The Second Sexism: Discrimination Against Men and Boys

The presence or absence of these disadvantages does not demonstrate that males with symptomatic haemochromatosis and females with iron deficiency anemia are the victims of sexism.

Discrimination

To understand the relationship between disadvantage (on the basis of sex) and sexism, there are a number of concepts we need to understand and distinguish. First, we need to distinguish disadvantage from discrimination. The man with haemochromatosis is disadvantaged by not menstruating, but he is not discriminated against. For there to be discrimination the disadvantage must be at least partly the product of agency, or, on some views, of social structures or practices. Thus an individual, an institution or a state might discriminate against people of one sex. Or it might be the case that particular social structures or practices have the effect of favoring one sex over the other. The disadvantage suffered by the man with haemochromatosis is not in itself the product of any of these. For example, nobody forbade or discouraged him from menstruating or removed the uterus he never had, or prevented him from acquiring one.6

We cannot conclude, however, that whenever some disadvantage is experienced as a result of discrimination on the basis of sex that the person suffering the disadvantage is the victim of sexism. This is because discrimination is sometimes entirely appropriate, if not desirable. The word “discrimination” is so often used in its pejorative sense that it is sometimes forgotten that it also has an entirely non-pejorative sense. To discriminate is to recognize a difference or to differentiate. Some discrimination in this sense is both necessary and desirable. Teachers, for example, must discriminate — discern the difference — between good- and bad-quality work submitted by their students. If teachers awarded first-class passes for all work, or failed all work, irrespective of its quality, they would not be acting in an appropriately discriminating way.

Wrongful discrimination

This brings us to a second distinction, namely between discrimination and unfair or wrongful discrimination. Whereas discrimination per se can be morally acceptable, wrongful discrimination is, by definition, morally problematic.

There are obviously many possible grounds on which one might wrongly discriminate. These include sex, race, religion, ethnic group, national origin and sexual orientation. Of interest in this book is wrongful discrimination on the basis of a person’s sex.7

However, sex is not always an inappropriate basis on which to discriminate between people. Thus once one has established that a disadvantage is the product of discrimination on the basis of somebody’s sex, one then needs to establish whether or not that discrimination is fair, just or justifiable. That is to say, one must determine whether or not a person’s sex provides an appropriate basis for the differential treatment. For example, one might say that middle-aged males are discriminated against if their medical insurance does not cover them, but does cover females of similar age, for routine mammography. However, one might argue that the discrimination is not unfair on account of a relevant difference between men and women. Women, given the nature of their breasts, are more likely to get breast cancer, and thus the cost of routine scanning may be warranted for them but not for men. (We can imagine exceptions, of course. If some subset of males were known to have an elevated risk of breast cancer, we might think it unfair if they, unlike other men, were not covered.)

As we might expect, there is disagreement about the correct account of when discrimination is wrong. My preferred answer is that discrimination is wrong when people are treated differently without there being a relevant difference between the people that justifies the differential treatment. (When I speak of the differential treatment being justified, I do not mean that some or other reason is offered for the differential treatment, but rather that there is good objective reason for the differential treatment.) If, for example, a teacher were to fail work that deserves to pass and does so on account of its having been written by a student of a particular sex, race, religion, ethnic group or sexual orientation, then that teacher has also acted unfairly and wrongly. Such features of the author of a piece of written work are irrelevant to assessing the quality of that work.

Although this is my preferred account of what makes discrimination wrong, it is not necessary to accept this particular account in order to reach the conclusions for which I shall argue later in this book. It is possible for people with different accounts of what makes discrimination wrong to agree that specific instances of discrimination are wrongful. Thus my arguments in subsequent chapters will not presuppose a specific account of when discrimination is wrongful. In this way I hope to bypass at least some disagreement about what makes some discrimination wrong.

To give a specific example, we do not need to have an account of what makes discrimination wrong in order to know that excluding women from university (because they are women) amounts to wrongful discrimination. Similarly, we do not need to have such an account in order to know that laws permitting the corporal punishment of boys but not of girls amounts to wrongful discrimination. This is not to say that each of these discriminatory practices has not had its defenders. Instead it is to say that the best way to determine whether a given form of discrimination is wrong is to examine that specific treatment and all the considerations relevant to it. That is what I shall do in Chapter 4.

For this same reason it is not necessary, for those who do accept my preferred account, to give a more detailed account of when precisely a person’s sex is irrelevant. This question too can be bypassed. Moreover, it is not clear, in any event, that any more precise account could be given. There are so many different ways of treating people and so many different conditions under which they may be treated. To expect that a precise account can be given to cover all these cases is to expect more than can be provided.8 Consider, for example, the breast cancer screening example above. Determining whether that is a case of justifiable discrimination depends on the relative risks of breast cancer faced by men and women, on the costs of competing screening policies and on the rationing principles one uses to distribute scarce resources. This is just one of very many contexts in which we need to determine whether discrimination is fair.

Sexism

I shall refer to wrongful discrimination on the basis of sex as “sex discrimination,” “sexist discrimination” or “sexism.”9 This seems like an entirely reasonable understanding of what sexism is. However, it is not uncontroversial and thus more needs to be said about this definition, its competitors and what is at stake between them.

6

Fans of Monty Python’s Life of Brian will remember that a man’s lack of a uterus is “nobody’s fault, not even the Romans’.”

7

As implied in note 2 above, I am interested in sex discrimination rather than gender discrimination. Although there are different ways of drawing the distinction, a common one is between the biological or anatomical condition of being male or female — a person’s sex — and attributes that are socially designated as being masculine or feminine — a person’s gender. Thus a person who is anatomically male might be feminine and a person who is masculine might be anatomically female. I am fundamentally interested in sex discrimination because I am interested in discrimination against people who are anatomically male (or who are perceived as such). This is the complement to concern about discrimination against people who are anatomically female. Of course, sex discrimination and gender discrimination are related. Sexists tend to assume that males should be masculine and females should be feminine, but the expectation is that people’s gender matches their sex. Masculine women do not escape discrimination against females, and feminine men do not escape discrimination against males.

8

I am not the only one to think this. For example, Sophia Moreau (“What is discrimination?” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 38(2), 2010) says that her view of discrimination “does not offer a single reductive explanation of the wrong of discrimination — that is, an explanation that traces the wrong of discrimination to some further single kind of normative fact that is operative in all cases” (p. 157). That it cannot be so reduced, she says, “reflects the complex nature of the type of injustice that we are trying to explain” (p. 157). She says that we can only address such questions “on a case-by-case basis” (p. 159). And she says that this is no more problematic for her “account than for any other account of discrimination” (p. 160). Iris Marion Young makes a similar claim about oppression. She says that “it is not possible to give one essential definition of oppression” (Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990, p. 42).

9

Some people use the term “sexual discrimination” but I prefer to avoid it as it is ambiguous between discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation or activity and discrimination on the grounds of a person’s sex.