The Department of Children and Equality is right to say that gender inequality in Ireland remains real and ongoing. It is correct, too, that the State has a role to play in reducing it. Its new National Strategy for Women and Girls, a five-year whole-of-government plan published this week with its first action plan, sets out seven objectives spanning safety, leadership, economic power and care.
Extending parental leave rights, embedding family-friendly practices in the workplace and pursuing well-judged measures in education are all legitimate instruments of public policy. So is action to ease the disproportionate burden of care that still falls on women, a burden that affects their earnings, their pensions and their working lives. On these issues the strategy stands on solid ground.
More questionable is its decision to name the manosphere and tradwife influencers as objects of official concern. These are buzzwords drawn from contemporary culture wars, and they gather together a wide and uneven range of activities.
Some are clearly illegal, including abuse, harassment and incitement. Some are reprehensible, such as misogyny and the crude objectification of women. And some are merely contentious, including views on gender roles and family structure that many citizens hold sincerely, express peacefully and remain entitled to hold.
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It will be said that the State campaigns on smoking, road safety and much else, and so it does. But those campaigns rest on settled evidence and broad consensus. Here some ground is contested, as the rebuff delivered to the last government in the family and care referendums demonstrated. It is true that the State is never fully or truly neutral and that all public policy expresses values. But the impossibility of perfect neutrality is not a justification for maximal partisanship. A government can act on the structures that hold women back, and stop well short of appointing itself the critic of private attitudes it dislikes. That is the necessary self-discipline of a liberal democratic state.
There is a practical danger alongside the principled one. Official disapproval has a way of lending its targets the glamour of the forbidden and the anti-establishment. A Government-funded campaign directed at these online trends may just end up amplifying the very attitudes it hopes to reduce.
None of this weakens the underlying case for meaningful action. A great deal can be done to reduce gender inequality, and to share the weight of care more fairly between women and men, through employment law, childcare provision, pay transparency and education.
All of that can be done without straying into this fraught terrain, where the State is poorly placed to act and stands to gain little.
