Recently I was compelled to read and discuss for class an article (from a textbook billing itself as The Best American Magazine Writing, 2006) that was driven by this assumption: American women are the oppressed victims of a sexist society.
The article cited statistics about the low numbers of women working in the fields of news-writing and political commentary, taking the numbers themselves as proof of unfair hiring practices and refusing to acknowledge any possibility other than that mean, bad men were refusing to hire women for these positions. It dragged up the old statistic that the average woman earns only 75% of what the average man earns.
By Megan Ritter,
Senior Staff Writer
Recently I was compelled to read and discuss for class an article (from a textbook billing itself as The Best American Magazine Writing, 2006) that was driven by this assumption: American women are the oppressed victims of a sexist society.
The article cited statistics about the low numbers of women working in the fields of news-writing and political commentary, taking the numbers themselves as proof of unfair hiring practices and refusing to acknowledge any possibility other than that mean, bad men were refusing to hire women for these positions. It dragged up the old statistic that the average woman earns only 75% of what the average man earns.
The article quoted a few men who were engaged in sounding dismissive of women’s ideas – pulling out the most damning ten second-clips from five-minute on-air exchanges. When one well-respected columnist – George Will, Who has been writing for The New York Times since approximately the dawn of time – is quoted characterizing some woman’s mode of arguing as “hysterical,” our article at hand insists that he is using the term in its deeply sexist ancient Greek meaning, which is, “an imbalance in the mind, unique to women, produced by a disturbance in the uterus.”
What depressed me was the not one single person in a class that is mostly, but not entirely female disagreed with the premise of the article: that women are victims of the men around us.
What depresses me even more is that this attitude is confined neither to my textbook nor to the class that I happened to be in at the moment. Girls are taught from elementary school forward to consider all the ways big and small that women are oppressed by a patriarchal society. That men are on a mission to reverse women’s liberation is generally assumed by the time we get to high school. Women are taught that we are all victims of all the men in our lives.
Are we? The best statistics available indicate that we might not be as victimized as we’ve been led to believe.
Christina Hoff Sommers, formerly of the University of Massachusetts, documents in The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Hurting Our Young Men, girls get better grades, are more likely to be enrolled in Advanced Placement courses in high school, and both participate and hold leadership positions in extracurricular activities in far greater numbers than boys. More women than men have been enrolled in college every single year for the past thirty years. Women currently make up 60% of the college population, earn associate’s, bachelor’s, and master’s degrees in higher rates than men, and are a majority of the student body in nearly every professional school. Women comprise more than half of the current U.S. workforce.
As for the oft-cited statistic that the average woman earns only 75-80% what the average man earns? Those who like to paint women as victims of a patriarchal system love this number: it seems to be positive proof of sexism in the workplace, doesn’t it?
Actually, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) finds out that when the data is adjusted for three particular lifestyle choices that women make, the “wage gap” disappears.
The CBO, which is, as its name implies, an agency of the U.S. Congress, finds that women, in general, take more time off from work, put in less overtime, and are far less likely to be employed in a dangerous line of work. (For example, it may require the same level of education to get a job as a receptionist or a mine worker, but I have no problem paying the mine worker significantly more in hazard pay. Men fall victim to 92% of all workplace deaths.) If men are out-earning us, ladies, it is, probably, because of the choices that we make in where to work and how much to work. No employer is crazy enough to pay us the same wages for doing less work.
All these figures should be encouraging. My fellow women ought to be happy to hear that we’re doing so well. I know even as I’m writing that some of you won’t be happy to hear all this. Someone, somewhere, will probably call me a tool of the patriarchal oppressor. I suppose it’s good to be considered a victim in today’s America, because victimhood confers on us elevated status and not a few special privileges.
I’m going to take a risk and quote someone who many of you (often including myself) believe to be the antichrist: Conservative writer Ann Coulter points out that we’ve taken the notion of women’s liberation so far that women are no longer prevented from doing even the things that we should be prevented from doing.
She means, of course, that we’ve taken the idea of liberation so far that there’s nothing even to stop women from making choices that are damaging to our individual selves.
One such destructive choice? Continuing to see American society as full of sexism as we continue to see ourselves as victims.