Gender inequality must be understood culturally- it isn't a variable that can be plugged in

(J. Ann, What is your Research Program? Some Feminist Answers to International Relations Methodological Questions International Studies Quarterly Vol 49 No 1 March)

Feminists claim that the lack of gender equality, which they believe exists in all states, albeit to widely varying extents, cannot be understood without reference to historical, gender-laden divisions between public and private spheres. At the time of the foundation of the modern western state, and coincidentally the beginnings of global capitalism, women were not included as citizens but consigned to the private space of the household; thus, they were removed both from the public sphere of politics and the economic sphere of production (Peterson, 1992:40-44). Women were not included in the original social contract by most contract theorists in the western tradition; rather, they were generally subsumed under male heads of households with no legal rights of their own (Pateman, 1988). This public/private distinction, upon which the modern western state was founded, has set up hierarchical gendered structures and role expectations, that impede the achievement of true gender equality, even in states where most legal barriers to women's equality have been removed. For example, when women enter the workforce, they do so with the expectation that they will continue to perform necessary reproductive and caring tasks, thus increasing their workload significantly because of this double burden. More importantly, this reinforces an expectation that may carry over into the types of paid employment, such as childcare and social services, considered most suitable for them. When women enter politics, particularly in areas of foreign policy, they enter an already constructed masculine world where role expectations are defined in terms of adherence to preferred masculine attributes such as rationality, autonomy, and power. It is for such reasons that women continue to be under-represented in positions of political and economic power even in societies long committed to formal equality and equal opportunity legislation. Measures, such as women's participation in politics and percentage of women in the workforce, do not adequately capture the fact that states have been constituted historically as gendered entities with all the attendant problems that this has created for women. Gender inequality, therefore, is not a single variable that can be adequately indexed or measured statistically; rather, it is a historically contingent, complex confluence of socio-cultural power relationships, including associated subjective understandings.39 Such relationships are not easily transferable into numerical data. (17)