Yes, Virginia, There Is a Gender Gap

Yes, Virginia, there is a gender gap. In fact, there are two gender gaps: one bad and one good.

The bad gender gap is that the biggest losers in the Obama economy are men rather than women. This is a fact that is bad for men, for families, for the federal deficit, federal debt problems and for the health of the U.S. economy. Men have lost twice as many jobs as women.

The 9.1 percent unemployment figure is not a good measure of the problem. The most important factor is that 20 percent of American men (1 in 5) are not in the workforce.

Those 20 percent are not all included in the unemployment figure. Some have just dropped out of the count and are no longer looking for a job, maybe depending on the paychecks of their wives, girlfriends or parents. And some are drawing disability (a number that has doubled in recent years).

Most adults can remember the days when we had an economy where a man could work a job, professional or blue-collar, that paid well enough to support his wife as a full-time homemaker and buy a house for his family. Since millions of those good jobs have been outsourced to China and other low-wage countries, the husband is now lucky if he gets a $10-an-hour job and sends his wife out to look for a job.

We've lost an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs every month over the last ten years. We are now supporting 44 million Americans on food stamps.

I hope men are not counting on President Obama's much ballyhooed jobs plan to get them back to work. Our first feminist president, Barack Obama will always toady to feminist demands, like when he responded to their public tantrum by giving women the majority of his stimulus jobs.

The National Economic Council report "Jobs and Economic Security for America's Women" recites some of the many ways the Obama administration is getting jobs for women. The report promises that President Obama "is committed to continuing the push for an economy that provides economic security and jobs for America's women."

You read that right. The Obama administration is committed to finding jobs for women, not men. This is a goal that is steadily pursued by sex-based affirmative action, grants to feminist organizations and feminist projects, and means-tested welfare that subsidizes non-marriage, making husbands and fathers irrelevant. The U.S. now has a 41 percent illegitimacy rate, which means taxpayers rather than husbands are supporting the kids.

This is all in line with feminist goals ever since Betty Friedan's 1963 book invited homemakers to escape from the home, which she labeled "a comfortable concentration camp." And don't forget that the most credentialed feminist of all, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, wrote in her 1977 book "Sex Bias in the U.S. Code" that the concept of husband breadwinner and wife homemaker "must be eliminated."

The White House Council on Women and Girls issued a report called "Women in America." In proudly commenting about this report, Obama repeated one of the favorite feminist whines: that "women still earn on average only about 75 cents for every dollar a man earns."

Well, so what? The American people believe, and federal law requires, (set ital) not (end ital) "equal pay" (that's a Communist notion), but "equal pay for equal work." And women, on average, are not doing work equal to men's.

The scholar Kay Hymowitz has once again demolished the feminist argument about wage discrimination in a new article in the City Journal. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, BLS, defines full-time work as 35-hours-a-week "or more."

The BLS reports that 27 percent of male full-timers have workweeks of 41 hours or more, but only 15 percent of females do. Hymowitz says statistics and comparisons of various categories shows how women, on average, choose fewer hours of work and less demanding specialties after they train for various careers such as being a surgeon or a pharmacist.

The reason women choose fewer hours and less demanding specialties, and then earn less than men do, is that some, maybe most of them have babies, and most mothers prefer the mommy track. Despite the long-running feminist propaganda that baby care is a demeaning job for an educated women and that this burden, imposed by the patriarchy, should be lifted from their shoulders by the taxpayers, most women still want time off from a workforce job to be with their children.

The feminists are at war with Mother Nature, and she is still winning. Polls show that 60 percent of employed mothers who have minor children prefer part-time work, and 19 percent would like to give up their workforce job altogether.

The gender gap the feminists gripe about is a good gender gap because it gives babies what they need most -- personal care by their own mother.

I always find it amusing that feminism was created by the sort of person that females would find abhorrent then and now but hailed and accepted as ‘empowering’ despite its wanton destruction of families and the very people it claimed to be helping.

We've lost an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs every month over the last ten years. We are now supporting 44 million Americans on food stamps.

This is a really important statement. The best way to create wealth, take raw materials, add labor, and produce a product that can be sold for a profit. Everything else is smoke and mirrors.

America is now sending raw materials to other countries, using their labor to produce a product, and the profit is staying in the other countries, or with the middlemen. All this gets us is cheap goods and unemployed workers at home.

Another thing to 'thank' the unions for...

It's not all the fault of the unions. There are plenty of business "consultants" who made the rounds of big business, collecting fat seminar fees, to recommend outsourcing as a way to boost profits. This has been going on for more than 20 years, and they should be ashamed. And the schools who tout that everyone must go to college are further to blame and further share the shame.

Now, businesses that remain can barely hire a machinist under 60 -- at least one that wants to remain a machinist. Transmission specialists? Rare as hen's teeth, yet there are good jobs out there just waiting. Electronic assembly. Quality assurance. Everybody wants their kid to be an attorney, or a stockbroker.

There is plenty of blame to go around.

And what happens to the businesses who outsourced all that work? A lot of them are trying to pull it back, but there is no dependable work force any more.

“America is now sending raw materials to other countries, using their labor to produce a product, and the profit is staying in the other countries, or with the middlemen. All this gets us is cheap goods and unemployed workers at home”
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Hey that’s unfair! US CEO’s have created many jobs in this country. (Some listed below) Because when a 10K sq ft mansion, two beach houses, a yacht, and a Porsche for the 16 year old child is simply not enough... You MUST send another factory to China!

Mexican pool boy
Mexican gardener
Nicaraguan cook
Swedish nanny
Chinese math tutor

Oh... and don’t forget.... Swiss banker....

many more... too many to list here.....

They wouldn’t be sending all the factories overseas in our regulatory burden wasn’t on par with that of the former Soviet Union...

Some, yes. But not the high-value moneymakers.

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