What Women Don't Want

Yesterday wasn’t a good day for feminism. Specifically it wasn’t a good day for those feminists who believe that institutional sexism is the root cause for the disproportionately large number of men in positions of corporate power.

Feminism is selling a narrative. The narrative says that men and women will not be equal until there are an equal number of men and women in all professions and at all levels of professional achievement. It also says that men and women will not be equal until they change an equal number of diapers and spend an equal amount of time with sick children.

Put this way, it sounds like idiocy. That’s because it is.

And yet, since the feminist narrative says it, and since great thinkers like Lena Dunham believe it, many women have signed on. Given today’s culture, they do not really have a choice.

Feminists leave only important element out of the equation: women. That is, women’s wishes, women’s aspirations, women’s preferences. The dark and hidden truth about feminism is that it does not really care about what women want or about how they want to lead their lives. Feminism cares about propagating feminist ideology.

The new study comes from the highly reputable Harvard Business School. It was conducted by faculty members of the school. It says that one principle reason why women are underrepresented in leadership positions because they do not want to hold these jobs. Astonishing that we should need a study to ask what women want.

Bloomberg reports on the study:

Women are underrepresented in leadership positions for plenty of reasons: They’re stereotyped as being less competent than men, they aren’t as aggressive, and there’s a perception that they can’t lead and raise a family at the same time. Now, research from Harvard Business School adds yet another reason to the list: Women aren’t in leadership positions because they just don’t want the jobs as much as men do.

The paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(PNAS), incorporates nine studies conducted on various high-achieving groups. Combined, the research indicates that women value power less than men, and the studies try to explain the phenomenon.

Bloomberg adds that women have other priorities. They do not define themselves by their power and their place on a status hierarchy. They think this way even after four decades of relentless feminist indoctrination.

Bloomberg continues:

Another one of the studies helps explain that finding, by suggesting women have more negative associations with power than men do. “Women expect more stress, burden, conflicts, and difficult trade-offs to accompany high-level positions,” said Alison Wood Brooks, a co-author of the paper and an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard.

The women surveyed not only listed more goals, but a smaller proportion of those goals were related to achieving power.

In other words, women feel more inclined to have it all than men, who listed fewer personal goals, and that means making compromises somewhere.

The bottom line: women understand the sacrifices that they would have to make in order to have it all. They choose not to make them. Women have multiple goals. Men are more single minded. In Isaiah Berlin's analysis, women are like foxes and men are like hedgehogs.

Strangely enough, we find ourselves needing to defend women’s rights to choose, even and especially when their choices do not fulfill the terms of the feminist narrative.