s work was economically without precedent, technically it seemed to go on as always. Indoor plumbing and the new fuels, gas and electricity, which were to become nearly universal in U.S. urban areas by 1920 and in small towns by 1930, were for the great majority of people no more than technological possibilities at the turn of the century. Only as recently as the second quarter of this century did technology really change the material reality of housework; simultaneously, radio and TV began to act as substitutes for community conversation. Industry then started to produce machinery for shadow work. As industrial work became less labor-intensive, housework, without diminishing, became by several orders of magnitude more capital-intensive.

Economic progress is usually measured by the number of work places, meaning jobs, that are created. But it can with equal right be called that process by which more goods are offered on the market, each new commodity requiring a greater “input” of shadow work.[37] Development conventionally means that production has become more capital-intensive; it can just as well be described as the course through which more and more capital-intensive shadow work is made necessary for the achievement of a minimum level of well-being.[38] It is highly improbable that the volume of productive wage labor will ever again increase anywhere in the world, or that make-work, now called “service,” will be paid for as extravagantly as has occurred up to now. Rather, I expect that automated production will decrease the overall volume of wage labor and lead to the marketing of commodities requiring more, not less, unpaid toil by the buyer/user. This shadow side of economic growth – a foreseeable increase in shadow work as wage labor decreases – will further accentuate a new kind of sexual discrimination, a discrimination within shadow work.

Shadow work is not women’s exclusive domain. It is as clearly genderless as wage labor. Unpaid work to upgrade industrial production is done by males, too. The husband who crams for an exam on a subject he hates, solely to get a promotion; the man who commutes every day to the office – these men are engaged in shadow work. True, the typical “consumer” is “the household”, and this is run by a woman – the expression being but a euphemism for her toil. But if women alone carried the burden of shadow work, it would be silly to say that, within the realm of shadow work, discrimination works against women. Yet this is precisely what happens. In shadow work much more intensely than in wage labor, women are discriminated against. They are tied to more of it, they must spend more time on it, they have less opportunity to avoid it, its volume does not diminish when they take outside employment, and they are penalized more cruelly when they refuse to do it. What women are cheated out of through discrimination in reported and unreported jobs is only a small fraction of the shadow price due them for their unpaid shadow work in the home.

Education provides a good example. In former times, growing up was not an “economic” process; what a boy or girl learned living at home was not scarce. Everyone learned to speak his vernacular tongue and the basic skills necessary for vernacular life. Growing up could not possibly have been described, with rare exceptions, as a process of capitalization of the labor force. Today, this is all changed. Parents have become teaching assistants within the educational system. They are responsible for those basic inputs of human capital, in the jargon of economics, through which their offspring will be qualified as Homo oeconomicus. Quite reasonably, the educational economist worries about how to get the mother to inject the largest possible unpaid capital input into her child. In an economist’s words: “… By the time the children enter the first grade, significant differences in verbal and mathematical competence exist among them. These differences reflect, first, variations in native ability and, second, the amount of human capital acquired before the child reaches the age of six. The stocks of acquired human capital reflect, in turn, varying inputs of time and of other resources by parents, teachers, siblings, and the child itself. The process of acquiring pre-school human capital is analogous to the acquisition, later on, of human capital through schooling and on-the-job training.”[39] Quite correctly, the mother’s unrewarded time-cum-effort inputs into the capitalization of her child are here described as the prime source of human capital formation. Even if one considers such expressions grotesque, it is necessary to concede the truth of their substance in a society in which competence is assumed to be scarce and must be economically produced. The mother’s shadow work constitutes an economic activity on which the cash flow, salaries, and surplus value for capital formation all ultimately depend. And the state-sponsored, professional “operationalization” of shadow work, at the center and in the economic peripheries, constitutes a new development strategy best called the colonization of the informal sector.

Shadow work, however, cannot be measured in units of currency, although it is possible to transform a specific activity now exacted as shadow work into labor done for wages. This has been tried in the case of commuters. Some Austrian unions, following the lead of a Swedish union, obtained recognition by the employers that commuting was part of their employees’ work. Commuting, they argued, is a burdensome task imposed on each worker. It becomes necessary because factories are located not where workers live, but where property is cheap, highways numerous, and sites for executive residential areas close. Commuting constitutes that shadow work by which the worker picks up his own labor force each morning, puts it into a car, and then, acting as the chauffeur of the commodity the employer has contracted to rent during the eight-hour workday, drives this commodity to the workplace. In addition, this shadow work requires a high level of capital investment. A significant percentage of each workday’s wages must be spent by the worker for the purchase and maintenance of the car, and to pay the taxes that finance the construction of the highways on which the car runs. And commuting remains shadow work, whether the vehicle is a car, a bus, or a bicycle. Some small unions won their point. Their members then acted each morning as the chauffeurs employed by the factory to transport their own bodies to work. If, however, this kind of argument were generally accepted and workers were paid for the now unpaid toil expended on “capitalizing themselves” for the job and then transporting themselves to and from it, the industrial system would cease to function.

As these men have done, women can also demand that their shadow work be transformed into paid labor. But as soon as the shadow price of shadow work and the cost of wage labor are compared, the paradoxical nature of the former becomes evident. At least in the non-militarized sector of every modern economy, the shadow work input required is arguably greater than that of wage labor.[42] The industrial system is based on the assumption that most basic needs must be satisfied for an increasing majority of society’s members by the consumption of a bill of goods. Hence, the toil that is connected with the consumption of these commodities is anthropologically more fundamental than the toil connected with their production. This has been hidden, as long as technical imperfections made human hands or memories necessary ingredients in the production process: Consistently productive labor was identified with legitimate work, and toil that was associated with consumption was passed over in silence or associated with satisfaction. Now, the time input in production decreases sharply, while the growing commodity intensity of society increases the time input necessary for consumption. At the same time, more different forms of consumption have become “musts” – not satisfactory but instrumental forms of time use: John drives, not because he likes driving, nor because he wants to drive like the Joneses, but because he cannot avoid it. It would be mislabeling most acts of consumption, if we called them “satisfaction” – they constitute unadulterated toil, full-blown shadow work. The total volume of shadow work rapidly surpasses the total volume of available production-associated work or ritual. No matter how you compute a money equivalent to housework, its total value exceeds the volume of wage labor.

When feminists argue that women should be paid for what they do to ready for consumption what the family income buys, they are mistaken when they ask for wages. The best they can hope for is not a shadow price but a consolation prize. The gratis performance of shadow work is the single most fundamental condition for the family’s dependence upon commodities. Even if these commodities were to be produced increasingly by robots, industrial society could not function without shadow work. It is to money what the neutron is to the electron. It is as unlike productive “employment,” in which commodities for others are produced, as it is unlike homesteading and traditional household activities, which are performed neither for nor with much money.

Shadow work today hides behind much that passes for self-help. Self-help is a modern term: Not so long ago, it was used to suggest masturbation. Self-help divides the acting subject into two parts: One hand washes the other. The term became current in international development through its widespread use by U.S. agencies for international assistance. Through this term, the economist’s traditional distinction of all activities into either production or consumption, either productive or reproductive “relations,” is projected right onto the consumer: With his right hand he is taught to produce what his left hand supposedly needs. He is taught to do as much with as little as possible, to perfect the most deficient commodities with the greatest possible amount of shadow work. Not only are new products continually being designed for shadow work, for self-help, but microprocessors are increasingly taking over certain jobs, and those people no longer needed in wage labor are then pushed into shadow work. Thus, shadow work ceases to be predominantly women’s domain. With every year that passes, shadow work becomes more obviously genderless, and so turns from being an arena of woman’s oppression into the main arena of the economic discrimination against her.

Now middle-class fathers increasingly claim for themselves the experience of the kitchen and of childcare. They want to “do the steaks” for the guests, to spend an hour playing with their infant son. But under the guise of shouldering some of the “housework,” they open a new field for competition and resentment between the sexes. Formerly, women felt forced to compete for equal opportunities in wage labor. Now men begin to demand special considerations in the shadow work of the home. During the last twenty years, as women have gained legal protection for equal opportunities, on-the-job discrimination has become more widespread and more acutely felt. Now, with more men being forced into shadow work as employment becomes ever more scarce, discrimination against women, right in their homes, will become more pronounced.

This, then, is the picture suggested by recent studies.[45] Discrimination against women in formal employment and in shadow work is worldwide, and the same is probably true, although seldom discussed, for women in the unreported or submerged market. Discrimination both on and off the job spreads with a rising GNP, as do other side effects like stress, pollution, and frustration. None of these forms of discrimination is seriously affected by cultural background, politics, climate, or religion. Reports on discrimination follow a pattern not unlike that of reports on cancer of the breast and uterus: When the per-capita GNPs are equivalent, geography influences the way in which the malady is discussed and recognized, rather than the way it occurs. Australian women keep splendid statistics and Italian women cultivate abrasive cynicism. The barriers that keep women from privileged wage labor and the traps that lock them into the kitchen are explained in different ways in Japan and in the USSR, but everywhere they are comparable in height and depth. Again, the educational process provides a good example. Even when, in different countries, it is of equal length, even if the curricula are the same, its consistent result everywhere is a lower lifetime salary for women than for men. Indeed, the more advanced the levels of education scaled, the more tightly are women locked into their place, for they then have less chance than men for a new start on a different track. The battles of the seventies may have opened the executive suite to women, or have weakened the springs on the traps of the kitchen, but this change has disproportionately benefited “sisters” from privileged backgrounds. A few more women behind the operating table or on the university faculty, an occasional husband domesticated for washing the dishes – these rare tokens only highlight the persistent discrimination against women as a group. At the same time, off-the-job resentment has sharpened its sex-related edge."

(https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ivan-illich-gender)