Reparations for women
Since every dubious idea expands these days, you have to ask
My most recent column looks at the issue of reparations. The idea, I wrote, is “like a bad sci-fi movie where our future selves have to travel back in time in order to mine resources necessary to survive."
But if reparations. should be made toward people who have had fewer opportunities and less pay because of discrimination, why not include women?
As a woman, I’ve been paid less than men for the same job. Like generations of American women before me, I was denied opportunities casually tossed to men younger and less experienced than I was.
I’ve been called every name in the book of demeaning terms for women. Predators have physically assaulted me.
In general, women make less money than men and we of a certain age were robbed of equal opportunities, but over the years women have made great advances and prestigious professions drift from white collar to pink.
Affirmative action helped open doors; now, while I wouldn’t say that sexism has been banished from the workplace, today women rule many roosts and have leadership roles in new media. Watch a White House briefing — with a usually distaff spokesperson and press corps from both genders — and you see nothing like the briefings I watched early in my career.
It would be hard to squeeze reparations for women from men because – well, until recently anyway – men couldn’t procreate without women. So it’s hard to target one gender.
I believe that as a group, Black men and women in America have had to climb a steeper, rockier path – with its own particular, cutting pain – than White women.
I also know that when she ran for president in 1972, Shirley Chisholm, a black Democrat, stated she had “met much more discrimination in terms of being a woman than being black, in the field of politics.” Thanks to the gains educated women have made since then, I don’t think Black women running for the White House would repeat that assertion. (Feel free to chime in if you think I’m wrong.)
Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor famously wrote, “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest [in student body diversity] approved today.” And yet, more than two decades later, supporters of racial preferences argue that they remain necessary.
Thoughts?
Debra J. Saunders is a fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Chapman Center for Citizen Leadership.
Yes. During my career I have been affected by the guy thing, the gay thing and the female thing. The guy thing is too numerous to mention but to be passed over for a promotion to someone's kid whose father happens to be the vice president of the company (not a family run business) made people mad for me but in the end nothing happened. It is called life................
There's a legal adage that translates from the Latin that "the inclusion of one thing is the exclusion of everything else." That defines affirmative action as it has been used perfectly. Under historic affirmative action, Arthur Ashe, who grew up on Long Island, would have been given a preference over Sam Huff, who grew up around coal mines in PA as I recall. That's not to demean either of these men but only as an illustration of what pure reliance on skin color could achieve. The best illustration I can think of for the diminution of all women is the movie "Hidden Figures."