Legislation against Sex Discrimination: Questions from a Feminist Perspective

Abstract

Since the Equal Pay Act was enacted in 1970, Britain has gradually formulated a legislative scheme explicitly aimed at the elimination of certain forms of discrimination.1 The Sex Discrimination Acts 1975 and 1986 and the Race Relations Act 1986 have resulted. Accession to the European Community has introduced the European standard of equal treatment, prompting developments such as the Equal Pay (Amendment) Regulations 1983, which introduced the concept of equal pay for work of equal value. Indeed, it seems fair to say that protection from unjust discrimination on grounds of sex or race is the area of civil rights which has received the most systematic and innovative legislative attention in Britain over the past two decades. Correspondingly, the technical and strategic problems thrown up by the antidiscrimination legislation and questions about its reform have received much attention.2 In this paper, by contrast, I want to raise some more general questions about the underlying basis of principle of the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, specifically from a feminist point of view. For these general questions have, as I shall argue, important implications in terms both of difficulties in using and enforcing the legislation and of our thinking about the proper direction of reform. In arguing from a feminist perspective, I shall not give any detailed account of a particular version of feminist theory. It should be sufficient to my argument to characterise such a theory as one which takes as its starting point the fact of women's subordination and oppression and which thus evaluates anti-discrimination legislation in terms of its actual and potential contribution to the dismantling of such oppression. This is not to say that the project of constructing a detailed theory and working towards a full understanding of the nature of women's oppression is not of fundamental importance. Rather,