Exclusion and Exploitation
The different barriers to full membership
Post 24: 10 June 2025
This week I continue to struggle with the interaction between identity-based demands for inclusion—civil rights movements—and the response to material inequality.
These aims should not be at odds. Full membership has material prerequisites, the set of things I call social rights, and guaranteeing these resources is a significant part of the response to material inequality. So full membership requires some response to material inequality. We may disagree about whether the social rights model is an adequate response, but it certainly is a response.
For the past few weeks, I have focused mostly on exclusions based on race and ethnicity. In these cases, progressive leaders generally recognize the value of shifting their focus toward economic justice. The correlation between income and race and ethnicity make this kind of a no-brainer. The problem has been, and continues to be, that a reservoir of White racism and the conservatives’ skill at exploiting it has made building working-class cross-racial coalitions very difficult. New windows to build these coalitions are always opening, however, so social rights advocates have to push ahead by defining a philosophically grounded response to material inequality and sticking to a simple principled message over time. It wouldn’t hurt either to teach people from an early age to recognize dog whistles like the substitution of “crime” for race.
When we expand the conversation to include the dimensions of gender and sexuality, the conversation gets more difficult. Now the tie between identity-based exclusion and economic affluence is either broken or complicated. A useful way to think about this is to consider the relationship between identity-based exclusion and systems of exploitation.
Exclusion often Serves the Goal of Exploitation
The most serious forms of exclusion are tied to some form of systematic economic exploitation. The most extreme version of this was, of course, slavery, but the basic principle applies to sharecroppers and migrant workers. In each of these cases, the group’s position in the social hierarchy is directly related to the absolutely essential economic slot to which they have been assigned. Their economic role is so vital that elites will resort to violence, if necessary, to maintain the system.
We sometimes forget about this connection. The progress of civil rights and the evolution of the economy have changed these ascriptive group assignments and, therefore, the politics of race for most established groups.1 As a group, African Americans no longer fill the essential but predetermined slot in the political economy they once did, for example, even if some lower-status jobs are still effectively “Black jobs” at least in some places. A similar thing occurred in Chicano history, I think. Their position in the economic hierarchy has slowly been taken over by other, newer arrivals, themselves mostly Latino, along with other immigrant workers (with and without papers). Moving out of ascribed slots in the economic system is a good thing, of course, but that shift requires that every member of these groups be truly integrated into the whole economy and society. To the extent that this is not the case—and it is often not the case—a new problem arises. I want to call this political economic redundancy. This is best explained crassly. If the White mainstream isn’t going to exploit Black people, what will it do with them? Unexploited, they are more threatening, more of a physical risk, so the answer (you are probably ahead of me on this) is social control—that is, prison. This helps maintain segregation, both economic and social, reenforcing this positive feedback loop. The net effect of this evolution is that for most African Americans and many Latinos, the injuries of identity-based exclusion and economic exploitation have been decoupled. They now operate more independently than in earlier periods, with more of the exploitation tied to social class than to race. Since this increases the degree of common cause among lower-status workers, it ought to make the task of building class-based coalitions easier.
The Exclusion and Exploitation of Women
The relationship between exclusion and exploitation is more complicated for women because the place of women in the world (in the economy and the society) depended a great deal on class. Lower status women always worked but were usually exploited (that is, as a class, they were not paid a fair market wage), while most higher status women were excluded from more meaningful employment. This duality has left a long trail. The leaders of the twentieth century women’s movement—typically middle- to upper-class, educated, White, and Protestant—focused on this and other exclusions. They did not, as a rule, emphasize economic inequality or basic economic questions like fair wages and working conditions. But those were the central concerns of Black and Catholic working class women. Writing about Susan B. Anthony, Angela Davis reports that
She was critical of the working women’s tendency to focus on their immediate needs. But they naturally sought tangible solutions to their immediate economic problems. And they were seldom moved by the suffragists’ promise that the vote would permit them to become equal to their men—their exploited, suffering men.
To suffragists like Anthony, Davis continues, “sexism itself was far more oppressive than class inequality and racism.” In some senses, this is true (the gender hierarchy is much older and deeper than the racial one and our current class system, linked to the factory, is newer still). But this point of view does not just divide the movement internally, it makes it more difficult for it to expand across classes and genders. Davis again,
Anthony’s staunchly feminist position was also a staunch reflection of bourgeois ideology. And it was probably because of the ideology’s blinding powers that she failed to realize that working-class women and Black women alike were fundamentally linked to their men by the class exploitation and racist oppression which did not discriminate between the sexes.2
Today, the women’s movement has long since shifted to emphasize equal pay, but the tone of its demands are still decidedly not working class. We hear about the relative pay of high status workers, about glass ceilings, about the relative incomes of highly paid performers and athletes. These are all legitimate issues, but working class Americans can be forgiven for their lack of interest in the problems of the well-to-do. We still don’t hear as much about patterns of exploitation that affect the majority of women.
The problem is that these spheres don’t connect as much as one might think. A major reason is that the economic exploitation of women has historically relied, and to a great extent still does rely, on the creation of “women’s jobs”—economic roles typically held by women. These were originally the lowest status factory jobs, but this principle was applied to the twentieth century office and hospital as well. It always also applied to some educational and caregiver roles, at least before marriage. Within the sphere of “women’s work”, the concept of equal pay may be a more or less meaningless concept. A bigger issue is unmaking the prescriptive aspect of women’s work. Individual conceptions of meaningful work may well be gendered, so there may always be more women in caregiving roles and more men may always like playing with trucks, but these have to be choices, not assignments.
I don’t want to overstate my case here. Lots of elements of the women’s rights movement emphasize maximizing choice for women. The essence of full membership, I keep saying, is having choices that are comparable to others in society, whether they have a different gender or have a different economic background. But I want to insist on keeping and expanding that class element. It is also worth emphasizing that reforms intended to increase opportunities for women will tend to increase opportunities for men as well, this is true regarding gendered work, for example, as well as reforms intended to make family formation easier, like parental leave or childcare subsidies.3
Gay & Trans Politics and Class
Finally, the exclusions of gay, lesbian, and transgender people do not have much to do with systematic exploitation at all. This does not mean there isn’t a class dimension, only that any link to economic well-being is related to the fact of exclusion, not exploitation. I suspect you can always find an economic injury if you really look. The core claim in the gay marriage case (Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015)) was economic. Still, economics was and remains secondary for most gay couples, who mostly sought basic recognition as well as other substantive spousal rights (related to health care, for example).
The stereotype is that gay and lesbian couples are well-to-do. This sets up the possibility of mobilizing a class dimension in anti-gay rhetoric. And, indeed, the right uses “elitist” tropes in their messaging, mostly to suggest that the concerns of gays and lesbians and “regular” or “ordinary” Americans diverge. Census data lend some support to this stereotype, but only for men. In 2019, the median income of male same-sex married couples ($123.6K) was substantially higher than for opposite-sex couples ($96.9K) or female same-sex couples ($95.7K). The sense of difference is also reinforced by the fact that male married couples are much less likely to have children in the home (9.3% vs 26% for lesbian married couples and 38% for heterosexual couples). This perception of a class difference is a vulnerability against which gay rights advocates should try to inoculate themselves, perhaps by demonstrating allyship on poor-people’s issues.4
That said, direct political attacks aimed at specific gay or lesbian persons seem to me to be more rare these days (this is just an impression that I need to back up). Instead, the most common conservative tactics lately reference the “promotion” of a “gay agenda” (which can often sound like warnings of “recruitment” or, worse, “grooming”) and a particularly hysterical response to gender non-conforming behavior, like drag. In these attacks, gayness is used as an abstract cultural marker. For people in the world, the antidote to poisonous messaging has always been personal knowledge of gay and lesbian family members, coworkers, and classmates. Homosexuality is not rare, so almost everyone has the direct knowledge that invalidates anti-gay propaganda. The anti-drag campaign is a stronger tactic for conservatives because the rest of us are less likely to know a drag queen (I don’t have any stats on this, though). These attacks also have an abstract, impersonal character (it doesn’t matter much who the specific drag queen is). In contrast, someone like Pete Buttigieg seems pretty damn normal, doesn’t he? And we know him. My key point here is that progressive activists do not refer to any element of economic struggle that can offset the implicit “elitist” subtext of the conservative attack.
They could. The census stats about gay married men aside, the exclusion of gender nonconforming and trans people has a significant economic component. A number of studies have found that this population has lower incomes, lower employment rates, worse self-rated health, and is less likely to have a college degree than other people.5 As a society, we rightfully condemn bullying and violence. That includes those perfectly happy to ostracize transgender and queer people. But those extreme behaviors are often well hidden from the average person, making it easier for us to underestimate how common they are and therefore dismiss them as threats. Adding this economic dimension, the most ordinary part of ordinary lives, makes it harder to simply dismiss. We should get more data on this and talk about it more. What’s more, these impacts mostly play out in the workplace, where employers and even the government can exercise some control. There is an opportunity here to improve the lives of some folks pushed to the margins of our society and, at the same time, help unmake the myth that non-heterosexual people are “elitist.”
The overall argument I have been developing is that progressives need to talk about equal economic opportunity more and to ground this message in a simple, repeated philosophical principle (I keep suggesting “freedom” but others may say differently). In the past few weeks, I have been focusing on how the civil rights message of inclusion needs this economic focus as well. Civil rights is about achieving full membership in society and this membership has a material dimension. While mixing civil rights and economic justice is internally seamless for movements focused on racial and ethnic division, it creates problems for women and the LGBTQ community. The women’s movement has internal class and racial divisions that leaders need to address, mostly by just worrying about the lives of ordinary working women more. While conservatives use class (the charge of “elitism”) against the LGBTQ community, the LGBTQ movement is quiet about issues of economic inclusion and fairness. But it is clear that some parts of this community (TQ+) pay a steep economic price for their exclusion. They can and should bring class back in.
Next week, something different, TBD (17 June 2023)
Notes
By “ascriptive”, I mean that the positions are assigned (and enforced) by others. These systems were and are never absolute, there is always some element of free choice even the more oppressive regimes, but in these examples individual choice is minimized in every way possible.
Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class, (Vintage 1981). These quotes are from Chapter 9, np (ebook).
The statistician in me is always troubled by the sloppy way we talk about pay equity. The pay gap is a good overall indicator, but when we cling to the 83¢ on the dollar statistic we are usually focusing on the wrong issue altogether. We have to try to see why gaps like this exist. In their 2024 review, PayScale repeated the 83¢ overall statistic (it’s been about that for a while) while simultaneously reporting that the “controlled gender pay gap” is 99¢. That is, taking into account stuff like detailed job descriptions and qualifications, there is no pay gap economy wide. That doesn’t mean that the 83¢ number is not real, however. We just need to unpack this stat to see which of its many causes deserves a social response. The one I emphasize here is the tendency to create niches in the economy where most workers are women, but there are others with social rights implications, especially factors related to the pay penalties associated with work discontinuity—like taking time off to raise kids. There are probably other factors that are outside the realm of policy. For example, we know that men tend to have a higher “reservation wage”; that is the take-it-or-leave-it break point. In short, they are more willing to walk out of a salary negotiation. On this, see Iris Kesternich, Heiner Schumacher, Bettina Siflinger, Franziska Valder, “Reservation wages and labor supply”, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (194, Feb 2022) 583-607. A public version is here. This truncates the male pay distribution at the lower end (more than enough to shift the means). [And, yes, there are other gendered structures that affect this, such as the different roles men and women have in the home.]
The pay gap is an old issue. I am reminded of this old exchange at a JFK press conference.
A good paper on transgender outcomes comes from Kitt Carpenter’s team using the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. A somewhat more recent study using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health focuses more on gender expression. Access here. There is a big literature here that tracks elements of social and cultural exclusion, including bullying and violence. In this essay I am focusing on the economic impacts of exclusion.
Some terms: “Gender nonconforming” refers to gender expression, specifically that a person’s appearance or mannerisms are not “gender typical”. [Since these are survey results, respondents have to describe how they perceive how others perceive them.] Transgender, in contrast, refers to self-identification of gender. These categories interact with sexuality (gay/straight etc.). These interactions, especially given how small some of these groups are, percentage wise, makes statistical work in this area difficult. No ordinary (commercial) poll could be used to make statements about some of these groups but government study tracking panels are large enough for this.
Cf. Claudia Goldin’s piece in today’s NYT (6-10-25) on pay gap in one industry—professional basketball—a unique methodology.