A current storyin The Weekly Standard by Christina Hoff Sommers details how NOW and its cohorts lobbied the Obama administration – successfully – to redirect the stimulus plan towards female jobs and away from infrastructure investment.
This, despite the fact that this recession, as we all know, has hit men very disproportionately. As Sommers points out, 80% of the jobs lost in the United States between December 2007 and May 2009 were male jobs. But when Obama talked last fall about investing government funds in these sectors – that is the ones that were hardest hit by the recession – the women’s groups revolted en masse. Sommers details how they flooded the new administration with demands that the stimulus package be redirected towards what they called “human infrastructure” – that is, areas such as health care, education, child care and social services, all areas in the economy which actually have grown jobs during the same period, and which are female dominated.
And it worked.
And her article aptly summarizes the political lesson to draw from this: mainstream feminists and the Obama administration that listens to them - don’t care about equality, and don’t care about men.
It just underscores what many of us have been saying for a long time. Feminism is not about equality, and it doesn’t give a damn about men in the least. Feminism is a female-only advocacy movement, which will advocate women’s interests at men’s expense gleefully and, largely, successfully.
Summers quotes Romer and Bernstein on the fact that 80% of the jobs lost during the early part of the recession were held by men, but only about 58% of the jobs created by the stimulus would go to men, so the stimulus was somewhat more favorable to women, net.
At least in what the OP quotes, Summers doesn’t provide any substantiation that this was the intent of the Evil Feminist Groups who wield so much power in Washington, you know. If Summers was doing any more than opining out of her ass about the evil of the feminist lobby, I would appreciate the OP’s quoting the appropriate sections of Summers’ piece. I’ve read her stuff before, and I’m not going to go digging through her trash just to do the work that the OP should have done.
So, I guess you could say “Men aren’t being persecuted after all!” I’ve yet to see any evidence that somehow men are being disadvantaged because the number of construction jobs have been reduced and the number of physician assistant jobs have been increased, since as you and I have pointed out, men and women can qualify for those jobs.
I know this is in MPSIMS, but I would like to thank you for being the first poster to respond with actual rebuttal argument. When arguments seem silly, there’s a tendency to simply dismiss them, but in my view your approach handles the task much better.
My rebuttal was substantive. And for someone who is so saddened to see even silly-seeming arguments dismissed, you certainly have not confronted the point raised in mine: The male job/female job distinction, on which the complained of unfairness in stimulus project priority is predicated, is utterly illusory. Since men are allowed to be nursing assistants just as women are, how can it be that moving dollars from construction projects to health care projects significantly disadvantages men?
If (indeed) 80% of jobs lost recently have been jobs held by men, and if (as a lot of evidence shows) women are unfavourably treated in the US job market, both before and after this recent increase in unemployment – then a stimulus, in which 58% of jobs go to men, might make the job market less unbalanced than it was before, but it’s hardly making the job market biassed towards women.
And do those complaining about the gender bias argue that the US actually needs to retain those jobs that were traditionally held by men? Or are they just assuming that men’s jobs are automatrically more important than women’s jobs?
Because filling lost jobs might mean propping up industries that are no longer profitable or relevant. If there’s no longer a market for buggy whips, why create jobs for buggy-whip makers? Instead, you should be retraining the buggy-whip makers in other professions.
Whenever this phrase pops into one’s mind, one should be especially careful.
I am amused that NOW, who basically called anyone who endorsed Obama over Clinton a spawn of the devil, is now presumed to have the ear of the President. That jobs were shifted from one place to another seems like pretty weak evidence that this was done at the behest of NOW or for the purpose of keeping “stimulus jobs away from men.”
a) As it stands, finance and manufacturing ARE dominated by men, and service sector jobs ARE dominated by women. So your argument that sectors could theoretically be 50-50 is, well, theoretical.
b) NOW lobbyists knew what the score was, and pushed for the requisite financial transfers between male-dominated and female-dominated jobs.
a) As it stands, finance and manufacturing ARE dominated by men, and service sector jobs ARE dominated by women. So your argument that sectors could theoretically be 50-50 is, well, theoretical.
a’) Cites?
a’’) Even if these health care, education, and social work were traditionally female-heavy fields, it is not unfair to prioritize stimulus projects in those areas unless men will be disadvantaged by having to work in those fields. Billy Bob does not have an entitlement to be a road paver if our social dollars are better spent in the hospital.
Will some dudes have to do work that they maybe thought they wouldn’t have to do? Sure. But that is not some diabolical plot, it is simply a reflection of where our growth industries and labor force needs are.
