ABSTRACT
Many recent arguments for rights or exemptions for religious or other cultural groups that may not themselves be liberal are based on liberal premises—whether the central liberal value be individual autonomy or tolerance for diversity of ways of life. In this chapter, the author shows, looking at three examples, that liberal defenders of group rights tend not to take gender inequality as seriously as other forms of morally arbitrary inequality when considering group rights and the limitations that should be placed on them by anyone starting from liberal premises. She discusses a number of reasons that contribute to women's being, in many cultural contexts, significantly less able than men to chart their own courses of life—outside of their community of origin if they should so choose. Clearly, defenders of cultural group rights or exemptions are often relatively insensitive to issues of gender and sometimes explicitly differentiate sex inequality from other forms of morally arbitrary inequality such as racial discrimination.
