The 50/50 Rule

Equal Pay Day has come and gone. Now that we know that Sen. Elizabeth Warren pays her female staffers far less than she pays her male staffers, we can all move on to the next outrage.

Some feminists, appalled about the 8% differential between male and female pay, have trotted out yet another mindless idea: true equality will only be achieved when it’s half-and-half, 50/50 at all levels of the corporate hierarchy. These great thinkers should have added that this would require that all housework and childrearing also be split 50/50.

Heather Wilhelm has the story:

For true empowerment to exist, women must be literally equal to men, in everything, all the time. In a new profile in New York magazine, New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand, described as “a bit of a gender essentialist,” insists that Congress should ideally be split 50/50 along gender lines. Sandberg, meanwhile, feels similarly: “We know how important achieving equality is for all of us. A world where women ran half of our companies and countries and men ran half of our homes would be a better world.”

Ah, yes. Kirsten Gillibrand, a waste of a senate seat. Name me one thing that KG has accomplished in the senate… except perhaps complaining that we did not have enough trangender soldiers.

The problem with the calculation, a problem that arises when you care more about ideas than about people, is simply that most women do not want to become like Sheryl Sandberg. They simply do not want her life. Do they have a choice? According to feminism, they do not.

Feminism does not allow women to choose their own life path or plan. They are free to choose abortion, but on other important life decisions they ought not to be free to choose.

Wilhelm continues, speaking for her own choices:

… I don’t want to run a company or a country. It sounds exhausting! Nor do I want to become a highly paid senior director of engineering, no matter how many times prominent feminists tell me I should. Many women — especially those with children, or who want to have children — feel the same way.

Of course, no law says that women have to live their lives the way that feminists dictate. And yet, the hectoring, the shaming, the pubic derision has produced a generation of women who dare not marry and have children when young and who dare not have modest career ambitions. The result: manufactured misery.

Wilhelm concludes:

And yet, strangely, many of today’s leading feminists seem quite fond of hectoring women into taking high-paying, high-pressure jobs whether they want to or not, promoting a weird vision of a corporate corner suite as heaven on earth. Studies have shown women’s happiness levels plummeting since the 1970s, the last time they were measured to be higher than those of men. Could it be because we’re getting a lot of really dodgy life advice?

Yes, it could.