BOOK REVIEW: THE FEMINST DILEMMA !!!!

[Daanyeer]

Source: mensdaily
By J. Steven Svoboda | Apr 2, 2009

The Feminist Dilemma: When Success is not Enough. By Diana Furchtgott-Roth and Christine Stolba. Washington, DC: The AEI Press, 2001.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth and Christine Stolba, co-authors of the excellent Women’s Figures: An Illustrated Guide to the Economic Progress of Women in America (1999), have published their second book together. The Feminist Dilemma: When Success is not Enough proves to be one of those admirable books that all too frequently gets short shrift in reviews. Not as revolutionary or dramatic as some works, not striving to shock or to be the most radical release of the year, the book effectively, lucidly dismantles feminist mythology while bringing together a wide range of useful information.

The authors find themselves in disagreement with most if not all feminist social engineering programs, which are the central concern of their book. They methodically spell out the reasons for their central thesis, that feminists’ “agenda is not about securing equal rights for women but about gaining power and continuing their own institutional existence.” The writers incisively discern four separate characteristics of the feminist message that women are victims:

First, it portrays society as organized around groups, not individuals. Second, it argues that women are oppressed and ignores women’s achievements. Third, it proposes that the only remedy for such oppression is government-sponsored preferential programs. Finally, it encourages politicians to change the laws and bureaucrats to interpret laws in such a fashion as to mandate quotas.

Furchtgott-Roth and Stolba astutely point out some of the many absurd examples of social engineering that are undertaken in the name of promoting women’s opportunities. For example, Joe’s Stone Crab Restaurant in Miami Beach, Florida, a woman-owned, woman-operated business, found itself compelled to undergo ruinous legal costs and “discrimination” penalties as a result of a lawsuit initiated by and ultimately won by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). You see, in a certain time period, 22 percent of its new hires were women, whereas the available labor pool was supposedly 31.9 percent female. The court’s ultimate conclusion: discrimination. “The owners had to pay back wages and benefits to four women, two of whom had never even applied for a job but who told the judge they had considered applying.” Possibly even more absurdly, no individual person ever lodged a complaint against Joe’s. Unfortunately, EEOC commissioners are empowered to bring such lawsuits even in the absence of any complainant!

The authors point out that “supporters of affirmative action “vehemently deny that they support hiring quotas, but in practice quotas are businesses’ only option if they hope to avoid costly litigation.” Even more fundamentally, regardless of one’s political stance, one can only see such programs as anti-American. “[A]ffirmative action promotes a vision of society wholly antithetical to that most Americans embrace—one that seeks equality of results rather than equality of opportunity.” Moreover, the authors ask, why are we not extending this principle to also challenge any area in which females are overrepresented, such as dance, drama, and nursing. In a saner world, the authors would not need to even mention “a possibility not considered by feminists, namely, that students’ choices of college majors reflect their abilities and preferences.”

Furchtgott-Roth and Stolba point out “two disturbing notions” that are “lurking behind feminists’ calls for 50 percent representation in chemistry classes” [and other subjects in which they are under-represented]:

First is the implicit assumption that women are not capable of making educational choices for themselves and that they are victims of a form of false consciousness that unfairly limits their options. Second is the notion that government bureaucrats, acting as social engineers in the classroom, are the answer to that perceived problem.

In a refreshing, fascinating chapter, we move us from the general to the very specific, focused life stories of two fascinating women: former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, and Jennifer Simon. We follow Fiorina’s remarkable path to the top of her industry, as she drops out of law school and works as a receptionist and teacher before joining AT&T as a sales representative. Despite initially being sure she would have another job within two years, Fiorina stayed and of course prospered, first marketing phone services to government agencies, then drawing praise as group president of a Lucent division. It is fascinating to compare the pseudonymous Ms. Simon, who excelled in law school and then at major law firms and in government agency work. Eventually, however, she decided her heart was in social work, and she dropped out of her legal career to obtain a degree in that low-paying field. The point: we make our life decisions based on our individual conditions and desires, and not due to lockstep allegiance to an imposed view of what we should want.

The authors ably summarize many of the findings discussed in more detail by Warren Farrell’s in his Why Men Earn More, all of which show that women’s lower average wages are not the result of any anti-woman discrimination whatsoever. Instead, women tend to choose careers that allow them more flexibility, fewer hours, more predictable hours, less travel, and reduced need to relocate. All these choices on average tend to move women away from the higher paying fast track while of course compensating them for their lost income with what they have shown by their actions that they deem to be a higher quality life.

Furchtgott-Roth and Stolba incisively take to task feminist activists who have, with a significant degree of success, advocated for relaxing or removing the requirement that sexual harassment be proven to have been unwelcome. The authors succinctly observe that “eliminating the unwelcomeness requirement [] undermines our justice system’s commitment to innocence until proven guilty.” They further note the outdated, underlying views, whereby frail, wilting violet females shy from any references to the body, a curiously Victorian picture that obviously is inconsistent with women’s relatively greater assertiveness and awareness today. The writers conclude:

Feminist-inspired sexual harassment law is fundamentally flawed. It relies on an outdated vision of women as victims of their social condition, trumpets subjective experience as the only standard of truth, and falsely equates harassment with violence.

Even more ridiculous and despicable are attempts, for which feminists are again responsible, to extend sexual harassment law to cover children. Sexual harassment should, the authors suggest, perhaps be treated as a tort rather than under the current, distorted approach whereby it is considered a form of sex-based discrimination under Title VII.

Furchtgott-Roth and Stolba also do not agree with feminist efforts to institute workplace benefits applicable only to or primarily to women. As they wryly observe, “Women are treating themselves as another type of disabled worker by asking employers to accommodate their special circumstances. Yet disabled workers have real handicaps; women do not.”

Ironically, mandatory benefits targeted at women reduce employers’ willingness to employ women. This is one of the great paradoxes of many mandatory benefits targeted at women: the programs may benefit some women, but only at great cost to others and to the economy at large.

The authors point out that despite feminists’ frequent reference to higher benefits available in certain European countries, American unemployment rates are typically much lower, especially for women (!). Moreover, the United States continues to be the most popular destination for immigrants, even those coming from nations that have nominally more generous benefits.

The authors usefully, if depressingly, review the catastrophic damage to university sports wreaked by misguided, brutally selfish feminist invocation of Title IX. As one example of a significant biological difference between men and women that I don’t recall previously reading, “women are five times more likely to suffer serious knee injuries, particularly injuries to the anterior cruciate ligament, than men. . . .” Title IX has indeed become “a tool for achieving a form of athletic socialism.”

As the authors see it, some commonalities underlie these different issues:

Success has bred a new dilemma for modern feminists, for acknowledging women’s progress would require a radical redefinition of their movement. Instead of reorienting themselves, they have chosen to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by continuing to claim that women are victims.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth and Christine Stolba conclude by noting, in a representative combination of pithiness and common sense, “In today’s environment of equal opportunity for women, gender is just as meaningless as height in determining whether a person should get special preference for a job.”

The Feminist Dilemma is a highly deserving and richly rewarding book.