A False Dilemma: Gender Equality versus Gender Justice

Although it seems quite obvious that the efforts to fight gender inequality can play a significant role to overcome the problems of oppression and discrimination of women, not all women seem to agree that gender equality is a goal worth pursuing.  The aim of this paper is to critically address the “gender equality vs gender justice” debate initiated by Islamist women in Turkey. The advocates of gender justice hold that women and men, albeit having the same human “essence,” are created by God with inherently different “natures” endowing them with different duties and functions. Identifying the “Western” idea of gender equality as the main cause of the injustices women suffer from, they further argue that the well-being of women can be achieved only when women are able to foster the duties and functions naturally flowing from their innate female nature. As the argument from justice seems to mistake equality for sameness or identicalness, the paper will first concentrate on the sense of equality as “equality in” rights, freedoms and opportunities, to then show that while justice, in the philosophical sense, has nothing to do with “conformity to nature,” the conceptualization of justice necessarily involves equality  as a constitutive idea. Finally, the paper will argue that a careful inquiry into the concepts of justice and equality from a feminist perspective will help reveal the false dilemma hidden in the “gender justice vs gender equality” debate.