The Sex Equality Gap
The United States has a sex equality problem that disproportionately impacts women of color.
Despite the passage of sweeping federal, state, and local laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex in employment, education, public benefits, housing, health care, voting, and in virtually all significant aspects of the U.S. economy and society, women, and particularly women of color, continue to experience persistent sex discrimination. These laws, starting with the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, make up what we call the 20th Century Sex Equality Paradigm.
At face value, such laws can be credited with having made considerable progress in dismantling stubborn forms of sex-based inequality for women. Yet, a deeper examination of this data reveals a harsher truth: white women have been the primary beneficiaries of sex equality laws, leaving women of color significantly behind.
"The Sex Equality Gap: How the 20th Century Sex Equality Paradigm Continues to Leave Women of Color Behind" examines this equality gap, demonstrating how the existing sex equality paradigm centers white women and does not adequately account for how sex and race discrimination intersect with one another. An approach to combating sex discrimination that ignores or tacks on considerations of race discrimination disguises how the benefits of existing equality measures have been distributed in ways that further marginalize women of color. Thus, the implicit focus on the experiences of white women that are built into the current sex equality paradigm creates an equality gap that is itself a serious problem of gender-based injustice. The paper utilizes comparative data to measure the extent of sex-based inequality in society for women of color as compared with their white female counterparts.
This policy brief seeks to name, examine, and disrupt the Sex Equality Gap that continues to exist between women of color and white women in the following areas:
Healthcare
Pay Equity
Homeownership
Education
Food Security
Ultimately, this brief recommends that a 21st Century Sex Equality Paradigm should reassess the relative value of sex equality laws and policies by deliberately centering the impacts on and benefits to women of color, and by adopting a substantive, rather than formal, approach to equality.
The paper concludes that the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), a measure that would add specific sex equality protections to the U.S. Constitution, could—and should—be the vehicle to bring about a more equitable form of sex equality in the U.S. through practical intersectional policy interventions.
“The success of sex equality laws should be measured not only by how they benefit women overall, but specifically how they benefit the most disenfranchised women, including women of color.”
“Failing to account for the intersectional dynamics of both sex and race discrimination, by using the gains experienced by the most privileged women in society as a model for all women, has the effect of disguising how the benefits of existing equality measures have been distributed in ways that further marginalize women of color, thus erasing and normalizing the sex equality gap,.”
“We conclude that final ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment can remedy the sex equality gap that has permeated the 20th Century Sex Equality Paradigm. By modernizing constitutional sex equality in ways that would benefit and center the people who have been left behind by current equality measures, the ERA would pull the U.S. Constitution into the 21st century.”