We're in a serious economic recession. Negative economic growth, car companies gushing red ink, home values plummeting, jobs evaporating all signal grim times ahead, and most agree it's going to get worse. So it must be time for feminists to make up facts about the downturn affecting women more than men, for the purpose of directing government largesse their way.
And sure enough, that's what Women's Enews does in this online piece (Women's Enews, 1/14/09). Judy Patrick and Surina Khan let us in on the little known fact that, "in the current economic recession, women are losing jobs at a faster pace than men." (I use the term "little known fact" to refer to the old "Peanuts" character Lucy who once confided that certain obviously false "facts" she was telling her little brother were "little known because I make 'em up." And so it is here.)
Inexplicably, they follow that claim with this admission,
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the jobless rate among women is 5.9 percent; however, the overall unemployment rate is 7.2 percent.
So how is it that women's unemployment is rising faster than men's? They don't explain, and I guess that's what passes for intellectual honesty these days.
But what's not honest is to cite the BLS unemployment statistics and neglect to say that that same data show that from November 1, 2007 through October 31, 2008, men in the United States lost almost 1.1 million jobs while women gained 12,000 jobs. Read about it here (The Boston Globe, 12/05/08). And that was before the economy coughed up 500,000 more jobs in each of November, December and January. Women losing jobs faster than men? Don't believe it for a second.
I've written about this before when feminists Randy Albelda and Katha Pollitt tried a similar ruse back in December. (See, "The Sexist Downturn") The ruse didn't work then and it doesn't work now.
After all, this is not hard to figure out even if you've never heard of the BLS. What led the economic downturn? The housing market; new construction fell off a cliff about a year ago and it's still falling. Who builds houses, men or women? Over 90% of construction workers are male. See? You don't have to be an economist to at least have a clue about which sex is taking the hit in these bad old times.
Patrick and Khan's intellectual dishonesty doesn't stop there, though. They recycle the long-debunked notion that workplace discrimination results in the 23-24% pay gap between men and women. Admittedly they do use some weasel words to hide what they're doing. They say women earn less than men for doing the same job. That could be true in some cases where the woman has fewer qualifications, less seniority, etc. but still holds the same job at lower pay as a better-qualified man.
But are they really claiming that that's what explains the pay gap? They don't say exactly, but that's the strong suggestion. Even former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich admits here that sex discrimination explains at most a small sliver of the pay gap (The New York Times, 5/1/08). But why would Patrick and Khan pay attention to the likes of him when they so casually ignore BLS statistics?
Meanwhile over at the feminist blog Feministing, we have this gem. The writer describes as the "kind of article that I like to see" a piece in the New York Times saying that the economic downturn may be so bad for men that women may actually surpass them in the labor force. She goes on to call that phenomenon "the light...in darkness."
For these feminists and some others I could name, economic devastation is a great opportunity to make good at the expense of men. And if all it takes is a little intellectual dishonesty to promote their righteous cause, well, that's nothing new.
I want men and women to have equal opportunities in the workplace. That means, among other things, that when one sex bears the vast majority of job losses, we stop making up facts and direct our resources at that sex and those jobs. That's called fairness and rationality. It's something Patrick, Khan, Albelda and Pollitt are having none of.
It is beyond disgraceful to see these people using economic catastrophe and disinformation to try to divert tax money away from men who are losing jobs at a record pace, toward women who aren't.
At long last, have they no shame?
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