One problem with feminism is that it produces the very outcomes that feminists then turn around and complain about. For example, consider the women’s studies major that is favored by feminists. Does it produce a good financial return on investment?
Here is an article from the Daily Signal to answer that.
Excerpt:
While only 23 percent of American women identify as feminists, 47 percent of millennial women do.
But unfortunately, the policies supported by modern feminists have been particularly bad for young women.
[…]Today, millennial women struggle with significant student loan debt and often have a hard time finding a job that will get them out of mom and dad’s basement. About 42 percent of women have more than $30,000 in student loan debt, compared than just 27 percent of men.
This could be a function of more women pursuing higher levels of learning. But significant student loan defaults among this group indicate that women may not be getting the return on investment they had hoped for.
Women are vastly overrepresented in majors that are known to have low returns on investment, such as gender studies or social work. Yet the feminist movement encourages more young women to pursue these degrees.
Their solution is to advocate further government assistance through policies such as free public college, loan forgiveness, and income-based repayment policies that drag out the life of a loan while doing nothing to put pressure on colleges to keep prices in check.
Hmm. Perhaps instead of taxing working men to pay for the poor academic decisions of women, we can shame and blame women who prefer useless degrees in women’s studies to useful degrees in computer science?
Look at the numbers reported by USA Today:
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of women’s and gender studies degrees in the United States has increased by more than 300% since 1990, and in 2015, there were more than 2,000 degrees conferred.
These days, women’s studies programs include gender and sexuality studies, and many of the programs explore and question the relationship of race, class, sexuality, ethnicity and more to encourage students to investigate in the broader field of gender.
THREE HUNDRED PERCENT. It would never occur to me – as a child of poor non-white immigrants – that I could spend tens of thousands of dollars, and even go into debt, for a degree that would not pay for itself. Whether I liked computer science or not, that’s what I had to study – or something like that.
What about the idea that women are paid less than men for the same work, because of discrimination?
Liberal feminist Hanna Rosin takes a look at this question in the far-left Slate, of all places.
Excerpt:
The official Bureau of Labor Department statistics show that the median earnings of full-time female workers is 77 percent of the median earnings of full-time male workers. But that is very different than “77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men.” The latter gives the impression that a man and a woman standing next to each other doing the same job for the same number of hours get paid different salaries. That’s not at all the case. “Full time” officially means 35 hours, but men work more hours than women. That’s the first problem: We could be comparing men working 40 hours to women working 35.
How to get a more accurate measure? First, instead of comparing annual wages, start by comparing average weekly wages. This is considered a slightly more accurate measure because it eliminates variables like time off during the year or annual bonuses (and yes, men get higher bonuses, but let’s shelve that for a moment in our quest for a pure wage gap number). By this measure, women earn 81 percent of what men earn, although it varies widely by race. African-American women, for example, earn 94 percent of what African-American men earn in a typical week. Then, when you restrict the comparison to men and women working 40 hours a week, the gap narrows to 87 percent.
But we’re still not close to measuring women “doing the same work as men.” For that, we’d have to adjust for many other factors that go into determining salary. Economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn did that in a recent paper, “The Gender Pay Gap.”.”They first accounted for education and experience. That didn’t shift the gap very much, because women generally have at least as much and usually more education than men, and since the 1980s they have been gaining the experience. The fact that men are more likely to be in unions and have their salaries protected accounts for about 4 percent of the gap. The big differences are in occupation and industry. Women congregate in different professions than men do, and the largely male professions tend to be higher-paying. If you account for those differences, and then compare a woman and a man doing the same job, the pay gap narrows to 91 percent. So, you could accurately say in that Obama ad that, “women get paid 91 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men.”
I believe that the remainder of the gap can be accounted for by looking at other voluntary factors that differentiate men and women.
The Heritage Foundation says that a recent study puts the number at 95 cents per dollar.
Excerpt:
Women are more likely than men to work in industries with more flexible schedules. Women are also more likely to spend time outside the labor force to care for children. These choices have benefits, but they also reduce pay—for both men and women. When economists control for such factors, they find the gender gap largely disappears.
A 2009 study commissioned by the Department of Labor found that after controlling for occupation, experience, and other choices, women earn 95 percent as much as men do. In 2005, June O’Neil, the former director of the Congressional Budget Office, found that “There is no gender gap in wages among men and women with similar family roles.” Different choices—not discrimination—account for different employment and wage outcomes.
If women choose to study women’s studies, why should they be surprised that they are paid less than men who study computer science? I wish the people who teach women’s studies understood what it means to create something for a customer that they are willing to pay for. Then maybe they could tell women how to get paid more. People who learn hard things, create value for customers, and work longer hours make more money. Teaching young women useless prejudices against men does not help them to make more money.
