Capitalism is the ultimate women’s liberation

International Women’s Day may not have made many headlines on Monday. But let’s consider the irony of this March 8th holiday, which was first proposed by the Socialist Party of America a century ago. As it turns out, women today are thriving as never before – thanks to global capitalism.

By now, most people are probably aware of the progress made by American women. Two decades ago, about 18 percent of women in two-income families made more money than their husbands, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics. By 2007, it was 26 percent. So far, a recession that has hit men so hard it is sometimes called a man-cession has only intensified the trend. Women also start businesses at a higher rate than men do.

As a generation of girl-powered millennials comes of age, the momentum is all in women’s favor. Fifty-eight percent of college graduates are female. They make up almost half of medical and law graduates and more than 50 percent of those earning master’s degrees. The National Center for Education Statistics recently asked tenth-graders how far they expected to pursue their education: 42 percent of girls said they planned to pursue a graduate or professional degree. Just 29 percent of boys said the same.

Less widely known is that female progress is an international trend; call it the New Girl Order. Throughout the European Union, women now dominate university enrollment. In a number of European countries like Denmark, France, and Finland, over half of all women between 20 and 24 are in school. The number of countries where women constitute the majority of postgraduate degree candidates is also growing rapidly.

In fact, some management experts and psychologists believe the erstwhile second sex has an advantage in the knowledge economy. With women getting all of those university degrees, the experts may be right.

What a ditsy column.

The second sex definitely has an advantage in the socialist economy, and always has, because that is where bureaucrats are empowered to arrange us evenly, male and female, like so many, you know, flowers. I would say, from my familiarity with the education biz, that women thrive in the socialist sectors of our economy that are dependent on the capitalist sectors. Society is like a marriage: e.g., male-dominated heavy industries donate the money or have it taxed from them, and female-dominated education (private or public) spends it.

The fast-growing, high-profit areas of the knowledge economy itself are based on electronics and software design, the quantification of financial risk, and other wonky specialties. They skew heavily male, because the males who are best at quantitative thinking are so much better at it than the best females. I was a little disappointed to see Kay cite that old "women start more companies than men" thing, which has always been true, since the statistic equates starting a dog-walking business with starting Dell or Apple or Microsoft.

What isn't addressed directly in this column is the sterility of the New Girl Order. The birth rate associated with these women is so low—marrying late or not at all, and bearing few children—that their descendants will people less and less of the future, losing out to the women of more primitive cultures. And in their own lifetimes, the New Girls' families, or their unmarried selves, will be less and less protected against random violence and intimidation, since their bonds with adult males are relatively superficial.

In short, without deregulation and a massive bureaucracy-ectomy in the West, Western society becomes one of those bumper stickers: "What if they created a utopia of sexual equality and nobody showed up?" Only free-market capitalism—without the cutesy-pie, girl-promoting regulations—actually makes money. And only in the capitalist West are women respected as men's spiritual equals, and their children protected. As opposed to women and children being treated like cattle, as they are in the primitive world.

Capitalism less oppressed by the state is a healthy mean between the grimy thuggishness of the primitive world and the doomed tyranny of subsidized equality.

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