The Women's
Equality Party is a party whose main agenda is to use women's lib to reduce
inequality and make women a more prominent force in society. Women make up just over
50% of the UK
But being the sort of seat
of the pants reality gambler that I am, I can actually conceive of why, in at least one area of consideration, women's
lib would actually have the knock on effect of increasing inequality. Not that
that's any reason to dislike it, of course - there are all sorts of things that
increase inequality that we ought to, and do, like.
What women's lib probably
has produced, albeit indirectly, is an increase in household income inequality, by which I mean inequality between sets of households.
The logic is fairly straightforward. Women now work in the job market a lot
more than they used to, and like men they tend to (but not in all cases) have a job roughly
commensurate with their education. Given this fact, which means they are going
to mix more with people in their academic group, and the fact that assortative
mating is very prominent in selective choosing, you are going to find like-minded
people will tend to marry each other, which means high end earners will marry
other high end earners, and the same with middle and low ends.
This means that household
incomes will be increasingly unequal. Two shelf stackers and two lawyers are
more likely to marry each other rather that two shelf stackers married to two
lawyers. Obviously there are plenty of exceptions, but generally what I've said
is true. But what it also means is that household rises in income inequality
are not only not much of a problem at all - they are, in fact, very directly
linked to the things we rightly celebrate, like the liberation of women.
