Posted on 10/23/2009 5:22:36 AM PDT by Kaslin
Maria Shriver's new report, "A Woman's Nation Changes Everything," has received a full dress media rollout. We are invited to examine the changes in women's lives over the past several decades and to deplore, as usual, the obstacles to full equality that women supposedly face. Published in cooperation with the Center for American Progress, "A Woman's Nation" claims to be reckoning with the new era but arguably fails to grapple with the most profound challenges to women (as well as children and men).
Some of what's in this report is a recycling of long-discredited data. Heather Boushey, for example, regurgitates the statistic that women only earn 77 cents on the dollar compared with men. But as the Hudson Institute's Diana Furchtgott-Roth and other economists have shown, this number conceals more than it reveals. It is only true on average. But when you begin to compare like with like, the discrepancies narrow considerably. Comparing men and women who both work 40 hours per week, for example, reduces the pay gap by 10 cents per hour. You have to look carefully at what is being compared. Among workers labeled "full time," hours worked by men tend to exceed hours worked by women. When men and women performing the same job are compared -- whether supermarket checker or first-year associate at a law firm -- the pay gap nearly disappears.
"A Woman's Nation" declares in one breath that the "war of the sexes is over" but in the next launches a broadside about women's educational opportunities. It requires some ingenuity to complain that women are educationally shortchanged, when, as even the chapter's author, Mary Ann Mason, acknowledges, "Women today receive 62 percent of college associate's degrees, 57 percent of bachelor's degrees, 60 percent of all master's degrees, half of all professional degrees (law and medicine) and just under half of all Ph.D.s." But there is a problem lurking beneath the surface of this evident success. Though they dominate higher education, too many women are still choosing "traditional female majors" like education, health care (including nursing), and psychology.
Some people look at these data and see free people making free choices. The report doesn't see it that way. Some unseen hand (the patriarchy?) is herding women students into psychology class and blocking their enrollment in engineering and computer science. Women shouldn't cluster in the "helping professions," the report complains, because those jobs don't pay as well as some others. That women may prefer these fields anyway is not considered. Yes, Mason admits, women choose fields that offer job flexibility so that they can fulfill family responsibilities. But that just shows how much the world must change to make these tradeoffs unnecessary.
The solution to the educational "problem," the report argues -- and here we come to the nub -- is more government action. "Our government has already started" to tackle these problems, the report chirps, through laws like Title IX. But Big Brother must do more! Title IX must be used "as a tool to level the playing field for women in the sciences, just as it has done successfully for sports." In other words, schools must be coerced into "equalizing" these programs or risk the loss of federal support.
There's so much for benevolent government to do. The U.S., the report laments, "is the only industrialized country without any requirement that employers provide paid family leave." Employers must be required by law to offer generous family leave, flexible working hours, and other benefits. The government must "increase support to families for child care, early education and elder care to help working parents cope with their multiple responsibilities." Would that be the same government that is already trillions in debt?
Hundreds of pages, lots of photos and charts, and it's the same old song. It completely misses the most important fact about modern women's lives -- the decline of family stability. And not just women's lives. The decline of marital stability and the rise of unmarried parenting (currently almost 40 percent of children are born to unmarried parents) has not only been a catastrophe for children, it has also made combining work and family harder than ever. Just at the moment women entered the workforce en masse, marriages -- so essential to providing stability to home life -- unraveled.
The solution, says the Shriver report, is for our "social insurance" programs to "recognize" how family life is changing and increase benefits for a range of domestic needs. See how it works? The more that families disintegrate, the more demands are made upon the government to step in to fill the gaps. That's a downward spiral from which there may be no escape.
We must help our maids and nannies like we all had as children.The Onion couldn’t have done better!
btt
Maria “Skeletor” Shriver Schwarzenegger’s book and beliefs are pure BS. How does a company that produces a product let someone off to tend to a sick child and move the assembly line. These people are living in a parallel universe.
one suspects that if the Governor of California signed such a family leave law in his state we would soon after find Maria’s illegal maid in the Governors Mansion nursing her newborn on her coffee breaks
Bump
Maria explains how an ardent Kennedy leftist can by proxy run the state of CA while her dolt of a husband searches for a hair color that looks somewhere near natural.
Elites like Maria-Shriver-Kennedy-Swartsneiger only write these books so they have something to talk about at cocktail parties and for pocket change.
for your consideration.
The MOST important job in the world for a woman is too stay home and raise her children and take care of her husband.
Bingo.
Apparently Maris doesn’t believe in real ‘full equality”, as she continues to drive with a cell phone in her hand, against the law in Califronia.
More of the aristocracy attitude.
Apparently Maris doesn’t believe in real ‘full equality”, as she continues to drive with a cell phone in her hand, against the law in Califronia.
More of the aristocracy attitude.
do you mean that the worst mistake was women protesting to get the vote? or giving the women the vote was the worst mistake? or that the Founding Fathers didn't take women into account as they formed the nation, and so women were in a position where they fought for the vote?
Abigail Adams told her husband something about remembering the ladies... here is a quote from her:
"If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation."
just wondering what you mean--thanks!
Giving women the right to vote was the blunder. They don't seem to think rationaly when they vote.
in the words of my nine-year old son, "that is a general statement." in my words, "hardly a rational statement."
It is, but it is accurate and consistent with psychological findings. Women do tend to make decisions about how they "feel" rather than what they "think". Usually that makes everybody, especially children, gain instant happiness and gratification; but, rarely does it suit long-term needs.
Women are perfectly capable of rational thought, but vote more like in a popularity contest. They vote for pretense of short-term security, not long-term sustenance.
yes--and men don't? so are you saying that all the men in my left-leaning family who "tend" to vote for pretense of short-term security ought to have the vote, but women like me, Lynn Cheney, Liz Cheney and Michelle Malkin ought not because "most women tend to vote for pretense of short-term security?"
the founding fathers ought to have listened to Abigail Adams who was not short-sighted at all... that someone like Chris Matthews should have the vote, but someone like Abigail Adams should not is irrational...
The men in America have become wussiefied by all of the "politically correct" trends and modifications to society. Most of this modification comes from the "kinder and gentler" maternal influence of women in the legislature and the educational system. Many men in our society have been feminized by an educational system that is overrun with leftist females. Even Cub Scouts has been feminized to the point of uselessness.
I don't mean to imply that all women are not critical thinkers; however, most women are, well, women. They have completely different wiring systems than men. Well, they used to. Now too many men are just plain female-like.
There really are intrinsic differences between the way women run a country and the way men run a country. Add the complications of today's she-males and he-females ... what a mess!
You do have a point regarding the leftist men ... but they are feminized.
Now, I do know quite a number of very rational women. History is full of them, and their influence was critically important. Still, most women will place personal security and soothed egoes over long-term solutions.
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