Tragedy in North Carolina! That was the message of at least one headline reporting on data produced on the Tar Heel State and the NOW’s annual conference there. The information came from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research’s analysis of economic, political and health data on women in North Carolina as part of its state-by state ratings of women’s welfare. Reporters on the IWPR’s data eagerly played up the bad news – the state’s women earn only 83 cents for every dollar earned by men, 20% of NC women get by without health insurance, 40% of the state’s women have never entered a college classroom, and the like. A tragedy indeed.
But is it? Unlike most feminist publications, the IWPR’s executive summary of its findings was mostly upbeat, as it should be, given the data on women in North Carolina. That’s because, despite the hue and cry from NOW and others, even in this time of economic crisis, the news on women, at least compared to men, is almost uniformly good. Put simply, women outstrip men in essentially every category studied, except one, with which I’ll deal in more detail later.
Political participation? Women go to the ballot box in numbers that far outpace men’s. In the 2008 and 2010, women outvoted men 53.7% to 46.3% and 52.8% to 47.2% nationwide. In the last presidential election year, a whopping 10 million more women voted than did men. Why the difference? The IWPR doesn’t go into that, but the fact that women live on average almost six years longer than men surely accounts for some of it; more women means more women voters.
But there’s another factor at work. There are currently about 2.3 million people incarcerated in federal and state penitentiaries in this country, millions more are out of prison but on parole or probation and over 90% of all those are men. Almost none of those men can vote. Only two states, Maine and Vermont, allow the incarcerated to vote. All the rest deny the right to vote during the period of incarceration and 35 states continue to deny it after the person is released on parole or probation.
Of course, no one forces a man to commit a crime, so if more men commit crimes, more will be incarcerated and more will lose their right to vote. But one of the justice system’s more outrageous secrets is that court’s leniency toward females convicted of criminal wrongdoing. Although men and women use marijuana in about equal numbers, some 90% of those in prison for minor drug offenses are male. Indeed, one of the several studies showing radical sex bias in sentencing revealed that being male is equivalent to being black in the harshness of sentencing. No wonder there are so many black males in state custody.
Health insurance coverage? The Henry J. Kaiser Foundation has found that men make up 55% of those without health insurance. And sure enough, in North Carolina and the nation generally, a greater percentage of men (26% in North Carolina and 25% in the U.S.) go without health insurance than do women (21% and 19% respectively).
Education? Remember that some 40% of North Carolina’s women have a high school diploma or less, but the figure for the state’s men is 45%. And among college enrollees and graduates, women in the state as well as the nation far outstrip men with 60% of women but only 55% of men having “some college” or more, all the way up to a Ph.D.
Employment? As in the country at large, in North Carolina, women are far more likely than men to work in managerial or professional jobs. Some 40% of the state’s female employees work in those jobs; on the national level, the figure is comparable. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a hefty 51.5% of professional, managerial and related jobs are now held by women.
But according to some, the above situation isn’t good news for women, it’s “tragic.” By any stretch of the imagination, the news is worse for men, but NOW and the articles on the IWPR data manage to spin the data as dark days for women.
That’s true of several articles recently claiming that the economic downturn, and the halting recovery have uniquely disadvantaged women. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that men have lost almost four times the number of jobs women have, but, as part of this election year’s political rhetoric about a “War on Women,” that fact never gets mentioned. As of July of this year, there were 1.9 million fewer Americans employed than there were on average during 2008. Of those who were no longer working, about 1.5 million were men and 400,000 were women. Both sexes were less well off, but it was men who suffered the brunt of the layoffs.
Speaking of jobs, it continues to be true that women earn less than men. In North Carolina, the earnings gap between the sexes stands at 17%. The figures vary depending on who’s using them, but they’re often unquestioningly cited for the propositions that (a) women are disadvantaged by society and (b) government must do something about it. Neither is true.
As countless studies have shown, two major factors explain women’s lower earnings – women tend to do less paid work and they tend to work at lower paying jobs than do men. We’re often told that “women who work full time still earn less than men who work full time.” That’s true because the definition of “full time” is 35 hours per week or more. So a woman who works 35 hours a week will predictably earn less than a man who works 50 hours a week. There’s nothing nefarious about that and it’s nothing the woman can’t remedy just by changing her own behavior. Again, a brief trip to the website for the BLS bears this out.
Likewise, women tend to fill the ranks of lower paying jobs. The jobs typically thought of as “women’s jobs” – teaching, nursing, secretary/clerical and retail sales – while respectable occupations, aren’t exactly the cream of the crop when it comes to earning potential. Remember those “professional and managerial” jobs? Teaching is one of those and close to 80% of primary and secondary school teachers are women.
It’s not that women are lazy; they just tend to have different priorities than men do. Perhaps the most important of those priorities is caring for children. Study after study and countless data sets show women taking time off from work – often many years – to stay home with their children until they reach a certain level of maturity. Those are legitimate choices freely made, but they obviously have an adverse impact on women’s earnings, a fact well-known to the women who make them.
There is no tragedy about the lot of women in the United States. In essentially all areas of life except earnings, they’re far outstripping men, and their lower earnings are a product of their own choices that they’re free to change at any time. Meanwhile, men find themselves holding the short end of the equality stick in at least a dozen different areas about which I’ll write more at a later date.
