The whiteness of ‘sex discrimination’: A historical antiracist analysis of UK gender equality legislation

In European feminist political science, while legislation on gender equality has been subject to much analysis, rarely has an antiracist critique been employed. This paper shares findings from the multidisciplinary Gender Equalities at Work project, which explores how UK gender equality legislation (Sex Discrimination Act 1975, Equal Pay Act 1970, and their successor the Equality Act 2010) was introduced, implemented and changed, in what contexts and with what consequences. In the UK, legislation concerning race preceded legislation concerning gender, and influenced approaches to race equality at EU level and beyond. Yet, legislation on race and sex developed in siloed (either/or) ways, which worked to efface the existence and experiences of Black women and women of colour, as well as the ways in which white women are also racialized as white. Drawing on analysis of parliamentary records and papers and news media, archival research and oral history interviews, I demonstrate how, though race and gender were frequently discussed together in the earlier years of the acts among powerful actors and in dominant discourses, they were almost invariably discussed in such a way so as to construct them as being mutually exclusive. Often white women parliamentarians were keen that sex and race be legislated for separately, and made arguments that promoted the idea that race and gender are mutually exclusive. While the categories employed associated with race were implicitly constructed as male through gender neutrality, I argue that the category of ‘woman/women’ was more explicitly constructed as exclusively white, with long lasting implications. This is part of a long discursive tradition of degendering of Black women in particular. In discourses which may now be read as white feminist, sex was also constructed as being more important than race. Gender equality legislation was enacted in such a way that it mainly benefitted white and otherwise relatively privileged women. I consider the implications of this analysis for the ongoing construction of the category ‘woman’, and the social structure of gender itself, as always-already white; and what can be learned from this about white feminism today.