Feminism

Is feminism falsifiable?

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'Feminism' can mean at least a couple of different things.

(1) As the view that women and men should have equal rights, or are owed equal respect, it's as falsifiable or unfalsifiable as any other moral/political position, e.g. that people should have equal rights or be given equal respect, irrespective of their race. Your question about feminism as a moral or political view raises more fundamental questions: are moral statements statements of fact? or are they expressions of approval or disapproval? or just claims as to how people should behave? If they are claims about how people should behave, are they grounded in the view that so behaving would make everyone better off, or that such behaviour alone gives due recognition to the relevant parties moral status, or that good, well-adjusted people would behave in such a way?

(2) As the view that women and men have equal capacities, feminism should be falsifiable: either women and men do, or don't have equal capacities, and we should be able to examine them to determine the answer. But there are real difficulties with doing this. First, there are lots of different capacities (depending on how you divide things up: e.g. there's the capacity to do mathematics, but also the capacity to do trigonometry and to calculate compound interest--two capacities, or one?) It doesn't seem that all of these capacities are equally important, or equally important in every context (compare the capacity to jump very high, the capacity to resolve social conflict, and the capacity to solve chemical structures). So how are we to measure whether women’s and men’s capacities are equal? If we could list capacities in some value-neutral way, and if we compared women and men on each of these, would our result be meaningful? Second, what we can measure is performance, and there may be lots of reasons that performance doesn’t accurately reflect capacities: the tests may be biased, or people with certain backgrounds may underperform because e.g. they think they’re bad at tests, or aren’t used to taking tests.

There’s lots more to say about this (and there are also varieties of feminism that what I’ve said above doesn’t quite fit). If you’d like to think about this further, I can recommend the book which I found really helpful when I was started to think about feminism:

Alison Jaggar’s Feminist Politics and Human Nature, Totowa, N.J: Rowman & Allanheld, and Brighton, U.K: Harvester Press, 1983.

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