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150 Citizenship

such rules as discriminating against women. In the 1970s, they were found
to be unconstitutional on the grounds that they infringed freedom of
personal choice; it was decided that women should not have to go on
maternity leave when pregnant. The current situation is that employers
are bound to treat pregnancy and maternity no less favorably than any
other illness or disability, or states of ill health which may also be suffered
by men. Many feminists see this as unsatisfactory: pregnancy is specifi c
to women and to describe it in such terms in order to make it gender -
neutral is to capitulate to the male norm. Furthermore, in most states,
paid maternity leave is covered only by insurance schemes which employ-
ers are under no obligation to provide, so that women who get pregnant
are being discriminated against as women. However, “ equal rights ” femi-
nists support the ruling, against “ difference ” feminists, on the grounds
that to insist on special treatment for women would prevent them from
competing on equal terms in the labor market and force them into eco-
nomic dependence on men (Bacchi, 1990 : chapter 5 ).
As Bacchi (1990) argues, the position of “ equal rights ” feminists in the
US often seems extreme to feminists elsewhere. To a large extent, it is due
to a lack of social rights; where women have a statutory right to paid
maternity leave, the same problems do not arise. In such countries, the
“ difference ” feminist position is much less risky for women, and it has
become increasingly important. Feminists are now concerned that treating
men and women as the same in law is ineffective as a means of realizing
real equality between the sexes. The anti - discrimination rights gained in
Europe and North America in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, now
tend to be seen as ineffective precisely because they fail to take into
account women ’ s particular embodiment and the way in which their his-

torically specific circumstances differ from those of men. Equal pay leg-
islation, for example, which stated that all workers should get equal pay
for doing the same jobs, was of little use because men and women tend
to do different kinds of jobs. In the British case, the European Court of
Justice ruled against this law and it has now been changed: comparison
must now be made between work of equal value . However, it remains
the case that the basis of comparison is the male norm insofar as women
must show the work they do to be of equal value to the better - paid work
done by men. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the job evaluation surveys on
which judgments of equal worth are based generally reproduce the under-
valuation of women ’ s work that already exists in society (Frazer and
Lacey, 1993 : 86).

The third case is exemplified by gender - differentiated social rights.
Women are disproportionately represented in welfare states, both as