Myth About Gender Equality

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2011/01/women-equality-hakim-choice

The myth of the "myth" of gender equality

Posted by Laurie Penny - 08 January 2011 10:53

The Daily Mail gets excited about yet another attempt to put women in their place.

Lay down your placards, ladies: the fight for equality is over and we can all go back to the kitchen. The Centre for Policy Studies has just released a "study" entitled "Feminist myths and magic medicine" that claims that there is no evidence that men are paid more than women, that where there is evidence of sex discrimination, that evidence doesn't matter, and that inequality is okay because some women actually choose it. Predictably, the Daily Mail has gone mental, expansively declaring the joyful news that "gender equality is a myth".

The report's author, Dr Catherine Hakim, has spent several years positioning herself as the only academic who can save this sick society from the scourge of feminism, one terrifyingly painted-on eyebrow permanently cocked at what she calls the "feminist myths" of equality legislation and "family-friendly" employment policies, presenting her table-rattling propaganda for right-wing think tanks as objective academic research. Hakim, who may or may not have actually met another woman, is best known as the face of "preference theory", the wildly original notion that differences in work outcomes between men and women in the developed world are not the result of enormous, straining patriarchal guns held to the head of every single female in the job market, but because women and girls make "substantively different career choices" from men, opting for part-time work and shorter hours that better enable them to juggle paid work with the pressures of childrearing that still fall largely upon the shoulders of women. It is a sad indictment of the state of modern gender relations that this is seen, by Hakim and her many breathless devotees in the right-wing press, as some sort of...