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Equity vs Equality

(2 minute read)

Are ‘equity’ and ‘equality’ the same thing? No, I don't think so. My mother was a feminist. She believed in equality and endeavoured to make me into a feminist also. I am a woman, a wife and mother to four children. I believe in equity not equality. I am very far from being a feminist!

My mother told me I could be anything that I wanted to be. I told her that I wanted to be a wife and a stay at home mother. Bizarrely, I was told that choice was beneath me! That WASN’T an option. I took it even so!

Equality and equity are both concerned with fairness but there is a marked difference. Equality demands that absolutely everyone should be treated the same way, regardless of their sex or who they are. Equality decrees that women be given exactly the same rights as men. Seen this way, fairness becomes a supreme entitlement regardless of whether it is deserved or even needed. No understanding of difference is applied. Indeed, it is seen as irrelevant.

Equity, on the other hand, asks that individuals be treated fairly according to their varying needs and situations. Equity emphasises that the needs of men and women are very different, fairness becomes a different concept; one which needs to be tempered by understanding.

In the artwork above, Joseph Jacques Tissot depicts Chana weeping in the Temple while the High Priest looks on. Chana is my namesake. She is to become the grandmother of King David but at this point in her life she is distracted beyond belief, self absorbed and in tears. In a scenario all too familiar in the Tanakh, she has been unable to conceive and give her husband children. Like me growing up, maybe she always expected to be a mother and to have a family. This was her destiny, her reason for being. Why, oh why would G_d deny her this?

She doesn’t pray in any formal external way as men do. She is locked in an internal pleading with G_d. The High Priest, is a man, wise beyond the scope of lesser men, yet he looks bewildered. Who is this woman? How dares she come in here, her lips moving silently, hysterical and withdrawn: Is she drunk? If you want to read her story, you’ll find it in Shmuel (Samuel) 1.

Chana’s story has always spoken to me about the differences between men and women; their separate roles and their respective place in society. Bereshit (Genesis) tells us that woman was created to be man’s helper; to support him. In a long and happy marriage I have always found that to be true.

Growing up into a young woman, I was always struck by the absurdity of equality. How on earth can I be equal to a man? I am designed to get pregnant and bear a child, he can’t. He is designed to impregnate me and make me bear children, I can’t. I am designed to feed my baby milk from my breasts, he isn’t. He has the single minded focus to provide and protect us, I’m not like that. He is the seed, the genius and spark which begins things. I am the nurturer who takes that seed and incubates it within, to create life. He provides the idea. I provide the understanding to turn it into living reality. His world is external and outside the home; mine is internal and within it. We are so different and our needs could not be more at variance.

In Judaism, a man’s role and mitzvot are external and judged by the world around him. It is a hard world and he needs to be tough. A woman’s role and mitzvot are internal and lie within the home. She needs to be soft enough to care. Her husband trusts her to fulfil her mission. Like their reproductive parts, men and women have roles that fit their purpose in life. Different and complementary, that combination of masculine and feminine is what grows and sustains the world and its future.

My husband therefore needs to lead and to have command of things. He needs to be able to control and direct and he requires the authority to allow him to do so effectively. I need to have shelter and protection so that I can develop those ideas and make them fly. I need to know there is someone in charge so that I can stop worrying about the external world and start a family. In Hebrew, the word for home (bayit) and daughter (bat) differ by only one tiny little character: yod. Hebrew has no vowels. The simple insertion of that yod between the first and last letter, turns a daughter into a home. It is like my husband’s seed, turning me from a girl into a mother. Jewish tradition considers that I am my husband’s ‘home’, his anchor point. I am his comfort, his help and solace.

Our very different social roles in this world cannot be met by equality which would accord us equal rights. We don’t need equality, we need equity. Both women and men have rights, no matter what the misogynists out there would have you believe. Our rights just happen to be very different. We have different roles to play in life. However you might see this, it means that I need a different education to him, a different type of upbringing and varying social and marital rights compared to his. He is dominant and I am submissive. He gives instruction and I obey. He stands and I kneel. He gives and I receive (both in a literal and a figurative sense). It embodies a beautiful balance. It does not make me less important and him more so, it does not diminish my needs and make his needs greater. We complement one another.

The world has been this way since it began and it did not need feminism to rearrange it. It is a concept deeply enshrined in our Torah and throughout the Tanakh; likewise in the Bible also. Equity not equality is the guiding principle that should rule our lives.

Chana bat Shoshana x