Yes, Virginia, There Is a Gender Gap

Yes, Virginia, There Is a Gender Gap
by Phyllis Schlafly
September 7, 2011

Yes, Virginia, there is a gender gap. In fact, there are two gender gaps: one bad and one good.

The bad gender gap is that the biggest losers in the Obama economy are men rather than women, a fact that is bad for men, for families, for the federal deficit and debt problems, and for the health of the U.S. economy. Men have lost twice as many jobs as women.

The 9.1 percent unemployment figure is not a good measure of the problem. The most important factor is that 20 percent of American men (one in five) are not in the workforce.

Those 20 percent are not all included in the unemployment figure. Some have just dropped out of the count and are no longer looking for a job, maybe depending on the paychecks of their wives, girlfriends, or parents; and some are drawing disability (a number that has doubled in recent years).

Most adults can remember the days when we had an economy where a man could work a job, professional or blue-collar, that paid well enough to support his wife as a full-time homemaker and buy a house for his family. Since millions of those good jobs have been outsourced to China and other low-wage countries, the husband is now lucky if he gets a $10-an-hour job and sends his wife out to look for a job.

We've lost an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs every month over the last ten years. We are now supporting 44 million Americans on food stamps.

I hope men are not counting on President Obama's much ballyhooed Jobs Plan to get them back to work. Our first feminist President, Barack Obama will always toady to feminist demands, such as when he responded to their public tantrum by giving women the majority of his Stimulus jobs.

The National Economic Council report called "Jobs and Economic Security for America's Women" recites some of the many ways the Obama Administration is getting jobs for women. The report promises that President Obama "is committed to continuing the push for an economy that provides economic security and jobs for America's women."

You read that right. The Obama Administration is committed to finding jobs for women, not men, a goal that is steadily pursued by sex-based affirmative action, grants to feminist organizations and for feminist projects, and means-tested welfare that subsidizes non-marriage and makes husbands and fathers irrelevant. The U.S. now has 41 percent illegitimacy, which means taxpayers rather than husbands are supporting the kids.

This is all in line with feminist goals ever since Betty Friedan's 1963 book invited homemakers to escape from the home, which she labeled "a comfortable concentration camp." And don't forget that the most credentialed feminist of all, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, wrote in her 1977 book Sex Bias in the U.S. Code that the concept of husband breadwinner and wife homemaker "must be eliminated."

The White House Council on Women and Girls issued a report called "Women in America." In proudly commenting about this report, Obama repeated one of the favorite feminist whines: that "women still earn on average only about 75 cents for every dollar a man earns."

Well, so what? The American people believe, and federal law requires, NOT "equal pay" (that's a Communist notion) but "equal pay for equal work." And women, on average, are not doing work equal to the men.

The scholar Kay Hymowitz has once again demolished the feminist argument about wage discrimination in a new article in City Journal. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) defines full-time work as 35 hours a week "or more."

The BLS reports that 27 percent of male full-timers have workweeks of 41 hours or more, but only 15 percent of females do likewise. Hymowitz reports statistics and comparisons of various categories and shows how women, on average, choose fewer hours of work and less demanding specialties after they train for various careers such as being a surgeon or a pharmacist.

The reason women choose fewer hours and less demanding specialties, and then earn less than men do, is that some, maybe most, of them have babies, and most mothers prefer the mommy track. Despite the long-running feminist propaganda that babycare is a demeaning job for an educated women and that this burden, imposed by the patriarchy, should be lifted from their shoulders by the taxpayers, most women still want time off from a workforce job to be with their children.

The feminists are at war with Mother Nature, and she is still winning. Polls show that 60 percent of employed mothers who have minor children prefer part-time work, and 19 percent would like to give up their workforce job altogether.

The gender gap the feminists gripe about is a good gender gap because it gives babies what they most need, personal care by their own mother.