ABSTRACT
In order to formally ensure free access for women to every social position, and in order to establish a society that is gender neutral, democratic states have, from the mid-seventies onward, established legislation prohibiting direct discrimination-that is, the arbitrary use of gender as a justification for a differentiated allocation of jobs, social positions and associated benefits. This conception of formal equality, which insists that women ought not to be constrained or arbitrarily discriminated against in their race for equal access to all desirable social positions, has nonetheless been deemed incomplete. In the eyes of some critics, the antidiscrimination legal reforms adopted under this paradigm of formal equality surely have prohibited (though not concretely eliminated all forms of) direct discrimination against women. But, feminists have argued, those reforms failed to deal with the larger and more problematic institutions of male dominance and couldn’t address the structural reproduction of gender inequalities.
