Institutional Pathways and Feminist Change

The difficulty of changing the gender division of labor highlights what Davina Cooper calls “the arduous character of pursuing and sustaining practices and norms that go against the current.” ^{Footnote 11} Cooper argues that trying to sustain counter-hegemonic practices in an inhospitable environment requires “pathways,” routinized and thus durable practices: “pathways highlight the ways in which practices can become normalised, taken for granted, or hegemonic.” ^{Footnote 12} The idea of pathways suggests the possibility of structuring environments so that oppositional actions can actually make sense rather than take extraordinary personal effort and dedication, or pop up in inexplicable spontaneous ways. Pathways, then, not only enable actions that are already desired, but can play a role in shaping desire in the first place. As Cooper says, “to the extent that more egalitarian relations are desired…pathways that are embedded and that, as a result, do not fade quickly may be called for.” ^{Footnote 13}

Notions of institutionalized routine and durability may not seem particularly democratic or even political; indeed, some influential strains of contemporary democratic theory take an expressly anti-institutional stance. For theorists like Sheldon Wolin, institutions impose stability and order on the “rebellious moment” of genuine democracy, which happens when citizens actively reassert their own power, apart from institutionalized rule. Thus, democracy is not “a form of government” at all; indeed, it is incompatible with regarding the state as the central aim and site of democratic politics. ^{Footnote 14} In a different idiom but to similar effect, Jacques Ranciere defines democratic politics in terms of an eruptive rebellious moment that poses a radical challenge to existing structures of governance. Institutions may be necessary, but they are inevitably forms of unequal power; thus Wolin and Ranciere challenge the tendency to “simply identify democracy with the legitimate state and liberalism.” ^{Footnote 15} Such an identification obscures the radical heart of democracy as a revolutionary way of being and acting that challenges mainstream conceptions of politics and hierarchical structures of governance, conceptions and structures that go under the name of “democracy” but which have nothing to do with the exercise of power by ordinary citizens or with practices of freedom.

What we find compelling in these theorists is the normative vision in which freedom and equality are linked to power and participation. Wolin puts it movingly: “Democracy is committed to the claim that experience with, and access to, power is essential to the development of the capacities of ordinary persons because power is crucial to human dignity and realization. Power is not merely something to be shared, but something to be used collaboratively in order to initiate, to invent, to bring about.” ^{Footnote 16} This use of power to “constitute a collaborative world” is the practice of freedom. Democracy, in this view, is an ongoing process of contestation, as people come together to challenge the workings of institutional power and the order it maintains. However, we challenge the claim that institutions are inevitably associated with elite dominance and a taming of such democratic impulses. Wolin’s own discussion of the ancient Athenian institutions of lot and rotation in office suggests that institutions can support and not merely constrain freedom. ^{Footnote 17} And the “ordinary individuals” that he regards as exemplars of democratic action are not simply protesting the current conditions of schools or the quality of their water, but trying to institute something better. Thus, as Patchen Markell puts it in his critique of anti-institutional theorists, it is hard to see “how their acknowledgment of the importance of rule is to be reconciled with their embrace of unruliness.” ^{Footnote 18} Their argument leaves little room for thinking about how to build institutional forms that sustain and enable democratic freedom.

In particular, with respect to the gender division of labor, we worry that the radical democratic view too clearly demarcates institutionalization and disruption, and thus projects a world of either passive acquiescence or heroic rebellion. This demarcation can obscure the great many decisions and actions that cannot be understood in these dichotomous terms given how people actually negotiate desires, options, and constraints. It can also keep us from appreciating how the desires underlying actions can be created, reshaped, and sustained by institutional forms in more democratic ways. Such “pathways,” to use Cooper's term, are not limited to de jure or governmental ones, but these are the ones we want to explore, given the critical perspective of anti-institutional theorists and given their importance in feminist theory and practice. Feminist theorists have long grappled with questions about the role of state institutions in creating the social change necessary for women’s freedom—their ability to share in the collaborative use of power. Feminist theorizing has the potential, then, to enrich contemporary democratic theory in important ways, by posing questions of democratic governance as well as questions of resistance.

Legal rulings (e.g., Roe v. Wade), access to political rights (e.g., suffrage), workplace regulation (e.g., the Pregnancy Discrimination Act), bureaucratic funding (e.g., Title IX), and various interventions into family life (e.g., the prosecution of marital rape) have made enormous impacts on the daily lives of women. Clearly, the project of women’s freedom has sometimes benefitted from institutional rules and the use of state power to promote or even impose new social orders. At the same time, the dangers of working with or within the state has been a topic of lively discussion in feminism, as in other social movements. ^{Footnote 19} Programs for radical change may be co-opted or redirected, or simply work to expand the state’s regulatory and disciplinary reach. This is a legitimate concern and an important insight for feminist strategizing; policies intended to support women's freedom may achieve neither freedom nor justice. But in our view, this concern should not lead feminists or radical democrats to avoid state action, but rather to think carefully about the complicated potentials of particular strategies and policies. ^{Footnote 20} “The state” is not a singular being but a fuzzy and fuzzily-bounded entity, one with multiple identities, sites, and powers that may be more and less hospitable to democratic and feminist aims. ^{Footnote 21} These multiple institutional structures play critical roles in shaping individual subjectivity, and to be sure, they can work to cultivate passively loyal and compliant citizens. ^{Footnote 22} Radical democrats tend to take that insight as a reason to be wary of institutions and to focus on efforts at resistance. But subjectivity never exists outside some logic, some structure, some order. So we want to venture in the other direction, arguing that democratic change requires more exploratory thinking about the positive potential of institutional forms. We agree with Wolin that democracy centrally involves the use of one’s freedom in “contesting forms of unequal power.” We will argue that this requires (among other things) using public policy to build pathways that sustain and enable democratic freedom by expanding the potential for participatory parity.

Two findings of recent empirical work in political science are especially relevant for trying to achieve progressive social change through state institutions. First, this work demonstrates how important continued movement activity outside the state is for accomplishing change via state channels. For example, Lee Ann Banaszak's study of “insider feminists” (movement activists working within the federal bureaucracy) reveals the importance not only of their insider position, but of their ability to mobilize external organizations to pressure state organizations. ^{Footnote 23} On a macro level, in Laurel Weldon's cross-national study of government action addressing violence against women, the key variable turns out to be not the number of women in the legislature but the presence of a vibrant feminist movement outside the state interacting with government agencies. These “strong, autonomous women's movements improve the institutional capabilities of government in addressing women's issues.” ^{Footnote 24} Clearly, then, working through state mechanisms cannot be an alternative to movement politics, but rather depends upon movement politics to be effective.

The second key finding of recent empirical work, for our purposes, is the tendency for advocates to focus on issues that are particularly relevant for advantaged subgroups. ^{Footnote 25} This supports the ongoing concern in feminism to recognize the ways in which axes of inequality (race, class, gender, sexuality, and so on) intersect in women's lives to create differently positioned subgroups. In what follows, we argue that the gender division of labor creates a kind of “linked fate” among women, while at the same time we aim to highlight how structures of choice and constraint vary for differently-situated women and thus require different policy projects to remedy. ^{Footnote 26}

Social Construction, Desire, and Democratic Freedom

Nancy Hirschmann’s work The Subject of Liberty provides an important critical lens through which we can better understand the roots of women’s inequality and the extent of change required to address it. It does so by highlighting the way freedom and equality are linked by a particular kind of power and participation: the “ability to participate in the processes of social construction.” ^{Footnote 27} The key aspect here is equal participation in shaping the norms that shape us, in acting on the relations and conventions that shape our actions, desires, and options. These norms exist throughout our world; they are salient not only in government bureaucracies and organizational hierarchies, but also in our associational life, our family structures, and our cultural artifacts, and they affect our self-understandings and bodily practices.

Although the power to act is central to any theory of freedom, Hirschmann also foregrounds the idea that acting individuals exist in discursive, social, and material contexts. These conditions affect not only how it is possible to act—the options available—but how it is possible to want to act. The self that desires and chooses to act does not exist in some neutral space; it has come into being in the context of discourses about possible and appropriate desires and choices for certain kinds of selves, and even appropriate ways of being a self. Undergirding and interacting with these discourses are the institutions and policies that materialize these possibilities. Analyzing freedom thus requires attention to “both the material conditions in which [a choice] is made and which affect the options available, and the internal conditions of identity and self-conception that give rise to desire.” ^{Footnote 28} It also requires analyzing how the external conditions interact with the internal—in other words, how “restraint and opportunity form and influence desire, preference, and choice.” ^{Footnote 29} In this view, then, democratic freedom must involve more than resisting established hierarches; it must also involve equal participation in the various social locations in which subjectivity is created—homes, social associations, workplaces, and state institutions. ^{Footnote 30}

To say that our desires are socially constructed, and that they might be constructed more freely, can seem to open the door to what Hirschmann calls “second-guessing”: the claim that someone’s true desires or preferences are not what they say (i.e., that the chooser has false consciousness). Although feminism in popular cultural discourse is notorious for making accusations of false consciousness, this is simply inaccurate. In the last few decades, feminists have explicitly struggled with the following dilemma about “choice” in a context of oppression: on one hand, if we are to engage in political struggle against oppression, women need to feel empowered and feminist analyses must understand women as agents, not just passive dupes of power. On the other hand, any quick and easy affirmation of women's agency ignores the extent to which even women's subjective experiences of choice and agency are profoundly shaped by power. ^{Footnote 31} Hirschmann addresses this dilemma by pointing to three intertwining levels of social construction: the ideological (i.e., beliefs about women), the material (the institutionalization of those beliefs), and the discursive (the conceptual language through which we make sense of the world and ourselves). For example, with respect to the gender division of labor, there exist ideological beliefs about the natural role of women as primary caretakers of children. These beliefs are then materialized in workplace structures and tax policies that assume a primary breadwinner with a primary caretaker at home. They also reproduce themselves discursively, becoming the conceptual framework through which we discuss a women’s “choice” to stay home. It is not that women make choices that go against their “true” or “objective” interests, but rather that their desires and their options have been formed within this particular social context.

Thus, for Hirschmann, the fact that a woman chooses to act in a particular way doesn’t mean she is free, for “what is relevant to understanding her freedom is not simply the fact that she makes choices but rather the degree to which she can participate in creating the options from which she must choose.” ^{Footnote 32} This participation is not only a matter of participating in creating specific policy options or in counter-hegemonic feminist organizing (although certainly that), but also of participating in creating the social contexts—material, ideological, and discursive—that shape us. For Hirschmann, as for us, the paid labor economy—the public sphere outside the home—is the key to linking these two moments of participation:

As women “acquire more power to participate in the terms and processes of social construction,” they “increase their freedom to make meaningful choices.” ^{Footnote 34}

Yet women currently are far from sharing equally in many of the central locations of social construction; they do not share equal power in the mainstream opinion-making centers of society (i.e., the media, advocacy groups), in civil society institutions where power is exercised (i.e., the workplace, academia, associational life), nor in the formal institutions of governmental decision-making. ^{Footnote 35} This imbalance and its effects extend beyond the upper socioeconomic classes through all levels of the social order. What we see in editorial offices of the New York Times and in Congress is also visible at the local supermarket or school district office. ^{Footnote 36} Overt discrimination still exists, of course, but this is only part of the story. Women do not participate equally in social construction because the ideological, material, and discursive contexts of the United States are such that many women desire to prioritize their role as caregivers, at the expense of their participation in paid labor. The lack of participatory parity, enabled and ensured by the gender division of labor, undercuts the conditions for women's freedom since they participate less fully in the construction of social contexts that then help to shape their desires, options, and decisions.

At the same time, we present evidence in our next section that many women in fact don’t desire to prioritize their role as caregivers; it just appears that they do because of how institutional and social contexts shape their decisions. In other words, it would be a mistake to see women’s decisions in the dichotomous terms of simple acquiescence or straightforward resistance. So by emphasizing processes of social construction, we do not mean to say that women are all produced as identical subjects, nor to say that women are passive dupes of power. Our social context is not singular or seamless; there are multiple ideologies, institutions, and discourses with varying degrees of power and visibility. Particular institutions and ideologies affect different women in different ways, and different women make different choices and take different actions. But the inequality at the level of social construction persists, part of the feedback loop that leads women in and out of paid labor and shouldering most of society’s care work, which in turn maintains the lack of participatory parity and reaffirms conventional assumptions about the gender division of labor.

One might argue, though, that women engage in processes of social construction through their care work, and that they play much more of a role in these contexts than do men. But this reaffirms assumptions about what type of person is fit for such roles and does little to address the marked underrepresentation of women in leadership positions throughout society. Moreover, the social construction that encourages women to find their primary role in the home and men to find theirs in the public sphere springs from a patriarchal view, which is activated in some way—regardless of how progressive the family is in other respects—when women find the home to be their primary area of influence. For heterosexual couples, we know that a woman’s financial weakness relative to her husband influences her power within the home. ^{Footnote 37} There is some evidence that labor specialization and unequal division of household tasks on the basis of power and income also exists within lesbian and gay households. ^{Footnote 38} In addition, for some men, the decisions they feel they must make to conform to gender norms go against what they would prefer. ^{Footnote 39} For all these reasons, it is not enough to offer women a sphere over which they hold putative dominion, as if the two arenas did not interact or as if they had equal influence over the rest of society. In order to better realize women’s—and men’s—freedom, we need a world in which participation in both the public and private worlds is more evenly distributed across genders, allowing women and men to more equitably share in the processes of social constructions that then shape their decisions and actions.

Women’s Freedom and the Gender Division of Labor: The Current US Landscape

Given the socially-constructed environment facing women, it is not surprising that so many women make decisions that lead to inequity between women and men in the processes of social construction. Many women forego advancement in their jobs, work at low-wage jobs without benefits, or give up paid work altogether in order to provide care for children and other family members. This occurs as girls are socialized toward motherhood, and often assume they will be (and are assumed to be) the primary caretakers of their children; they choose education and career options accordingly. ^{Footnote 40} Ideologically, there is general cultural disapproval of mothers of young children working full-time. For example, in a 2013 Pew Research Center survey, only 16 percent of respondents felt that full-time working mothers are ideal for young children, with one-third of adults responding that having a mother who doesn’t work at all is ideal (although support for full-time working mothers is much stronger among African-Americans; 31 percent of African-Americans support full-time working moms versus 13 percent for whites and 17 percent for Hispanics). ^{Footnote 41} At the same time, only 36 percent of full-time caregiving mothers report that their situation is what they most prefer; that is, 64 percent would prefer another arrangement. Among all mothers, 32 percent say full-time work would be ideal for them (51 percent of mothers do work full-time), while 47 percent percent say working part-time would be ideal (but these options are notoriously limited in terms of pay and benefits). Importantly, all these numbers vary depending on respondents’ class position, race, and marital status, with higher-income, white, and married respondents being more likely to prefer not to work and to see stay-at-home motherhood as the ideal. Meanwhile, 75 percent of fathers report that they most prefer full-time work. ^{Footnote 42} An additional 2013 study indicates the depth of the male breadwinner/female caregiver ideology, finding that “gender identity—in particular, an aversion to the wife earning more than the husband— [negatively] impacts marriage formation, the wife's labor force participation, the wife's income conditional on working, marriage satisfaction, likelihood of divorce, and the division of home production.” ^{Footnote 43} These data are not conclusive, of course; they don’t uncover why individuals answered surveys the way they did and they reveal a diversity of attitudes among women. They do, however, suggest that there are clear ideological pressures pushing women—and not men—to put care work ahead of paid labor.

These gendered beliefs are materialized into the lived reality of mothers. This materialization ensures that even those women who may be able to avoid the ideological constructions at home—mothers in same-sex relationships, for example—remain subject to the disciplining force of these social constructions. ^{Footnote 44} One study paints a dismal picture for mothers in the workplace: they are less likely to be hired, less likely to be promoted, and less likely to be viewed as competent or committed to their jobs than men (with or without children) or women without children. ^{Footnote 45} Moreover, for each child they have, mothers earn 7 percent less in hourly wages than women without children; a 5 percent penalty remains even after accounting for workplace experience. ^{Footnote 46} For those who are able to take time off from paid work following the arrival of a child, later “on ramps” are notoriously limited. ^{Footnote 47} Women also earn dramatically less—20-30 percent annually—when they do return to the labor market, compared to women who have not taken time off. ^{Footnote 48} And many mothers do not in fact “opt out” of paid work but rather find themselves pushed out of jobs they would otherwise retain. ^{Footnote 49} Despite high-profile, wealthy stay-at-home moms, more women stay in the labor force but “end up in deskilled, dead-end jobs.” ^{Footnote 50}

Most contemporary workplaces are still structured under the assumption that workers have someone else taking care of family matters, despite the fact that most women work outside the home. Indeed, within one year of giving birth, 55 percent of women were back in the labor force in some capacity in 2010 (34 percent were employed full-time, with dramatic increases in full-time versus part-time employment as educational attainment increases). ^{Footnote 51} But caring for an infant presents enormous obstacles to wage-working mothers, who must balance work with the demanding schedule of infant care with few public resources to assist them. ^{Footnote 52} Moreover, women do not often find themselves sharing parenting responsibilities equally with another adult. Over 17 percent of mothers with a child under 18 live alone (the comparable number is 3.4 percent for fathers). ^{Footnote 53} Yet even in households with a male partner present, the gender division of labor leaves women largely responsible for household management, even when they earn more than half of the household income. ^{Footnote 54} Men report spending more time on childcare duties than in the past, but women still spend more time overall. ^{Footnote 55} More mundane household duties like cooking and cleaning, as well as household management tasks like child care arrangements, still appear to fall disproportionately to women, even as men believe themselves to be taking more of the work. ^{Footnote 56} Within same-sex couples, the gender ideology may not remain in force in the same ways, but differentials in household tasks along gender-coded lines can remain. Some ethnographic evidence points to an “family myth” of egalitarianism, in which household work is actually outsourced to paid domestic workers or done by a partner specializing in domesticity. ^{Footnote 57} The arrival of children often encourages same-sex partners to specialize in either paid or unpaid labor, since the material conditions of the contemporary United States do not currently support workers’ care work responsibilities. ^{Footnote 58} This not only leaves one partner more vulnerable in the event of separation, it does little to dismantle the gender division of labor since it maintains a breadwinner/caregiver binary and its attendant inequality. ^{Footnote 59}

Women make decisions about paid labor and care work in this cultural and institutional context. These decisions are discursively constructed in terms of “choice,” which veils the myriad other forces influencing which pathways makes sense to individual women. The ideological, material, and discursive processes of social construction are intertwined, and are entrenched throughout our institutional landscape. For example, the Census Bureau counts mothers as the “designated parent,” and codes time spent with the father as time spent in “childcare.” ^{Footnote 60} Even seemingly generous and gender neutral policies often reinforce ideas about appropriate divisions of labor; e.g., many universities’ parental leave policy allows leave only for the “primary caregiver,” not for both parents. ^{Footnote 61} These are but two of the many ways that the gender division of labor is quite literally institutionalized. In the latter example, the policy materializes its own ideological assumption; since only one parent can take the leave (even if both are employees), that parent will be more likely to do more caretaking. In our current social context, that parent is more likely to be the mother. The policy quite literally legislates against equally-shared parenting, and joins the multitude of social, political, and economic factors that maintain the pathways for the gender division of labor.

With ideological assumptions about their role shaping their own sense of motherhood and family, with forces outside of them reiterating these messages, with little material support for parenting from employers or the state, and with the second shift looming, it is not surprising that women who can often “opt out” and women who can’t get stuck in low-waged, dead-end jobs. Economically-privileged women can also attempt to cope with the conflict between paid work and the gender division of labor by using money to purchase household labor services. The role of African-American and immigrant female care workers in this country highlights the ways in which wealthier, usually white, women continue to rely on other axes of marginalization (race, ethnicity, income) in order to make their families work. ^{Footnote 62} This shifting of the burden of care to less advantaged women leaves the underlying problem—the devaluation of care work and men’s historical exemption from it—uncontested.

As that example makes clear, although all women are affected by the socially-constructed gender division of labor, as social and material conditions differ so do the specific structures of choice and constraint. For example, in Jennifer Johnson’s study of white working-class women, she notes that working-class women are more likely to have jobs that involve a time clock, restricted breaks, close surveillance, involuntary scheduling, and pay penalties or other discipline for lateness. This makes it more difficult for them to perform wage labor while also meeting their caretaking responsibilities. ^{Footnote 63} As a result, working-class women tended to move in and out of jobs with more frequency than middle-class women. ^{Footnote 64} They operated within the material possibilities particular to women in their economic class—possibilities that often limit advancement in the workforce or lead to future financial hardship.

Although working-class women have little choice about whether and when to work, this doesn’t imply that they would prefer not to if they could afford it. Not surprisingly, Johnson’s respondents displayed a diversity of orientations: some would have preferred to stay home, but many were happier when working outside of the house. Although their jobs were low-paid and often lacked benefits—assembly line workers, nurses’ aides, cashiers, cafeteria workers—many women enjoyed the independence and the sense of competence and social contribution that their jobs gave them. ^{Footnote 65} However, like middle-class women, working-class women’s social context affects what work and care work options they choose or even consider—what “makes sense” to those in their social and material conditions.

Meanwhile, single mothers who are welfare recipients have virtually no options to consider. The racialized ideological constructions surrounding “welfare queens” materializes into institutional policy that pushes single mothers on welfare out of the home, regardless of their own desires. Since the passage of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRA), “all welfare mothers are now required to work . . . from the moment they enter the welfare office, they must be looking for a job, training for a job, or in a job.” ^{Footnote 66} Alternatively, poor single mothers supposedly have the “choice” to get married to a breadwinner; indeed, the stated purposes of PRA are to promote marriage and “the formation and maintenance of two-parent families.” ^{Footnote 67} As Mink puts it, “the Personal Responsibility Act tells the poor single mother that if she doesn’t participate in a father-mother family, she surrenders her right to care for her children.” ^{Footnote 68} In addition to this clear lack of autonomy, the further problem is that the jobs available generally don't offer job security, a way out of poverty, or influence in the processes of social construction. Nonetheless, welfare recipients often must adhere to a time intensive and often bewildering array of regulations: job-search requirements (like making 40 job contacts in 30 days); mandatory skills workshops, training programs, or workfare; and “reporting responsibilities” to one's caseworker. ^{Footnote 69} Penalties for not adhering to regulations include losing a percentage of one's welfare benefits. Yet the inadequate services and subsidies for childcare and transportation, and the sheer number of requirements, make it difficult for any woman to fully comply. Welfare reform, as Hays writes, has produced an odd combination of “bureaucratic control, behaviorist methods [incentives and sanctions], and demands for autonomy.” ^{Footnote 70} Women’s experience in the welfare bureaucracy is supposed to train them in “personal responsibility,” but it in fact requires obedience and compliance—qualities not generally associated with freedom. Here we see an obvious example of the way in which institutional forces shape us as political actors in precisely the undemocratic way Wolin and Ranciere would stress. Yet, as both theorists might expect, welfare recipients have also been active in welfare rights movements that contest these institutions and policies. To us, this example underscores the dire need for more freedom-supporting social welfare institutions, ones that at a minimum do not impose extra constraints on the agency of poor women as they make decisions about paid work and family care.

We see the internal and external forces combine in various ways across the range of women's racial, ethnic, and class positions; the social context conditions both women’s desires and their available options, more or less stringently, making particular pathways into appealing or sensible choices (and sometimes the only choice). Attention to intersectionality and the relative advantages and disadvantages of different subgroups of women helps us appreciate the depth of social construction and the radical changes necessary to transform the gender order. In the end, the key point is that the current processes of social construction encourage female subjects to shoulder the majority of responsibility for care work in a household (whether with enthusiasm, or with mixed feelings, or out of necessity) to the detriment of their potential for positions of greater authority outside the home. ^{Footnote 71} These decisions then in turn help maintain those social constructions by ensuring unequal participation in their creation.

Creating Pathways to Participatory Parity

This discussion helps us better appreciate the ways in which social construction both shapes desire and forms barriers to what women may themselves want; in other words, these processes of social construction may serve as unnoticed desire-forming forces or be felt as external barriers, or some of both. While Hirschmann’s analysis helps us see the various levels of social construction and thus the different types of forces playing a role in the formation of desire, we also want to highlight here the diversity of desires one person may hold, the ways desires come into conflict with one another or with the range of available options, and the resulting outward manifestations of desire. This is better captured when we speak of “decision,” as opposed to “choice.” Decision is how we manage our desires within a particular set of options and possibilities, and we make decisions within this particular gendered context. Within any context, there are diverse desires, options, and decisions. Clearly, some women find the identity and practice of the stay-at-home mom appealing, and decide upon that path. Other women may also decide upon that path, although it conflicts with their sense of self, since they find that other material constraints leave little alternative (i.e., inaccessible, unaffordable, or low-quality daycare options or the healthcare needs of a family member). Other women will reject this option entirely, but may perhaps contribute to the reproduction of particular ideas that help to reproduce unjust gender relations, e.g., about the inferiority of care work to other types of labor. Still others may want to stay home with their children, but find that state policy requires that they be engaged in labor outside the home in order to qualify for the food aid their family needs. What is significant here is that that the decision to act, the outwardly visible “choice,” does not always reflect the whole of desire. Two similar decisions may not reflect similar desires and two different decisions may in fact be rooted in similar desires. In short, a decision may seem to be the result of a particular desire, but it likely does not tell the entire story, especially given the constraints that limit women’s options in the first place.

Our point is twofold: first, that what is characterized as a choice is actually a decision profoundly shaped by the social context. Any end result—any decision—actually elides a much larger array of constraints and desires. The internal and external context combine in various and often invisible ways to produce a particular individual decision. Thus, we cannot assume that a decision reflects in any uncomplicated way what a woman actually—according to her—desires. Second, because decisions are often backed by this complex array of desires, changes—even small ones—to institutions and policies have the potential to tip decisions one way or another, leading to more profound changes in the processes of social construction.

To be sure, the change required to achieve participatory parity is enormous. We need high-quality, state-subsidized daycare; living wages; a true end to wage discrimination; flexible jobs; a shorter full-time workweek; paid nontransferable parental leave for both parents; reformed domestic partnership, divorce, and child support systems; universal health care; more generous and less intrusive social welfare programs; job training; a culture of assumed co-parenting; and so on. ^{Footnote 72} Yet the likelihood of these larger transformations is undermined by the feedback loop between the gender division of labor and women’s inequality in the creation and recreation of those conditions. Propelling change forward thus requires the development of alternative pathways for women that could help enable participatory parity. At the same time, those who wish to enable women’s freedom must also respect the decisions women make—even if they undercut women’s potential for equal participation in the processes of social construction. Pressuring individuals into pathways that go against their deeply held desires or sense of self—taking away their immediate power over their lives, even in the service of increasing women’s ability to participate more equitably in the institutions that in turn shape those desires and that power—is quite clearly at odds with the vision of democratic freedom articulated here. What then would these institutional pathways, informed by feminist theories of social construction and a commitment to a radical democratic ethos, look like?

Here, we take up a different public language about choice and attempt to turn it toward the project of women's freedom. In Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein popularized the idea of “choice architecture,” or the way that the design of the context for choice influences the decisions that are made. ^{Footnote 73} We find the analogy to physical architecture particularly useful. Because the built environment is constructed with particular ways of being in mind, it normalizes and makes easier those ways of being. For example, a large part of what makes being in a wheelchair “disabling” is that buildings and streets are not built on an assumption of wheeled mobility, but rather on an assumption that users are able to walk, mount curbs, and climb stairs without assistance. Just as physical architecture and interior design help to create “disability,” the regulations and rules governing the contexts in which people manage their desires have an enormous impact on those decisions. ^{Footnote 74}

Thaler and Sunstein argue for the importance of designing policies that “maintain or increase freedom of choice” but also try to “influence choices in a way that will make choosers better off, as judged by themselves.” They call this kind of design a “nudge”:

The example of arranging food in the cafeteria underscores Thaler and Sunstein's crucial point that there is no neutral choice architecture; something has to be at eye level, and it matters what.

It may seem willfully contrarian for two feminists to turn to an approach described by its authors as “libertarian paternalism.” ^{Footnote 76} This approach also seems to be fundamentally at odds with the commitments of radical democrats given its expertise-driven focus on institutional design and its behavioralist approach. Like other critics, we worry about the technocratic approach and want to distance ourselves from what the New York Times has called “the University of Chicago Mind” and its faith in behavioral social science. ^{Footnote 77} But we believe that focusing on ideas about “choice architecture” can help highlight the non-neutrality of any public policy (including the non-neutrality of the lack of a public policy) and can underscore how the existing social architecture already helps to shape both our desires and decisions. Further, even choice architects on Thaler and Sunstein’s model can be guided by commitments that resonate with our feminist analysis. They are aware, as we are, that the design of the context reflects a normative assumption about better outcomes. But for them as for us, the design must also reflect a normative commitment to freedom in the sense of autonomy, by not penalizing people who choose in a way the design would regard as worse. ^{Footnote 78} In this sense, then, feminist choice architecture about wage work and care work provides a concrete way to respect the diverse decisions women make while at the same time embodying a feminist judgment about what decisions are more likely to enhance women’s democratic freedom—their ability to use power collaboratively, to contest the roles assigned to them, and to participate equally in the processes of social construction that help shape their very desire for participation.

Why do we think the design of decision contexts will make a difference, if women are conditioned and constrained to choose in specific ways anyway? First of all, many women express dissatisfaction with the choices they have, as the evidence cited in the previous section makes clear. Secondly, as we argued earlier, the policy context itself is a significant part of the conditioning and the constraint women face. We do not claim that more women participating as peers in social construction automatically means more feminist outcomes (although we can't resist hoping so). But at a minimum, changing the decision context can open spaces for different decisions and increase potentials for participatory parity. To design choice architecture that would make women better off “as judged by themselves” requires that we continue to learn more about the kinds of choices women wish they had (not just how they justify it when talking to journalists, but taking seriously their satisfactions and dissatisfactions, their needs and aims, at different times of life and in different classes and identity groups). It requires the collaborative use of power— an ongoing engagement between broadly-based women’s movements and policymaking processes in order to articulate what different women want and how those desires are hampered or supported by specific proposals. ^{Footnote 79} Throughout these efforts, we must remain mindful of the dangers of compounding the existing marginalization of less advantaged women, as well as the possibility of embedding practices that can aid in addressing that marginalization. ^{Footnote 80} Our own analysis of the social construction of care work as women’s work makes clear the critical importance of an intersectional approach. As long as some groups of women are designated substitute care workers so that other, more advantaged groups of women may become more like elite men, the patriarchal social construction remains and women who are able to participate equally—and men who choose to do equal or primary care work—will remain interesting exceptions.

We are certainly not saying that the possibilities we present next are sufficient for the radical and fundamental changes necessary to fully realize women’s freedom. We do believe that these steps have the potential to further democratic freedom while respecting the decisions women make under current conditions—that is, without further violating women’s self-determination. As Hirschmann argues, women’s participation in labor outside the home “elevates their status as a group,” transforming understandings about women’s (and men’s) proper roles both within the family and society at large. This doesn't happen automatically, of course, but in conjunction with multi-pronged feminist organizing. Our hope is that momentum will build and lead to other changes as well: that as social constructions about the roles of men and women change further, the existence of more role models, social movement and interest group pressure, increased representation, and demands for individual equity—none of which is sufficient on its own—will create a powerful force moving us more fully toward freedom and democracy. So in order to intervene in the feedback loop between the gender division of labor and the lack of participatory parity, we propose some feminist nudges. We are focused here on public policy and the state; we expect that the pressure for these nudges, however, would come from various locales, from bureaucratic and political agents inside the state, as well as feminist movement from the outside.

Feminist Nudges

Consider the strategies Thaler and Sunstein offer for thinking about choice architecture. They suggest taking seriously the importance of the default option; designing a system that is forgiving of “error” and gives feedback about mistakes; providing clear information about how choices connect to future outcomes; structuring complex choices in ways that give clear but simplified information; and creating or highlighting incentives. ^{Footnote 81} These principles guide us in imagining some feminist choice architecture. We begin with nudges that would allow women to remain in paid labor and move on to others that would facilitate their return after a care work absence. Yet these proposals, while necessary and potentially life-changing for many women, do not do enough to deconstruct the ideology around care work and who properly undertakes it in our society—and may just result in more “second shifts” or lower-income women taking on more care work for those who can afford to buy their services. For this reason, we go on to suggest nudges with the potential to change the value placed on care work, as well as nudges with the potential to more fairly distribute the care work throughout our society. ^{Footnote 82}

For many women, taking time off seems to make financial sense, even when that's not actually the case. This often happens when women measure childcare costs against their current, rather than overall future, earnings; they also may see childcare payments as coming from their salary, rather than from their male partner’s salary or from the total of two combined salaries. How might we nudge women to consider the long-term financial vulnerability that results from taking time out of the workplace? Family needs often compel working-class women to quit inflexible jobs despite the financial hardships and many women who decide to leave their jobs may be well aware of the consequences but find the immediate benefits more compelling. But for others, clear information about long-term costs might affect their decisions. Before the Great Recession, individuals received annual Social Security benefits statements. Along with reinstating that program, a nudging statement could provide estimates of the difference in benefits based on previous versus current earnings in cases where there is a sudden drop in income. This information might rub salt in the wounds of those who have lost their jobs, so there could be an option to discontinue receiving the information, but the default option would be to have it provided. In addition, home economics, life skills, or family studies courses at the secondary level could include detailed examples of the differences in lifetime earnings and retirement benefits among people who have different work patterns, as well as more information on the likelihood of divorce and disability over the course of a lifetime. These options do not directly or forcibly intervene in the decision making process. But they could lead to more accurate consideration of the long-term costs of economic dependence, and they might also prompt recognition of the disjuncture between rhetorical endorsements of care work and the lack of material support and benefits provided for those doing it, helping to transform how we view this work.

Another example addresses the lack of paid sick or family leave, which often makes it impossible for workers to fulfill both their work responsibilities and their family's needs. The lack of paid sick leave is particularly difficult for lower-income workers, since these workers are more likely to have inflexible schedules and patchwork childcare arrangements, leading to “a pattern of serial quitting.” ^{Footnote 83} Of course, adding paid leave might not appear to be a low-cost change. Yet many analysts have argued that the absence of paid leave is not just bad for workers, but a bad decision for employers—and bad decisionmaking can be addressed through nudges that provide clear information or highlight incentives. ^{Footnote 84} Flexibility and paid leave can improve productivity and morale, and reduce absenteeism, turnover, and lateness. So employers already have financial incentives to offer paid leave. But as Thaler and Sunstein point out, people often need to be made aware of the incentives they face. ^{Footnote 85} This sort of nudge might apply to either private employers or state governments; for example, California and New Jersey have implemented paid family leaves, at an approximate annual cost of $30 per taxpayer for 3 months paid leave. ^{Footnote 86} Nudging employers and taxpayers to recognize their financial incentives should make easier the passage of laws such as the federal Healthy Families Act (H. R. 1286/S. 631 in the 113th Congress), and has the potential to make the implementation of the laws more consistent and less grudging. Paid leaves would help women stay in their jobs, and would signal a revaluation of care work. It is also possible that paid leave would encourage men to take on more care work by providing them accepted pathways for doing so. ^{Footnote 87}

Other nudges could address the financial stresses facing lower-income mothers even more directly, leaving them more time to focus on both professional development and carework. As we noted above, the welfare system needs to be seriously transformed, and welfare policy must respect, and not penalize, poor women’s decisions about work and family. At the same time, relatively straightforward changes in social policy administrative “defaults” could make an immediate difference to the economic vulnerability and overall well-being of low-income mothers. Researchers have suggested that parents be given the opportunity to request children's health insurance coverage on their tax forms; that software be adopted to enable recipients to apply for multiple programs at the same time; and that for re-enrollment, agencies “use preprinted forms that include the information submitted the previous year. Families would only need to update any information that has changed since the year before.” ^{Footnote 88} Some form of simplified filing could also be implemented for the Earned Income Tax Credit, a program supported by both parties that has been extremely effective in reducing poverty and in increasing employment, particularly among single mothers. ^{Footnote 89}

There are also ways to modify public institutions that would make it less onerous for all individuals to stay in the workplace when they desire to do so. For example, the farm-based schedule of the public school system has long posed problems for working parents. In one of our own districts, the elementary school day runs 8:40-3:05, except on Wednesday, when school lets out at 1:20. Moreover, each level of school (elementary, middle, high school) has a different start and end time, and all schools are closed from mid-June through the end of August. While many women may want full-time work, this variability in the school schedules, coupled with the ideological assumption of gendered parenting, presents enormous logistical challenges.

For those who decide to leave the workplace for a period, there are a number of nudges that could help ease their return and reduce some of the harm associated with such leaves. Employers, professional associations, or unions—working collaboratively with the affected individuals—could take the lead in developing programs that keep parents’ skills and licensing up-to-date while they are caring for children; governance institutions could offer incentives for developing such programs. Teachers, tradespeople, health care workers, and childcare workers could all benefit from such programs, maintaining their connections to their public lives, and their workplaces and industries would benefit from reduced replacement costs and more satisfied workers.

Some interventions in choice architecture might aim at trying to open new discussions about the value of care work and preventing the most obvious forms of inequality springing from the gender division of labor. More than 20 years ago, Susan Okin suggested the economic dependence of wives who do not work outside the home could be reduced “if both partners have equal legal entitlement to all earnings,” and if employers divided wage checks between the worker and partner providing otherwise unpaid care work. ^{Footnote 90} What about a more modest plan, in which W-4 forms are changed to include a section where the worker would need to choose one of the following options:

• ____ I request wage check be paid to worker.

• ___ I request wage check be split between worker and designated partner (provide full name, Social Security number, and address).

Many workers would simply choose what is now the status quo, and it would be easy to do so. Others might choose the split option for a variety of reasons (including a commitment to egalitarian relations or to valuing domestic work). And still more would probably discuss it, argue about it, and wonder what they should do and why there is an option. The potential here is not only that some individual women's economic dependence could be reduced, but also that having the option formally available would legitimate the idea that domestic work is valuable labor. A similar program could work for 401(k) contributions from the employer or Social Security records through the state. ^{Footnote 91} Such a policy does nothing to ameliorate inequality between families, nor does it provide unemployment or disability insurance for care workers, but it is a relatively simple, low-cost nudge that would help those who want to contest the value of the role assigned them by the division of labor.

Thoughtfully designed public policies can also help to more justly distribute care work between the genders. The experience of the Nordic countries is instructive here. Gender-neutral family leave (which either parent can take) results in women, but not men, taking parental leave, thus reinforcing the gender division of labor and creating “mommy tracks” in the workplace. Nontransferable family leave (in which a certain proportion of leave is reserved for each adult) has noticeably increased the number of fathers taking leaves to care for their children. ^{Footnote 92} As more women stay more attached to the workforce and as caring for others becomes a more accepted practice throughout society, early research shows that these changes can lead to more dramatic shifts in the social construction of the genders, enhancing men’s participation in various forms of care work and women’s participation in paid employment. ^{Footnote 93} Changes to the way childcare assistance is organized can also help reshape the gender division of labor. The United States currently offers almost no public support for childcare, with meager subsidies for low-income parents and woefully inadequate limits on Dependent Care Spending Accounts and Dependent Care Tax Credits. But what if the deductions for Spending Accounts, at the very least, required that couples split the deduction between two working parents (when two are present), helping to normalize shared responsibility for childcare? Even with more public resources for family leave or childcare, a feminist welfare state requires careful attention to rules and program design in order to achieve more than a second shift for mothers, “mommy tracks” in the workplace, or a transferal of care burdens to less wealthy women (who may not receive Social Security or unemployment insurance, among other inequities.) ^{Footnote 94} The United States has a long way to go before providing families with a robust network of social supports, but the role of public policy in shaping gender constructions and material possibilities is clear.