Dimensions: 6'' x 9'' 200 pages AEI Press  (Washington) Publication Date: February 2001 Hardcover ISBN: 0844741299 Price: $ 25.00 Add to Cart   Examination Copies

February 2001
The Feminist Dilemma: When Success Is Not Enough
By Diana Furchtgott-Roth and Christine Stolba

The achievement of women's equality poses a serious dilemma for contemporary feminists because it marks the end of the movement’s reason for existence. Thus, rather than celebrate victory, today’s feminists feign defeat. This book explains how the contemporary feminists' ideological campaign in the courts and in Congress is undermining the principles of our economic system--and how those efforts actually do not help women's progress.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth was a resident fellow at AEI from 1993 to 2001. Christine Stolba is a senior fellow with the Independent Women's Forum and an adjunct scholar of AEI. Furchtgott-Roth and Stolba previously coauthored Women's Figures: An Illustrated Guide to the Economic Progress of Women in America (AEI Press, 1999). The following summary of The Feminist Dilemma is adapted from the first chapter of the book.

America's early feminists fought to increase women's options by providing equality of opportunity--as property owners, at the ballot box, in schools, and in the workplace. They fought for women's civil and legal equality, and it is a testament to the strength of the American democratic ideal that they succeeded. Women are now fully equal members of American society, and their success is worth celebrating.

But that success has created a dilemma for some contemporary feminists, especially those whose "second-wave" activism has now become a full-time business. For them, the accomplishments women have made as the result of equal opportunity are not good enough. They seek equal outcomes. The Feminist Dilemma shows that contemporary feminism has lost its way by turning its back on the fundamental principles of the early feminist movement; today, feminists pursue public policies that would enshrine equality of results at the expense of equality of opportunity. Where once feminists demanded and received the right to equal pay for equal work with the Equal Pay Act, now they demand that the government set wages to favor female-dominated occupations. Once, feminists challenged discriminatory restrictions on female education; today, their campaign is for "gender equity" in education, an idea that begins with the illogical notion that, without discrimination, men and women would achieve absolute proportionality in all educational fields. Similarly, where once feminists boldly challenged the American public to end the practice of sex-segregated job advertisements and to give qualified women a chance to enter the professions, today, feminists claim that discrimination is to blame if women do not choose to enter all fields in numbers equal to men.

With the push toward defining equality for women as numerical parity has come a skillful change in the language feminists use to describe women’s rights. Government-mandated wage guidelines, also known as comparable worth, become "pay equity"; preferential programs for women such as government-subsidized or government-mandated day care or maternity leave are now billed as "working women’s rights." Working women whose careers top out before the level of chief executive officer are described as hitting a "glass ceiling," whereas men in a similar position have just peaked. Rather than demanding equal opportunity, feminists are lobbying for preferential rights for their own interest group. Of course, women still face challenges, and discrimination and harassment are still unfortunately a part of our society. But data show that they are not systemic problems in the United States nor ones without solutions. In addition, the laws that are in place serve to protect all individuals. Feminists are, however, winning their war to redefine equality as numerical parity. In administrative agencies such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and executive branch offices such as the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, the feminists' message of equality of outcome now reigns. Federal agencies and all private-sector firms with more than fifteen workers are required to keep records of all workers, divided into sex and a multitude of racial categories. Many vacancies are targeted for men or women, blacks or whites, Asian Americans or Native Americans, and both federal agencies and private firms live in fear of a poor report by the EEOC. When men are underrepresented, as is the case in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, no efforts are made to increase their hiring, but the EEOC is known to set its sights on firms with a low representation of women, even in the absence of complaints.

The facts about women's achievements are impossible to ignore. While this book examines the central arenas where feminist efforts to redefine equality have made the deepest inroads, it also presents the facts about women’s success. Chapter 2 lays out the issue that initially inspired the writing of this book, namely feminists' insistent claims of continuing discrimination in the face of women's obvious achievements in so many fields. We describe how feminists have moved from a message of equality of opportunity to one that emphasizes equality of outcomes.

The overwhelming evidence of women's success at the secondary, college, and university levels belies feminists' claims of discrimination in education, as we discuss in chapter 3. Nowadays, more women than men attend college, and more women than men receive bachelor's and master's degrees. But many women choose to pursue fields that pay less than those dominated by men. For example, women receive a majority of degrees in public administration and English literature, and a minority of degrees in mathematics and engineering. We explore whether such choices are evidence of discrimination and assess feminists' proposals to transform education.

Feminism in the Workplace

In chapter 4 we engage another element of the feminists' dilemma in coming to terms with women's choices. We look at the wide range of job choices available to women. Feminists frequently claim that women face discrimination in their choice of careers. They point, for example, to the paucity of women in such traditional blue-collar professions as mining and construction or to the small number of female CEOs. We suggest, however, that women have many reasons to prefer not to enter those professions and that they value job flexibility or shorter hours. In examining job choice, the great distance between what women in the real world are doing and what feminists say they should be doing is impossible to ignore.

Women’s job choices have a significant effect on their lifetime earnings and workplace advancement. Those are the topics of chapter 5. We discuss contemporary feminists’ main pillars of "proof" of workplace  discrimination--the "wage gap" that supposedly exists between men and women and the "glass ceiling" that prevents women from advancing--and assess their validity. We note the misleading claims repeatedly made by feminists about women's wages and present evidence that demonstrates that when such vital factors as education, experience, and consecutive years in the work force are considered, pay between men and women is about the same. In addition, we refute the myth of the "glass ceiling" by noting that common sense and a cursory glance at the history of professional school degrees reveal the existence of a corporate pipeline through which women only recently began moving. Again, choice--not discrimination--explains the lack of perfect male-female proportionality in wages and advancement.

In chapter 6 we describe the costs to society of another favorite feminist weapon: sexual harassment law. Although sexual harassment law was initially intended to target egregious cases of sexual extortion, it is now being used as a means of monitoring a wide range of behavior and speech in the workplace, much of it benign. We explore the arguments of feminist legal theorists who call for the further expansion of sexual harassment law and point to the potential costs of such expansion, including the costs to women in the workplace.

It is inconsistent that at the same time that contemporary feminists claim that women can do anything done by men, they also call for more laws that would require employers to provide women with specific benefits, such as paid maternity leave or subsidized child care. The necessity for and the cost of such required benefits are the subject of chapter 7. Feminists often cite the example of European countries, in which employers and the government frequently provide paid maternity leave and subsidized child care, as the model America should be following. We test the validity of that claim and, using examples from real companies, demonstrate the costs of legislation such as the Family and Medical Leave Act, which provides twelve weeks of unpaid leave to deal with family issues. Further, although feminists claim that the European model of workplace policies would help American women, we present data demonstrating that European women are less advanced in the workplace than Americans. Women in European countries work less outside the home rather than more; their unemployment rates are usually higher than men’s unemployment rates; and their countries have uniformly higher unemployment rates overall and uniformly lower rates of economic growth.

After examining the costs of mandatory benefits, we turn our attention to an area outside the workplace where the feminist campaign for statistical proportionality has had disturbing success: college athletics. Chapter 8 explores the history and current application of a piece of federal educational legislation called Title IX. Although the intent of Title IX’s creators was to guarantee equality of opportunity, feminists and misguided government bureaucrats have transformed the statute into a weapon for enforcing statistical proportionality in college sports. The result is the elimination of men’s sports teams all over the country: Between 1993 and 1999 colleges and universities terminated fifty-three men’s golf teams, forty-three wrestling teams, and sixteen baseball teams, among others--the vast majority because of Title IX requirements.

In chapter 9 we describe how feminist-inspired policies have resulted in women’s being classified by sex in every workplace in the United States that has more than fifteen workers. Employers are required to keep records of how many men and how many women they hire, in many cases divided by job classification. The EEOC can investigate a company at any time, without any complaint filed, to see whether the proportion of women in the work force meets the proportion in the local labor force. If it does not, the commission can assume that discrimination has taken place and can take the company to court, where the firm may ultimately be fined. That possibility has resulted in a quota mentality among personnel departments, which live in fear of an EEOC investigation, and the pressure to hire and promote less-qualified women over more-qualified men.

Unfortunately, contemporary feminists' focus on outcomes has blinded them to the recently more complex, but not necessarily unequal, status of American women. Inherent in many of their discussions is a debate about what kind of society Americans want for themselves. Should all people be held to a single, sex-blind standard, with equality of opportunity rather than equality of result as the guiding force in achievement? Or do women--who, after all, make up more than half the population, who are better educated, who have a life expectancy seven years greater than men, and who have a much smaller percentage on hard drugs and in prison--warrant protected status in the workplace? Do existing preferential government programs assume that women should make certain choices? How do forces outside the workplace--cultural and social forces relating to family and personal goals--influence the decisions women make inside the workplace and vice versa? By examining those questions, we hope to contribute to the debate over the meaning of equality and success for women in a democratic society.