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 ffirmative
action for women is a bad idea. Funny how seldom you hear that proposition
debated in public. Have you ever noticed how the argument over affirmative
action usually turns on the question of race, rather than sex, even
though women are the principal beneficiaries of preferential treatment?
Why is that?
Probably because
both sides in the affirmative-action debate have an interest in
avoiding the issue. Republicans fear the loss of the "women's
vote." So even though the case for sex-based preferences is
extraordinarily weak, conservatives hesitate to attack it. The Left,
on the other hand, knows perfectly well that preferences for women
are barely defensible, so it protects them by propping up the case
for race-based affirmative action. The result is that when it comes
to debates over affirmative action, women have become the proverbial
elephant in the living room. Or is it bedroom? (Actually, it's the
faculty lounge.)
This idea that
the debate over affirmative action for women has been quietly suppressed
by both Democrats and Republicans is more than an impression. A
survey published a few years back by American's for a Fair Chance,
a coalition of civil-rights organizations, showed that in the first
six months of 1998, only 2% of 314 published stories on affirmative
action in major media focused on women. In fact only 19% of those
stories even mentioned affirmative action's effects on women. The
typical pattern was for stories to begin discussion with a phrase
like "race and gender preferences," and then go on to
discuss the issue as though it were only a question of race. And
again, this survey was sponsored by supporters of affirmative
action. Even activists on the Left are frustrated by their inability
to inject the issue of preferences for women into an otherwise liberal
media.
There are no
major gaps in the performance of middle-class men and women on standardized
tests — certainly nothing approaching the gaps in test scores
between blacks and Hispanics on the one hand, and whites and Asians,
on the other. And we know that women are now attending college at
significantly higher levels than men. If anything, that would argue
for affirmative action for men. And policy analysts at the Independent
Women's Forum, like Christine Stolba and Diana Furchtgott-Roth,
have shown time and again that notions like the "glass ceiling"
and the "wage gap" are nonsense — that the predominance
of men at the highest levels of business and government is due,
not to "sexism," but to women's own desire to rear children,
even at some cost to their careers. (See Women's
Figures and the forthcoming book, The
Feminist Dilemma, both by Furchtgott-Roth and Stolba.)
So what's really
driving affirmative action for women is a hopelessly utopian attempt
to eradicate the differences between the sexes. Women want to be
the primary caretakers of their children. But that's not good enough
for feminists, who give lip service to the idea of "choice."
The real reason feminists back affirmative action is their hope
that preferences will lure larger and larger numbers of women into
the professions, slowly breaking them of their annoyingly disproportionate
affinity for mothering. The feminists won't be satisfied until men
and women hit levels of 50/50 in all prestigious job categories.
You can read
about these utopian plans for androgyny in the work of academic
feminists. Popular political theorist Susan Okin, for example, wants
to see a combination of elaborate government financed day care and
affirmative action in early education to free up women for careers,
and to make sure that children see equal numbers of women and men
in all social roles, from their earliest years. For inspiration,
Okin draws on the work of Amy Gutmann, a political theorist who
strongly supports gender-based affirmative action, and who has just
been appointed provost of Princeton University. Okin, by the way,
openly says that her goal is to move to a future "without gender"
— an androgynous world in which the differences between men
and women will have effectively disappeared.
You can dismiss
these academic feminists are marginal extremists — but you'd
be wrong. For one thing, pro-affirmative action feminists like Amy
Gutmann are now running our most prestigious universities. And during
the eight years of the Clinton administration, the worst sort of
utopian schemes were driving pro-androgyny policies at both the
Department of Education and the Department of Defense. But the important
point is that in a sense the academic feminists are right. That
is, the academic radicals understand what many moderate, right-thinking
supporters of affirmative action for women do not — that the
real barrier to those supposedly ideal 50/50 job ratios is not discrimination,
but the womanliness of women — above all, their desire to mother.
Trouble is,
promoting androgyny and subverting the womanliness of women just
doesn't cut it as a campaign slogan. So the feminists and their
Democratic allies are content to avoid direct debate of affirmative
action for women, preferring instead to link sex-based preferences
to the misguided hopes of guilty liberals that affirmative action
is the way to solve the problem of race in America.
The Republican's
meanwhile, are paralyzed by their fear of losing still more of the
"woman's vote." The public may not be interested in promoting
androgyny, but there are still enough women who want to keep the
unfair advantage they've gained through preferences to cost the
Republicans some votes if they go after the practice. Worse still
would be the danger of appearing to be "anti-woman" just
by raising the issue. The truth is, when affirmative action was
put to the test by California's proposition 209, it was rejected
by the public — including many women. But timid politicians
are perhaps understandably loathe to risk alienating anyone at all
by battling over so controversial an issue in such a closely divided
political situation.
The end result
is that a profoundly unjust policy is being perpetuated — with
no debate, and therefore with no real acknowledgment of its true
purpose and effects. Is there a remedy? Perhaps not. But if there
is, the first step will be to break the silence.
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