With
another in a series of executive orders, President Obama on
March 11 created a “White House Council on Women and Girls.”
Having been advised that female CEOs run only three percent
of the Fortune 500 companies, and that women earn 78 cents
for every dollar that men earn in comparable jobs (about which
more later), the president wants some two dozen department heads
to help remedy those deficiencies in the name of “fulfill[ing]
the promise of democracy for all our people.”
Before signing the Council creation document, President
Obama
described the new panel as having “a mission that dates back
to our founding,” and quoted former Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright to the effect that “responsibility for the advancement
of women is not the job of any one agency; it’s the job of all of
them.”
Some people love the initiative. Others
question its usefulness, suggesting that ambition should be
made of sterner stuff. Despite the grandiose rhetoric with which
the president welcomed his latest creation into the fold, the new
council is lower in the political pecking order than a
blue-ribbon presidential commission staffed with marquee names
like former HP CEO Carly Fiorina or current Xerox CEO Anne
Mulcahy would have been. If the Balrog of Bad Intentions comes
calling, the council may not be strong enough to shout “You shall
not pass!” without sounding like a hobbit holding a Russian
dictionary and a badly-translated “reset” button.
The East Room was jammed for the signing ceremony.
Interestingly, the guest list released by the White House
revealed that professional advocates for abortion comprised
the largest single group of attendees after politicians.
Pretty words about fairness for all could not obscure the fact
that the president pitched most of his remarks to the pro-choice
wing of “grievance feminism.” As a result, representatives from
influential contrarian groups like Feminists for Life, Concerned
Women for America, and the Independent Women’s Forum were nowhere
to be found.
Outside the field of dreams where “Clueless Joe” Biden roams the
baselines looking for a fly ball with which to try out his new
glove, all of Washington now knows that only a fairy godmother
and a pair of talking mice will get pro-life feminists to
official functions of the Obama administration. William McGurn of
the Wall Street Journal described
the new environment as condescending to “any American woman
deemed insufficiently progressive on the received wisdom.”
Although the White House council is supposed to improve the lot
of all women, EMILY’s List thumped Susan B. Anthony’s.
If you’re unfamiliar with those lobbying groups, the contrast in
their names deserves scrutiny: Pro-life
feminists find inspiration in the example of a real woman,
while people who fundraise in the name of abortion rights
identify themselves with a cynical acronym (“Early
Money Is Like Yeast”).
For President Obama, anti-abortion arguments are abstractions to
which lip service must be paid for the sake of maintaining
bipartisan appearances. Not surprisingly, the president and his
inner circle treat pro-life views either as rebukes to be laughed
off by underlings or as tools by which annoying conservatives
keep trying to thwart political appointments and plans for
universal health care.
Think back to Animal Farm and assume for the sake of
argument that some women are more equal than others. George
Orwell’s unvarnished distillation of what happens when socialist
theory meets socialist practice explains why pro-life women
are rightly regarded as threats to the increasingly
tattered
myth that pro-abortion politicians actually advance the
pro-life cause.
Having already moved to
rescind a rule that allowed health care workers to opt out of
abortion counseling if it violated their beliefs, and knowing
that a lawyer
with a history of defending pornographers would be
confirmed to the number two post in the Justice Department,
President Obama had no desire to draw renewed attention to
questions about how those decisions or unprincipled
leadership at the Department of Health and Human Services might
impact the lives of American women and girls.
Fortunately, the president keeps his flunkies numbered for just
such an occasion, and one or more of them had briefed the senior
teleprompter on the “78 cents for women to every dollar earned by
men” statistic.
That particular ratio has become a teddy bear for
people whose definition of “comparable jobs” sometimes stretches
enough to mix pilots with Pilates instructors. Other researchers
do honest work, but fail to account for the impact of things like
maternity leave and sex segregation by occupation. “Due
diligence” in this administration does not necessarily involve
looking into different points of view, else someone might
also have noticed that while a pay gap between men and women
does exist, several studies have pegged it at considerably less
than 22 cents on the dollar.
Columnist Ilana
Mercer was not at the ceremony, but asked the kind of
economically-informed question that rarely percolates up through
discussions of pay equity: If women with the same skills as men
were getting only 78 cents for
every dollar a man earns, wouldn’t men have long-since priced
themselves out of the job market? The fact that men haven’t done
that might mean that different abilities and experiences are at
work, Mercer guessed, “rather than a conspiracy to suppress
women.”
Mercer’s glass slipper of a response to equity issues will not
fit anyone in the Obama administration, but it still attracts
more positive attention than Christina Hoff Summers’ argument
that boys rather than girls need help, thanks to a culture that
derides men as oafs, and an educational system that considers
masculinity the root of intolerance.
Governor Sarah Palin, abortion survivor Gianna Jessen,
and radio host Laura Ingraham all have a better shot at honorary
membership on the White House Council for Women and Girls than
Ilana Mercer and Christina Hoff Summers do. Yet while the Obama
administration has little time for women like these, the rest of
us are not similarly hobbled, and that is reason enough to be
grateful.
