I argue that to be compelled to do routine work is to be gravely harmed. Indeed, that pink - collar work is a more serious harm to women than rape. My purpose is to urge politically active feminists and feminist organizations to arrange their priorities accordingly and devote most of their resources to working for the elimination of sex segregation in employment.

Open access: Philosophers and policy-makers concerned with the ethics, economics, and politics of development argue that the phenomenon of “adaptive preference” makes preference-utilitarian measures of well-being untenable. Poor women in the Global South, they suggest, adapt to deprivation and oppression and may come to prefer states of affairs that are not conducive to flourishing. This critique, however, assumes a questionable understanding of preference utilitarianism and, more fundamentally, of the concept of preference that figures in such accounts. If well-being is understood (...) as preference satisfaction, it is easy to see why poor women in the Global South are badly off: even if they do not desire more favorable conditions, they nevertheless prefer them, and that preference is not satisfied. Preferentism provides a rationale for improving economic conditions and dismantling the unjust institutions that prevent them from climbing higher on their preference rankings. Utilitarianism, therefore, insofar as utility is understood as preference satisfaction, is good for women. (shrink)

Questions about the use of “inclusive language” in Christian discourse are trivial but the discussion which surrounds them raises an exceedingly important question, namely that of whether gender is theologically salient-whether Christian doctrine either reveals theologically significant differences between men and women or prescribes different roles for them. Arguably both conservative support for sex roles and allegedly progressive doctrines about the theological significance of gender, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation are contrary to the radical teaching of the Gospel that in (...) Christ there is no male or female, Greek or Jew, slave or free man. (shrink)