Global Gender Gap Report III: Women’s Advocacy = Gender Neutrality
I've dealt with the categories of Education, and Health and Survival in the Global Gender Gap Report, which I assume Barbara Kay would prefer I call the Global Women's Interests Gap Report, since that would be less misleading. But I think I won't. Here it is again (WEForum, 2009).
The Report includes two other categories, Economic Participation and Opportunity, and Political Empowerment. It also includes a miscellaneous category called Additional Data. Frankly, I'm not sure where they came up with some of these numbers. For example, the Report informs us that, in the U.S., 56% of Professional and Technical workers are women and 44% are men, which sounds fishy to me, but I'm not here to quibble. (By the way, check out the page for the U.S. and you'll see that that 56:44 ratio, as with all others favoring women, is defined as equality.)
For all its categories, the Report records "outcomes," which means they don't inquire into the whys and wherefores of the data. They admit that upfront, and I don't have any problem with it, but no one reading the Report should forget what it is they're reading. So when the Report says that men in the United States outearn women, that's reported as unequal, which it is, but what produces that outcome - women's choices about what jobs to work at and how long to work at them - is ignored.
Likewise, the Report shows data on Political Empowerment, which records how many women have held elective and appointive offices in the past 50 years. So outcomes in democratic and non-democratic countries alike get the same treatment. In the United States, for example, relatively few women have been elected to office including no female heads of state. But those facts obscure others, like women having had the vote here for almost 90 years, and that they vote in greater numbers than do men, but resolutely don't vote for female candidates.
The Report's exclusive attention to outcomes has the feel of neutrality. It's a snapshot of what exists at a particular time and nothing more. That would be fair enough if the authors stuck to it, but they don't. For at the same time they announce that the report is merely a neutral snapshot, they turn to frankly pro-female advocacy. The Preface itself is an extended paean to women's empowerment, pronouncing it "long overdue."
That too would be fine. If someone wants to advocate for greater women's rights worldwide, it won't upset me in the least. Certainly, there are many places in the world in which women are treated abominably, at least according to my way of thinking. But the Report wants it both ways - to pose as a set of neutral data and a piece of advocacy too. And as we've seen, the data are anything but neutral.
One look at the "Additional Data" category will disabuse even the casual reader of any notion that this Report is a balanced look at the wellbeing of the sexes worldwide. It's a radically biased look at one sex - women - that's doggedly determined to find them holding the short end of the stick.
As but one example, the Additional Data section includes information on whether a nation has "legislation punishing acts of violence against women." Here's some top secret information for the Report's authors - every nation has such legislation. Every nation has laws against murder, rape, assault, battery, etc. Indeed, some poor misguided souls like me actually believe that laws against personal violence that apply to and protect both males and females should be considered "equality" in that area of law.
But we'd be wrong. In order to achieve the Report's Orwellian concept of "equality," a country must have special laws which benefit only women. Therefore, having laws benefiting only women constitutes equality; having laws that benefit both sexes equally constitutes inequality. This is the world the authors inhabit and in which they invite us to join them. I think I'll pass.
"Additional Data" is the category which you might expect to include such chestnuts as the ratio of men to women killed in war or on the job. It might include incarceration rates, suicide rates, homelessness, drug and alcohol addiction, child custody, involuntary military servitude, and countless others. After all, those are not exactly irrelevant to the equality or wellbeing of the sexes. But the report makes no mention of them at all. And that alone reveals the anti-male bias of the Global Gender Gap Report. Reporting those figures would show that, far from being the uniformly privileged sex, men in many parts of the world and in many walks of life are anything but. From the industrialized world to the third world, men suffer their own inequalities in literally dozens of different areas.
The title, the "Global Gender Gap Report," sounds neutral and balanced. Its contents are anything but. When it's not spinning anti-male inequality as the affirmative good called "equality," the Global Gender Gap Report ignores anti-male inequality altogether.
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