Talking Equality but Doing Discrimination

A short essay on the use and abuse of language

Indigo airline is one of the largest in the world. Though unfamiliar to most outside India, you might have seen some headlines when they gave women the option of segregated seating away from men. But they are notable for another reason as well.

Indigo makes much of its DEI credentials:

IndiGo is a global leader in diversity

At IndiGo, we have always promoted a workplace that thrives on diversity and inclusivity.

Fine words, but difficult to reconcile with the reality that Indigo only hires female cabin crew – a selling point they highlighted in an advertising campaign boasting that cabin crew are “Escaping the patriarchy at 800kph”.

But is “diverse” really an apt description for a uniformly female cabin crew? And how can excluding men be called inclusive?

In an earlier essay, I argued that the feminist term “Gender Equality” actually refers to discrimination. Is there a pattern here?

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You have probably noticed that, when people behave immorally, they generally have a ready excuse or rationalisation. Psychologists have noticed this as well and studied it in the field of moral psychology.

An early advance came in the 1950s with the theory of Cognitive Dissonance which predicts that, if a person’s actions are inconsistent with their moral beliefs, they will feel a mental discomfort that drives them to change their beliefs or behaviour.

Moral Psychologists, led by Albert Bandura, expanded this framework by identifying specific mechanisms that allow people to maintain a positive self-image while engaging in unethical or harmful behaviour. One of the key mechanisms Bandura identified was the use of sanitising language or euphemistic labelling:

Language shapes thought patterns on which actions are based. Activities can take on very different appearances depending on what they are called. Not surprisingly, euphemistic language is widely used to make harmful conduct respectable and to reduce personal responsibility for it.

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Moral psychology has given us considerable insights into why people cloak immoral behaviour in sanitising language. But political writers, philosophers and authors have also contributed keen observations on how political ideologies twist words. And, in particular, that many disguise immoral acts with words that denote the exact opposite.

As long ago as the 18^th century, political thinker Benjamin Constant noted that political ideologies may twist words to mean their opposite. Fast forward to the 20^th century, and George Orwell famously wrote of the manipulation of language in his novel 1984. More recently, philosopher Jason Stanley explains how us-vs-them ideologies use:

the language of virtuous ideals to unite people behind otherwise objectionable ends.

Perhaps the broadest perspective of all belongs to sociobiologist Robert Trivers who wrote in his book The Folly of Fools: The logic of deceit and self-deception in human life:

What is notable here is that the opposite of the truth (180 degrees) is more plausible than a smaller deviation from the truth...

Linguists have also noticed this phenomenon across many different settings and coined a term for it: semantic inversion.

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So it should be unsurprising that, as we saw earlier, feminists would label discrimination as “Gender Equality”. This semantic inversion doesn’t just obscure the immorality, it cloaks it in virtue.

And we see the same semantic inversion in DEI rhetoric such as that of Indigo airline. To be sure, most DEI policies aren’t as extreme – not so much “Men need not apply” as “Don’t get your hopes up”.

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So how did this come about?

Around the 1980s, the feminist zeitgeist underwent a seismic shift. Feminist academia engaged in a debate between equality feminism, which favoured equality, and difference feminism, which argued that women should be treated more favourably than men. By 1993, equality feminism had been relegated to the margins and Anne Phillips, a key author on the politics of feminism, could write of the issue in the past tense:

[…] the pendulum has substantially shifted from abstract equality towards engendered difference.

But, despite turning away from actual equality, many feminists sought to retain the rhetorical power of the word by developing:

a new theory of equality that no longer relies on us being treated the same.

We can visualise this shift in language by looking at changes in the use of phrases over time. (See paper.)

Source: Google Books Ngram Viewer (scaled)

The graph shows the decline of a term associated with equality (“equal opportunity”) coinciding with increasing use of phrases associated with discrimination against men (“women-only” and “quota for women”). And note that this linguistic shift aligns perfectly with the history just described. On the heels of this pivot, the phrase “Gender Equality”, not previously in common use, rises dramatically. It seems the term Gender Equality is not just associated with discrimination against men but serves to rebrand it. And the reference to “Equality” in “Gender Equality” is merely a euphemistic label that retains an echo of the equality that feminism once supported.

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The result is a chasm between feminism’s rhetoric and its reality. One consequence is that, when feminism is faced with criticism of its discrimination, it inevitably retreats into the rhetoric of Gender Equality and DEI to escape the reality of the criticism. For, to deal with the criticism directly would involve facing the cognitive dissonance that motivates the reframing in the first place. So, we have a bizarre situation where feminists cannot even acknowledge that they are being criticised for discrimination. Instead, they reframe criticism to avoid the real issue.

A striking example of the confusion this generates can be seen in recent feminist discussion of survey results showing many young men support equality between the sexes and oppose feminism. There shouldn’t be anything mysterious about that – it’s the core position of the men’s rights movement. But, for a feminist to acknowledge it would be to concede that feminist policy is far removed from equality. Consequently, the authors conclude, ludicrously, that even though young men say they oppose feminism, they don’t really!

The most common outcome, though, is that feminists misrepresent criticism (especially about discrimination) as misogyny. At some level they presumably recognise that the criticism is not literally an expression of hatred against women but branding critics as misogynists allows them to acknowledge the existence of criticism without engaging with its substance.

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In the end, the reality is clear. An airline exclusively hiring women is not diversity. Excluding men is not inclusion. It is discrimination and rhetoric cannot change that. Even totemic words like “equality”, “diversity” and “inclusion” cannot change the nature of an act, they can only obscure it.

Feminists commonly use deflections like “But it’s not discrimination, it’s just…”. We are invited to embrace the rhetoric of Gender Equality and DEI but ignore the reality. My advice is to look to the reality and, if the in-group is favoured over the out-group, then it is discrimination and the rhetoric can never rehabilitate the reality. And it is the harsh reality of discrimination our society must address.

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This is the last of my four essays on discrimination and Gender Equality. The next group of essays will explore what drives Feminism and the consequences of those drivers. Along the way, I’ll continue to develop my theme that the nature of feminism’s in-group focus gives cause for concern. Please make sure you are subscribed to be informed when they are published.