The Week Of The Whining Womin

The logic is as simple as it is foolproof. An “air-tight free-market argument,” according to WND: “If women with the same skills as men were getting only 78 cents for every dollar a man earns, men as a group would have long-since priced themselves out of the market. That entrepreneurs don’t ditch men en masse for women suggests that different abilities and experience are at work, rather than a conspiracy to suppress women.”

The logic is not, however, female proof.

It’s been the week of the weaker sex: filled with baseless whining. The Week of the Womin culminated with Facebook billionaire Sheryl Sandberg grumbling to Fox News millionaire Megyn Kelly: “I think it’s good that the president took some steps on equal pay, but it’s not enough.”

About women’s work Sandberg holds humdrum feminist views. She learned the hard way, having dared, at first, to share the aggregate reality she had encountered in the workplace: Men were wont to be as driven as demons. Women needed to be driven. For that observation, the Pussy Riot Sisterhood threatened to sandbag Sandberg. Facebook’s chief operating officer quickly corrected course. Ms. Sandberg started mouthing the only acceptable meme: Saddle “society” and the “patriarchy” for any and all female failures and preferences.

As her politically pleasing, mainstream opinion currently has it, society and the patriarchy have conditioned women to be nurturing and to apologize for any male-like, go-getter ambitions they harbor. While men will attribute their success to their own core skills; women “attribute their success to luck and help from other people,” carps Sandberg. The girls are too nice. They don’t take credit for their greatness. They don’t raise their hand enough. They don’t “Lean In”—the trite title of Sandberg’s serialized book. Yes, there’s a follow up for advanced nudniks.

While she should seldom be taken seriously, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was perfectly serious when she too, in 2012, inveighed against the same debunked myth of “income disparity between men and women” that Democrat Sandberg is perpetuating.

For their part, Republicans will seldom deploy economic logic to dispel distaff America’s claims of disadvantage. To counter Pelosi, Republicans called on a teletart who is front-and-center on GOP TV because in possession of what TV takes: Big hair, big boobs and Chiclets for teeth—a pretty package that more than compensates for a lack of cerebral agility or originality. (Yes, why is it that nobody dares to comment on the overwhelming, overweening dominance the fair sex has in the anchor’s chair? Does anyone imagine that this advantage is bestowed at Fox Business, because “Kennedy” is more brilliant than Judge Andrew Napolitano? The reader doesn’t need me to spell out the profit-generating advantages women hold in visual media.)

Although this column did not name her at the time, one Michelle Fields, I believe, “pioneered” the tit-for-tat, rudderless case the Republicans excel at making on wage parity. Incapable of argument, Fields thus condemned Pelosi—not for her bogus theory of pay inequality, but for her hypocrisy. Pelosi, it was revealed, had been silent about Democratic senators who were paying women staffers less than male staffers.

The lesson is equally applicable to the revelation, this week, that women working in the “executive mansion” are also getting paid less, on average, than their male counterparts. As this column advised in 2012 (well before Chuckie Krauthammer cottoned on), the T & A Republican TV contingent ought to have responded as follows:

“We’re glad that Barack Obama has finally understood that the length of time a woman has been in the workplace, her age, experience, education; whether she has put her career on hold to marry and mother—all factor into the wage equation. Good for you, Mr. President, for showing in practice that you comprehend that women are more likely than men to have had an interrupted career trajectory and to opt for part-time and lower-paying professions—education instead of engineering, for example.”

Now, Mr. President, please put down your pay-parity executive order and step away from that pen, slowly.