Feminism: pending
agenda and
pseudoproblems
International Women's Day
Roxana Kreimer
@RoxanaKreimer
@feminiscience
@feminisciencia
The International Women's Day is an
occasion to raise demands such as the
decriminalization of abortion, but also to
point out pseudoproblems such as the wage
gap, the underrepresentation of women in
hierarchical positions of companies and in
technical careers, the exhibition of the female
body as synonymous with reification (in times
when the feminine intellectual virtues are
widely recognized), and the assumption that
in the West we still live in a patriarchy.
Let's start with the wage gap. There is no
evidence that women charge 73% less for
similar tasks. Analysis of the data from Argentina shows that the gap is due to men working an average of ten hours more per week, as shown by a study by Martín González Rozana based on the Permanent Household Survey, a figure consistent with the figures of Eurostat, which shows that in Europe there are 772,900 men and 2,04 million women with a part-time contract. The moment when people have children is the key to understanding this problem. At the age when women become mothers, the average salary drops by 20% according to a Danish study by Søgaard and colleagues (2007), and when they don´t have children it is 8% higher than that of men and that that of mothers, according to a study by Manes Chung for Reach Advisors.
There are single-parent households, but it is not taken into account if the reduction of working time away from home is compensated by the economic contributions of the woman's partner. In some countries the single mother receives subsidies, and while they don´t appear as a payment for reproductive work, they prevent the family from falling into poverty.
Because they abandon all or part of their employment in crucial years for the career, many women have difficulties in ascending to hierarchical positions, but in the Scandinavian countries there are between 6 and 18% of women in hierarchical positions of private companies, compared to 38% in the U.S. Apparently, this is because Scandinavians are better off economically, and women prefer to stay at home when they have children, which is corroborated by a 2015 Gallup poll in which 56% of women in the U.S. say they would prefer not to work outside their home when they have children under 18 years old. Those who want to combine motherhood and work should have more day care centers, long-term parental leaves and perhaps a direct retribution for their reproductive work.
There is cross-cultural evidence that on average women have different priorities and interests. They choose more works focused on people and not on things, a difference that has a biological origin and interacts with culture, but that is not a destination nor constitutes the excuse of any researcher to discriminate against groups or individuals. Despite this, almost all feminism denies innate predispositions, against the evidence of a profuse scientific literature, implicitly suggesting that women should have the same preferences as men. If they are overrepresented in a discipline, nobody bothers. If the overrepresented are men, they blame patriarchy.
The historian Helen Pluckrose believes that in the West we no longer live in a patriarchy: we have to solve specific problems that men and women suffer. Whe should also try to understand how culture and biology interact, but if we omit one ofboth, the diagnoses on gender issues will be wrong. Truth is not sexist. If we want to change the world, we must first understand it.
