This past week, San Francisco mandated paid leave for
mothers and fathers alike; companies in San Francisco must now ensure all parents paid leave for six weeks
after having a child. With this new law,
we could be circumventing a problem we previously had with leveling the playing
field between men and women. While it
may have been true that having maternal leave for new mothers could catalyze
economic activity by attracting more women to the work force, it is also
probably true that employers were more hesitant to hire young women because
they were aware of the possibility that those women could get pregnant and
require paid leave. It seems this could
be a deterrent to hiring young women that would not have previously affected
hiring young men.
While this law may have passed in arguably one of the most
liberal places on our planet, it nonetheless demonstrates movement towards
aligning shares in the domestic division in labor. If women no longer have to take on the lion’s
share of child-rearing responsibilities and domestic activities, then they are
equally free to search for “income-generating activity and to acquire more
human capital” (33). Thus, with this new
arrangement, marriages are still dependent on the joint cooperation between
husbands and wives, yet the division does not have to divide based on working
inside the home versus outside of the home, but both parties can take shares in
both activities. In this way, if we were
able to equalize other gendered discrimination, women would have equal reason
to search for income also outside of the house and share the workload with
their husbands. With this new autonomy, they
would have the ability to detach their identify from just that of their family
and find individual with multiple social groups outside of the home.
While it is true that places around the world do not have
nearly the same access to this gender equality, San Francisco could begin to
depict a world in which women may have the same potential to generate income
and thus stand on the same ground as men in marriages, allowing them to play an
equal role in society. In this way, women
would have the ability to find work, join organizations, and meet people
outside of their home. By joining all
these new social orders, women would actually be finding individuality,
where no single order defines their identity or autonomy, but they are rather
given freedom to move in and out of any type of groups according to their own
priorities. With this transition, we
would begin to move to “cosmopolitan identification,” in which we all “identify
with multiple collective agencies, as well as with humanity as a whole, and
[we] therefore accept multiple commitments, not grounded in individual
preferences, as reasons for action,” giving us both more universality and autonomy (37). San Francisco’s new law could trail
blaze the way to “a kingdom of ends” in which every person is an individual and
treated as an end (37).
Hi Ellen! This is such a terrific post. San Francisco’s fully paid paternal leave is a great example that illustrates Anderson’s movement not only towards increasing a woman’s bargaining position, but also creating a cosmopolitan identification. This cosmopolitan identification ensures a “universal commitment [that] secures the conditions for everyone being able to achieve an identity and agency as individuals” (37). While this law is potentially susceptible to resistance, Anderson’s theory would argue that in the “kingdom of ends” would accept this law since it incorporates the universalization principle (37). In deciding whether to pass a mandated fully paid paternal leave for both men and women, San Francisco adopted a comprehensive perspective to determine the appropriate outcome, “a constitutive principle of a collective agent (a ‘plural subject’ or ‘we’) that whatever can count as a reason for all” (29). With this perspective, San Francisco was acting according to Anderson’s account “on reasons that are universalizable to their membership” (29). This law embodies Anderson’s universalization principle as it equally benefits both men and women.
ReplyDelete