"The idea that female politicians inherently represent women and male politicians inherently represent men embodies a problematic identity-politics fallacy."

"The idea that female politicians inherently represent women and male politicians inherently represent men embodies a problematic identity-politics fallacy. This assumption simplifies complex identities into superficial categories, implying a universal, shared interest among people based solely on gender. Such oversimplification is both logically flawed and practically misleading ...
    "Individuals within the same gender group frequently possess widely varying interests and opinions ... Moreover ... [e]ffective political representation requires empathy, policy alignment, and competence rather than mere identity resemblance. ...
    "Finally, the identity politics fallacy inadvertently perpetuates gender stereotyping ... Representation should ... be rooted in inclusive, nuanced understandings of individual and community needs, transcending reductive demographic categories. Such an approach better serves democratic ideals, promotes effective governance, and fosters genuine equality."

~ Tim Harding on his post 'Identity politics gender fallacy'

"The issue is never the issue; the issue is always the revolution."

"The issue is never the issue; the issue is always the revolution. The revolution proceeds through conflict and strategic framing of polarised manufactured 'sides.' The issue is just an excuse (or mediator) to orient the conflict in the direction of Leftist 'progress'."

~ James Lindsay explaining the process of "dialectical progress"

"A peevish, grudging rancour against men has been one of the most unpalatable and unjust features of second- and third-wave feminism..."

"A peevish, grudging rancour against men has been one of the most unpalatable and unjust features of second- and third-wave feminism. Men’s faults, failings and foibles have been seized on and magnified into gruesome bills of indictment. Ideologue professors at our leading universities indoctrinate impressionable undergraduates with carelessly fact-free theories alleging that gender is an arbitrary, oppressive fiction with no basis in biology.
    "Is it any wonder that so many high-achieving young women, despite all the happy talk about their academic success, find themselves in the early stages of their careers in chronic uncertainty or anxiety about their prospects for an emotionally fulfilled private life? When an educated culture routinely denigrates masculinity and manhood, then women will be perpetually stuck with boys, who have no incentive to mature or to honor their commitments. And without strong men as models to either embrace or (for dissident lesbians) to resist, women will never attain a centred and profound sense of themselves as women....
    "It was always the proper mission of feminism to attack and reconstruct the ossified social practices that had led to wide-ranging discrimination against women. But surely it was and is possible for a progressive reform movement to achieve that without stereotyping, belittling, or demonising men. History must be seen clearly and fairly: obstructive traditions arose not from men’s hatred or enslavement of women but from the natural division of labour that had developed over thousands of years during the agrarian period and that once immensely benefited and protected women, permitting them to remain at the hearth to care for helpless infants and children. Over the past century, it was labour-saving appliances, invented by men and spread by capitalism, that liberated women from daily drudgery."

~ Camille Paglia from her opening statement to the 2013 Toronto Debate: 'Be it Resolved: Men are Obsolete.'

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“Saying that men and women have different aptitudes isn’t sexism. It’s a statement about the true nature of the world. If we keep saying that those differences are because of sexism, nobody’s going to end up happy with what they’re doing, and we’re going to keep making laws to remedy what’s actually the result of freedom.” #QotD

“Saying that men and women have different aptitudes isn’t sexism. It’s a statement about the true nature of the world. If we keep saying that those differences … are because of sexism, nobody’s going to end up happy with what they’re doing, and we’re going to keep making laws to remedy what’s actually the result of freedom.”

~ evolutionary psychologist Diana Fleischman, in John Stossel's post 'Gender Wars: The Difference Between Male & Female Brains'
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#QotD: 'How to read authors of earlier times who expressed views or created characters that we find repugnant today'

"It’s as if we imagine an old book to be a time machine that brings the writer to us. We buy a book and take it home, and the writer appears before us, asking to be admitted into our company. If we find that the writer’s views are ethnocentric or sexist or racist, we reject the application, and we bar his or her entry into the present.
"As [my] student had put it, 'I don’t want anyone like that in my house'.
"I think we’d all be better readers if we realised that it isn’t the writer who’s the time traveler. It’s the reader. When we pick up an old novel, we’re not bringing the novelist into our world and deciding whether he or she is enlightened enough to belong here; we’re journeying into the novelist’s world and taking a look around."
          ~ Brian Morton, author and director of the writing program at Sarah Lawrence College, as quoted in the post
             'How to read authors of earlier times who expressed views or created characters that we find repugnant today'.

QotD: "I believe the #MeToo movement was a healthy grassroots attempt to highlight and eradicate a serious injustice. But the movement is increasingly being taken over by collectivism -- the innocence or guilt of any individual judged not by objective facts but by his group affiliation"

"I believe the #MeToo movement was a healthy grassroots attempt to highlight and eradicate a serious injustice. But the movement is increasingly being taken over by collectivism, which means that the individual is subordinate to the moral supremacy of the group. Under collectivism, the innocence or guilt of any individual is to be judged not by objective facts but by his group affiliation. 

    "#MeToo is collectivising into a war on men--all men. Petula Dvorak of the 'Washington Post' calls for a '#MeToo March on Washington' this week in one-sided support for Ford ahead of any testimony and prior to the surfacing of relevant facts or proof. Jenna Wortham of the 'New York Times' wants “every single man put on notice, to know that they, too, were vulnerable because women were talking.” 

    "This is pure hatred... This is collectivism. If 'every single man' should fear any woman 'talking,' then any man can legitimately be accused of sexual harassment, whether he as an individual is guilty or not. Why not? He’s a man. He’s guilty no matter the actual facts of any individual case, because men as a group are guilty...    "Just as the Civil Rights Movement started out as a legitimate demand by an oppressed group that America live up to its creed of equal individual rights, but was hijacked by statists who turned it into a collectivist movement for totalitarian socialism, so it looks like the #MeToo movement is being hijacked by a predatory, collectivist, revenge-seeking gang that is on the hunt for innocent victims to condemn without evidence, without a hearing, and without the benefit of Innocent Until Proven Guilty." 

        ~ Mike LaFerrara, from his post 'The Hijacking of the #Me-Too Movement'
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Guess what, folks: Women already have equal pay

 

Kevin Roberts was forced to resign for telling an interviewer companies should be judged by how happy they make their female employees happy, not by how many with female parts occupy the boardroom. That the debate about gender diversity is over. Not at the American Democratic Convention however, where Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker could be heard lamenting that American women do not earn “equal pay for equal work.”

The social-justice warriors are out in force, and they appear to have the numbers on their side.

The latest U.S. Department of Labor data show that women working full-time make 81 percent of full-time men’s wages. In the UK the gender pay “gap” is said to be just under 20 percent – and boardrooms still host more suits and ties than they do frocks and high heels. But these figures are both inaccurate and misleading. The statistics look only at raw averages and do not take into account factors such as education, skills, ambitions and hours worked – a few of things that Roberts himself mentioned in what has become his career epitaph.

Control for the Obvious

After controlling for other factors, the gender pay gap practically disappears. Indeed, among single, childless workers under 30, women earn more than men. Legislation to close the gender “wage gap” is misguided: in reality, there is no gap to close.

Likewise, the official statistics are misleading because they generally average earnings for all full-time women — no matter their education, profession, experience, or hours worked — and earnings for all full-time men. As such, it is not an apples-to-apples comparison.

Even in President Obama’s White House, women earn 84 percent of what men earn, according to published data analysed by American Enterprise Institute scholar Mark Perry.

The US Labor Department classifies “full-time” work as any workweek of more than 35 hours; but men typically work more hours than women. Among full-time workers, men work 43 hours per week, on average, and women, 41 hours per week. Women who work exactly 40 hours per week earn 89 percent of what their respective male peers earn. (When unmarried, childless workers under 30 are compared, a “reverse wage gap” appears, with women earning $1.08 for every dollar earned by comparable men.)

Women and Men Make Different Choices

The causes of the remaining 11 percent wage “gap” are numerous. Take men’s and women’s field of study in college. Men outnumber women in nine of the ten highest-paying majors, while women outnumber men in nine of the ten lowest-paying majors. According to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, for example, women make up a statistically insignificant share of petroleum-engineering majors and only 7 percent of electrical-engineering majors — degrees that open the door to lucrative professions. On the other hand, women account for 59 percent of studio-art majors, 56 percent of drama majors, and 88 percent of elementary-education majors — degrees that lead to relatively low-paying careers.

It would be wrong to conscously choose what you know is a low-paying career path, then demand restitution for the lower-paid trajectory then taken.

Employers often pay more for employees with strong quantitative skills. And, according to the American Community Survey, majors with high SAT math scores are more likely to lead to higher salaries; yet for various reasons, women are less likely to choose majors that require high math SAT scores. After graduation, more women than men work for nonprofits, which pay less: according to the DOL, of the 9.3 million U.S. workers in the private, nonprofit sector in 2015, 6.3 million were female.

Women are also more likely to leave the labour force temporarily to raise children, which contributes to the work-experience gap between men and women. (According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 97 percent of adults who identify as “homemakers” are women.) In a 2016 paper, Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn of Cornell University find that “recent research suggests a continued and especially important role for work force interruptions and shorter hours in explaining gender wage gaps in high skilled occupations.”

Women are more likely to work part-time, too. In 2015, 25 percent of women worked part-time, compared with 12 percent of men, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. However, when part-time workers are compared in apples-to-apples fashion, the wage gap is reversed: women earn $1.03 for every dollar earned by comparable men.

It is also true that men work in more dangerous jobs, which often pay more to compensate for the greater risk: in 2014 America, for example, men experienced 92 percent of fatal injuries on the job, despite working 57 percent of total hours. Men, in other words, are roughly nine times more likely to die from work-related injuries. Employers cannot be blamed for the fact that men are vastly more likely to enter professions that kill or severely maim them, but they can be expected to properly compensate them for the risks they are choosing.

Look before You Legislate

Various academic studies have found that, when women are compared with men in the same jobs, the same credentials, and the same job tenure—true apples-to-apples comparisons — the wage gap narrows to 3 cents to 7 cents on the dollar. This small remaining wage gap may be due to discrimination or to factors that have not yet been measured.

To correct this alleged injustice, men who speak the truth are harried out of their jobs, and politicians introduce things like the Paycheck Fairness Act. But despite President Obama’s enthusiastic support, the Paycheck Fairness Act failed to pass even the Democratic-controlled Congress. So, as an example of how modern politics works, the ill-named Equal Employment Opportunity Commission will instead require companies to report the wages, occupations, hours worked, and race and sex of their employees -- in an effort to implement the Act by regulation and circumvent Congress. 

If the Commission succeeds in collecting this data, the increased threat of litigation over pay differences between men and women, as well as between certain minorities and whites, would undoubtedly raise the cost of employment, thereby discouraging hiring.

Women who believe that they are legitimate victims of wage discrimination do already have legal avenues for redress. It is currently illegal to pay women less than men for the same work, and has been for some time – in the US, since as far back as 1963.

Isolated incidents of discrimination no doubt exist and may never be stamped out entirely. But when all the factors behind divergent pay numbers are accounted for, men and women earn roughly the same. The equal-pay-for-equal-work crusaders have already won.

But do you think that will make them shut up?

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Diana Furchtgott-Roth
Diana Furchtgott-Roth, former chief economist of the U.S. Department of Labor, is director of Economics21 and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
A version of this post appeared previously at E21 and FEE.

 

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Kevin Roberts: suspended for honesty

 

NZer Kevin Roberts was “suspended” from his job as head of the Saatchi advertising empire for saying companies should be judged by how happy they make their female employees happy, not by how many with female parts occupy the boardroom. The feminazis rose up in droves.  “People like Kevin Roberts no longer belong in ad agencies,” thundered the politest of the commentariat.We’re supposed to back his sacking say Twitterati, because this is apparently offensive to all right-thinking social-justice warriors. Get with their programme, Kev!

But what did he say that was so wrong, wonders Elena Shalneva? What’s wrong with being honest about “gender diversity”?

Not only is he well-informed on the subject, but he approaches the complex issue of gender diversity in a more intelligent and nuanced way than most…
    From what I have read, there is absolutely nothing wrong with what Roberts said. On the contrary, he dared to approach an issue as sensitive as gender diversity in an honest and humane way, rather than resort to the one-sided ideological statements more customary to this subject.

How dare he. How dare he point out that that the “’Darwinian urges of wealth, power, and fame’ do not necessarily apply to everyone, and that what many people want is just to do ‘great work’ and be happy rather than reach the top.”

So he’s been suspended for sins against feminism. “The new gender intolerance has claimed another scalp,” says Ella Whelan, who concedes that Roberts may have got things wrong – “his assertion that women don’t want top jobs because they ‘simply want to be happy and do great work’ is a little naive. Many women will understand that taking a top position will involve a great deal of sacrifice” – but hardly deserves being tarred and feathered.

The crazy thing about this whole debacle is that Roberts’ comments don’t actually harm women. He’s obviously a stranger to the factors that shape many women’s decisions – he’s clearly not had to come home to a kitchen that needs mopping after a long day’s work. But all he’s really guilty of is not being interested in having a discussion about gender. That’s fair enough. Gallop and her feminist supporters however, are undermining women’s freedom. In their assertion that women need a leg-up in the workplace, they paint women as incapable of being independent agents in the world. Gallop and other proponents of gender equality believe that women are incapable of forging their own destinies.
    We need to remind ourselves that discrimination in the workplace is illegal and that, as Joanna Williams has pointed out on spiked, ‘the gender pay gap is dead’. So, in a sense, Roberts is right to wonder why this zombie debate on gender equality is still being rehearsed? It really is all over.
    Roberts doesn’t want a debate about gender equality, but neither do his critics. Gender equality, it seems, is not up for discussion. Anyone who has criticised the political inadequacies of contemporary feminism knows this. If we want to have a real debate about women’s freedom (a discussion on reproductive rights would be a good start), we should have one. But let’s stop this pretence of a debate about gender and get serious about defending women’s agency and capabilities. That means allowing men like Roberts to have an opinion and to voice it freely without being silenced or sacked.

But if we were all allowed our own opinion, what would the world’s social-justice warriors do with all their spare time?

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The gender pay-gap myth

 

Watch Amy Holmes and John Stossel bust the gender pay gap myth – starting at 6:42…

RELATED POSTS:

• Questions For Those Who Believe that Women Are Underpaid – Don Boudreaux, CAFE HAYEK
• Some thoughts on Equal Pay Day and the 23% gender pay gap myth – Mark Perry, AE IDEAS

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Ayn Rand on the Man Ban [updated]

Since the “Man Ban” was first issued by Labour—i.e., their proposal for a special quota to ensure a 50:50 split between men and women in the Labour caucus—it’s been widely dismissed. But only by derision, not by pointing out why such  quotas are wrong.

It only takes some slight paraphrasing from the original to explain why:

The notion of sexual quotas is so obviously an expression of sexism that no lengthy discussion is necessary. If a young man is barred from a school or a job because the quota for his particular sex has been filled, he is barred by reason of his sex. Telling him that those admitted are his “representatives,” is adding insult to injury. To demand such quotas in the name of fighting sexual discrimination, is an obscene mockery…
    The quota doctrine assumes that all members of a given physiological group are identical and interchangeable—not merely in the eyes of other people, but in their own eyes and minds. Assuming a total merging of the self with the group, the doctrine holds that it makes no difference to a woman whether she or her “representative” is admitted to a school, gets a job, or makes a decision.

By this thinking then, it would make no difference whether you were to find Helen Clark or Margaret Thatcher in your cabinet.

Can we get advocates of the Man Ban to buy that proposition?

UPDATE 1: Ayn’s done her job. Man Ban redacted.

UPDATE 2: And the backlash begins…