Today’s #Slatepitch: Gender Injustice Is Over!

I quite enjoyed Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men, although the whole was less than the sum of the parts.  The often very smart and nuanced individual essays suffered from being wedged into the overall attention-grabbing titular framework that is obviously wrong for the reasons cited by its critics.

Rosin, alas, has doubled down on the weakest aspects of her argument. I direct you first to the excellent responses from Nora Caplan-Bricker, Katie Baker, and especially Kat Stoefell. To add a couple of points, I think this paragraph illustrates the crucial problem with Rosin’s “end of patriarchy” argument:

Coontz also makes the broader point that women, even college-educated women, continue to flock to less prestigious jobs. She points out that woman are even more concentrated now than they were before in the professions of legal secretary or “managers of medicine and health occupations.” We can call the pattern of women’s jobs by its old, disparaging name, “gender segregation,” and insist on seeing it as a choice that is imposed on them. But we can also see it through a new paradigm—as Coontz in her own work has so successfully encouraged us to do vis-à-vis marriage—that acknowledges women as agents making intelligent decisions about what jobs are available in this economy. Maybe women are choosing health occupations because the health care field is booming, not because they are blindly walking—or being led—into a female ghetto.

The key analytical error here is the assumption that if women are rational agents able to make choices that make sense for them then the patriarchy must have been vanquished. But this isn’t true: women, like men, “make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” This analysis doesn’t explain why the more rational choice to enter high-demand employment fields offers fewer rewards when these fields are dominated by women. The eligible women who make family choices that make it less likely to, say, be selected as Supreme Court clerks may be making choices that make sense to them, but it remains true that nobody would ever dream of writing a cover story for the Atlantic wondering how Antonin Scalia could “have it all” by raising 9 kids while being a successful academic and appellate judge. That’s what we call, er, patriarchy.

As Coontz says, it’s remarkably implausible that the gross underrepresentation of women among the financial elite of the United States is simply the result of free choices made by women. And to assume that the greater success of women in school will inevitably result in women outpacing men economically as well is begging the question. (Of course, if the latter ends up not following from the former, Rosin’s argument isn’t really falsified because it’s tautological; if most CEOs remain men this must be because women just don’t want the jobs for reasons that have nothing to do with assumptions that women should bear the brunt of the work at home.)

Her response to the point made my numerous critics about the ongoing underrepresentation of women in Congress has similar problems:

The 2012 elections inspired a similar reactionary response in some quarters. A record number of women were elected to Congress, and women were critical to Obama’s re-election, particularly single women.* And yet soon after the election, the New York Times published as its lead op-ed a study by two academics showing that women would not truly reach parity or be in a position to pass women-friendly policies until they controlled half of all congressional seats. This seems true enough, if a little obvious. But it entirely missed the revolutionary shift the moment marked. There was a group marginalized in the election: white men. They voted en masse for Mitt Romney, and lost.

First of all, the whole argument is just a non-sequitur. Leaving aside the fact that Romney got 52% of the male vote — not really “en masse” [UPDATE: as a commenter notes, the claim was about “white men,” where the 62% is closer to en masse. Evidently, the more important rejoinders still apply. And of course Romney won white women too…] — under current political conditions women will be more likely than men to prefer one candidate to another and sometimes the women’s favorite candidate will win; this doesn’t really address the fact that political office is a field that remains dominated by men. Moreover, the presidential election isn’t the only election that took place in 2012. Yes, the GOP’s rape philosophers lost races they otherwise would have won, a real sign of progress. On the other hand, the House of Representatives is controlled by Republicans with a nearly monolithical commitment to values identical to Akin’s only expressed with a little more discipline. And the statehouses! Just start with #1 on Stoeffel’s list. If the 2014 midterms result in the GOP taking over the Senate, will Rosin concede that the patriarchy is alive and kicking? Kicking women in their reproductive and civil rights?