Conscription: A Gender-Based Injustice Around the World

dakru · 2020-06-13T12:34:02+00:00

In this post I make the point that conscription is a serious gender-based injustice. I give an overview of conscription policies around the world (including the few countries that conscript both men and women, which doesn't always mean applying the policy equally), look at some problematic cases of abuse and mistreatment in conscription, and discuss some of the possible objections to the idea that conscription is a gender-based injustice.

There are lots of points to discuss, but here's one that I'll highlight. A hypothetical objection that someone could make:

If women are exempt from conscription in a country that is overall bad for women, does eliminating one of their few advantages really further gender equality?

Here's part of my own response:

Can it ever be worth keeping an otherwise undesirable inequality to balance out other inequalities? A gender-flipped example to illustrate: let’s say you think that most social norms around dating and relationships favour women over men, with the exception that the man’s last name takes precedence for marriage and children. If you see this as one of the few advantages that men have here, you might hesitate to eliminate it.

The premise isn’t completely crazy but I’m not very comfortable with it. First, it just results in a lot more roadblocks to equality. If you can’t fix discrimination in conscription because of other inequalities harming women, what’s stopping someone from saying that you can’t fix those other inequalities because of the discrimination in conscription? And if you want to keep the preference for men’s last names over women’s, you risk people using that as a justification to keep other inequalities in dating or relationships that favour women, such as the expectation that men pay for dates.

Another point is that gender-discriminatory conscription, by mandating such different life experiences for men and women, very plausibly furthers the gender divide and creates resentment between men and women. [...]

Title	Conscription: A Gender-Based Injustice Around the World
Author	dakru
Upvotes	21
Comments	1
Date	June 13, 2020 12:27 PM UTC (6 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/h86lu9/conscription_a_genderbased_injustice_around_the/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/conscription-a-gender-based-injustice-around-the.1197474 https://theredarchive.com/post/1197474

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