The Logics of Gender Justice: State Action on Women's Rights Around the World is a remarkable achievement by renowned political scientists Mala Htun and S. Laurel Weldon. The book is their most recent contribution to nearly a decade of pathbreaking research on cross-national variation in women's rights. The authors take on the vexing question of why state policies on women's rights vary so markedly throughout the world, as well as within societies. Their objectives are twofold: for scholars, they shed light on the circumstances under which governments work actively to support and advance women's rights; for activists, they explore which types of laws and policies can promote gender-based social change.
The book is framed by two core assumptions. The first is that gender is not a simple binary category, but rather a set of institutionalized norms, rules, and practices that shape the parameters of belonging to a particular sex group. Just as important, gender is constructed differently in different historical and cultural settings. In recognizing and seeking to operationalize gender's multidimensional properties, Htun and Weldon's work marks a major advance beyond conventional unidimensional approaches that reduce gender inequality to a single facet such as sexuality, material inequality, or patriarchy. In this regard, their book should set a new standard for the field.
The second core assumption is that different governmental policies pertaining to women's rights are derived from three distinct political philosophies. Gender status policies are those that affect all women by virtue of being female, such as policies designed to control violence against women. Class policies are intended to promote women's greater economic and social equality, for example, family leave and public funding for childcare. Crosscutting gender and class-based policy dimensions are those they term doctrinal and nondoctrinal. Doctrinal policies derive from, for example, well-established, powerful institutions such as organized religion, whereas nondoctrinal policies include the strength of local and international feminist movements and political parties on the Left.
Htun and Weldon's methodology is elegant and comprehensive. They began by creating a dataset of 70 countries (85% of the world's population), which, although not randomly chosen, would, in their view, produce generalizable findings applicable to most national contexts. They selected five major women's rights issues for cross-national comparison: combating violence against women, women's legal status at work, family law, family leave and childcare policy, and reproductive rights and freedoms. Unlike other more narrowly framed cross-national comparisons, this one employs variables intended to be comparable across nation-states with vastly different histories, economies, and institutions.
For each issue, one or more indices were developed to assess the extent to which a given government promoted women's equality and autonomy at 10-year intervals, beginning in 1975 and ending in 2005. For example, their Family Law Index consisted of 13 items scored 0 (for “yes”) or 1 (for “no”) and included such items as laws on adultery being more favorable to men, inheritance policies favoring male kin, and laws requiring a common family name. A higher score indicated that the country's family law system guaranteed women greater equality (which obviously does not necessarily equate with an absence of legal discrimination). The authors nevertheless regard these laws less as a cause of equality than as a reflection of the degree to which nation-states have incorporated the value of equality, and they suggest that the results can offer a foundation for more nuanced legislation and a fairer legal system.
The authors present their data in charts, tables, and in some cases illuminating maps (which would have been even more so had their publisher used larger fonts) that provide a global overview of the issue under analysis across the four decades. Finally, they perform multiple regression analysis and coefficient plotting with variables they hypothesized would be salient in the relevant contexts. To again use the example of family law, these variables include an official religion and religious legislation, a strong feminist movement, and a history of communism. Their longitudinal approach using panel data of this nature is among the book's many strengths. By repeatedly employing the same variables over time, their findings effectively reveal the scope, comprehensiveness, and degree of gender equality with regard to the specific topics under consideration.
The book consists of an introduction, a conclusion, and five issue-oriented chapters. In each, the authors distill many of their findings into specific claims. Some are intuitive and expected. For example, highly institutionalized forms of religious authority, coupled with high degrees of religiosity, are associated with less sex equality in family law. In contrast, strong feminist movements are associated with stronger legislation designed to guarantee women's equal status at work. Other results are counterintuitive. For example, while the higher proportions of women in elected office had a positive association with advances in workplace laws affecting women, on other issues (i.e. violence against women, family law, reproductive rights, and family leave and childcare policies) they found a much smaller role than might be expected; other factors such as political parties, civil society actors, and religious and other institutional legacies exerted far more powerful influences. All results—intuitive or not—are subjected to detailed interpretation.
Perhaps The Logics of Gender Justice’s signal contribution is to unequivocally demonstrate that state efforts to promote women's equality and autonomy are neither simple, linear, nor unidimensional. Given that gender is multidimensional, and that societies and states intersect through multiple dimensions, laws and policies may move in contradictory directions, granting women some rights while simultaneously denying them others.
Htun and Weldon inject a valuable note of realism in their concluding comments addressed to gender justice activists: given that the contemporary dynamics of gender inequality worldwide are formed through the multiple logics of class, status, and doctrinal politics, it is not meaningful to expect large-scale solutions. Local, smaller-scale, incremental actions may instead offer more productive means toward global gender equality.
As a nonspecialist, I found the book's exposition consistently accessible, aided by the authors’ lucid delivery. They describe their methodologies, rationales for choosing them, and limitations thereof in great detail, and in a manner I found comprehensible. Aside from the great value of its content, the volume would be an immensely useful tool for teaching research methods to advanced undergraduates and graduate students. Overall, The Logics of Gender Justice is a masterful achievement.
