Last week Facebook chief operating officer and feminist activist Sheryl Sandberg was back in the news with a new “Lean In” initiative, titled #LeanInTogether. It’s an addendum to her original “Lean In” program that focuses on men. Specifically, Sandberg wants men to “support” women in their career goals by working less at their jobs and more on the home front so women can do less on the home front and work more at their jobs.
That’s not how Sandberg phrases it, of course, but it’s the inevitable result of her lofty goal. “My goal is very clear, which is that women run half our companies and countries and men run half our homes.”
Predictably, “Lean In” has been a spectacular failure. “Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 book ‘Lean In’ has spawned lasting initiatives meant to spur the progress of women to positions of power in major corporations,” writes author and professor Steven Rhoads. But such efforts have failed since “most women who have dependent children don’t want to work full time, much less to put in the hours required of corporate titans.”
Ironically, the same week Sandberg was peddling her modified agenda for Lean In, a new study by the Council of Contemporary Families was released that shows fewer young people want gender equality at home! The study found an increase in the number of college-bound students who believe families are better off if men are “the achievers outside the home” and women “handled most of the family and domestic duties.” There has also been “an uptick in the number who prefer the men to be dominant.”
It seems to today’s young people are wiser than the feminists who came before them. In fact, a mere “25 percent of the women Millennial voters and 15 percent of the Millennial men” identify as feminists. That’s not because they’ve “shifted back to more traditional views of the roles of the sexes,” notes Belinda Luscombe of Time but because, unlike feminists, they recognize the significance and value of domestic life and accept that sex differences are a vital component of any good marriage.
Yet another paper in the study, says Luscombe, “found that the number of 18- to 25-year-olds who disagreed with the statement that ‘a woman’s place is in the home,’ dropped in the same time period.” This is particularly unusual, she adds, “considering that the most recent studies have found that couples who share household chores more equally are usually happier and more satisfied with their marriage.”
Funny, that’s exactly what Sandberg argues in her new #LeanInTogether initiative. “If you are a husband to a woman and you do more of the childcare, it helps [make] your marriage stronger, you have more sex, your divorce rate is lower,” she writes. That simply isn’t true. According to the 2012 study by the American Psychological Association, husbands and wives who divide household tasks according to the gendered norms have more sex than those who don’t, which invariably translates to stronger marriages.
Sociologists and academics are scratching their heads at the results of this study, but it makes perfect sense. The younger generation isn’t interested in what women like Sheryl Sandberg and Gloria Steinem are interested in. Back in 1995, Steinem said, “We’ve proven that women can do what men did, professionally. But we haven’t convinced ourselves, or them, that men can do what women have done.”
That sort of thinking just doesn’t appeal to young people. They don’t feel the need to prove anything, and they don’t think men and women need to do each other’s jobs in order to prove some faux notion of equality. They don’t want to compete with each other in that way. Rather, they want to love each other and build families together. Who does what within those families is moot.
A new day is dawning in America, for more reasons than one. But it seems abundantly clear to me that feminism is dead.
Feminists can use the more palatable term “gender equality” to make their agenda sound better. But it’s falling on deaf ears.
Suzanne Venker (@SuzanneVenker) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is an author, Fox News contributor, and trustee of Leading Women for Shared Parenting. Her fifth book, “The Alpha Female’s Guide to Men & Marriage: HOW LOVE WORKS,” was published in February.
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