In explaining a key contribution of their book, it is perhaps best to start toward the end of Mala Htun and S. Laurel Weldon’s The Logics of Gender Justice. Chapter 7 aptly illustrates both why scholars and practitioners need more nuance in their discussion of women’s rights and the importance of recognizing that a “one-size-fits-all” model for promoting women’s rights policy is simply not borne out by the data. In this penultimate chapter the authors compare the five policy areas discussed previously: violence against women (VAW), women’s work status, family law, family leave and child care, and reproductive rights (abortion and contraception). They use each policy area as a dependent variable and then test their main independent variables from the previous chapters. One of their key arguments is reinforced by their statistical analyses: each policy area operates according to distinct dynamics—including different underlying logics, actors, and institutions—that result in distinctive pathways to promoting varying women’s rights policies. In other words, violence against women policy may be an “easier” policy area for states to address than abortion because VAW policies engage with states, markets, and organized religion in distinctive ways.
The Introduction lays out Htun and Weldon’s overall framework for understanding aspects of women’s rights, which is one facet of gender justice, defined as “equality and autonomy for people constructed by gender institutions, including people of all sexes, genders, sexual identities, and gender identities” (p. 2). They frame women’s rights pathways as varying along two key themes: (1) the “class-status dimension,” which distinguishes whether the policy focuses on women’s socioeconomic “class” or their social/legal “status,” and (2) the “doctrinal-nondoctrinal” dimension, or the degree to which gender equality policy challenges the state–religion status quo. Based on these two dimensions, they create a 2 x 2 typology table that plots the five different women’s rights issues listed earlier. Although I think this table certainly works in framing and organizing their study, I found its binary nature limiting, as it does not adequately represent how their later analyses focus on degrees rather than either-or indicators. A four-quadrant figure based on two intersecting continuums would have allowed for more nuance in theorizing the degrees to which gender–class and doctrinal–nondoctrinal variables play a role in shaping policy outcomes.
Intersecting continuums would have been especially helpful for the discussion on reproductive rights. According to their typology, public funding for abortion/contraceptives is doctrinal and class based, whereas the legality of abortion is also doctrinal but status based, so there is overlap that cannot be easily mapped in this table. In using continuums, one could more easily see how reproductive rights vary primarily, though not entirely, on their relationship to class and gender designations, but even this is not an either-or outcome. Abortion, even when framed as an issue of public funding, is still gendered: gender is just not as significant as class for explaining when states support abortion. Additionally the authors include policies in this initial table not discussed in the book, such as gender quotas and reproductive freedom, so one wonders if the same factors analyzed for those policies in the book would have had the same effects.
Based on these dimensions, the authors focus on how different actors matter for different women’s rights issues. Strong autonomous feminist movements, international norms on women’s rights (specifically the Conventions of the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women [CEDAW], and leftist parties are key actors in promoting women’s rights (though to varying degrees depending on the issue), whereas strong state–religion relations are a key deterrent to them. The authors offer far more nuance than this, however, noting how leftist parties really only matter when women’s rights issues are considered “class” politics. This may be a surprising finding for many: that policies related to women’s status as women, such as violence against women, are not determined by political parties or even women in parliament, but instead autonomous feminist movements are what matter most. International pressure/agreements only seem to matter for violence against women and legal equality policy, whereas level of economic development matters for class policies like parental leave and publicly funded child care.
Each chapter then explores one particular policy area of women’s rights at four points in time: 1975, 1985, 1995, and 2005. The layout of each chapter is important because it demonstrates both the scope and depth with which this book treats these issues. In general the chapters first outline the meaning of a particular right and how it is informed by their typology. For example, Chapter 4, “Doctrinal Politics, Religious Power, the State, and Family Law,” explains what family law is and why it is considered a doctrinal issue focused on women’s status. Then each chapter outlines global variation in these policies (some, like Chapter 2 on VAW, do so more extensively than others). The authors then put forth their hypotheses based on the literature and offer statistical analyses based on those hypotheses. Each chapter concludes with discussion and explanation of the findings. The content, analyses, and discussion are extensive and easy to follow, even for those not particularly interested in statistics.
One of the many significant contributions of this book are the original data and indexes Htun and Weldon produced based on this research. They developed indexes for 70 countries, which cover 85% of the global population, on each issue at four points in time. These indexes vary in what they measure and how, but aim to offer a more robust assessment of the variation in women’s rights policies. There are indexes that measure policy adoption and/or implementation of VAW, economic equality, family law policy, family leave “generosity,” and both the legal status and funding for abortion and contraception. For example, to measure abortion laws, the authors created a 10-point scale based on the time period during which an abortion is available to pregnant women and reasons it is allowed, rather than simply asking if abortion is legal or not.
These indexes are theoretically informed in ways that will satisfy feminist scholars seeking to engage empirical work while trying to maintain a feminist critique that binary measures and thinking limit our substantive understanding of policy realities for women in various countries. The cross-national and longitudinal scope of Htun and Weldon’s research is a monumental feat, and although it “ends” at 2005, nearly 15 years ago, I do not see this as a limitation. Rather I think this means they have laid the necessary and time-consuming foundation for the next era of feminist scholarship on women’s rights on which other scholars can continue to build. And they have done so with the necessary rigor and transparency that are hallmarks of their work: this book is an excellent example of how to do quality political science research.
I also think Htun and Weldon’s engagement with religion offers a much-needed (re)framing for political science. Religion plays a varying role in shaping states, and although it seems obvious this role would affect women’s rights, it is often only used to specify how particular religions, like Islam, are bad for women. But the authors argue that it is not necessarily a particular religion that is inimical to women’s rights, but rather the relationship between the state and religion that shapes women’s rights, and they note how varied Catholicism and Islam may be regarding different aspects of this issue.
There are many substantive results that are significant contributions as well, to which I can only briefly allude here. Some of their findings were somewhat surprising and interesting to me. For example, I was struck by how small a role having women in parliament played in explaining policy adoption. Although it did matter for some issues, such as women’s legal work status, its overall impact was much smaller than other factors. The authors note that women in parliament play a greater role in preventing rollback of rights rather than in promoting them, but also caution how a focus/belief that “women’s representation is a causal driver of women’s rights…may have colored our conventional wisdom…about politics” (p. 240). Coupled with their assessment that public policy research does not include many indicators of social movements despite their significance (p. 30), scholars may want to rethink how to model women’s rights and activists may want to rethink strategies for promoting them. This book offers a strong case why these issues matter.
Having said that, the authors tend to conflate gender justice, women’s rights, and gender equality. For example, in the Introduction, Htun and Weldon are specific in claiming that they are focused on women’s rights, which is a subset of gender justice and sex equality (p. 7) focused on “equality and autonomy for men and women” (p. 7). However, in the footnotes on the same page, they also note how they treat not only gender justice and gender equality as synonyms but also women’s rights, gender equality policies, and gender issues as synonyms (p. 7). They explain that this is purposefully ambiguous because women’s rights and sex equality are in fact part of gender equality issues. Given the attention that the authors pay to the nuance and meanings of different aspects of women’s rights, conflating gender justice, gender equality, and women’s rights seems like a problematic assumption to make and a missed opportunity to intervene against the normalizing of gender equality as woman-focused policy.
Empirically women’s rights and gender equality can be measured very differently: women’s rights may focus on policy outcomes, such as voting rights and legal access to resources, whereas gender equality may also include policies focused on outcomes like education rates and maternal health, so their conflation could actually limit the potential of the gender justice research agenda. For example, it is possible that gender justice could simply become the new name for the gender equality research paradigm, missing the important potential for broadening the meaning of gender beyond women. I imagine gender justice as an agenda that does more than study women’s right’s issues, but as the authors note, it could focus on heteronormativity and queer politics as well (p. 7). So being clear about the relationship between these ideas and what is actually being theorized and measured is important. Today’s gender equality research agenda has been co-opted globally to focus almost entirely on adding women, so clarifying how the gender justice frame moves beyond this in ways that will push scholars and practitioners to think more broadly about gender, sex, and sexuality could be better developed here.
Ultimately, this is an agenda-setting book, full of rich data, insight, and contributions that will have a lasting and formative impact for those studying gender, women, and politics.
