Women's Issues

Greene and Cohen's celebrated essay looks, inter alia, at freewill and questions whether our conception that we make choices can survive advances in neuroscience.[38] From a hard determinist standpoint freewill is an illusion. All events are the results of prior causes operating according to the laws of nature.[39] Every event is causally determined - including human action. The idea of an uncaused causer has no place in this world view. For the law such a world view is potentially very challenging. Law and in particular the criminal law is built on the assumption that individuals normally have choice and that they are to be judged on the basis of the choices that they make. This is not a new phenomenon, in the mid eighteenth century Blackstone wrote:

'the concurrence of the will, when it has the choice either to do or to avoid the fact in question, being the only thing that renders human actions either praiseworthy or culpable. Indeed, to make a complete crime, there must be both a will and an act.'[40]

This idea of both a will and an act can be seen in the requirement for most crimes of both a physical act (actus reus) and a mental element (mens rea), but Blackstone's statement also importantly has a focus on choice. This belief in a capacity of the individual to make choices remains a central underpinning of the law. Two hundred years after Blackstone, Hart wrote: 'unless a man has the capacity and a fair opportunity or chance to adjust his behaviour to the law its penalties ought not to be applied to him.'[41] More recently the Law Commission for England and Wales have stated that: 'A person with no possibility of making any choice - whose action is in that sense "automatic" - does not have the capacity to control his or her actions.'[42] In the view of the Law Commission such a person should be entitled to a defence to any criminal charge.[43] If hard determinists are correct then nobody has choice. Benjamin Libet's experiment is often cited as evidence that our belief that we choose is an illusion.[44] In the experiment the participant has electroencephalogram (EEG) electrodes attached to her scalp. She sits in front of an oscilloscope timer and presses a button when she feels the urge to do so. She then records where the timer hands were when she first felt the urge to press the button. The experiment found that brain activity preceded the participant's perception as to when she first felt the desire to press the button. On average the brain activity took place 350 milliseconds (ms) before the participant reported starting to feel the urge to press the button. Whilst the test has been replicated, the interpretation of its findings remain controversial: with many objecting to an interpretation that the test demonstrates that free will is an illusion.[45] Proponents of a belief that we have choice in whether or not to act can point to the fact that according to Libet's findings there is a further delay (on average 150 ms) between the reported timing of the first urge to press the button and the actual pressing of the button.[46] This allows, it is argued, for an opportunity to veto the action. Therefore, whilst Libet's findings may (or may not) challenge a belief in free will they do create the possibility of creating a belief in 'free won't' (i.e. an ability to veto action). If we return to the definitions of Blackstone, Hart and the Law Commission this opportunity to control actions, preserved by this interpretation of Libet's experiment, is enough to retain a belief that we normally have choice and the corollary that in such circumstances it is normally[47] justifiable to hold us responsible for those choices.

For the present, it would appear that the neuroscience of free will won't force the law to reassess its underlying approach to imposing responsibility. Scientists may on occasion say that there is no such thing as free will[48] but this does not mean that law must abandon its assumption that acts are normally voluntary acts. The scientific debate continues with some taking compatiblist[49] and some taking incompatabilist[50] standpoints. At some point a consensus may emerge, but for the moment that does not seem imminent. If a consensus supporting hard determinism does emerge it may challenge mankind's innate feeling that we do make decisions. Our current beliefs may not be evidenced by scientific proof, indeed they date back to centuries when a belief in the mind and the soul as separate entities from the brain and the physical body was not challenged by emerging scientific understanding. We may now reject the idea of the ghost in the machine or the homunculus, but we still are very wedded to a view of the world which feels in tune with how we 'experience' our lives. Such belief systems may be termed 'folk psychology', but that does not alter their importance both for society and for the law. Findings from the Human Brain Project and the BRAIN Initiative or from subsequent investigations into brain processes may make belief in such folk psychology untenable and if that happens the implications not just for the law but for society may be enormous, but for the moment it is hard to see law abandoning its underlying belief in human autonomy, individual responsibility and free will.

Women experience more severe repercussions for misconduct in the financial advisory industry than their male counterparts, research published on the Bank of England’s staff blog shows.

Women are 20 per cent more likely to lose their jobs – and 30 per cent less likely to find new employment – following an incident of misconduct compared to men, guest writers Mark Egan, Gregor Matvos and Amit Seru said in a blog post Wednesday. The gap is even wider in firms with few female managers.

“The financial advisory industry is willing to give male advisers a second chance, while female advisers are cast from the industry for similar or less severe missteps,” the researchers said. “The effects of the gender punishment gap are costly, long-lasting, and may ultimately contribute to the glass ceiling faced by women in finance.”

The academics followed the careers of 1.2 million workers in the US financial advisory industry from 2005 to 2015 and found that the disparity persists throughout one’s career. Offences include customer disputes resulting in a settlement, internal company discipline, and regulatory and criminal offences.

Men are twice as likely to be repeat offenders and engage in misconduct that is 20 per cent more costly, the researchers said, meaning that the so-called punishment gap can’t be explained by women’s behaviour being more expensive for firms. Instead, the composition of companies’ management and executives seems to play a role.

At firms with no gender diversity at the executive or ownership level, female advisers are 42 per cent more likely to leave their jobs following misconduct than their male colleagues. Firms with more equal representation apply more balanced disciplinary measures.

Ethnic minority men experience a similar disparity in their treatment, the researchers said, and it’s again narrower at firms with more multiculturalism in management and executive positions. That suggests the imbalances are driven by “ingroup favouritism,” the researchers said.

For all the powerful abusers exposed and censured over the past 12 months, one of the biggest accomplishments of the #Me Too! movement has been the reintroduction and reframing of past misconduct. Bill Clinton has been the subject of the most prominent of these retroactive reckonings, with feminists and progressives interrogating the Democratic Party’s continued embrace of a man who has been credibly accused of sexual harassment and assault, and also, while president, treated an intern like a disposable genital wipe after engaging her in an extramarital romantic and sexual affair.

It hasn’t been easy to find a productive way into Bill Clinton Reckoning 2.0, given his lack of official political power and the unwillingness of old-school Democrats to explicitly condemn him. Further complicating the endeavor is Hillary Clinton, a fraught symbol of feminism’s accomplishments and failures and a painful reminder of the overt sexism Americans voted for in 2016. To exhume Hillary’s role in Bill’s alleged decades-long exploitation of women—as the #Me Too! movement must if it intends to fully confront the forces that supported a sleazeball and alleged rapist for decades—seems a nearly impossible task in a political climate that rewards unabashed liars with Supreme Court seats and proud misogynists with rising approval ratings.

In social movements, however, the hardest tasks are often the most essential. The 2016 election season found Michelle Goldberg arguing in Slate that although Juanita Broaddrick’s rape allegations against Bill Clinton were credible, her claims that Hillary Clinton had silenced and threatened her were not. But Goldberg, like most feminists at that time, still ignored what Hillary’s forever-endorsement of Bill revealed about her character and commitment to women’s rights: The stakes were too high to direct fire at the wife of an alleged sexual abuser when another alleged sexual abuser was her presidential opponent. The act of questioning Hillary’s decision to stand by and defend Bill would’ve evoked the humiliating slights conservatives have subjected her to for the past two decades: the “Hillary Sucks But Not Like Monica” paraphernalia, the portrayals of the former secretary of state as a ball-buster too frigid or dykey to properly satisfy a male partner. It’s difficult to imagine a good-faith assessment of Hillary Clinton’s role in enabling Bill Clinton’s abuse when bad-faith attacks still dominate the conversation, as they did when Trump invited Bill’s accusers to a presidential debate. The line between holding a woman to task for the company she keeps, and blaming her for her husband’s actions, was too fine to discern during an election cycle that had already blinded us with rage.

Today, with the #Me Too! movement maturing and both Clintons speaking out about Bill’s affair with Lewinsky, that line is coming into focus. In an interview with CBS correspondent Tony Dokoupil, Hillary said that affair did not constitute an abuse of power because Lewinsky, who was in her early 20s at the time, was “an adult.” “But let me ask you this,” she added. “Where’s the investigation of the current [president], against whom numerous allegations have been made, and which he dismisses, denies, and ridicules?” Hillary’s attempt to deflect criticism echoed Bill’s response to similar questions in June, when he said recent reassessments of his actions have come from progressives who are merely “frustrated that they’ve got all these serious allegations against the current occupant of the Oval Office and his voters don’t seem to care.”

The problem with the Clintons’ whataboutism circa 2018 is that, unlike the 2016 presidential election, this isn’t a Clinton vs. Trump contest. Both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump can be too amoral for public office, and there’s more than enough bottled-up anger in various women’s movements to target both a problematic old fave and an imminent threat to democracy. Trump’s colossal shortcomings as a leader and repulsiveness as a human being were enough to spare Bill two years ago. In 2018, it’s become clear that a go-along-to-get-along mentality will never keep sexual abusers out of top positions in government. With Trump in the White House and Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, feminists have far less to lose.

Now that probable 2020 presidential contender Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has said Bill Clinton should have resigned after his affair with Lewinsky, it’s looking like the mainstream Democratic Party—to say nothing of its burgeoning left wing—may finally be getting around to exiling Bill from its inner sanctum. And yet, any attempt to parse Hillary Clinton’s role in Bill’s evasion of punishment for his offenses inevitably devolves into a vortex of contradictions and co-existing truths. Hillary exhibited atrocious moral, political, and intellectual judgment by staying with Bill after every revelation of his alleged and admitted sexual misconduct.

But also: It would have been unthinkable for the wife of a governor or president to leave her husband while he was in office, and then go on to build a public-facing career in a man’s world. But also: By standing by Bill, Hillary did a grave disservice to Lewinsky, Broaddrick, Paula Jones, and by association, all women hoping for allies as they fought to keep sexual harassers and rapists out of the workplace. But also: How could anyone expect a moderate feminist to disavow a man she loved, who had made a fair bit of political progress for women, when so many other feminists, Gloria Steinem famously among them, did not? But also: The fact that one of the world’s most visible feminists has defended one of the world’s most visible accused abusers for 20 years and counting has undoubtedly delayed an already overdue reckoning with the abuses of men in power. But also: Hillary, too, has suffered for her husband’s transgressions; to impose additional consequences on her—even rhetorical ones—while Bill evades any meaningful accountability only reinforces the gendered double standards women in politics must already surmount.

In the Trump era, we’ve landed on a word to describe the silent, smiling acquiescence of women close to the president. We say they are complicit—willing instruments of both the president’s anti-woman policy agenda and the broader male-supremacist ideology he promotes. For all the harm they caused poor women and families of color, Bill Clinton’s policies did not approach Trumpian levels of racism and punitive sexism. But on a personal level, Hillary Clinton performed much the same role in the Clinton administration as Melania and Ivanka Trump do today. It feels deeply unfeminist to ask Hillary to revisit her husband’s sexual misdeeds and answer for her role in mitigating their impact on his status in public life. But if feminists intend to complete a full audit of Bill Clinton’s place in the history of men getting away with serial exploitation, we must do it anyway.