Happily unequal — why we are not equal

A beginning in rights

One of the great achievements of the modern age is the victory of rights.

Rights enshrined at the level of nationhood and state, in law, and in the very fabric of our social and cultural customs, have transformed the quality of human life. People are freer to speak, to work, to worship, to love, and to build lives of their own choosing than in any previous century.

Yet some have benefited more than others from the creation and extension of such rights. Workers, women, and minorities have each experienced revolutions in formal rights — and yet in each domain, inequalities persist. This is not only because the project of equal rights is unfinished, but also because some inequalities are natural, structural, or even desirable.

The British writers Louise Perry (The Case Against the Sexual Revolution), Mary Harrington (Feminism Against Progress), and Kathleen Stock (Material Girls) have each, in different ways, challenged the idea that progress equals ever-greater equality. Using the paradigm of their work in feminism I explore the idea of how equality and inequality are not a zero-sum game.

Perry shows how a culture of sexual “freedom” can disadvantage women by ignoring real asymmetries between the sexes. Harrington argues that uncritical pursuit of “progress” for women sometimes hollows out the very relationships and structures that sustain human flourishing, mostly through a form of market-driven commodification of the human body. Stock highlights how denying material reality — such as the biological basis of sex — in the name of inclusion can create new injustices. All three urge us to be honest about human difference.

This article takes the same spirit and applies it more broadly as an aid to clients and students I work with to help understand why discussions around rights and eqaulity can feel confusing and misleading. I'm quick to point out that this has nothing to do with denigrating the achievment of rights. Rights have been a magnificent achievement. But it has a lot to do with challenging the implicit mantra of “equality”. This mantra often obscures a richer truth: humans are not equal, and pretending otherwise could be doing more harm than good.

This is something both tangible and visible in my work with my clients and students as a teacher and guide. I have seen again and again over the years the confusion that results when individuals fail to make sense of the dissonance they experience when the ideology of equality meets the reality of lived experience.

The mantra of equality

Because rights were so hard-won, their benefits so obvious, it is easy to see why the rallying cry for equal rights has become sacrosanct, and most people dare not challenge the notion of equality for all out of fear of being labelled illiberal, misogynistic, racist, or any other slur that could discredit a person's sincere misgivings.

In the twentieth century alone, workers gained legal protections against dangerous conditions, compensation for injury and sickness, and minimum wages. Women fought for — and won — suffrage, access to education, and economic opportunities once off-limits. Many minority groups secured basic freedoms to live, work, and participate in public life.

On the whole, a loose, often disconnected movement for rights has made workplaces safer, wages higher, and opportunities more widely shared. As a slogan, equality feels like the natural endpoint: once rights are extended to some, why not extend them to all? Not to do so can look like discrimination or prejudice.

Yet as Perry, Harrington, and Stock each in their own ways note, equal rights do not erase deep differences in circumstance, power, biology, or desire. In fact, once the ship of rights has set sail, society often becomes reluctant to admit that some inequalities are real, or to ask whether some asymmetries should remain. The result is a kind of “silent hypocrisy”.

Everyone senses the limits of equality but few dare voice their concerns, for fear of seeming reactionary or illiberal.

The nature of inequality

Rights movements emerged as a response to inequalities. But from this starting point, debates have tended to skip over the question of why inequalities exist and whether some are inevitable or even necessary for a functioning society. Instead, “progress” is assumed to mean “ever more equality.”

A more honest conversation would distinguish between unjust inequalities — which rights can and should address — and natural or structural inequalities, which cannot be erased without perverse effects. In other words, we need to separate the moral imperative of dignity from the dream of uniformity.

Workers’ rights: power and hierarchy

Most people accept that workers should be afforded dignity and safety comparable to those in other professions. For long stretches of history, physical labourers had almost no bargaining power and endured dangerous conditions for meagre wages. Rights movements aimed to redress this imbalance through political change and legal advocacy.

Yet a century after the high-water mark of labour activism, workers’ rights have stalled or even regressed in many places. Globalisation and outsourcing have created new classes of precarious workers in warehouses, construction sites, and service jobs — often migrants — who earn low wages under physically taxing conditions. This is a harsh reminder against our collective complacency while others enjoy the fruits of prosperity.

Some inequalities, however, seem baked into the economic order. Paying all workers the same would be economically unviable and would remove key incentives to work. Even so, the scale of pay disparities — especially between executives and ordinary employees — is hard to justify. The gross disparity of remuneration in corporate life has created what one might now call a "new aristocracy": a small class of senior staff entrusted with making unpopular decisions and rewarded for their loyalty with outsized compensation. This hierarchy is rarely challenged and seems far from any form of equality.

Gender asymmetry adds another layer. The vast majority of physically dangerous, low-paid jobs — construction, heavy engineering, mining, military service, sewage work, refuse collection, farming, trawler fishing — are still performed by men, often at a ratio far higher than ten to one. Yet there is no movement campaigning to equalise male and female participation in these occupations.

Conversely, many professions remain heavily female: childcare, nursing, education, therapy, wellness, beauty, administrative work, garment manufacturing, and retail. Few men actively clamber to enter these roles. Some of this reflects social conditioning, but as Mary Harrington points out, much also reflects “sexual asymmetry”: men and women, on average, have different aptitudes, bodies, and desires.

The lesson is not that one sex is “better” than the other, but that trying to impose a 50:50 split in every domain ignores material reality. Instead of pretending differences do not exist, we should ask whether workers in both male-dominated and female-dominated sectors receive fair dignity, pay, and recognition for the forms of labour they actually do.

Women’s rights: progress and its discontents

The last century’s expansion of women’s rights was one of history’s most dramatic transformations. Women gained the vote, access to education, and entry into professions once reserved for men. In much of the world, their legal status shifted from dependent to autonomous. These changes were, and remain, profoundly good.

But as Louise Perry argues in The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, some of the “freedoms” won under the banner of equality have imposed hidden costs. A culture of sexual liberation, designed on male assumptions about casual sex and risk tolerance has often disadvantaged women by downplaying the biological realities of pregnancy, physical vulnerability, and long-term consequences.

In Perry’s view, women’s bodies and psyches have not changed as quickly as social norms, leaving many struggling to reconcile freedom with safety and stability.

Mary Harrington makes a complementary argument in Feminism Against Progress: when feminism defines itself solely as the pursuit of individual autonomy and material advancement, it can hollow out the very relationships and structures that make life meaningful — especially family, motherhood, and interdependence between the sexes. For Harrington, a “progress narrative” that treats all asymmetry as injustice risks turning women into atomised market actors rather than whole persons embedded in communities.

These critiques do not amount to rolling back women’s rights. They are calls to be honest about human difference.

Women are not simply “men with wombs.”

Their reproductive capacities, embodied vulnerabilities, and social preferences will always shape their experience of work, family, and public life. Ignoring these facts in pursuit of a flat equality can backfire into absurdities, producing new forms of exploitation.

The workplace illustrates this tension. Women’s participation in higher education and the professions has soared, but caregiving and domestic labour remain heavily female. Governments and corporations tout “choice,” but as Harrington notes, the default solution is to commercialise care — outsourcing it to low-paid workers, many of them migrant women, rather than rethinking how society values it.

The result is a double inequality: between men and women, and between affluent women who can outsource domestic tasks and poorer women who perform them, or those that can't outsource them.

A more nuanced feminism would stop treating every difference as a deficit. It would seek to uphold dignity and fair treatment across all forms of work — paid and unpaid — while recognising that a society without any sexual asymmetry is neither possible nor necessarily desirable.

Minority rights: inclusion and material reality

The story of minority rights is often told as a simple arc from oppression to liberation. In reality, the past is more nuanced: different groups have experienced periods of tolerance and repression; gains are partial and uneven; and formal rights do not automatically translate into lived dignity.

Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls offers an instructive case. Stock argues that in the rush to expand rights for transgender people, some activists and institutions have downplayed or denied the material reality of biological sex. This, she contends, creates conflicts with the rights and safety of women — for instance in single-sex spaces, sports, and prisons. Her point is not that trans people should have no rights, but that rights grounded in identity claims must be balanced with the rights grounded in material facts.

More broadly, minority rights raise hard questions about how far legal equality can go without confronting deeper inequalities of culture, power, and material conditions. Anti-discrimination laws can open doors, but they cannot erase all differences in outcomes, nor should we expect them to. Some differences reflect prejudice and require redress; others reflect cultural preferences, geographic constraints, or sheer diversity of human lives.

As with workers and women, the challenge is to resist complacency — assuming that because laws exist, justice has been achieved — while also resisting the temptation to imagine that perfect equality of results is possible or even fair.

The goal should be equal dignity and protection under law, not a homogenised society, in the ideological pursuit of uniformity.

Natural inequality: diversity as a fact of life

Beyond the spheres of work, sex, and identity, inequalities abound in everyday life. Some people are taller or stronger; others are more intellectually gifted or physically agile; some are born into wealth, others into poverty. Nature distributes talents and circumstances unevenly. We seldom talk about flattening these differences, because doing so would be absurd. In fact, diversity of abilities and dispositions makes life richer and communities more resilient.

The same is true of sex differences. Perry’s critique of sexual liberation, Harrington’s scepticism of “progress,” and Stock’s insistence on material reality all converge on a single point: denying natural asymmetries in the name of equality does not liberate us; it confuses and sometimes harms us.

This is not an argument for fatalism or hierarchy. It is an argument for humility. Rights are essential safeguards against arbitrary power and cruelty.

Rights cannot turn us into interchangeable units. They can only create a framework within which unequal individuals and groups can live with dignity.

Towards a more honest conversation

If the twentieth century was the age of extending rights, the twenty-first may need to be the age of rethinking what we expect rights to do. Equality before the law is non-negotiable. But equality as a slogan can mislead us into thinking that every disparity is an injustice and every asymmetry a sign of oppression.

A more mature politics would:

• Distinguish between unjust inequalities (to be remedied) and natural or structural inequalities (to be managed with fairness but not denied)

• Recognise sexual asymmetry without treating it as destiny or deficit

• Value caregiving and other traditionally “female” forms of labour alongside market work, rather than simply commercialising them

• Balance identity-based rights with material realities, so that the rights of one group do not erase the rights of another

• Revisit extreme disparities of power and pay — especially in corporate life — without assuming that every difference can or should be flattened

Such a politics would be truer to the spirit of Perry, Harrington, and Stock: not anti-rights, but anti-naïveté. It would defend the gains of workers, women, and minorities while also acknowledging that perfect equality is neither achievable nor necessarily just.

Conclusion: happily unequal

We began with the “victory of rights.” That victory is real and precious. Workers, women, and minorities live freer, safer, and more dignified lives than their forebears. But the very success of rights movements has made “equality” into a mantra, a sacred word rarely interrogated.

Humans are unequal. We are unequal in talents, bodies, desires, risks, burdens, and opportunities. Some of these inequalities are cruel and should be mitigated; others are simply facts of life. Pretending otherwise can lead to absurd outcomes, leaving the vulnerable more exposed, not less.

As Perry shows, sexual liberation designed on male terms can hurt women. As Harrington argues, a blind faith in “progress” can hollow out the goods that sustain us. As Stock warns, denying material reality in the name of inclusion can produce new injustices. All three writers point toward a richer vision of human life: one that upholds dignity and fairness without erasing difference.

The task ahead is not to abolish inequality but to cultivate a society in which different people — with different bodies, capacities, and callings — can live well together. That means holding fast to rights, but letting go of the fantasy that rights can make us equal in every way. In embracing our inequalities honestly, we may find a deeper kind of justice — and perhaps even a happier one.

A society that recognises difference can still uphold fairness and compassion. A society that tries to erase difference ends up creating new injustices.

Selected bibliography

Harrington, M. (2023). Feminism against progress. Forum Books.

Perry, L. (2022). The case against the sexual revolution. Polity Press.

Stock, K. (2021). Material girls: Why reality matters for feminism. Fleet.