Larry Elder recently wrote an article, Feminization Mania wondering whether the main obstacle preventing women from reaching the highest levels of power in business or government in large numbers is due to sexual discrimination or rather by the choices women make.

He notes that Madeline Albright believes there will be a woman president soon, but given the pattern in business, Elder is more skeptical.

According to a study by Korn Ferry, the international executive recruiting firm, only 14 percent of women in corporations aspire to the position of CEO. Contrast that with nearly half of the men. If given sufficient financial resources, many women choose stay-at-home mothering over working outside the home.

Of course there will be plenty of women (14 percent at least) who want to be the CEO, so I’d imagine we’re likely to see far more female CEOs and politicians — it is the general distribution from middle management on up where we’re never likely to see the neat 50/50 division feminists would like, largely because of the work decisions that women tend to make (such as taking time off to have a child).

Nobody lays bare the idiocy of radical feminism than Wendy McElroy, and in her latest article, VAWA2: Gender Apartheid, she goes after the Violence Against Women Act which is about to expire, and is the subject of a good deal of debate among its supporters and critics.

McElroy reminds readers that the original VAWA contained a measure, since ruled unconstitutional, that attempted to cement the feminist notion of “gender apartheid” into the law. As McElroy writes, the case involved a woman who in 1995 alleged that she was raped in her dormitory room at Virginia Polytechnic Institute,

The accused men had been cleared by both a university judicial committee and a criminal grand jury. Although the evidence could not sustain a criminal charge, Brzonkala [the alleged victim] used the VAWA to bring a civil case against them in federal court. The advantages to feminists of using a civil court ot punish an alleged criminal wrong were clear: civil courts require only a preponderance of evidence (51%) rather than “beyond a reasonable doubt” (99%) to “convict.” Moreover, the standards and procedures are far looser in a civil proceeding. In short, the evidence required to ruin a man’s life was watered down to meet feminist requirements.

A very strong, but accurate, characterization of the VAWA. The underlying principle behind the VAWA, and the reason it should be rejected, is the elevating of crimes of violence to special categories, if and only if they are committed for reasons of gender. This odd, primarily because it ignores the fact that pretty much all crimes involve some discriminatory intent. It should not be surprising that male rapists choose women as targets for violent acts, for example, anymore than it is surprising that armed robbers choose banks and commercial enterprises as targets for their larceny.

The real discriminatory intent in all of this is the VAWA which funds enormous sums of money to fight violence against women even though, as McElroy points out, the level of real violence against women has been declining since the early 1990s and regardless of which year is chosen as a baseline, men, not women, are the overwhelming victims of violence (yet when was the last time you heard of a program designed to help men avoid, deal with or ameliorate the results of violent crime?)

Source:

VAWA2: Gender Apartheid. Wendy McElroy, LewRockwell.Com, October 9, 2000.

In its latest session the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear quite a few cases that center around Fourth Amendment issues. One of those cases, Ferguson v. City of Charleston, centers around a controversial program at a public hospital in South Carolina that tested pregnant women for the presence of cocaine in their bodies. If the women tested positive, they and the results were turned over to police after giving birth.

Is this reasonable? Justice Antonin Scalia, in questioning at the Court today, provided the basic defense of the testing — if a person shows up at a hospital with a gunshot or stab wound, laws in most state require doctors to notify local police. Unfortunately for Scalia, and hopefully the law, the two situations are no analogous.

In the gunshot case, the information the doctor has is a direct result of his duties to take care of the patient. When it comes to pregnancy, however, a) women are not routinely given tests for narcotic substances, and b) even in the South Carolina hospital the doctors drug tested only those women they suspected of using cocaine. This is not information that arises in the normal process of treating a patient, where the expectation of privacy for information related to a possible crime might be diminished, but rather a public hospital actively seeking to collect evidence.

To make the gun shot example analogous, not only would doctors notify the police but they’d also run a series of drug tests on the victims to see if he’d been committing other crimes.

Aside from the Fourth Amendment, it’s scary to think that doctors are running around performing tests that are medically unnecessary in order to squeal to the state. As more than one critic of the law has noted, far from helping infants of cocaine using mothers, the most likely result of the law is to keep women from seeking prenatal care and other medical attention, and possibly even to avoiding giving birth in a hospital (home birth is a great option for many people, but probably not a great idea for a drug addict).

Sources:

Drug tests on pregnant women unconstitutional, lawyers argue. CNN, October 4, 2000.

Supreme Court to decide on women’s medical privacy. Laurie Asseo, The Associated Press, October 4, 2000.

Policing pregnancy. Rachel Roth, The Nation, October 16, 2000.

The recent FDA approval of the abortion inducing RU-486 became a hot political issue this week as Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush tried to dodge statements he made back in January that if he were president he would have serious reservations about the FDA approving the drug, while several politicians chimed in to say they would do all in their power to reverse the FDA’s decision.

Reform Party presidential candidate Pat Buchanan reaching deep into his rhetorical bag referred to RU-486 as “a human pesticide,” adding that if he should be elected, “I would use all the power of my office, including appointments at the FDA, to prevent its being put on the market.”

Unlike Buchanan, who has no real chance of winning in November, Sen. Tim Hutchinson, R-Arkansas, does hold elective office. Hutchinson told ABC’s “This Week” that there “a lot of questions” about whether or not the drug is safe and hinted that Congress might try to put additional restrictions on the drug. Rep. Tom Coburn, R-Okalhoma, said he would introduce legislation that would do just that. Given all of the burdensome restrictions that are already placed on the drug’s use, it’s hard to know what else they want to do.

For a variety of reasons, the Republican position on abortion is not the dominant view of the American people (neither is the pro-choice view, however — most Americans seem to be somewhere in between, wanting abortion to remain legal, but sometimes approving of limited restrictions on its use). Using backdoors like this to try to get their way is a bit unseemly.

On the other hand, if they succeed they’re just beating the feminists at their own game. After all there are any number of feminist tracts likening the birth control to the poisoning of women by patriarchal power brokers (the difference being when Mary Daly attacks birth control, feminists hail her as a genius, whereas were some Republican Senator to do so, he’s immediately pounced upon by feminists).

RU-486 is certainly safe, and since it leads to abortion very early in the first trimester (and by manipulating hormone levels rather than through a surgical procedure), it also meets the objections of a lot of Americans with concerns about late 2nd and even early 3rd trimester abortions. The FDA placed too many restrictions on its use, but overall it did a good thing by finally bringing this drug to market.

Source:

Abortion opponents question safety of new pill. The Associated Press, October 1, 2000.

Cathy Young has an written excellent, objective look (Dr. Bad News) at research by Judith Wallerstein, touted by conservatives and loathed by feminists, that claims children of divorced parents suffer from the effects of divorce well into adulthood.

Although concerned about the effects of divorce (who, after all, isn’t?), Young finds more smoke than fire behind Wallerstein’s claims. One of the problems with Wallerstein’s latest research, as well as her earlier material, is that the people she interviewed for her book seem to be an unrepresentative sample. Young writes,

Findings from national studies, cited by Wallerstein in the appendix, cast further doubt on her methodology. Forty percent of adult children of divorce in her sample never married, compared with just 24 percent in the same age range in a series of national surveys. In both studies, around 40 percent of the marriages had ended in divorce.

The national data, however, show only a moderately lower prevalence of divorce for people raised in intact families (35 percent) — whereas in Wallerstein’s “intact” comparison sample, only 9 percent of the marriages had broken up. And while Wallerstein found that men and women whose parents had divorced were much less likely to have children than were those from intact marriages, national data indicate no difference in childbearing rates between the two groups.

In fact Young and some of the people she interviews repeatedly note, Wallerstein’s claim that there are large differences between children of divorced parents vs. children of non-divorced parents is contradicted by numerous studies, which do find small differences but nothing of the magnitude that Wallerstein claims.

Once again Young brings her sharp mind to debunking an over-reaching claims and bringing a common sense analysis to a controversial issue.

Cathy Young wrote a column for the Detroit News a few weeks ago on her impressions of forums held by opponents in the gender war — the American Association of University Women panel, “Beyond the Gender Wars,” and the Independent Women’s Forum’s, “The XY Files: The Truth Is Out There … About the Differences Between Boys and Girls.” As she deftly put it in her column (It?s time for a truce in gender wars), “Perhaps the clearest fact to emerge from the two panels is that both feminist and conservative ideologies offer a blinkered view of reality.”

One of the things Young is very good at is highlighting the hypocrisy of feminists who tend to think some social phenomenon is disastrous until the discussion turns toward men at which point all bets are off. Young writes, for example,

The leitmotif of the symposium was that instead of pitting girls against boys in a victimhood contest, we should make the schools better for everyone. Sounds good, but isn?t it a bit disingenuous to trumpet girls? victimization and then shout, “Let?s not play victim!” when boys? problems are mentioned? As some IWF speakers noted, the AAUW played a key role in starting the “gender wars” it now decries.

The AAUW angrily denies this. One of its panelists, Barrie Thorne, a women?s studies professor at the University of California, Berkeley, declared that gender equity is not a zero-sum game in which one sex wins at the other?s expense — which is true. But the protestations that girls? advocates never tried to deny or minimize boys? problems are less credible.

The 1992 AAUW report, “How Schools Shortchange Girls,” called for programs to boost girls? achievement in math and science while warning against targeted efforts to remedy boys? deficits in reading and writing. At the symposium, some speakers downplayed the fact that women now get 55 percent of college degrees by suggesting that women need college to earn as much as male high school graduates (which may have been true 20 years ago but certainly not for the current generation).

Young, on the other hand, also sees the dangers in turning around and framing such issues entirely in terms of boys’ needs. Rather, she takes the rather obvious, commonsense view that educational programs should be geared to helping children succeed regardless of sex. Of course that proposal is too sensible to be taken seriously by the radical feminists or their conservative anti-feminist counterparts, except when they are forced into that position as the AAUW has been thanks to new educational research on boys’ poor educational performance.

Source:

It?s time for a truce in gender wars. Cathy Young, The Detroit News, September 28, 2000.