It might seem like things have gotten a little better for women. There is widespread consensus that Jeffrey Epstein did a bad thing in trafficking girls, and one person is now behind bars for those crimes (even if it is his female partner). In the church, stained-glass ceilings have been visibly broken; women hold the highest offices in a number of mainline denominations around the globe. Taylor Swift was named by The New York Times as one of the 30 best living songwriters, and a male critic, Sam Sifton, offered a distinctly feminist spin in conferring the honor:
Swift has done as much as anyone in modern popular music history to advance the idea of the song—its construction and impact, its tensions and limitations—as an important art form. But she has also done it while foregrounding the agency and emotional lives of young women.
Of course, women aren’t meaningfully advancing in the area of paid labor, still just making 71 to 88 percent of the wage a man makes for the same work. And many of our denominations, despite celebrating milestone anniversaries in the ordination of women, have seen numbers around the ordination of women stall and even backslide. Women continue to feel mostly unsafe seeking justice in incidents of sexual misconduct, with studies suggesting that up to 95 percent of sexual assaults are not reported to police. On average, every ten minutes a woman or girl is killed by an intimate partner or family member somewhere in the world. Sometimes I find myself sinking into the depressing conclusion that the world still doesn’t really care about women.
