Tag Archives: Equality

Commentary

Carrie Lukas does the math on the male-female pay gap

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Carrie Lukas
Carrie Lukas

A popular article by Carrie Lukas, writing in the Wall Street Journal. (H/T Mary)

Excerpt:

The unemployment rate is consistently higher among men than among women. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 9.3% of men over the age of 16 are currently out of work. The figure for women is 8.3%. Unemployment fell for both sexes over the past year, but labor force participation (the percentage of working age people employed) also dropped. The participation rate fell more among men (to 70.4% today from 71.4% in March 2010) than women (to 58.3% from 58.8%). That means much of the improvement in unemployment numbers comes from discouraged workers—particularly male ones—giving up their job searches entirely.

Men have been hit harder by this recession because they tend to work in fields like construction, manufacturing and trucking, which are disproportionately affected by bad economic conditions. Women cluster in more insulated occupations, such as teaching, health care and service industries.

[…]The Department of Labor’s Time Use survey shows that full-time working women spend an average of 8.01 hours per day on the job, compared to 8.75 hours for full-time working men. One would expect that someone who works 9% more would also earn more. This one fact alone accounts for more than a third of the wage gap.

Choice of occupation also plays an important role in earnings. While feminists suggest that women are coerced into lower-paying job sectors, most women know that something else is often at work. Women gravitate toward jobs with fewer risks, more comfortable conditions, regular hours, more personal fulfillment and greater flexibility. Simply put, many women—not all, but enough to have a big impact on the statistics—are willing to trade higher pay for other desirable job characteristics.

Men, by contrast, often take on jobs that involve physical labor, outdoor work, overnight shifts and dangerous conditions (which is also why men suffer the overwhelming majority of injuries and deaths at the workplace). They put up with these unpleasant factors so that they can earn more.

Recent studies have shown that the wage gap shrinks—or even reverses—when relevant factors are taken into account and comparisons are made between men and women in similar circumstances. In a 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30, the research firm Reach Advisors found that women earned an average of 8% more than their male counterparts. Given that women are outpacing men in educational attainment, and that our economy is increasingly geared toward knowledge-based jobs, it makes sense that women’s earnings are going up compared to men’s.

My favorite book on feminism, economics and marriage is Carrie Lukas’ “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex and Feminism“. If you don’t have the book, then please go out and buy one for you, and one for a young, unmarried woman in your life. Books like this one are for women who are serious about making their marriages last. And men can read them, too – so that we’ll know what to look for in women. There is nothing more attractive to a marriage-minded man than a fiscally conservative woman.

Here’s an interview of Carrie Lukas conducted by famous men’s rights activist Bernard Chapin. The next time you see men reading the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, take a closer look. On the inside of that magazine we are often concealing a copy of Carrie Lukas’ book. When Carrie Lukas talks about economics and policy, men think about marriage.

News

Public school bans home-made packed lunches

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This story is from the Chicago Tribune. (H/T ECM, The Way the Ball Bounces)

Excerpt:

Fernando Dominguez cut the figure of a young revolutionary leader during a recent lunch period at his elementary school.

“Who thinks the lunch is not good enough?” the seventh-grader shouted to his lunch mates in Spanish and English.

Dozens of hands flew in the air and fellow students shouted along: “We should bring our own lunch! We should bring our own lunch! We should bring our own lunch!”

Fernando waved his hand over the crowd and asked a visiting reporter: “Do you see the situation?”

At his public school, Little Village Academy on Chicago’s West Side, students are not allowed to pack lunches from home. Unless they have a medical excuse, they must eat the food served in the cafeteria.

[…]Any school that bans homemade lunches also puts more money in the pockets of the district’s food provider, Chartwells-Thompson. The federal government pays the district for each free or reduced-price lunch taken, and the caterer receives a set fee from the district per lunch.

[…]At Little Village, most students must take the meals served in the cafeteria or go hungry or both. During a recent visit to the school, dozens of students took the lunch but threw most of it in the garbage uneaten. Though CPS has improved the nutritional quality of its meals this year, it also has seen a drop-off in meal participation among students, many of whom say the food tastes bad.

“Some of the kids don’t like the food they give at our school for lunch or breakfast,” said Little Village parent Erica Martinez. “So it would be a good idea if they could bring their lunch so they could at least eat something.”

One thing you have to understand about the secular left. They don’t like the idea that people are different. They want everyone to be “equal”. They want everyone to drive the same kind of car, live in the same kind of house, and especially to be forced to attend the same public schools. They don’t want anyone to be better or worse at anything, no matter how hard they try. Forcing all the children to have the same food for breakfast and lunch is their way of making all the children equal. If you’ve seen the movie “The Incredibles”, the secular left are like the annoying cry-babies who sue the super heroes for being super until the super heroes go underground. Progressives think that should be no freedom to be different, because that might make someone else feel bad.

Having the school provide generic meals also a way of marginalizing fathers, I think. One of the things that fathers really like, I am told, is feeding their children. Dads get a big kick out of buying things for their family to eat. By taking over the father’s role as provider, the school is making fathers unnecessary. When fathers don’t have a special role in the home, they tune out of the family. When fathers are forced to share their responsibilities with the state, it diminishes their prestige and authority in the home. When government takes over the role of men, the men who were good at those roles are no longer sought after. And all the money they make by working hard is just gobbled up by the government and redistributed – which makes them less able to to marry and raise their own families.

Liberty and Equality

To read a really excellent explanation of what I’ve tried to explain clumsily above, read my previous post on liberty (equality of OPPORTUNITY) and equality (equality of OUTCOMES). I reference a couple of articles by Jewish thinker Dennis Prager. He really explains it well. You can have liberty, or you can have equality, but you can’t have both. So long as there is freedom, people will do different things. What the secular left wants is to destroy liberty, so that everyone will be the same.

By the way, The Way the Ball Bounces is a great blog. You should bookmark it.

Commentary

Why the media can’t tell the truth about why Lara Logan was attacked

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This is currently the top post on National Review.

Excerpt:

As Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer has detailed, al-Azhar University endorses a sharia manual called Umdat al-Salik. It is quite clear on the subject of women who become captives of Muslim forces: “When a child or a woman is taken captive, they become slaves by the fact of capture, and the woman’s previous marriage is immediately annulled.” This is so the woman can then be made a concubine of her captor.

This arrangement is encouraged by the Koran. Sura 4:23–24, for example, forbids Muslim men from consorting with the wives of other Muslims but declares sexual open season on any women these men have enslaved. (“Forbidden to you are . . . married women, except those whom you own as slaves.”) Moreover, Mohammed — whose life Muslims are exhorted by scripture to emulate — rewarded his fighters by distributing as slaves the women of the Jewish Qurazyzah tribe after Muslim forces had beheaded their husbands, fathers, and sons. The prophet himself also took one of the captured women, Rayhanna, as his concubine. And, as Spencer further notes, Mohammed directed his jihadists that they should not practice coitus interruptus with their slaves — they were encouraged to ravish them, but only in a manner that might produce Muslim offspring.

As I documented in an earlier column, Sheikh Qaradawi contends that women bring sexual abuse on themselves if they fail to conform to Islamist conventions of modest dress. Shahid Mehdi, a top Islamic cleric in Denmark, has explained that women who fail to don a headscarf are asking to be raped, an admonition echoed by Sheikh Faiz Mohammed, a prominent Lebanese cleric, during a lecture he delivered in Australia.

In light of these exhortations, should it be any surprise that the sexual abuse of women is Islam’s silent scandal? In Europe’s expanding Muslim enclaves, it is a terror tactic to extort women — Muslim and non-Muslim — into adopting the hijab and other Islamic sartorial standards. Rape has become so prevalent, and so identifiably a Muslim scourge, that embarrassed and hyper–politically correct Swedish authorities have discouraged police in cities such as heavily Muslim Malmo from collecting data that point to Islam as the common denominator in rape reports.

This week, muslims were also implicated in terrorist attacks in the United States and in supporting polygamy in Canada.