Eileen Boris

Is a fair shake enough? Can “changing the game” through higher minimum wages, reformed managerial practices, ceilings on CEO salaries, community investment in childcare, and stronger laws reset the playing field for those for whom justice rather than equal rights is a necessity for thriving?  Naomi Cahn, June Carbone, and Nancy Levit think such measures can combat the harms perpetrated by what they aptly name the “winner take all” (WTA) economy now pervading our politics, corporate boardrooms, and tech campuses. However, they remain caught between a narrative desire to dramatize economic themes through powerful individual stories and an analytical need to underscore structural underpinnings and social solutions. They end up emphasizing the toxic masculinity that is a consequence of and a driving force behind the latest stage of racial capitalism while neglecting the increasing inequality among women that has taken hold in tandem with the widening gap between genders. 

Male employer villains loom large, working against women strivers everywhere, including low-waged sales and gig workers as well as highly compensated bankers and tech engineers (although they are not as well compensated as their cisgender male counterparts). WTA workplaces foster sexual harassment and dismiss family-friendly policies like parental leave and childcare tax credits even when available. They select the most rapacious and swashbuckling for advancement, though women who attempt to play by the written and hidden rules get burned or blamed when deals go south and illegalities become exposed. Aided by the neoliberal dismantling of the New Deal order, the culprits here are the “bros’ clubs” that jettison regulations, reward cutthroat individualism, and exclude others who fail to fit into the profiles of elite Ivy Leaguer or nerd. After 1970, a corporate focus on internal reorganization displaced the mid-twentieth-century emphasis on teamwork, loyalty, and cooperation, valued qualities that the law-professor trio associate with the feminine.  

In emphasizing the widening gender pay gap among professionals, the authors seek to explain persistent inequality between the sexes rather than accounting for divergences among women, despite careful selection of cases with diverse plaintiffs. The outsourcing of reproductive labor to the low-waged service and household worker sectors—disproportionately immigrant and US-born women of color—has facilitated the ability of some women to compete in the WTA economy. This reproductive displacement feeds into workplace expectations that allow employers to ignore mothers who are forced to leave jobs when care systems fail, like dental sales representative Lauren Martinez (one of the plaintiffs in the book). The devaluing of work associated with Black women, an afterlife of slavery, hence complicates the gendered inequality that Cahn, Carbone, and Levit do so much to expose. 

Recognizing the power of collective over individual solutions, the authors laud feminist anger and the cross-class and -race movements like #MeToo and support for reproductive health. They celebrate the McDonald’s workers who marched against sexual harassment along with the teacher unions that demanded community betterment as well as living wages. They advocate seeking political power to enact change.  Electing liberal politicians, however, is no guarantee. Uber and Lyft successfully derailed California’s reclassification of their drivers as employees rather than independent contractors. Even after years of lobbying, domestic workers still face exclusion from basic labor protections. Financiers find a new arena for profit in nursing homes and hospitals despite staffing regulations.   

[click_to_tweet tweet=”Eileen Boris: ”Fairness’ left intact festering harms. Neither will it vanquish the winner-take-all economy without confronting divisions among women—and the persistence of racial capitalism.'” quote=”“Fairness” left intact festering harms. Neither will it vanquish WTA without confronting divisions among women—and the persistence of racial capitalism. ” theme=”style2″]

When it comes to fairness, the lessons of World War II offer a cautionary tale. The Fair Employment Practices Commission was to end race discrimination. In shipyards and factories, white women could advance by going out with the boss, Black women only got harassment. Antidiscrimination never encompassed reproductive labor.  “Fairness” left intact festering harms. Neither will it vanquish WTA without confronting divisions among women—and the persistence of racial capitalism. 

Sarah Jones

Over a decade after Sheryl Sandberg urged us all to “lean in,” the American workplace can still be openly hostile to women. The gender pay gap not only persists but has remained stable over the last two decades, the Pew Research Center reported in 2023. The revelations of the #MeToo movement brought sexual violence out into the open and took down a handful of influential and terrible men. But no movement wins overnight. Women—especially women who lack union protections or the financial and social capital it requires to pursue a case—still face sexual violence at work every day. They can “lean in,” but without collective organizing, their circumstances will not permanently change.  

[click_to_tweet tweet=”Sarah Jones: ‘Women … still face sexual violence at work every day. They can “lean in,” but w/o collective organizing, their circumstances will not permanently change.'” quote=”Women … still face sexual violence at work every day. They can “lean in,” but without collective organizing, their circumstances will not permanently change.  ” theme=”style2″]

The authors of Fair Shake: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy link this troubled history to what they call a “winner take all” economy. Women cannot prosper under an economic regime that relies on their subordination and degradation. In Fair Shake, an early example concerns the women of Walmart. Founder Sam Walton “thought of management” as “‘the exclusive province of men’” and agreed with other retailers that lower-paid clerk jobs were for women, the authors write. Five women denied advancement and fair pay at Walmart filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of 1.6 million coworkers nationwide. The case went to the US Supreme Court, where justices, led by the late Antonin Scalia, ruled against them. 

In Fair Shake, women are failed, often, by American institutions as they seek justice. Nor is the acquisition of power and influence necessarily a safeguard against discrimination. The women of Walmart have something in common, then, with the women of finance and tech, as the latter challenge a chauvinistic bro culture and the abuse it fosters. The “winner take all” economy damages them all, the authors argue. Of course this is capitalism, working as intended, a regime that feminism has often tried to work with rather than against. The scholar Nancy Fraser, writing in the Guardian not long after the publication of Sandberg’s Lean In, argued that women’s liberation once “pointed simultaneously to two different possible futures.” In one, feminism “prefigured a world in which gender emancipation went hand in hand with participatory democracy and social solidarity,” and in another, “it promised a new form of liberalism, able to grant women as well as men the goods of individual autonomy, increased choice, and meritocratic advancement.” That “ambivalence,” she added, has been decided in favor of the second option. We now reckon with the consequences: what the authors of Fair Shake call the “winner take all” economy is simply a virulent form of capitalism that will not advance equality. 

But all is not lost. Fair Shake enters a discourse shaped by resurgent critiques of capitalism. Women are not monolithic, but many are beginning to realize that they’ve been playing a rigged game. The authors write that as they approached the final section of their book, they realized “the women who are fighting back are not fighting to enjoy the spoils of the new, stratified economy. They are fighting, alongside like-minded men, to change the very terms on which society is conducted.” Our current reality is difficult, the authors of Fair Shake acknowledge. Feminism, though, is an optimistic movement. In its most transformational form, it can restructure the present to achieve a better future for all. That future is still within our grasp.  

Alicia Modestino

Compared to most other disciplines, economics as a profession does not even come close to being representative of the society we live in, and it doesn’t look like things will change anytime soon. In the United States, women received only 32 percent of US PhD degrees in economics in 2021, compared to 53 percent in other social sciences and 41 percent of doctorates in science and engineering. Worse still, Black and Hispanic economists accounted for just 9 percent of newly minted economics PhDs—considerably lower than their combined share of doctorates in other social sciences (17 percent) and in science and engineering (13 percent). Within academia, women disproportionately fall off the career ladder compared to men during promotion to tenure and account for only 15 percent of full professors. 

This perpetual lack of representation in economics has important consequences, perpetuating a hidden bias in data collection and analysis that pervades policymaking. Economists routinely advise governments on a variety of decisions that touch people’s lives and affect aggregate measures of well-being such as consumer spending, economic growth, and income inequality. Until recently, that advisory role in the United States has been led exclusively by whites and predominantly by men.  

Yet in the wake of the #MeToo movement and the COVID-19 “take this job and shove it” recovery, we have seen a shift in the racial, gender, and ideological composition of economists in leadership positions. Janet Yellen has served as both Federal Reserve Chair and now Treasury Secretary. Cecilia Rouse chairs the Council of Economic Advisers, the first person of color and only the fourth woman to hold that position. These leaders and those who serve alongside them have helped to shift the focus of economic policy from markets to workers as America recovers from the pandemic and grapples with racial injustice and economic inequality. As a result, Biden is the first US president to champion a Medicare-like public health-insurance option, childcare as a core part of national infrastructure, and a $15-per-hour federal minimum wage. 

In Fair Shake: Women & the Fight to Build a Just Economy the authors lift the veil to reveal how and why women were set up to fail during the pandemic. Back in January 2020, just prior to the pandemic, women had reached an important economic milestone, holding just over half of all payroll jobs in America, for only the second time in history. Economists were predicting that women would continue to outnumber men in the workforce, particularly since the share of women with a college degree had surpassed that of men. Little did we know that women’s employment prospects would plummet just two months later. One reason for these losses was that the industries hardest hit by the pandemic—leisure, hospitality, education, and even some parts of health care—were “disproportionately female.” The other reason was the unprecedented disruption to caregiving as daycares and schools were closed, exposing the critical links between childcare, the labor market, and the economic prospects of women. While optimists speculated that this unexpected disruption to the status quo might usher in a new era of gender equity with respect to caregiving, others cautioned that the childcare burden would fall disproportionately on mothers, possibly undoing the historic gender parity in labor market outcomes just prior to the pandemic.    

As the authors of Fair Shake argue, without mobilizing a larger movement to put worker power at the forefront, women’s earnings will continue to lag behind those of men, and their overall economic progress will remain stalled. At the heart of this battle is the structural sexism underlying many of our labor market institutions, policies, and practices coupled with “winner take all” incentives and compensation schemes that have given rise to what Nobel Prize–winning economist Claudia Goldin has famously labeled “greedy jobs.”  Greedy jobs are extractive, requiring long hours, flexibility, and loyalty above and beyond the norm. They often involve working outside of normal hours, such as evenings, weekends, or holidays, and may require meeting last-minute demands. In return, greedy jobs have big payoffs for those who can compete for them, providing rapid promotions, salary increases, and decision-making power. 

[click_to_tweet tweet=”Alicia Modestino: ‘Without mobilizing a larger movement to put worker power at the forefront, women’s earnings will continue to lag behind those of men, and their overall economic progress will remain stalled.'” quote=”Without mobilizing a larger movement to put worker power at the forefront, women’s earnings will continue to lag behind those of men, and their overall economic progress will remain stalled. ” theme=”style2″]

As an economist and Goldin protégé, I was not surprised by the evidence of women’s lack of economic progress in this book. However, Fair Shake picks up where Goldin’s book Career and Family leaves off, as a call for women to step in and rewrite the rules of the economy, not just for their own benefit but also for the greater good of society. As much as I’d like to think that paid leave, subsidized childcare, and pay transparency laws will help to level the playing field, those policies won’t change greedy jobs nor address the misogyny, discrimination, and sexual harassment that women continue to face on a daily basis. Fair Shake brings together the individual stories of women who have fought our unjust economic system to demonstrate their collective power to increase economic equality. But now more than ever we must push that fight forward if women are to gain access to their fair share of economic resources and the decision-making power that comes with it.  

We first want to thank Signs and the incredible luminaries from feminist studies (Eileen Boris), journalism (Sarah Jones), and economics (Alicia Modestino) who have offered such thoughtful and interesting responses to Fair Shake. 

Eileen Boris’s response, “Toward Intersectional Justice,” appreciates our identification of a “winner take all” (WTA) ethos that pervades our economy and culture. As Boris notes, we “emphasiz[e] the toxic masculinity” that both results from and is “a driving force behind” what Boris identifies as “the latest stage of racial capitalism.” Boris then points out that reform must necessarily include a focus on “the increasing inequality among women.” And she is right. Our book tries to capture the dynamics that explain the workplaces that disadvantage women; as Boris’s inspirational work on the precarity of labor demonstrates, the class divide separates women in secure, mommy-track jobs (who may be passed over for promotion) from the women who cycle in and out of insecure jobs, made that much more insecure by evisceration of labor protections. We try to situate, moreover, what Boris describes as “the devaluing of work associated with Black women” not just as a legacy of slavery or of the dismissal of women’s caretaking but rather as part of a restructured economy that uses the exploitation of women to undermine what were once better jobs in teaching and the retail economy. We ended the book at a point we see as consonant with her conclusions; this is not a fix-the-woman book, it is a fix-the-system book, and our suggestions for collective action emphasize that the solutions do not lie in reforming one workplace at a time. Instead, as Boris’s own work emphasizes, the solutions are necessarily global in character; genuine reform requires capping the power of the few to design the workplaces that exploit the many on an international scale.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”Cahn, Carbone, & Levit: ‘This is not a fix-the-woman book, it is a fix-the-system book…. Genuine reform requires capping the power of the few to design the workplaces that exploit the many.'” quote=”This is not a fix-the-woman book, it is a fix-the-system book…. Genuine reform requires capping the power of the few to design the workplaces that exploit the many.” theme=”style2″]

In “Equality is Still Possible,” Sarah Jones similarly applauds our critique in Fair Shake of the WTA economy. As Jones notes, Fair Shake points out the similarities between minimum-wage greeters at Walmart and highly paid bankers on Wall Street who come up against masculinity-contest cultures in the WTA economy.  In that economy, business executives have the opportunity to amass a large share of resources for themselves and their chosen team, and they are rewarded for meeting short-term goals, like sales and earnings. To generate these, many top leaders pit employees against each other, creating hypercompetition and endurance contests. Employees become insecure and some engage in bullying, harassing, and dominating behaviors. It is in these types of companies where greater gender disparities are shown. And, like us, she sees a different future. 

Jones’s insight that feminism offered two possibilities, one “in which gender emancipation went hand in hand with participatory democracy and social solidarity” and another that granted women as well as men “individual autonomy, increased choice, and meritocratic advancement” is a powerful one. We agree with her conclusion that this is a false choice; we explain how, at least in today’s WTA economy, there is no possibility of the second without the first.  The challenge is how to construct a movement that connects not just women of different races, education, and social classes but also includes men of different races, education, and social classes.

Alicia Modestino, in “It’s Time for Women to Rewrite the Rules of Our Economy,” points out the “structural sexism underlying many of our labor market institutions, policies, and practices” works with the WTA economy to help explain women’s lack of progress.  Modestino, like the three of us, relies on the work of Nobel Prize–winning economist Claudia Goldin to diagnose problems in our economy. As Modestino notes, Fair Shake follows up on Goldin’s work “as a call for women to step in and rewrite the rules of the economy.” The solution is not just providing support for managing work both within and outside of the formal workplace but changing the system.

We were excited to see an economist, Modestino, who shares our conviction that (overwhelmingly white male) economists overlook many of the most important economic issues.  Indeed, we were heartened to see that all three authors share our view, as Modestino points out, that “now more than ever we must push [the] fight forward if women are to gain access to their fair share of economic resources and the decision-making power that comes with it.”  

One of the themes that unites the three responses is the sense of hopefulness when thinking through how to create a blueprint for the future. These are all forward-looking thinkers. Modestino talks about “mobilizing a larger movement” and issues a call to “push that fight forward” and “rewrite the rules.”  Boris rightly directs attention to “confronting divisions among women.”   Jones’s title, “Equality Is Still Possible,” does sound a promising note.  The calls we make in Fair Shake are for collective organizing, on the models of labor unions, overarching alliances and coalitions, and movements. 

As a final note, we are honored to be part of Signs’s Feminist Public Intellectuals Project—to combat fracturing in feminist theorizing, promote discourse about feminist issues, and bring together academics, public intellectuals, and activists. This is precisely the sort of collective action, transparency, and voice that Fair Shake encourages. These are the conversations that will build the interdisciplinary foundation, help envision a future where equality is possible, and create a bridge from dialogue to action.