Ask some people how they feel about feminism and they'll say, “Feminism is dead. It’s accomplished.” However, while women (insert any power minority) have a great deal more political equality than a hundred years ago, they still lack social equality. That is, people's identity, i.e. race, gender, sexual orientation, puts them at a social (dis)advantage. While quotas in the workplace can be dangerous and ineffective in that they risk reducing equality to a common denominator, to deny someone a job because they have a vagina (or are black or gay), is to treat them adversely because of a common denominator.
Contrary to popular belief, feminism does not base equality on sameness. Feminists believe that equality should be based on distinctiveness. However, feminists resist the argument put forth by those who fear feminism that the distinctiveness of women should be based on traditionally inscribed gender roles. To do so is to contradict one’s argument for distinctiveness because it reduces women to a common denominator (their vagina). Furthermore, the problem with basing gender-equality on traditional gender roles is that the traits and characteristics, even “virtues,” traditionally associated with women is that they are not valued in society.
A consequence of this devaluation has been the association of femininity with weakness/inferiority which has become accepted by society as natural and normal. Not only is this demeaning to women in that it imposes artificial limits on what they can achieve or who they can be, it is also demeaning to men because it reveals the instability of their masculinity. Put differently, if women pretend to be less intelligent or less strong than men, to maintain consciously the illusion of weakness in relation to men – in order to make men feel more secure about their masculinity – then masculinity and its associations with strength and superiority are undermined.
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