Structural injustice: why treating everyone the same is not enough

A hypothetical warehouse company writes into its rules that every employee is considered for promotion on the same criteria. Three years later all six shift leaders are men, although more than three in ten staff are women. No one broke the rule. If you wrote a rule like that and still see one group falling behind, Iris Marion Young offers a way to look for the cause: the question is not only whether the rule is applied evenly, but what structure the rule stands on.

What is "equal treatment", and where does Young push back?

Young calls it the liberal paradigm: justice and equality require non-discrimination, the application of the same principles of evaluation and distribution to all persons regardless of their social position or background. She writes that the movements behind a "politics of difference" argued that this difference-blind ideal was part of the problem. Identifying equality with equal treatment ignores deep material differences in social position, division of labour, socialised capacities, normalised standards and ways of living that continue to disadvantage members of historically excluded groups (Young, 2008).

Her objection targets an assumption: if the rule is fair to each person, the outcome is fair. Even without explicitly discriminatory laws and rules, she says, adherence to bodily norms of appearance, struggles over power and other dynamics of differentiation will tend to reproduce group inequalities unless institutions take explicit action to counteract them (Young, 2008). As I read it, that is why a policy that reads cleanly is not enough evidence of a fair workplace.

What are the three structures: division of labour, decision-making power, normalisation?

Young defines social groups structurally: social processes that position people differently along axes that generate status, power and the opportunity to develop capacities or acquire goods (Young, 2008). Among the axes she lists are the social division of labour, hierarchies of decision-making power, practices of sexuality and bodily aesthetics, and the arrangement of persons in physical and social space (Young, 2008). The library takes the first two plus normalisation and sets them beside Rawls's focus on the distribution of wealth and opportunity. I have not read Rawls (2001), so I describe him only through the card.

Young also says structural injustice is defined by the vulnerabilities and limitations people face, more than by the amount of goods or power they hold at a given moment (Young, 2008). As I read it, a well-paid employee can still be in a position with no route upward.

How does normalisation work inside a workplace?

As I read it, normalisation is the hardest of the three to see, so Young uses examples. For people with disabilities she argues that the problem lies not in individuals' attributes but in the lack of fit between those attributes and the dominant structures, practices and norms. She points to the physical layout and equipment of workplaces, the organisation of the work process, and the ways aptitude is assessed in schools and workplaces. The blind engineer, she writes, gets little comfort from an employer who assures him that the same computer equipment is available to all employees (Young, 2008). She sees the Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires employers to make "reasonable accommodation" to the specific needs of people with disabilities, as codifying this view in principle, while noting that the law is contested over who counts as disabled and which accommodations are reasonable (Young, 2008).

On gender, she writes that most employers institutionalise an assumption that the holder of a good job, one that supports a family at a decent level with a pension, holiday and security, can devote himself or herself primarily to it. Workers whose family responsibilities conflict with employer expectations are treated as deviants and find it hard to combine real work with family responsibility. She also says that, in the society she analyses, women do most of the unpaid care work in the family (Young, 2008). That is Young's claim about that society; I have no figures for Vietnam.

As I read it, the two examples share this: nobody made a rule to exclude disabled people or parents of small children. Every rule was applied evenly. What was normalised was the picture of an "ordinary employee".

How could Company Z audit the three structures in a week?

This example is entirely hypothetical; "Company Z" and its figures are mine and belong to no real business. Company Z is a 60-person warehouse firm with 22 women and 38 men. Its promotion rule says anyone with at least three years' experience who is willing to take night shifts and weekend overtime is considered for shift leader. All six current shift leaders are men. Fourteen people hold forklift certificates, one of them a woman; all six shift leaders are among them. The owner wants to know why. The table audits each axis; the audit questions and the checks are my reasoning from the three axes on the library card, not conclusions of Young.

Suppose the answers show that training places are nominated by shift leaders and that two women dropped out of overtime to collect their children. The problem then is not one prejudiced person. It is a chain: you are considered only if you have been trained, you are consulted only if you attend the meeting, and you are judged uncommitted if your hours do not fit. Along that chain the "considered alike" rule stays true word for word. Possible fixes are opening forklift sign-up to everyone, putting a staff representative in the weekly meeting, and redefining "commitment" by results instead of hours present. All three are my suggestions, not Young's recommendations.

When does this view suit, and when not?

It suits you if you have written a fair rule and your data on promotion, training or leavers still skew by group, and you want to find the structure behind it rather than a culprit. It suits you if you have group-level data and may lawfully use it.

It does not suit you if you have only a handful of staff and one person makes every decision; there you should talk to each person rather than audit a structure. It does not suit you if you plan to use the table as legal evidence; Young writes political theory, not a compliance test. And fixing an axis has real costs: opening training to everyone costs money and working hours, and changing the shift-leader criteria may unsettle those who hold the posts. Young's essay supplies no figures for those costs or for the results.

For more on three kinds of discrimination and how a company can recognise each, see the three-type discrimination post; this post sits in the structural type of that framework.

Going deeper: what did I read, and what could I not check?

I read the full text of Iris Marion Young's essay "Structural Injustice and the Politics of Difference" (2008) in a 2007 print from a different publisher, with its own pagination. The library records the source as a chapter in a Routledge-Cavendish book of 2008, pages 289-314, so I use no page numbers and no direct quotations, only paraphrase. I could not read Young (2006), which the library card also lists as an origin, so I do not cite it. I have not read Rawls (2001) and describe him only through the library card.

Three limits. First, Young's examples come mainly from the United States and Europe; the essay does not discuss Vietnam, and I have no Vietnamese data. Second, this is political theory and does not measure whether fixing structures works inside a company. Third, Company Z, the audit table and the possible fixes are my own reasoning and assumptions, untested on a real business.