Liberalism, Neutrality, and the Gendered Division of Labor. Gina Schouten. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019 (ISBN 978-019881307)

Abstract

The gendered division of labor (GDL) is the phenomenon whereby most unpaid household and caring work is done by women, regardless of whether they also do paid work outside of the home. It is sustained by ideologies, practices, and institutional arrangements. Examples include workplace norms demanding worker dedication, which leave workers little time for domestic work, and ideals of motherhood that encourage women to devote themselves unflaggingly to their children. A gender-egalitarian division of labor obtains when domestic labor is divided more or less equally between men and women. Gina Schouten ’ s Liberalism, Neutrality, and the Gendered Division of Labor presents a careful, sophisticated, if somewhat elaborate, argument that the coercive realization of increased opportunities for a gender-egalitarian division of labor can be justified using the limited, but, we assume, independently justified, tools of political liberalism. Schouten begins by presenting data showing that the GDL is indeed entrenched and that individual strategies for avoiding it are costly and difficult. Chapter 2 first explains the obstacle political liberalism presents to combating the GDL, namely the neutrality constraint. This constraint prohibits policies justified by appeal to a particular world-view, such as Catholicism or classical liberalism. Second, it considers and rejects some options for working around this constraint. They include the claim that opposition to a gender-egalitarian division of labor is unreasonable, that the GDL is nonvol-untary, and that it violates basic liberties. Chapters 3 and 5 rebut two prominent arguments for implementing a gender-egalitarian division of labor that observe the neutrality constraint. One claims that the GDL is a type of distributive injustice and the other claims that the GDL undermines women ’ s equal citizenship. Schouten ’ s alternative “ stability argument, ” which I reconstruct below, unfolds in chapters 4, 6, and 7.