For years I’ve been hearing these claims that a United Nations study found that when you include housework and other non-compensated labor women actually work more hours per week on average than men. In fact, sometimes this claim is taken further and cited for various other purposes — for example, with claims that the additional work that women preform should be added to the GDP or that various programs that cover workers should be amended to take into account women’s undocumented work.

But Glenn Sacks did a nice job of puncturing this myth in a March 18 column, Men, Women and Work. Now certainly the work that women do is to be praised and duly compensated. Laws and traditions that kept women from working or excluded them from certain professions was not only morally wrong, but was also completely wrongheaded economically. Anyone whose ever worked with or for a talented woman must marvel at the idea that in an earlier time those talents would have been allowed to go to waste (and it is mindboggling that some nations still hamper there economies with such dubious restrictions).

But the question at hand is whether or not women work significant numbers of hours more than men, and the answer there is no. Well, at least that the studies that claim to show this are bogus.

The major source of such claims is the United Nations’ 1995 Human Development Report. This claimed that by the time you add in housework and other uncompensated work that women do, they end up working significantly more hours than men. But Sacks notes there are a number of problems with the report,

As men’s issues author Warren Farrell explained in his 1999 book Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say, the UN report upon which most claims of “women work more” are based was deeply flawed. In fact, UN official Terry McKinley admitted in February, 1996 that the UN misrepresented the study in several important ways. For one, the information provided by the UN to the press only applied to countries where women were found to work more hours than men; the countries where men were found to work more hours than women were deliberately excluded.

Now there is a neat trick that more researchers would love to be able to pull out of their hats. Releasing only the data that supports a hypothesis while not including the data that contradicts a hypothesis is pretty much a ticket to ride. Sacks continues,

Moreoer, when the data provided by researchers in some countries (including the US) did not fit the UN’s intention to show that women “do more,” researchers were asked in a private communication to amend their studies. Researchers were asked to include women’s voluntary community work as well as hobbies in order to increase women’s perceived workload. Researchers were not asked to include those items or new ones in men’s labor. As a study of men and women’s labor, the UN findings are worthless.

And it’s not just the UN using such patently unsound methods. He also takes to task UC Berkeley professor Arlie Hochschild’s 1989 book, The Second Shift which claimed that “women work an extra month of 24 hour days each year.” Holy cow — is there even enough time available for such an enormous disparity? Well there is if you compare two very different groups of men and women. Sacks writes,

For one, she compared the housework burdens of full-time employed males with those of part-time employed females, portraying men working 50 hour weeks as lazy and selfish for not doing as much housework as their wives who were working a 20 hour week. Also, she claimed that men did no more housework in the late 1980s than in the prefeminist era, but, with one minor exception, she used data on male housework from studies done in the pre-feminist era, rendering it worthless [as a source for late 1980s male housework trends].

In the United States, Sacks reports, men in act work 3-5 hours per week more than women on average. That’s actually a pretty amazing figure, especially if it includes women who have temporarily altered their workload after having children. Lets have three cheers for America — where everyone is entitled to work 50 hours a week regardless of their sex!

Source:

Men, Women and Work. Glenn Sacks, Mens News Daily, March 18, 2003.

Wendy McElroy wrote an essay back in March on the likely effects that the war on Iraq would have on feminism in the United States. McElroy argues that the war will have the same impact on feminism as the Civil War (which led to feminism’s narrow focus on the right to vote) and the Vietnam War (which transformed feminism into a largely Left wing enterprise).

McElroy argues that as predominantly Muslim countries liberalize, the conflict between the emerging Islamic feminism — which situates a call for equality within the confines of Muslim beliefs — will come into conflict with Western feminism — which, if not atheistic, is extremely hostile to religion — and lead to a transformation of feminism.

McElroy writes,

Most Islamic feminists base their demand for equality upon the teachings of Islam. They do not separate themselves or their identity as women from the larger context of religion. To them, the current inequality results from a misinterpretation of the Koran.

By contrast, Western feminists reject a religious basis for equality and argue from an entirely secular perspective. Indeed, they are hostile to religion, and especially to Christianity, which is viewed as an institution that oppresses women.

McElroy argues that Western feminists will end up simply ignoring and/or mischaracterizing Islamic feminists.

But then what happens to Western feminism? The September 11 terrorists attacks were the beginning of the end of Left wing feminism. The wide gulf between the small number of women who are involved in the feminist movement and women as a group in the United States has never been more obvious in last 18 months.

On the domestic side we’ve seen national feminist figures engage in handwringing and protests over two successive wars that enjoyed overwhelming support from women. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have done more to help women in those countries than all of the protests by feminists. In fact, the toppling of the Taliban regime seemed to both outrage and embarrass feminists. After all, it’s hard to portray the United States as being on the verge of A Handmaid’s Tail-like future when a Republican president is on national TV denouncing and then removing a regime that was absolutely hideous toward women.

Source:

Iraq war may kill feminism as we know it. Wendy McElroy, FoxNews.Com, March 18, 2003.

IndyMedia.Org ran a speech back in March featuring Helen Caldicott ranting and raving as only she can. Caldicott belongs to a special group of ranters and ravers because some of what she says makes a great deal of sense, but then she goes off on some nutball idea. At one point, for example, Caldicott completely misunderstood NASA releases about the space shuttle and was campaigning to stop shuttle launches on the grounds that just a small number of launches would completely destroy the ozone layer. Her latest speech contains many such gems.

The speech, delivered at an anti-war teach-in, starts off with completely nonsensical ravings about violence and evolution.

What is the attraction of killing? What evolutionary situation necessitated that the killing reflex be located in the human (male?s) brain? I believe it started when we were Troglodites [?]. The world was hostile in those days, full of saber-tooth tigers, mammoth elephants and roaring tribes. While women sat in caves breast-feeding and nurturing their young., the males quickly learned to protect their genes by aggression and killing. This innate instinct led to the survival of the fittest, where the human race eventually dominated and conquered nature –indeed we have.

. . .

It was then that I realized that when the scent of blood metaphorically enters the male nostril, it triggers the psychological imperative to kill ? a primitive autonomic reflex located in the male midbrain. This must be a relic of their Troglidaic [?] days.

What the hell is she talking about? She is so wrong on so many counts, it is difficult to know where to begin.

First, of course, it is incorrect to assume that women do not have any instincts or abilities which would lead them to kill. The idea that men went out hunting and killing while women sat around in caves all day is a vision closer to the Flintstones than the reality of the human evolutionary past.

Second, humans are a product of the “survival of the fittest” — it is not something invented by a bunch of violent cave men sitting around with nothing better to do. Moreover what allowed human beings to dominate the globe (at least from our point of view) was not innate aggression. If that’s all it took to dominate, there are certainly other species that are much superior to human beings on that count. Rather, what guaranteed human dominate was our extended levels of cooperation which allowed men and women to organize themselves into ever more complex social structure capable of carrying out increasingly complex tasks. In Caldicott’s vision it’s hard to see how agriculture would ever develop if males are too busy killing each other and women breast feeding to do much else.

Violence and killing is condoned by societies dominated by male values, while the 53% of the population made up by women also condones this psychotic behavior by their silence.

This, of course, is simply regurgitating centuries old stereotypes about men as inherently aggressive and women as inherently passive. Caldicott faces a problem in both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a majority of American women favored going to war. Better to pretend that their simply puppets of a society “dominated by male values” than dig down further.

Oddly enough, when Caldicott does urge women to action, she uses an imagery of violence,

Now 53% of us are women. We’ve had the majority and we’ve been absolute wimps. And it’s time we smacked their bottoms, removed them, and we took over. I’m not just joking — this isn’t funny. I am deadly serious.

Caldicott is still trapped by the increasingly irrelevant nuclear disarmament movement. With the end of the cold war, the likelihood of a huge exchange of nuclear weapons between Russia and the United States diminished and the nuclear disarmament movement seems to have all but disappeared. Caldicott is still trapped in that time period, though, and desperately needs to update her facts.

There is a huge fallout shelter in Virginia; all the members of Congress are allowed to go in the event of a nuclear war, except a nuclear war only takes a half hour to complete and they won’t have time to get there. It’s huge, full of hospitals and everything. Interestingly, congresspeople can’t take their wives, they can only take their secretaries.

Apparently Caldicott is unaware that, a) some Members of Congress are women — a very odd oversight given her trumpeting of women, and b) the fallout shelter she referred to can be visited by anyone since it was closed in the mid-1990s and turned into a tourist attraction. This is the shelter beneath the Greenbriar Hotel, and you can find information about touring it here. The existence of the shelter, which was exposed by a 1992 story in the Washington Post has been widely reported and the hotel featured on pretty much every television news magazine I can think of

What is most interesting about Caldicott’s speech, however, is less what she says than what she doesn’t say. She talks about violence-loving Christian fundamentalists in the White House and the intense destruction of warfare, but the reader living in a cave would hear Caldicott’s speech and think that Sept. 11 was simply the day that Cheney started “living in a fallout shelter.” Similarly she is big on talking about women as some amorphous group, but doesn’t venture a single word about the life of women under a dictatorship such as that of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

And Caldicott’s analysis of violence ultimately fails because she never comes to grip with the correct answer to why human beings were prepared by evolution to engage in violence. The answer, of course, is that sometimes violence and war are the solutions to the problems facing us. Certainly human beings have too frequently used violence and war and often for unjust reasons, but the view that violence and war are always and everywhere immoral is absurd.

Source:

Men: Natural Born Killers. Helen Caldicott, FrontPageMagazine.Com, March 17, 2003.