Tag Archives: Man-cession

Commentary

How feminist groups skewed the Obama stimulus towards women’s jobs

29 Comments
Christina Hoff Sommers

This Weekly Standard article is by Christina Hoff Sommers, an equity feminist who doesn’t much care for third-wave (gender) feminists. (H/T Ari)

Excerpt:

A “man-cession.” That’s what some economists are starting to call it. Of the 5.7 million jobs Americans lost between December 2007 and May 2009, nearly 80 percent had been held by men. Mark Perry, an economist at the University of Michigan, characterizes the recession as a “downturn” for women but a “catastrophe” for men.

Men are bearing the brunt of the current economic crisis because they predominate in manufacturing and construction, the hardest-hit sectors, which have lost more than 3 million jobs since December 2007. Women, by contrast, are a majority in recession-resistant fields such as education and health care, which gained 588,000 jobs during the same period. Rescuing hundreds of thousands of unemployed crane operators, welders, production line managers, and machine setters was never going to be easy. But the concerted opposition of several powerful women’s groups has made it all but impossible. Consider what just happened with the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Last November, President-elect Obama addressed the devastation in the construction and manufacturing industries by proposing an ambitious New Deal-like program to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure. He called for a two-year “shovel ready” stimulus program to modernize roads, bridges, schools, electrical grids, public transportation, and dams and made reinvigorating the hardest-hit sectors of the economy the goal of the legislation that would become the recovery act.

Women’s groups were appalled. Grids? Dams? Opinion pieces immediately appeared in major newspapers with titles like “Where are the New Jobs for Women?” and “The Macho Stimulus Plan.” A group of “notable feminist economists” circulated a petition that quickly garnered more than 600 signatures, calling on the president-elect to add projects in health, child care, education, and social services and to “institute apprenticeships” to train women for “at least one third” of the infrastructure jobs. At the same time, more than 1,000 feminist historians signed an open letter urging Obama not to favor a “heavily male-dominated field” like construction: “We need to rebuild not only concrete and steel bridges but also human bridges.” As soon as these groups became aware of each other, they formed an anti-stimulus plan action group called WEAVE — Women’s Equality Adds Value to the Economy.

The National Organization for Women (NOW), the Feminist Majority, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, and the National Women’s Law Center soon joined the battle against the supposedly sexist bailout of men’s jobs. At the suggestion of a staffer to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, NOW president Kim Gandy canvassed for a female equivalent of the “testosterone-laden ‘shovel-ready’ ” terminology. (“Apron-ready” was broached but rejected.) Christina Romer, the highly regarded economist President Obama chose to chair his Council of Economic Advisers, would later say of her entrance on the political stage, “The very first email I got . . . was from a women’s group saying ‘We don’t want this stimulus package to just create jobs for burly men.’ ”

[…]Our incoming president did what many sensible men do when confronted by a chorus of female complaint: He changed his plan. He added health, education, and other human infrastructure components to the proposal. And he tasked Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein, Joseph Biden’s chief economist, with preparing an extraordinary report that calculated not only the number of jobs the plan would likely create, but the gender composition of the various employment sectors and the division of largess between women and men.

Romer and Bernstein delivered “The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan” on January 10. They estimated that “the total number of created jobs likely to go to women is roughly 42 percent.” Lest anyone miss the point, they added that since women had held only 20 percent of the jobs lost in the recession, the stimulus package now “skews job creation somewhat towards women.”

Read the whole thing.

And ask yourself – how do men feel when women don’t want them to have their traditional roles? How do MEN feel about it, not how do women feel. And what will men do when they cannot find jobs? Will they marry? Will they have children? There seems to be an outcry about global warming and recycling these days amongst women. Where is the outcry about men being discriminated against by schools dominated by female teachers? Where is the outcry among women when the number of incoming female college students is 60%? Or when the vast majority of jobs lost in the recession are lost by men?

Or do women prefer to not know the causes of the decline of men, and just to blame men without understanding the way the world really is, and the forces in play? I don’t think that men are very happy to be blamed for a situation orchestrated by feminists. And when men aren’t happy, men don’t engage. They don’t do what women expect. They retreat. They withdraw. Women cannot just act selfishly all their lives and expect men and children to just continue to please them as if they were robots – men and children are people, too.

News

It turns out there is a gender pay gap – and men are the victims

2 Comments

Well, first of all, it’s important to note for those who didn’t know that salary differences are purely the result of individual lifestyle choices, not the result of sexist discrimination. Who says? The US Labor Department, that’s who.

Here are the details.

Excerpt:

Economists who have studied the pay gap have observed that numerous factors other than discrimination contribute to the wage gap, such as hours worked, experience, and education. For example, Professor June O’Neil has written extensively about how time out of the workforce, or years spent working part-time, can reduce future pay. Likewise, economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth, in her book Women’s Figures, has written about the decisions that women are more likely to make to choose flexibility, a friendly workplace environment, and other nonmonetary factors as compared to men.

Recognizing the importance of unbiased research on the pay gap, the Labor Department recently contracted with CONSAD Research Corporation for a review of more than 50 existing studies as well as a new economic and statistical analysis of the pay gap. CONSAD’s Report, which was finalized on January 12, 2009, found that the vast majority of the pay gap is due to several identifiable factors and that the remainder may be due to other specific factors they were not able to measure.

CONSAD found that controlling for career interruption and other factors reduced the pay gap from about 20 percent to about 5 percent. Data limitations prevented it from considering many other factors. For example, the data did not permit an examination of total compensation, which would examine health insurance and other benefits, and instead focused solely on wages paid. The data were also limited with respect to work experience, job tenure, and other factors.

The Labor Department’s conclusion was that the gender pay gap was the result of a multitude of factors and that the “raw wage gap should not be used as the basis for [legislative] correction. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of individual choices being made by both male and female workers.”

It turns out that the pay gap, which was always entirely due to lifestyle choices, is now working against men. After Jennifer Roback Morse, one of the women I like the most is Carrie Lukas, author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex and Feminism”. Here she is writing in National Review, explaining the latest research on the pay gap.

She cites the radically left-wing Time magazine:

…according to a new analysis of 2,000 communities by a market research company, in 147 out of 150 of the biggest cities in the U.S., the median full-time salaries of young women are 8% higher than those of the guys in their peer group. In two cities, Atlanta and Memphis, those women are making about 20% more. This squares with earlier research from Queens College, New York, that had suggested that this was happening in major metropolises. But the new study suggests that the gap is bigger than previously thought, with young women in New York City, Los Angeles and San Diego making 17%, 12% and 15% more than their male peers, respectively. And it also holds true even in reasonably small areas like the Raleigh-Durham region and Charlotte in North Carolina (both 14% more), and Jacksonville, Fla. (6%).

And then Carrie says:

As this new research shows, it’s women’s (and men’s) attributes and career choices that determine earnings. Yet there’s something troubling about Time‘s tone, which suggests that we should all be celebrating the idea of women dominating the workplace. To the extent that this trend is driven by men losing jobs and remaining out of work, and young men failing to attain the skills needed to meaningfully contribute to the economy, this is not good news at all.

Of course, we all want women to have the opportunity to compete and succeed in whatever profession they choose. But we want the same to be true for men. Furthermore, given that some women still wish to stay home or reduce their workload in order to spend time raising children, women’s higher earnings may actually be a symptom of hardship: More women are having to work more since the men in their lives can’t provide for the family alone or because they are providing for themselves.

You can read more about this whole story on Hot Air. Remember that in the traditional family, men get their authority to lead because of their role as primary earner. When they are not the primary earner, or when they are swapped entirely for a government check, then children have to grow up without that moral and spiritual leadership. Men are all about the moral standards, and women are all about forgiveness and compassion. Both are needed.