This past week, a Colgate alumnus added me as a friend on Facebook. I had only met this guy once or twice, but figured he was definitely the type of person who would bring it up if I did not accept his request. You know the type...annoying, thinks everyone likes him, creepy toward girls, and just generally a pest. It turns out he's a pest on Facebook, as well as in real life. Every single day, he bombards my newsfeed with articles he shares on a variety of topics. The other day, I saw the headline "
No, Women Don't Make Less Money Than Men" and decided this was something worth a read. Reading this article confirmed my opinion of this alumnus.
This article was written as a reaction to the State of the Union address, in which the President discussed the issue of the wage gap. He declared that women make 77 cents for every dollar men make. The author of the article, Christina Hoff Sommers, AKA a woman, called this "the bogus statistic that won't die." Throughout the article, Sommers explains why women and men earn different wages, but claims that it is not an unfair or oppressive situation, rather that it is because of choice. At first, I agreed with the article, thinking that it made sense because people choose different career paths. Then, I realized that the issue is not as simple as Sommers believes. The income gap between men and women is a deeply-seeded issue, based in the oppressive male-dominated society, that only appears to be a result of choice.
There are so many aspects of this article that are just outrageously inaccurate that it is hard for me to pick a starting point. The main point that needs to be discussed is that Sommers states that men and women, as a group, are just fundamentally different. She says that women "appear to be drawn to jobs in the caring professions; men are more likely to turn up in people-free zones." It is necessary to note that Sommers has come up with this idea of the career preferences of men and women in a backwards order. Women do not choose caring professions because they want them, they choose them because they have been taught to think that they want them.
The Cult of True Womanhood describes a true woman as one who took care of the home and family. The true woman cooked, cleaned, took care of children, et cetera. Her duties as a caretaker were highly praised. Thus, all women came to have the image of being particularly skilled and interested in caretaking areas.
The idea that women were most valuable in caretaker roles is also seen in
The Problem That Has No Name. Women were told by "experts" how they should perform as a real woman, and that they should display their femininity by being a wife and mother. Furthermore, women were taught to pity those women who aspired to be poets, physicists, and more, because those women were "neurotic, unfeminine, [and] unhappy" (1). This constant reinforcement has led women to become caretakers. Women, as a group, do not inherently enjoy caring for others; women, as a group, have been taught to enjoy caring for others and have been told that caring for others is their special talent.
Due to this viewpoint, women have had different experiences in higher education than men have had. Christina Hoff Sommers says that women choose college majors that lead to jobs with lower pay than those college majors chosen by men. Once again, this is because of how women have been conditioned to think of themselves.
Women are not supposed to be involved in the sciences. Women have been told that they excel in care professions and domestic activities. They have also been told that men are the ones who hold the jobs which deal with finance and politics, et cetera.
The Cult of True Womanhood tells women that "by both temperament and ability, [they are] ill-suited to hard labor, to the rough-and-tumble of political life, or to the competitive individualism of the industrial economy." Thus, it has been engrained in the minds of our society that women are naturally unable to pursue so-called men's work because they are mentally, emotionally, and physically unable to do so. As such, there has been less stress on women than on men to be interested in finance, science, politics, and other areas that are deemed masculine.
Another reason for the choice of college majors is that history of female enrollment in colleges. Despite the interest of women to pursue education, according to the
Declaration of Sentiments, not even 200 years ago, men had "denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against her" (2). Thus, women are fairly new to any form of higher education. It is possible that because for years and years women did not have the opportunity to explore academia, they are still in their beginning phases of education. By this, I mean that when universities first opened (to men), it is probable that men studied these concentrations that are now predominately studied by women just as much as they studied their current majors. So, because men have had so many years on women in receiving education, they have shifted away from those areas which have been deemed more suitable for women.
In addition, education can be thought to be dangerous to women. As noted in
The Problem That Has No Name, women in the 1950s went to college primarily to find a husband. Once women found a husband, it seems as though most women dropped out of college, because they no longer needed to be there. But why did they no longer
want to be there? The reason is that women did not want to be
too educated because "too much education would be a marriage bar" (1). "Real women" did not want or need to be educated because they had a man who was educated, who could make money, who could make decisions, who could control everything. So, a woman who continued education were thought to be less of a woman.
Another bothersome view presented in the article is that women put themselves at a disadvantage. Sommers claims that "untold millions of state and federal dollars have been devoted to recruiting young women into engineering and computer technology," but women steadfastly refuse to take advantage. She says that it is obvious that women are intelligent enough to study the same things men study, but they have different interests. However, this goes back to the point that women have been taught to be more interested in care, and to let men handle the men's work. It is not acceptable for a woman to take seize an opportunity that will put them on the same level with men because it will take away their femininity, make them less appealing for marriage, and prevent them from being a real woman. If a woman were to take advantage of these opportunities, she would face criticism for all of this.
Lastly, Sommers asks us the ever insulting question: "Have these groups noticed that American women are now amongst the most educated, autonomous, opportunity-rich women in history?" This is another way of asking: can't women just accept the progress they've already made? Sommers makes it seem as though women have achieved equality with men because they are able to go to college and have jobs. She is wrong. Just because women have made progress, it does not mean that women have become equal to men.
Sommers claims that by women continuing to fight for equality, they are creating more of a problem for themselves. She is essentially telling women to be how they have always been taught to be: quiet, passive, submissive. By saying that women can be controlled, manipulated, and oppressed by "forces beyond their control," women are just reinforcing the idea that they are weak. Her solution is to stop complaining about "nothing," suck it up, and do what you want to do. She fails to acknowledge that women are a part of a male-dominated society, and that her solution is easier said than done. Because she chose to be a writer, she does not realize that it is likely more difficult to obtain a job in a more "masculine" profession.
What is most interesting about this article is that Sommers completely contradicts herself. She says that the wage gap is a myth, that men and women choose different career paths that are accompanied by different pay, that women and men are equal, and then she says that there is a more concerning wage gap in the White House than the average gap that needs to be fixed. So, after Sommers breaks down why there is no wage gap, she says there is. She also states previously that with all the factors presented removed, that the wage gap is only about 5 cents, but that this is due to "hard-to-measure" differences, without realizing that those differences lie in oppression.
