Can you define “equality”? If not, is it something that we should still seek for? Lundagård’s columnist, Satomi Miyata will look into how the term “equality” is difficult to define for this month’s column.
We won’t ever see an equal society realized anytime soon. Then, is it worth pursuing such thing that we will never obtain?
People would argue that even if we can’t realize such a society, setting an equal society as the ultimate goal is important, and this is a value to be shared among people regardless of different nationality, background, race and religion. Just like my father always puts, “Aim big and you achieve little. Aim small and you achieve nothing.” But it wouldn’t do any harm if I give it a rethink – whether equality is relevant to set as a goal or maybe one should just give up on the whole idea of equality.
As appealing as it sounds, I am very skeptical about the whole idea of equality. Take an example of gender equality. If we measure gender equality with the level of women’s participation in the labor market, Scandinavian countries are definitely on top of the scale.
But why is women’s active participation in labor market important in the first place? I have heard from a lot of my female friends from different parts of the world saying how bored they are at work and how they crave for nothing more than a weekend sitting at their work desk. It doesn’t sound like women particularly wanted to join labor market from this side of the story.
Some might argue that women’s power of earning makes easier for them to voice at households. That might be true to some extent. But you see a completely different case in other parts of the world. For example, in Japan, the number of women in labor force, especially in high positions of companies is very low compared to Scandinavian countries. But we have a saying which goes that “my wife holds the string of my wallet.” This means that housewives control where the money that husbands earn go. But then, it is true that when the door to labor market for women is closed, women are deprived of experiencing another way of getting hold of cash which men already enjoy, and I am fully aware of this problem. In addition, under such circumstances, women become vulnerable when they opt out of marriage. What I want to say here is that the measurement of gender equality is very difficult, and that there are many hypothesises and assumptions behind that we should first assess.
I should also talk about the precondition of unknown “equal society”, which is that people are given as many rights as possible so that they can act as an individual and steer their life the way they want without any intervention. In other words, it is the empowerment of each individual. But it seems to me that this is based on almost too naïve belief in each individual’s rationale and the potential that they believe that human beings have. I believe that our decision-making process is influenced by external factors more than we think. It is so easy to distort facts into the truth, which differs from one person to another. What I believe rational might be completely irrational for other people.
I am still not decided on whether equality is still something we should seek for regardless of its vagueness in definition. But I am convinced that we should all be aware of the term’s vagueness and vulnerability.
