An article came out recently in the New York Times about women in the workplace. Has there been a feminist regression in the last fifteen years? Why are women working/earning/living less large now than in other decades since the feminist revolution? The author, Stephanie Coontz, sets out to answer these questions, using lots of illuminating statistics. Americans love statistics! Americans love actor Jennifer Lawrence, too. I’ve never seen her movies. But her deft, no B.S. handling of inane press questions (and Jack Nicholson) after this year’s Oscars ceremony sure won me over. I’ll distill the latest analysis of gender equality by impersonating how Lawrence might interpret the role of Coontz.
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-Why has the gender revolution “hit a wall?” Are you kidding me? America is the biggest douche on the globe when it comes to equal pay and policies that support working families.* Plus, many women find themselves doing most of the stuff at home as well as most of the stuff at work. That’s a double workload, so in my calculus, they should retire in half the time.
-What was running through my mind as I just answered that? A bad word. Instead of saying women do most the “stuff,” I was going to say another word that starts with an S.
-Am I worried that Gender Equality has peaked too soon? Well now I am, geez!! No, seriously, of course not! As I write in my New York Times piece, “let’s stop arguing about the hard choices women make and help more women and men avoid such hard choices. To do that we must stop seeing work-family policy as a women’s issue and start seeing it as a human rights issue that affects parents, children, partners, children, and elders.” I mean honestly, what do you expect working parents to do with their kids when they’re out of school all summer? Send them to Screen Camp?  Sorry, I did a shot before I came out. God. So embarrassing!!
*Clarification: America shares the latter indistinction with Suriname, Palau, Nauru, Western Samoa, and Tonga. Is that on purpose? Absolutely.
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