Social Dynamic Response Theory: Examining the Impact of the Pandemic-era Reduction in Women’s Rights on the Social Climate in the U.S.
Marshall, J.
Author correspondence: jamaal.marshall@hvisualizations.com
Cite this article: Marshall, J. (2023). Social Dynamic Response Theory. Diverse Perspectives on Wellness, 1(3), 1-6.
Abstract
Social Dynamic Response Theory reaffirms the contributions of multiple demographic groups who generate a well of advantages from which most, if not all members of the community benefit, and posits that when demographic groups’ agency or institutional access is challenged beyond a point of reasonable expectation, they are likely to respond with less participation in those institutions. The principles of Social Dynamic Response Theory are partially derived from Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Geert Hofstede’s Theory of Power Distance, and Karl Marx’s Conflict Theory. Social Dynamic Response Theory is where these three theories intersect and proposes that traditional family structures are possible because women exchange participation in benevolent sexism for reaffirmed safety in patriarchal societies, proactive participation in childbirth/marital institutions for reproductive freedom, and openness to casual intimacy for environmental assurances of sexual safety. Thus, it stands to reason that as gender inequality increases in a low power distance culture, intergender conflict will also increase, with too great an imbalance threatening community wellness, social cohesion and the overall social climate.
Keywords: feminism, theory, women’s rights, sociology, pandemic
Fourth Wave of Feminism (2012-2017)
Compared to previous movements, the Fourth Wave of Feminism’s progress in undermining rape culture, body shaming, sexual harassment and the feminine roles and values prescribed by patriarchal and male dominant culture was empowered by its resonance across races and intersections, as it more fully embraced minority, non-binary and trans women’s rights during continued advances towards gender equality. Both the Me Too Movement, a prominent campaign to heighten the visibility of sexual violence against women, and the Time’s Up movement, a social media-driven advocacy campaign to improve workplace safety and opportunities were effective in driving a change in public opinion and sentencing reform, which in turn, shifted the balance away from abuse without a reliable means for justice and towards undoing unconscious gender bias, increasing accountability for patterns of harassment, improving C-suite representation for women and improving the representation of trans women across prominent industries.
Women’s Withdrawal from Gendered Institutions (2017-2020)
As the success of the Fourth Wave of Feminism led to improvements in the sexual safety, economic freedom and agency for women in the U.S., women began to respond with less participation in marital institutions. 2017 marked the decline of the U.S. marriage rate, as well as the start of a 6% decline in the birth rate and the beginning of an upward trend in abortions for the first time in 30 years. With an increasing percentage of women entering the workforce while still serving as the primary caregivers for their families and children, some Americans perceived the changing landscape as a threat to family and marital institutions. Unfortunately, advances in women’s rights would be interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. With the first case arriving in the U.S. in January 2020, a nationwide crisis began, signaled by increasing transmission and mortality rates, mandatory lockdowns, deteriorating social conditions, economic insecurity and hyper-competitive work environments. This unique mix of social and political conditions would set the stage for new policy challenges to feminist advancements, which in turn would threaten to derail significant gains made by feminists during the previous waves, increase intergender hostility and undermine the social climate of the U.S.
COVID-19 Pandemic: Work-from-Home (2020-2022)
Although the pandemic-era work-from-home policy was originally conceived as a means for reducing COVID-19 transmission opportunities and countering the hardships of the pandemic, what was originally interpreted as a beneficial policy ultimately added to the imbalance of gendered responsibilities among two-partner families and drove employed mothers to a point of exhaustion, burnout, and in some cases, resignation to accommodate personal health needs, childcare and e-learning. Although the absolute impact of COVID-19 on the U.S. economic climate is immeasurable given how heightened concern with family and mental health may have affected The Great Resignation, what’s clear is that COVID-19’s influence on the workforce reduced functioning across social institutions and negatively impacted marginalized groups’ access to health and social services.
Maternal Mortality Rate (2018-2021)
The resulting decline in the functionality of social institutions was highly evident in maternal health care. This new era in U.S. healthcare was ushered in by pandemic-era sociopolitical dynamics, with reduced outgroup empathy and increased legislation against birth justice serving as leading indicators of a maternal healthcare landscape that had become even more hazardous for new and expectant mothers. Between 2018 and 2021, the maternal mortality rates for Black, Hispanic and White mothers increased by 87%, 137% and 79%, respectively. Average annual maternal mortality rate increases of 3.5%, 6.0% and 10.6% in 2019, 2020 and 2021 suggest that COVID-19 may have negatively impacted the prioritization of maternal healthcare services throughout the course of the pandemic. For mothers impacted by pandemic-era career changes, limited access to health insurance, quality health care providers, childcare and food security, along with restricted bodily autonomy resulted in a unique pregnancy experience, especially for those new and expectant mothers who were less informed about the drivers of systemic, interpersonal and individual-level behavioral changes that typically contribute to low prenatal and birth outcomes. This deterioration of an already difficult patient-provider dynamic calls for a careful and accurate evaluation of old and new-era structures. While the increasing maternal mortality rate indicates a decline in reproductive justice, and there are multiple feminist issues that require immediate attention, this paper argues that an injection of quantitative data and patient narratives into the conscious of the U.S. maternal health care system may serve as a mechanism for reversing pandemic-era prenatal and birth outcomes among U.S. women. The case with decreased safety in maternal health care is perhaps one that reflects changing social dynamics, and a grave example of how deteriorating outgroup attitudes can lead to policy actions that legitimize fear-based behavior and undermine between-group dynamics. In an egalitarian democracy, perceived competence is often considered a prerequisite to agency. However, there is little reasonable rationale within a democracy for removing autonomy from a group with perceived competence except to retain an imbalance of power.
Roe v. Wade Reversal (2022)
One study reveals that when men experience a large loss of power in man/woman dynamics, it is in these instances where society experiences an increase in patterns of hostile sexism towards women. Acts of hostile sexism, or negative reactions towards women who assume roles traditionally reserved for men may include disparagement, punishment and adverse policy action that seek to reduce women’s influence, and on June 24, 2022, Roe v. Wade was overturned as an indicator of the shift in prevailing attitudes towards women’s growing influence over American society. However, when policymakers commit to policy actions in an effort to retain their ideal balance as it relates to power, it is worth considering the ideal balance of power from all groups’ perspectives. Perhaps considerations of the decision to empower states to make abortion illegal did not factor in how women’s perception of bodily autonomy had evolved from a right to an expectation that when revoked, would create an environment of low perceived safety for women, and ultimately result in a backlash so potent that it would go on to impact dating and casual intimacy. The social dynamics after the 2023 Roe v. Wade reversal are reminiscent of the power imbalance that existed between men and women prior to the original passing of Roe v. Wade on January 22, 1973. Women’s campaigns against domestic violence and visible frustration with marital rape, an absence of reproductive rights and a massive imbalance in personal freedoms were likely strong considerations in the original 7-2 Roe v. Wade judgment. To further explore how adverse policy acts may push marginalized groups with less-than-ideal agency and group-level anger towards intentionally removing or reducing their contributions to larger society, it is worth better exploring the theoretical basis for pandemic-era intergender conflict and its impact on the larger social climate in the U.S.
Social Dynamic Response Theory
A. The Influence of Policy on Social Dynamics
Successful social policies are usually crafted with an understanding that perceived satisfaction across groups is necessary to some degree; meanwhile, policies created with only privileged demographic groups in mind risk shifting the health, social and moral burden of policies towards disadvantaged social classes and disrupting the social order to an extent that may correlate with the level of negative impact felt by the affected group. Although community-based organizations function as back-end solutions to mitigate the harms of policies that fail to consider impacts across groups, the damage that marginalized groups and larger society experience from faulty policy and policy failure can lead to irreversible consequences, and thus, greater consideration of wide-ranging impact is needed during the policy-making process. Poor policy planning may result from failure to properly research historical precedent for policy, and thus, misunderstanding the relevant sociopolitical dynamics and potential implications may lead to an overestimation of the level of support. Therefore, having a clear understanding of the theoretical basis for community-level reactions to social policies is critical to ensuring that policies serve their intended benefit.
B. Social Dynamic Response Theory
The implications of policy changes that reduce bodily autonomy for women are profound in practice and in theory. Policy changes can help delegitimize harmful personal views, and following the Roe v. Wade judgment in 1973, deaths from legal abortion declined fivefold between 1973 and 1985 (from 3.3 deaths to 0.4 death per 100,000 procedures), reflecting increased physician education, skills and improvements in medical technology. To aid in the development of statewide policies that encourage social cohesion, it’s critical for policymakers to be in tune with marginalized groups. Conversely, it’s also critical to better understand how well-intentioned policies may accidentally push inequality to a tipping point, increase intergender hostility and set the stage for a backlash. In this section, we unpack the theoretical basis for the Roe v. Wade reversal and present Social Dynamic Response Theory to explain women’s response to reduced gender equality and help inform a hopeful reduction of gender inequality and intergender hostility moving forward.
Social Dynamic Response Theory reaffirms the contributions of multiple demographic groups who generate a well of advantages from which most, if not all members of the community can benefit, and posits that when demographic groups’ agency or institutional access has been negatively impacted beyond a point of reasonable expectation, they are likely to respond with less participation in those institutions. The principles of Social Dynamic Response Theory are partially derived from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, a foundational piece in the human behavioral theoretical space which asserts that humans struggle to consider higher-level needs (e.g., intimacy, marriage, self-esteem and career ambition) when more basic needs are not met (e.g., food, safety and reproduction). Considering that many women’s burdens increased because of work-from-home policies, the increasing maternal mortality rate and decision to reverse Roe v. Wade only added to the psychological load and pushed women in the U.S. to a place of having less capacity to consider higher-level needs like casual sex, intimacy, marriage and childbirth. Geert Hofstede’s Theory of Power Distance differentiates between high power distance cultures where categorical access to rights is accepted, and low power distance cultures (e.g., U.S., U.K., Australia, etc.) where most members of society expect equality to a degree and are unlikely to accept bias beyond a certain point. A reliable indicator of high power distance cultures is the relatively low representation of socioeconomically disadvantaged groups in institutions that create policies or provide access to critical social services.
Karl Marx’s Conflict Theory states that conflict arises in response to the perception of limited resources and provides the rationale for considering whether the downward pressure experienced by feminism materialized as a privilege-driven reaction to a perceived loss of power. Social Dynamic Response Theory is where these three theories intersect and suggests women’s reduced participation in gendered social institutions as a response to a consistent rollback in feminist gains. Going further, what Social Dynamic Response Theory proposes is that traditional family structures are possible because women exchange participation in benevolent sexism for reaffirmed safety in patriarchal societies, proactive participation in childbirth and marital institutions for reproductive freedom and openness to casual intimacy for environmental assurances of sexual safety. Thus, it stands to reason that as gender inequality increases in a democratic society, intergender conflict will also increase, with too great an imbalance threatening community wellness, social cohesion and the overall social climate.
Next Steps
Feminist standpoint theory asserts that the most marginalized identities hold the most knowledge regarding the inner workings of the systems and structures by which they are oppressed. The Fifth Wave of Feminism, much like its predecessor is already being driven by the shared perspectives of women who are working against structural harms that have derailed birth justice, sexual safety and equitable access to economic freedom, security and social institutions. A year after the Roe v. Wade reversal, the current presidential administration continues to mitigate access issues by strengthening access to over-the-counter Plan B. Although conservative citizens, families and politicians who value traditional gender roles and view feminism as a threat to familial stability are motivated by potential investments in childbirth, community safety, growth, connection and a focus on sustainability and efficiency for the next generation, policies that reduce the humanity of women and deter the potential for an equivalent exchange of individual ambitions create an environment that disincentivizes marriage, families, childbirth and casual intimacy. Thus, moving forward, it’s critical that larger society and social institutions prioritize women’s bodily autonomy and safety to ensure a balance of conservative and liberal values as well as a balance between groups that promotes advancements in gender equality, a healthy social climate and continued progress.
References
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by Health Analytics & Visualizations. The author(s) would like to thank Kristin Moore for her peer review and comments.
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest or financial incentive. The author’s relationships with the stakeholders and subject matter did not lead to unreasonable bias or compromise the objectivity of the research.
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