In 2019, a female friend, who is also a very well-established and highly regarded professor, was asked ‘did you get this job on merit?’ In 2008, I sat in a university forum, where the vice chancellor was asked why there were no women on the senior management team. He responded, with no sense of irony, “we did have a woman apply for a position once, but she wasn't good enough”. Alongside the notion that one woman therefore stands for all women, is an assumption as to what counts as ‘good enough’. But how exactly is this ‘good enough’ defined? How can we determine who is and is not good enough, by what criteria are they being measured? Who writes that definition? What do we mean by merit? These are fundamentally political questions: they invite us to think about whose interests are reflected in this definition, and by extension, what structures and interests are obscured. While the #MeToo campaign was concerned with the ways in which individual women were abused, assaulted and harassed, this chapter takes as its starting point the need to explore how violence towards women is legitimated through the ideas that are promulgated about what is valuable in our society and whose interests they represent.

The notion of what is ‘good enough’ suggests a commitment to some kind of objective ideal of value, or worth, or merit. Someone got the job, or their position in society, or in the media, because they were ‘good enough’ or had merit. What I want to suggest is that our current understanding of merit is intensely gendered. In its contemporary context the way in which the term merit has become taken for granted masks a series of sexist assumptions about what actually counts as meritorious. It is unlikely that we would hear the statement ‘we did have a man apply for the job once, but he wasn't good enough’. We would also not expect to hear statements made in public about men's absence in boardrooms, such as ‘all of the good men have already been snapped up’ or ‘there aren't that many men with the right credentials and depth of experience to sit on the board – the issues covered are extremely complex’.