We are constantly told that we should "think the world after": after the pandemic, after the #MeToo wave. If we want a feminist post-world, the best solution is surely to listen to those who strive to think it, to theorize it, to research it. They are women, artists, researchers, politicians, experts in their field that want to make things happen, so that we never go back to the world as it was before. Each week, The Elephant gives them the floor, to think together about our feminist futures.
You may know the economist Julia Cagé for her political commitments. In particular, she campaigned with Benoît Hamon during the 2017 presidential election, supporting the need for a universal income. You may also know her for her book, The Price of Democracy, published in September 2018, in which she highlights the weight of private interests within our democratic life. President of the association Un Bout des Médias, she fights above all for the independence of the media in France and for a public reconquest of our democratic life.
When asked if she is a feminist, Julia Cagé hesitates for a few seconds before affirming that "it's complicated not to be. Like all women of my generation, I go to demonstrations and I read books on the issue. I haven't made an identity out of it, but I fundamentally am one.”
The tone is set: if the economist is not specialized in feminist themes, she does not completely distance herself from them. She does not tackle gender issues head-on in her research, but she does appear concerned about gender inequalities in professional life:
"I wonder how to avoid being in a discipline where, de facto, when I take two students at the end of their master’s degree with exactly the same level, you have a much lower probability that the woman will continue and do a thesis, whereas the man will do it.”
Cagé, however, did defend her thesis at Harvard University in 2014, entitled "Essays on the Political Economy of Information." Already specializing in political economy, she dedicated most of her research to the issue of media and political party independence. As we know, the place of women in the media is crucial. In its report on the "Presence of women in the audiovisual environment" published in March 2020, the CSA (the Audiovisual Superior Council is the public entity which regulates media in France) reported a slight increase in female representation on radio and television. After highlighting the disastrous state of parity the previous year, the CSA had put a stop to it, urging TV and radio channels to make an effort on female representation, which now stands at 41%, all audiovisual environments combined.
However, parity is not there quite yet, and the solution offered by Julia Cagé is clear: "Quotas are needed. This is what we have learned from everything that has happened in recent years in France and in other countries: if you don't put rules in place, things don't change by themselves. For television, you have conventions signed between the channels and the CSA. In these conventions, you have a certain number of rules. For example, you are not allowed to have more than a certain number of minutes of advertising. Commitments must be made in terms of representation of women and minorities. We just need to make them stricter and make license renewals conditional on compliance with these rules.”
It is in this direction that the Franceschini mission went, a mission of aid to the press launched by the French Ministry of Culture in December 2020 and which aimed in particular to aid the press in representation of women. The economist agrees, while stating that things are trickier for paper press : how can we measure the share of women representation in a newspaper?
For Julia Cagé, once again, the solution is obvious: "it should be more about parity in management positions. The problem is not that the editors are fundamentally in bad faith, it is that they do not realize it. There are meetings where the people who make the decision about the cover are all men. There are no women. The solution is not to say that you need half women on the cover. But if you put in rules that make the management team half women, the problem will disappear by itself.”
In the eyes of Julia Cagé, a more feminist future is therefore a future made of strict parity rules, to ensure equal representation of women and men ; the rest will naturally follow until quotas prove useless. If there is a model to follow for the researcher, it is of course that of Nordic countries: "We have made small progress in France by increasing paternity leave, but in the Nordic countries, they have gone further and it works better, especially by saying that women and men must take leave in equal parts”.
One thinks in particular of the Swedish system in which each of the two parents can take forty-eight days of leave, paid at 80% salary. If it is possible to transfer the days of leave between parents, each must take at least two months, otherwise the leave will be cancelled. If there is a lesson to be learned from this interview with the French economist, it is that the keys to overcome the lack of parity between women and men already exist, we just need to implement them. For her, "we have to base ourselves on research. Not everything works and some policies can have perverse effects that must be anticipated. For that, we need experience. And that's where economics and political science can be useful: trying to look at what works, what doesn't work, trying to learn from it and improve things for the future. Giving voice to researchers, therefore, and creating policies based on their work to evaluate the rules put in place around the world. The final word is clear: the feminist future must be based on research.
Julia Cagé's reading advice
"Pauline Grosjean's excellent book Patriarcapitalism has just been published in September. In it, she really tackles the issue of equality between women and men only from an economic point of view. She evaluates the policies that have been put in place in recent years and that have worked or not”.
In her book, Pauline Grosjean, former student of the French École Nationale Supérieure and associate professor of economics, describes the professional evolution of women throughout the 20th century and their recent stagnation. She denounces a structure of gender domination that interacts with our economic system: patriarcapitalism. The good news is that the researcher also gives us the means to get out of it.
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