The Dishonesty of Professional, Perpetually Aggrieved Feminists

Margaret Wente (!) has an excellent column in the Globe and Mail today sarcastically entitled "The Nightmare Gender Gap" in which she excoriates feminists for persistently exaggerating the grievances of well-off, white, middle-class, women and basically ignoring real women's issues such as the health of aboriginal women. She says:

"Did you know that women's human rights in Canada have been steadily eroding? Did you know that women now make only 70.5 cents for every dollar made by men? Did you know that Canada ranks 25th on the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap Index? That's below Ecuador, Mongolia, Lesotho and South Africa.

“Canadian women have lost ground in many areas in the past 15 years,” says Barbara Byers, executive vice-president of the Canadian Labour Congress. Since 1981, the wage gap has grown much worse, says Kathy Lahey, a professor of law and gender studies at Queen's University; “deep, cultural” forces, she warns, are operating against women.

The proof is contained in a high-profile report (Reality Check: Women in Canada) prepared by a coalition of feminist and labour groups for the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. Their aim is to embarrass the Harper government before the world. Unfortunately, the “proof” amounts to the usual labour-feminist rhetorical stew, flavoured with a heaping cup of statistical abuse.

Take the gender wage gap. To arrive at 70.5 cents, the report compares full-time annual wages between men and women. What it doesn't mention is that men work more hours in a year than women do. Once you adjust for that, the gap narrows to 84 cents. And when you adjust for work experience and women's preference for jobs in the public sector and social services, the gap shrinks to 93 cents.

The cancellation of Paul Martin's national daycare program is also treated as a major setback for women – even though national daycare never existed and is never likely to exist, and even though most families, when polled, say they'd prefer other child-care arrangements instead. Then there's violence against aboriginal women, which is rightly identified as a serious problem. The report puts the blame on racism, sexism and the indifference of law enforcers. But it neglects to mention that most violence against aboriginal women is committed by aboriginal men.

So what's the Gender Gap Index? And why does Canada rank lower than Mongolia?

It turns out the Gender Gap Index is measured by a precise number (Canada gets 0.7196) based on a series of calculations I defy anyone to explain. But never mind. The rankings are full of impressive-looking charts and graphs. Whether the women of Canada really ought to envy the women of 10th-place Lesotho (with an infant mortality rate 15 times higher than ours) or sixth-place South Africa (where the rape rate is among the highest in the world) is something you'll have to ask the experts."

Read the rest here.

Christin Hoff Sommers, in her book Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women, makes basically the same case using many examples of how second wave feminism uses the natural sympathy most people have for the underdog plus a plethora of misleading statistics and dishonest accusations to build a case for its radical agenda.

Behind the rage against "inequality" and "oppression" is a deliberate attempt to undermine traditional morality, intimidate opponents and overthrow Judeo-Christian morality and the traditional family structure including marriage. The drive for same-sex marriage is largely powered by this Marxist-Feminist ideology and Christians are going to get nowhere until they lose their shyness about confronting Feminism as the anti-child, anti-family, anti-human movement that it actually is.

The time for being intimidate is long past and the time to resist is here, unless we are prepared to have our children grow up in a society in which liberty has been extinguished in the name of Statist tryanny.