Breaking the Silence
All about women.

Mr. Kurtz is also a fellow at the Hudson Institute
September 10, 2001 8:55 a.m.

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.