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In the Company of Women

Videos Jun 17, 2019 Lisa D. Cook , Liza Featherstone, Antara Haldar, Betsey Stevenson, and Graciela Chichilnisky

Amid stalled progress toward gender equality, the World Economic Forum predicts that it will take 202 years to close the global pay gap between men and women. Five leading thinkers discuss the institutional and cultural obstacles women face in the workplace, and what gender inequality is costing in terms of economic growth and wellbeing.

This film was created in collaboration with the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University during the Center's Women in an Inclusive Economy conference.

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Lisa D. Cook

Lisa D. Cook is Professor of Economics and International Relations at Michigan State University.

Liza Featherstone

Liza Featherstone is a journalist and professor who writes frequently on labor and student activism. She is the author of Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation.

Antara Haldar

Writing for PS since 2019
32 Commentaries

Antara Haldar, Associate Professor of Empirical Legal Studies at the University of Cambridge, is a visiting faculty member at Harvard University and the principal investigator on a European Research Council grant on law and cognition.

Betsey Stevenson

Betsey Stevenson is a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan, and served as President Barack Obama’s chief economist at the Department of Labor.

Graciela Chichilnisky

Writing for PS since 2019
1 Commentary

Graciela Chichilnisky, Professor of Economics and Mathematical Statistics at Columbia University, is Director of Columbia Consortium for Risk Management, co-founder and CEO of Global Thermostat, and co-author of Reversing Climate Change (World Scientific Publishing, December 2019).

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Lawrence Michael Jul 17, 2019

The idea of confusing economic parameters in developed democracies and states to be global ones is a fallacy even if one assumes them to be equal societies in terms of conceptualization of democratic equality that is inherent in their 'socialization' processes. This is simply because of various psycho-cultural factors that do denote the imagination of the structural ones including how those institutionalized norms and behaviour plays itself out in reality, including their reasons for it. Second is the necessity of what one terms the civil as the precursor to the political. Whereby the rule of the law is imagined after the issues of equal societies in the ideas of the civil and political are established. The imagination of the 'ideal' as the 'desirable' often proves detrimental when we recognize the inevitability of the 'ideal' as real and the inadmissibility of deviations as 'cultural'. This occurs because of the reification of those various practices as 'normal' that then makes the inevitable of democratic equality as normal all the more difficult. Second, the idea of the equal society is dogged with many problems within developed societies and states with the imagination of the equal and specially the imagination of the women about the equal. Given the often confrontationist attributes that mark the protesting women for real or imagined wrongs query this imagination and its various sources, including the subject of protest and their causes. Often within an environment of inequality as 'normalized', the protest merely turns to be one for better conditions for work and play under the normalized iinequality instead of a struggle for democratic equality in reality. Thereby marking the step for democratic equality in equal pay as one that is an important one but needs to examine itself over the above issues. Given the age old problems inherent in the gendered roles and functions, the inevitable right to democratic equality that is equal (and not merely protests) is critical. Seen as those brings the need for the key issues involved in the imaginations of gendered roles and the function of both the sexes as equals and not antagonistic, beg for those imaginations to be sorted out and examined and re-examined without letting particular religion abused/used as the pretext for the 'cultural' for a wooden-leg syndrome. While an important step, the key issues remain of equality and their imaginations in the civil, and thereby the political and wherefrom the rule of the law derives and becomes a guarantor for peace, prosperity and collective living. Something that we then see within socialization or the common practices backed by imaginations whose 'normalization' is what we term socialization.
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