Thaïs d’Escufon Responds to Feminist Criticism on Work, Relationships and Inequality

The disagreement between Thaïs d’Escufon and her feminist critics centres on a key question: how should relations between men and women in contemporary society be interpreted? The exchanges pit two frameworks against each other. On one side is a feminist analysis focused on domination, discrimination and structural inequalities. On the other, Thaïs d’Escufon defends an approach based on social history, biological differences between the sexes and the complementarity of roles.

The issues discussed are wide-ranging: the history of women’s work, the place of care professions, pay gaps, the role of the family, monogamous marriage, seduction and the notion of sisterhood. Beyond their substantive disagreements, the debate also concerns whether opposing views can be confronted without reducing one’s opponent to a label.

Women’s work: a disagreement over historical interpretation

Thaïs d’Escufon challenges the idea that women were largely absent from work for a long period of history. She argues that, in rural and family-based societies, many women took part in the economic activities of the household, business or farm, without necessarily having employee status.

She therefore distinguishes work in the broad sense from paid employment. In her view, historical change does not follow a linear path from women once confined to the home to women later entering the labour market. She refers to the work of Claudia Goldin, the 2023 Nobel Prize laureate in Economic Sciences, to stress that women’s economic activity has changed according to periods and forms of economic organisation.

Her critics, meanwhile, emphasise the historical invisibility of women’s work and the obstacles women faced in gaining access to certain rights and social spaces. They argue that the rights obtained were not simply concessions, but the result of campaigns led by women.

The disagreement is therefore not limited to the facts cited, but extends to their interpretation. Thaïs d’Escufon stresses women’s participation in productive life and the collective nature of the family economy in the past. The feminist perspective mentioned places greater emphasis on women’s legal, financial and social autonomy.

A view of modern comfort centred on male-dominated occupations

Thaïs d’Escufon argues that the material comfort of Western societies relies heavily on arduous, technical or dangerous work, mostly carried out by men. She cites infrastructure, transport, emergency services, digital tools and the activities required for everyday supplies.

From this perspective, she believes that feminist criticism of men’s role does not sufficiently take account of the contribution of those who perform the most thankless or risky functions. Her argument is intended to highlight the concrete interdependence of the sexes rather than portray relations between men and women as an exclusively conflictual relationship.

The women to whom she responds, for their part, stress the importance of care professions, which are often held by women. They describe these roles as essential to collective life, particularly because they involve support, education and care. Thaïs d’Escufon identifies a tension in this argument: these professions may be described both as a source of social power and as evidence of an unfavourable distribution of roles.

Biology, relationships and monogamous marriage

Another major aspect of her position concerns the place of biology in relations between the sexes. Thaïs d’Escufon considers that men’s and women’s relationship strategies are partly influenced by reproductive differences. In particular, she links the physical cost of pregnancy for women to more demanding partner selection, while presenting men as being more oriented towards a logic of quantity.

She specifies that this approach does not deny the existence of feelings or the role of civilisation. She presents monogamous marriage as a social compromise that has made it possible to channel different tendencies: female hypergamy, in her terms, and male polygamy. Her stated aim is to better understand romantic behaviour so that everyone can make informed choices.

This interpretation is challenged by those who reject biology as the main framework for explaining social relations. Their criticism focuses on the risk of assigning men and women supposedly natural behaviours at the expense of history, sociology and individual choices.

Pay gaps: overall averages or comparable situations?

The issue of pay inequality particularly crystallises the opposition. One participant refers to a 23% pay gap between women and men in 2022, attributed to INSEE. Thaïs d’Escufon responds that this figure is an average gap and cannot, on its own, establish direct pay discrimination.

She puts forward three main explanations. First, men and women would not gravitate towards the same professional sectors: she cites finance for men and social work for women. Second, she states that men work more overtime, citing a rate of 28% compared with 13% for women. Third, she believes that women ask for raises or negotiate their pay less often.

On the basis of these points, she argues that the gap would narrow sharply when occupations, working hours and other comparable characteristics are taken into account, reaching around 5% at most according to her analysis. Her opponents maintain, for their part, that the observed gaps are part of a broader system of discrimination and relations of domination.

The divergence is as much methodological as political: should priority be given to the average gap across all incomes, or should professional situations that are as similar as possible be compared? Thaïs d’Escufon clearly supports the latter approach and disputes that the aggregate gap alone can demonstrate widespread discrimination.

Sisterhood and competition between women

Thaïs d’Escufon also criticises the notion of sisterhood when it becomes, in her view, an injunction to ideological conformity. She sees it as social pressure exerted among women to penalise those who adopt a different relationship, aesthetic or political strategy.

She links this criticism to the term “pick me,” used to describe a woman perceived as seeking male attention or validation. In her analysis, the term can be used to discredit women who embrace their attractiveness or reject certain feminist codes. She then interprets this hostility as the expression of female competition for male attention.

This analysis forms part of a broader view: Thaïs d’Escufon believes that feminism places greater value on qualities she describes as masculine, such as competition, ambition and power, while devaluing certain qualities traditionally associated with femininity. Instead, she calls for the home, attentiveness to others and feminine roles to be valued again, without presenting them as inferior.

A debate about ideas as much as dialogue

Thaïs d’Escufon states that she does not regard men as her enemies and says she defends a vision based on cooperation between the sexes. She reproaches her detractors for reducing intellectual disagreements to personal judgments and refusing contradiction.

The positions remain far apart. The feminist critics referred to defend an analysis of inequality based on power relations and discrimination. Thaïs d’Escufon favours an interpretation based on sexual differences, individual choices, complementarity and shared responsibilities. The confrontation thus reveals two difficult-to-reconcile conceptions of work, relationships and emancipation.

FAQ

What is the main disagreement between Thaïs d’Escufon and her feminist critics?

The main disagreement concerns the origins of inequalities between the sexes. Her critics see them as the result of structural domination and discrimination, while Thaïs d’Escufon highlights biological differences, career choices and interdependence between men and women.

What is Thaïs d’Escufon’s position on pay gaps?

She challenges the interpretation of an overall gap as direct evidence of discrimination. She points in particular to differences in occupations, working hours and pay negotiations to explain a substantial share of the observed gaps.

How does she define sisterhood?

She criticises a form of sisterhood that she interprets as pressure among women intended to prevent some of them from standing out, particularly in romantic competition or in the expression of non-feminist views.