The Telegraph, home of the UK’s populist crowd, just published a feature that should end all debates: feminism is over. Equality has been achieved. We can pack the protest signs and go home.
Written by Cristina Odone, self described journalist, novelist and broadcaster specializing in the relationship between society, families and faith. Also a Research Fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies (and this is an important point I’ll get back to in a moment), she is a former editor of the Catholic Herald and deputy editor of the New Statesman. Her latest novel, The Good Divorce Guide, is published by Harper Collins.
So, Odone writes (no, you didn’t wake up, once again, in the 19th century, this was written yesterday):
Lock up your daughters, here come the feminists! Or rather, the so-called feminists. Because what is “feminist” about teaching generations of women that men are the enemy, all-powerful, oppressive and malevolent? What is feminist about the message that women are victims, passive and powerless?
Absolutely nothing. And finally, after 50 years of this wrong-headed orthodoxy being dressed up as liberating and empowering, a report exposes it as nothing but a big fat myth. Published today, international research by LSE economist Catherine Hakim shows that, far from hating men, women see them as allies in building a family, and want to rely on them as the main breadwinners. Far from being barred from the top jobs by an oppressive patriarchy, women are choosing lower-rung jobs in order to have more time to bring up children and care for elderly parents.
Women are not passive victims of an all-male professional structure designed to catch them out and keep them down. Women are free agents who – surprise, surprise – choose the way their work to suit their lifestyle. I found this out last year when I did some research into working women in Britain. Hakim’s study shows that the same is true across the world. Her research includes countries as different as Britain, Sweden, and Spain, that women around the world prioritize family above career, husbands above autonomy. It must come as a horrible shock to the “feminists” who preached that only a fat salary can fulfill you and only a big title can make you happy.
More importantly, it will come as a big shock to the Coalition government that has adopted, automatically, the last government’s campaign to promote gender equality. Hakim’s research shows that the Harriet Harman-type policies are founded on those man-hating, victim-mongering myths we can now discard.
So, I downloaded this study she mentions (PDF at the link) and lo and behold, who funded it? No less than the Centre for Policy Studies where Odone is a Fellow!
Some of the key findings of this “study”, Feminist Myths and Magic Medicine:
- Equal opportunity policies, in regards to women’s access to the labour market in the UK, have been successful.
- Despite this, many politicians and feminists appear disappointed with the slow pace of change in women’s attainment of top jobs. Sex differences are treated as self- evident proof of widespread sex discrimination and sex-role stereotyping rather than the result of personal choices and preferences.
- Similarly, a study of nine OECD countries (ED: OECD stands for Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) has shown that the link between occupational segregation and the pay gap is coincidental, not causal. We now know why: higher levels of female employment produce higher levels of occupational segregation (as more unskilled women join the labour force) and thus a larger pay gap.
- Sex differentials in the professions are due primarily to substantively different work orientations and career choices among men and women.
- Modern and egalitarian societies do not necessarily score better on these popular indicators of gender equality. The country with the lowest level of occupational segregation in the world is China. The lowest pay gap in the world is in Swaziland, followed closely by Sri Lanka. Despite all its family friendly and equal opportunity policies, Sweden (and the other Nordic countries) does not have a better record than Anglo-Saxon countries in terms of eliminating sex differences in the labour market.
And then this:
Women’s aspiration to marry up, if they can, to a man who is better-educated and higher-earning, persists in most European countries. The Nordic countries share this pattern with all other parts of Europe. Women thereby continue to use marriage as an alternative or supplement to their employment careers. Financial dependence on a man has lost none of its attractions after the equal opportunities revolution.
Not a word on any of the following: how gendered toys since childhood actually shape those preferences; how media reinforces these roles (from cartoons and children’s TV shows to Princess movies, films for teens, magazines, etc); how the educational system that subtly leads girls and boys into different paths is also responsible for these apparent choices, etc, etc.
Not a word about any of the above. Because now we know that all social and economical trends happen in a vacuum.
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