Last Wednesday Dr. Christina Hoff Summers gave a lecture titled “The Case for Conservative Feminism.” In her hour-long speech, Dr. Sommers, author of the books “Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women” and “The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men” spoke about her critique of contemporary feminism and how its misinterpretation of facts and statistics is hurting the Western understanding of equality.
But to me the “ideology” seemed to be a lack thereof. The case of conservative feminism, as Dr. Sommers defined it, was actually just retaliation against the already-set notion of what feminism is: the idea of bringing social, economic and political equality to the sexes. In fact, the most “feminist” part about conservative feminism is its stress on pushing women’s rights only outside of the United States.
According to Dr. Sommers, the United States is already experiencing equality. More women graduate from college today than do men, and despite the $8,000 pay gap between college graduates in terms of sex, which Sommers attributed to difference in qualifying majors and efficient business models, women in the Western world do enjoy the same rights as men — and sometimes even more.
The World Economic Forum, however, would tell you otherwise. According to their 2012 Global Gender Gap Report, several nations in Europe and elsewhere are superior to the United States in women’s economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival and political empowerment. This ranking and others seem to make the feminist case that women in the United States continue to be suppressed and unequal to their male counterparts.
Yet the strongest argument for “conservative feminism” is not that there are no inherent differences between males and females — a simple biology textbook could clear that up if you have any doubts — but that a notion of equality does not lie in the balance of data. Both logically and numerically, the “numbers” to which feminist theorists refer to — jobs, salaries and rankings — are required to be higher for one sex over the other. The fact that fewer women than men become engineers does not imply a conscious societal effort to push women out of engineering; it’s simply a statistic that had to favor a certain sex.
Moreover, sex isn’t a uniform initial state, so members of each sex are not inherently entitled to the advantages of the other. Women are built differently than men and studies have shown that they think differently than men, also. So by extension, the idea of perfect “equality” for women is impossible, because the idea of distributive justice as applied to sex doesn’t work without a leveled playing field from the beginning. What’s important is whether despite these disparities, women have the same opportunities to break the quotidian, both personal and professional. And according to Dr. Sommers, they do. Some women choose not to have children to continue with their careers. Others are able to strike a balance between work and family life. The point is that most personal situations — whether it is sex, gender or race — are an unavoidable circumstance that people can work around to get what they want.
So the outcomes for women in the United States, while not ideal (and unlikely to ever be), are pretty favorable in comparison to the original “goal” of feminism of perfect equality. The bigger point is, however, that the goal of the original feminism was not to take sides on gender or deny its existence, but to give each gender the resources to end up in the same place. While there will always be an uneven number of men and women in certain fields, the fact that they can make it there is what’s most important.
Denise Taylor’s column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at d.taylor@cavalierdaily.com.
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