Equality

Coupled with strenuous political activity, such claims of women's sameness—in regard to being "like men" in their possession of the essential quality grounding equality—eventually produced formal legal equality for women in most states. In most countries in the early twenty-first century, according to law, women can vote, own property, enter professions, receive an education, hold public office, and so forth. However, despite this formal equality, few would argue that gender asymmetries have disappeared. Women worldwide are far more likely than men who are otherwise similarly situated in race, ethnic, and class positions to be poor or illiterate; to perform the most dangerous, low-paying work; to suffer sexual violence; and to be absent from positions of public, economic, and cultural power.

The persistence of such gender asymmetries generates vigorous feminist debate. Some argue discourses of equality replicate rather than undermine male dominance. The male side of the gender binary remains the norm, hence female difference is devalued. Equality simply means the integration of women within "male-ordered" states. Insofar as individual women seek to emulate male-dominant values, they may attain equal access to political, cultural, and economic institutions. Such individual access will do nothing to transform the devaluation of the feminine or undermine patriarchal ways of life. True equality would require a revaluation of female difference and its incorporation, not erasure, within revised norms and social practices. Alternatively, some argue that the persistence of gender asymmetry is a symptom of pervasive, systemic domination. Equality is insufficient or inappropriate to overturn such social relations. Instead, theorists recommend a variety of alternate approaches, for example, ones rooted in theories and practices of justice, radical democracy, or sex or class revolution.