Women’s Workplace Equality Under Threat—Hooray!

According to a Substack article from this past May [link: https://substack.com/home/post/p-162330198?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web]—I just stumbled across it—a recent survey of 8th and 10th graders shows a sharp drop in the percent of boys who believe that women should have the same professional opportunities as men. Here is the graph:

Had I been asked these deceptively simple questions as a naïve eighth or tenth grader, I would certainly have given my assent. Who (I would have reasoned) could possibly be opposed to simple fairness and the impartial treatment of women? Feminism, like other utopian doctrines, can be highly plausible and seductive before it is actually put into practice.

Half a century has gone by and the American workplace is utterly saturated with women. They completely dominate certain lucrative fields such as publishing. In some cities, young women are outearning young men. You go, girl!

What have been the consequences? Two of the most obvious have been cratering fertility and the proliferation of miserable spinsters and divorcées furious at the entire male sex. These have gotten some public attention, since everyone likes children and sympathizes with unhappy women. Less attention gets paid to men, since they are largely expected to take whatever knocks life hands them and keep plugging away—not unlike a popular brand of watches promoted as able to “take a licking and keep on ticking.”

But men do not have hearts of oak or stone, and there are limits upon what can be demanded of them. Their lives have been profoundly affected by the mass invasion of the workplace by women, and it has not resembled what feminism promised them. At first, they were assured by a young and confident feminist movement that having women work would benefit men as well as the women themselves—by reducing both the pressure upon men to provide all the economic support for their families and the emphasis placed by women upon the earning-power of potential husbands.

Several decades of “women in the workforce” have ensued and the results are in. They are not pretty. For many men, the principal consequence of competing against women at work has been increased difficulty—for some an outright impossibility—of finding a wife and starting a family. In part this is because when women have their own money, they only perceive men who earn even more than they do as possible “providers,” and therefore as potential husbands. So pressure on men to earn has increased, not decreased. At the same time, the entry of large numbers of women into the workforce has increased the supply of labor, thereby reducing earnings all around. Women have gained some financial independence, it is true, but only because men have been hit with the double-whammy of lowered earnings and raised female expectations.

But there is more—much, much more. Whereas unmarried men and women used to go to dance halls or similar places of public amusement to meet members of the opposite sex, they now rub elbows every day at work. Naturally, both men and women are interested in the possibility of discovering a mate among their workplace colleagues; they would not be human if they were not. But workplace mate-seeking is not exactly treated in the same way when engaged in by women as when engaged in by men.

“Human resource” departments are a heavily female part of today’s corporate world that hardly existed before the mass entry of women into the workforce. Today they control hiring for most entry level positions. Unsurprisingly, experimental studies reveal that these female-dominated departments are more likely to extend job offers to attractive than to unattractive men. On the other hand, they incline to hire plainer women more often than pretty ones. It is not enough to bring in more handsome fellows, you see—competition from prettier girls must also be eliminated!

No doubt a company’s bottom line depends crucially on its entry level employees consisting of Adonises and plain Janes.

The obvious lesson here is that women unhesitatingly pursue their own mating strategies in the workplace. They may benefit themselves in this way, but it does nothing for efficiency, the rational allocation of resources, or edging out the competition. Yet companies tolerate the behavior. Without those HR departments, they might be liable to lawsuits over failing to hire enough women.

In a sexually integrated workplace, there will inevitably be men as well who hope to meet a nice girl to marry from among their work colleagues. But, of course, the mate-seeking behavior of such men is not indulged like that of the women in the HR department. Since the 1980s, a whole new body of law has arisen to punish male courtship behavior in the workplace under the name of “sexual harassment” (a term only coined in the late 1970s). Sexual harassment is big business now, causing countless millions of dollars to change hands every year and making a few lawyers and female plaintiffs rich. Since the term has no clear or agreed-upon definition, and since companies are legally liable if they fail to prevent the undefined phenomenon, they must assume the guilt of any man accused. Careers that took years to build up can be destroyed overnight by an unguarded word or misinterpreted gesture.

The recent #MeToo bruhaha has made the dangers clear to even the most naïve and traditionally chivalrous men. They are now deeply suspicious of their female colleagues, and with excellent reason. Cases have been uncovered of women teaming up to fabricate accusations in the hopes of getting lucrative court settlements. Many false or frivolous accusations are motivated by nothing more than the thrill of power some women experience at their ability to destroy men professionally. Much of #MeToo was of the nature of a copycat crime: women envied the attention and sympathy being expressed for accusers and waned to share in it.

Inevitably, men are adapting. An informal code has arisen under which men refuse to speak a single word to female colleagues that is not strictly work-related. No more “that’s a pretty dress,” no friendly chats around the water cooler. Every interaction that can be documented must be. Telephone calls must be recorded; complete records of all email correspondence with female colleagues must be preserved in triplicate and stored in a safe place, for any man can be called upon at any time to prove his innocence in court. In short, women have nothing more to teach men about “hostile work environments”—men are experiencing a level of hostility and suspicion in the workplace of which few women can have any conception.

Now back to that poll we cited at the beginning: it would not surprise me one bit if working men responding safely and anonymously to a pollster were to have begun telling them that women can take their “workplace equality” and stick it up their collective arse. But the really astonishing thing is that this was a poll conducted among eighth and tenth graders! As noted, this author would almost unthinkingly have agreed to feminist platitudes about equality at that age, having as yet had little experience of either women or the workplace. How is it that mere boys are now among those wising up to the feminist reign of terror over working men? Are they hearing about the realities from their fathers or elder brothers? Do they observe the privileging of girls in their own juvenile environment?

Whatever the explanation, this poll indicates that feminism is finally in serious trouble. Women have never had any right to equal work or to equal pay. At best, they have a right to support themselves in some fashion if they fail to marry. They also have a right to get married—presuming they can find a man foolish enough to propose to them, which most can if they play their cards carefully when young. They have a right to be faithful wives and dutiful mothers. And they have a right to stay out of working men’s way while men keep the world running and support their families. The future depends on women’s exercise of these rights, not the imaginary ones cooked up by utopian dreamers sixty years ago.