Excerpted from the Encounter Broadsides series Women in 21st century America live five years longer than men; face an unemployment rate that is over a full percentage point lower; are awarded a substantially larger share of high school diplomas, BAs, MAs, and Ph.D.s; and show lower rates of incarceration, alcoholism and drug abuse.
Contrary to what feminist lobbyists would have Congress believe, girls and women are doing well.
With these data before us, reasonable individuals should be holding conferences on how to help men. Policymakers should require that government contractors hire men to bring down their unemployment rate. Health reform bills should feature Offices of Men’s Health to assist men in living to the same age as women.
Unfortunately, the reverse is occurring. Congress and President Obama continue to advocate policies that favor women over men. The financial regulation bill has mandated 29 offices to help the advancement of women.
The recently passed health reform law has set up multiple offices of women’s health. The Labor Department wants affirmative action for women at construction sites.
Much of this is motivated by congressional defensiveness in the face of fierce feminist lobbying that is largely unopposed. Once, feminists advocated equality of opportunity.
Now that has been largely achieved, they clamor for equal outcomes — a result that Congress prudently should not try to legislate. Equal outcomes is a pernicious goal for government policy, one that smacks of central planning and heavy official intrusion into private decision making, such as what to study and what vocation to pursue.
Women as a group spontaneously make choices that are different from men’s, and there is nothing wrong with that. Of course, if professional feminists were to acknowledge the validity of these choices, they would put themselves out of business — and might have to make some other career choices of their own.
Congress also responds to data that show differences in average wages between men and women. There is less to these differences than meets the eye. The gap almost disappears when the analysis takes account of gender differences in education, on-the-job experience, and the presence of children in the worker’s household.
By rightly lobbying for equality of opportunity, feminists in the 1960s were sending the message that women can take care of themselves in the economy and in society.
Helen Reddy’s song “I Am Woman,” top of the charts in 1972, contained the lyrics “‘I am strong, I am invincible, I am woman.” Reddy’s woman was not intimidated by going into law and medicine, and the idea that she would need affirmative action and quotas to go into science or finance contradicts the basic message that women are as strong as men.
In contrast, the 21st century feminist message is that women are weak and need protection through special preferences. This harms men by depriving them of opportunities, and harms women by invalidating their hard-earned credentials.
Not even a woman would choose a female brain surgeon for delicate surgery if she knew that the surgeon was a product of affirmative action. Giving preferences to a few women sows seeds of doubt that reflect on all.
A woman who chooses a part-time job with a flexible schedule in order to have time both for her family and her career thinks of herself as successful. But to feminists, she is a failure because she is on a lower earnings path than a man.
Government programs that attempt to guarantee outcomes favorable to women undermine the achievements and choices that women make every day without such programs.
Like all Americans, women succeed in their daily lives not because the federal government guarantees success, but precisely because it does not.
Examiner Columnist Diana Furchtgott-Roth, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
