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Decline gender field

thank you and thank you so much the Aspen ideas festival really grateful to be here with you folks and appreciate the opportunity to be a little bit of the countercultural or minority in terms of our ideas here Mona Sharon is a senior fellow at the ethics in Public Policy Center she's an author and columnist and host of her podcasts need to know prior to her current position she was a speechwriter for Nancy Reagan and also worked with the Reagan White House Public Affairs Office she's the author of two books but her newest book is this book sex matters which just came out in June Newsday Tuesday and in the interest of the kind of conversation that we're going to be having about including issues of work/life balance and having it all she is married to Robert Parker and mother to three sons who is here tonight and with that I think we will jump right into it I think the first thing that we're gonna be discussing obviously we're talking about the relevance of feminism today and and what American women think about feminism and why that might be and I think it would be amiss to start the conversation without noting that the overwhelming majority 2/3 of American women reject the label feminists what does that say about feminism about its relevance today to American women so usually when people introduce this statistic the response is well there must be something that these women are not in touch with they don't realize their own best interests and it's up to us to show them that they really should be found this because being feminists is what it means to be Pro woman and but I think that the polling is telling us something it is telling us that the image that feminism has in the wider public is of and if you go down into the polls you will see the responses that people think that feminists are too extreme that they're anti male they're anti family and so those are some of the critiques that I have also had feminism while I completely endorse a lot of the reforms that feminism had a role in introducing into our society equal pay political equals of men but the feminist movement made some mistakes and we haven't grappled with that we have not had a reckoning about where the movement took some wrong turns and I try to lay out in the book where I think those were they fall into a few different categories and but I won't fill of us or I'll just say they endorsed the sexual revolution which was not a good idea for anybody they denigrated family life and they insisted that there are no differences between men and women which caught them up when science showed that that was just not true so they wound up in a position where they were denying science and so for those three reasons I think they they took some wrong turns and I would love to see a discussion about where they went wrong and where they can course correct we can all course correct so it's interesting because often when conservative women push back against the idea of feminism we are told that it's actually that the definition of feminism is the political social equality of the sexes and that seems to be an idea they think that everybody should be able to get behind but you point out a long history of academic feminism in this book you have an entire chapter about sort of the history of academic feminism where some of the ideas came from what you mentioned you think it went wrong where where do you think were those kind of academic or intellectual turning points where feminism split from a mere equality so Betty Ford and published The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and that was considered through the groundbreaking book that changed the world and in some ways it was although I take issue with me how much it really affected women going into the workforce it did to some degree no doubt but as I point out in this the movement of women into the workforce predated feminism predated for Dan and predated the modern feminist movement it had a lot to do I suppose with the changing economy changing from an industrial to a post-industrial or information economy which plays more to women's strengths the increasing wealth of the society greater education for women gave them more opportunities and more things to spend money on I mean for the during the 1930s and 40s people were desperately poor and didn't have the opportunity to even contemplate luxuries so so I try to put that in perspective but so Betty Ford Anne comes along and she writes her blockbuster and it's there are many things wrong with the book I was looking at the 50th anniversary edition that was recently published and it was somebody said it was a you know readable and I thought really I mean I it's about 500 pages or it felt like it and and it was it was full of anecdotes and kind of what we would now label junk science just but her big focus was getting women out of the house and into the workplace that was her goal and that was what her book was about so that's 63 1977 years later along come the really furious sorority of radical feminists who dominate the bestseller lists in 1970 you had Germaine Greer Kate Millett and Shirley meets Firestone they were beyond Betty Ford Ann and by the way it's interesting about Betty Ford and she changed her mind later she's the only one of those major second wave feminists who actually was a mother and and she later wrote a book called the second stage where she basically retracted a lot of what she had said in The Feminine Mystique but that's a footnote so these feminists the the the the more radical ones who came along in the set and in 1970 we're also part of the new left and their project was way beyond women being in the workforce or you know pay equity or things like that their agenda was to smash the patriarchy as they put it and by that they meant that all of the standards about family life had to go out the window that the family was the greatest obstacle to women's happiness and they were explicit about it and that was when the movement took a sharp wrong turn so speaking of happiness we have a lot of surveys on women's happiness going back to you the 50s 60s 70s and then on through the modern era and and you point out that arise and women's happiness did not correlate with feminist gains in fact we see more and more women telling survey surveyors that they're unhappy um I mean you point to the criticism of the family life is that because women have maybe missed out on some things that had made them happy before is it because they realized they went out into the world and into the workforce and realized it was you know not a place for women due to the patriarchy or whatever other explanation I mean you can think of a lot of different explanations for those what why do you think that women are less happy today according to these surveys than they were before most of the second wave and third wave feminists is it cold yeah so there are a number of surveys including the General Social Survey which is the biggest and most comprehensive and asks Americans a lot of questions about their subjective happiness and it's been it's been notable that since 1972 women have reported declining happiness every single year and men have reported increasing slightly increasing happiness so that they've switched places whereas in the past women were a little happier than men now they're less happy now we can't who knows I mean it's it's impossible to say what causes something so broad but I do speculate in the book that when you consider what like and what how nature made us and also the things that we see so what women are for example much more likely to be risk averse than men like investment advisors know that if they have a couple that the husband's going to be more comfortable with taking a slightly riskier bet and the wife is gonna be like I'm not so sure you know so together they make a nice balance but women are a little bit risk-averse women are you know worried more they tell pollsters that they worry about nuclear war or nuclear energy or they are they're much more worried about radical changes so when Scotland was voting on the referendum about whether to leave the EU I'm sorry the UK women came out and voted against it and and perhaps because it was it was too big of a change it was too risky and we know that all over the developed world women are more likely to vote for candidates and parties that want a strong safety net and lots of social supports so we know that women are risk-averse more risk-averse than men and obviously there are differences within that some women are more so some less of course these are all generalizations but so women are risk averse they want and need security and that seems fairly obvious why that would be we get pregnant we have babies we are kind of in need of somebody to help us out while we have young children we need husbands or someone to help us and women are very aware of their own vulnerability and in the last 40 years because of the changes that partly were brought about through because of feminism women are less secure than they used to be they are they have more opportunities for sure and and that's great but there's always a trade-off and I would not want women to be denied any opportunity that they want and I also would never say that women should all do one thing and not another that they should all stay home and be moms though I loved being a mom but but I am saying that for the average woman with marriage further out of reach with a lot of young men in our society not really growing up and not taking responsibility for themselves for their children that they father for anything really not their communities either when when men don't marry they they don't assume a lot of responsibilities in life so women are less secure and I think that accounts for why they're less happy so you critique the sexual revolution a lot in this book and so it's interesting when we talk about men and women's happiness right and and relative to each other there is a school of thought that says that the sexual revolution was a great boon to men if you think about the me2 movement and how that started out talking about Harvey Weinstein and sort of very criminal behavior right he's now had to turn himself in to the police and undergo criminal trial we started talking about that and the the kind of conclusion although it's still obviously ongoing the last huge story to kind of hit and I think that that made subsequent story is more difficult to run was a disease and sorry a story that was run by babe and a line and that story really jumped out to me right it says the the girl is telling the reporter I went in the I called an uber home and I just cried the whole way home in the uber because I felt so bad about this encounter I mean we seem to be having a debate as a society about consent and the left seems to want to push the definition of consent to be much broader than what the right would think is is traditional or the law things for example is consent do we talk about consent because we don't have a language with which to talk about hurtful sex yeah that's that's an excellent point one of the one of the ironies is that we are today we've gotten to the point in our society where we have no long linked sexual behavior with character right it used to be that somebody a man or woman who was you know used other people purely for their own pleasure and was not committed and you know there were all kinds of names for people like that some names for women some names for men but it was considered a mark of bad character and because of the sexual revolution we sort of repealed that but so when women were faced with situations where men were behaving in ways that were not rape or were not assault but they were not still not being treated right and they were still unhappy they don't have any other vocabulary that the culture gives them to protest and say this isn't working for me and I said last night but I quoted Jessica Valenti as it was a feminist but when she was talking about Disney's Ansari story she said a lot of men will read that and they'll say that's a pretty straightforward normal sexual encounter and what they don't understand is for us women it's just not working and that's one of the fundamental differences and it's something has gone very wrong when men have not been men have been misled into thinking that women are just as into you know a casual hookup as they are and it's just it leads to unnecessary disappointment and heartbreak and it's not I think that it's the enemy of love casual sex and the hookup culture so let's get to the heart of your truth claim right because a lot of what we're talking about is dependent on the idea that men and women are not just different in terms of the obvious physical differences but that we're deeply different in terms of brain structure in terms of you you mentioned risk-averse as in terms of personality traits right where is the evidence for the claim so the left will say right that this is socially constructed socially constructed and that in fact the differences that we see between men and women on average are more due to the way that society raises girls and boys then it has to do with anything inherently underlying biological what's your answer to that so look does does culture matter of course you know and and it would be crazy to say otherwise but is it everything there's a lot of reason to be skeptical about that we have abundant evidence of differences that show up between boy babies and girl babies in the first days of life before anybody's had an opportunity to program them so little girl babies are will respond more to the sound of a human in distress little boy babies will respond more to flashing lights and moving objects there are noticeable differences in sensitivity to touch in fact in this area sensitivity to touch there really isn't any overlap between men and women they're so different men men being less sensitive women being much more there some of the differences are small but some of them are not insignificant and so they show up in infancy we see them around the world and speaking of around the world if something is socially constructed then you would expect to find cultures somewhere that do it differently right wearing kilts is socially constructed it's not innate if it were we'd find it you know in New Zealand or well actually we might find it in you a bad example we'd find it in you know Kenya and and Peru but we don't okay fine but but other things like for example surveys about what people are looking for in a potential mate you can tell based only on what people say they look they look for in a mate whether with about 90 percent accuracy whether you're looking at a boy a male or female so males will say they want someone young and beautiful and females will say they want someone with resources this is true in Iran it's true in you know Chile it's true in the United States it's true everywhere and so if something is true everywhere then it's much less likely that we're looking at something that is culturally and um you you mentioned you know beauty that men are looking for the young and beautiful this actually really surprised me in your book i'm i'm a fan of fashion runways and I like reading fashion magazines so you wrote the fashion magazines of the 1950s portrayed beauty is much more attainable with effort right so they portrayed beauty as something that most women could attain with you know these five tips or whatever and it strikes me that the way that we talk about beauty today is much it's it's very there's a big dichotomy right and it seems to me to be a little bit schizophrenic we on the one hand we have an incredibly kind of airbrushed standard of beauty that seems wildly unattainable to most women and on the other we talk about beauty as though it doesn't matter at all that the only thing that matters is what's inside your character and that beauty is irrelevant to anything important in life and then with the third the third plank of kind of ideas it seemed to me to be in tension is we we made as you point out sexuality kind of the cornerstone in many ways of our identities and if sexuality is I think I'm trying to find the the quote the spiritual quest right you call it a spiritual quest we've made sexuality to be so central to our identity is that kind of necessitates a focus on attractiveness to the other sex that might not be as might not seem as existential as maybe one of many qualities if sexuality was not as central to identity yeah we've we've lost a lot of the old sources of identity and so other things are rushing in and one of them is sexuality and we have now the idea that there are many sexualities I talk about that a little bit in the book but I have to say that this is one area the way our society has evolved in the last you know 2530 years that you know when as I've been looking at it where I had a lot of sympathy for the feminist view that the the protesting against the sexualization of women using women to to advertise things and yet it's only gotten worse now there's you know modesty is completely gone and it it pains me frankly to look at Fox News which you know has made a business out of the other neighborhood never do it too but not nearly to the degree you know where the cameras down there and they're wearing short skirts and you know and you know I just I think that women's dignity rests in part upon not presenting a sexualized image to the world one of the things I cited in the book was the the gymnast Aly Raisman who posed topless for Sports Illustrated and this was before by the way all the all the news came out about about Nasser and all that but but she posed and it was sort of a semi nude yeah picture and she said she did it to show that she didn't have the body image problems you know and I thought look and I say in the book you know Angela Merkel does not take her blouse off to show she doesn't have body image problem okay and if she did no one would respect her and women have to realize that there that this matters and that the way they present themselves of course you can always get a ton of attention by dressing in a certain way but it's if you lose dignity and you lose respect so you talk about the fact that men are going to look at that picture and they're not gonna think about how proud she is of her body or her body image or see her as an empowered woman they're gonna think about sex you know I love that you actually you have my all-time favorite quote at the top of one your chapters in this book which is by Horace oh yeah you may drive nature out with a pitch for and yet she will come hurrying back how much of this nature nurture debate when we understand a little bit more and not be afraid to look at the scientific evidence and and just to observe around us in the culture the distinctions between men and women the difference is the deep differences between men and women I mean to loop back a little bit to the happiness conversation how much potential for harmony and happiness is is there in truly understanding what motivates the opposite sex right for men to understand a little bit more about what motivates women and for women to understand a little bit more about what motivates men right that's so important and one of the reasons it's so important is that if you understand that men are kind of like this you know like they're not into having long 3-hour conversations about your feelings and that there's nothing wrong with your particular husband or boyfriend that he can only last a half-hour that that just kind of why you have girlfriends and sisters and so forth it will lead to less dissatisfaction with your particular man and similarly there are traits that women have that men should be aware of and you know and obviously there are these are generalizations and I want to be clear that there's a huge amount of variety within both sexes and we've all known very mannish women and very effeminate men and that's great and you know but as a generalization it is true that we are different and we don't appreciate or honor each other and mostly I've been concerned in the last few years about the denigration of men because I think that men are really falling behind 60% of the undergraduates and universities right now are women it would be higher if they didn't practice kind of silent and for males they are falling away from the workforce they're not marrying and it's really worrisome not just for them it's worrisome for women because women want to have our creatures are bound together for even even if one is not heterosexual but the vast majority of people are our futures are bound together because we have sons we have husbands we have friends we have you know are half the planet is the opposite sex for each of us so obviously our futures are are bound together I wanted to ask you what we lose then in terms of of the dynamic between men and women and and this doesn't have to be exclusively romantic or sexual right I'm talking about the dynamic between men and women in the workplace in on the street you know on the subway and romantic relationships and friendships and and all kinds of relationships between men and women haven't lost something about the joy of the differences and kind of having a good time with those differences I mean a couple examples that kind of that I've pushed back against in my writing and I was genuinely shocked to read the interpretation of one of my favorite songs in the last few years baby it's cold outside and and this song if you haven't heard the song in the last few years has become somewhat controversial there the interpretation is that there's something that there's some kind of lack of consent that he's maybe drugging her and her drink and and to me was the conversation is the implication that they date rape in that song but what I wasn't that song I hear a beautiful illustration of kind of the dance between men and women what do we lose when the sort of model of female power goes from Liz Taylor to Liz Lemon hmm well it's also you know the one of the things that kept coming up when I talk to young people when I was researching this book is the the loss of flirtation a lot of girls in particular say they would love to flirt and get to know guys and enjoy that and it still happens I'm not saying it's yeah I'm gone but it's it's much different I mean now we're living we're living in the world of swipe right swipe left the the whole as you say the dance of courtship and and and the chase which frankly is pleasurable for both men and women is as much cruder now and a much less fun and and what we lose is the sense that we're dealing here with something that's actually incredibly profound one of the mistakes of the sexual revolution was in believing that it was not important when I got to college in the 1970s yeah they said ah it's just like a handshake or you know it's chaste makes waste and various other slogans or if you were a woman who was just gonna use a man for sex that was a great step forward for the sisterhood but the fact is that this I think is in deep denial about a fact of human nature and in fact about women's natures which it is important let's look at that story that ran into New Yorker a few months ago the cat people yeah so it showed it was fiction but its hold the deep truth this this couple get to know each other through a texting flirtation they finally go out on a date and they have sex on the first date and it's not good sex for her and she really doesn't like him anymore and this has all these mixed feelings fine okay but then he starts to communicate with her afterwards and she starts to get these texts that suddenly sound a little frightening and a little bit threatening what happened there they had sex which unleashes passions in the human heart that are sometimes dark a better that have to be dealt with that have to be controlled and to say that sex is always just a roll in the hay and it's not you know who cares and everybody should be doing it all the time and you know it doesn't you don't have to be in a relationship or the hell with commitment well you know what we're finding out misery and it's because I think we're denying something that is real and deep and if you want to know about it watch you know watch any opera you know read literature isn't some tragedy yeah hopefully that's not the case across the board in our lives so speaking about the dark side right of a man's nature that you argue was largely unleashed by the sexual revolution although it existed before but now it was sort of sanctioned by society on the flip side right I don't know so this is something that is controversial even among kind of women on the right I think but I so I'm starting to believe that feminism also encourages the worst instincts of women you write about back in the 70s oh sorry I said that feminism encourages the worst instincts or some of the worst natural instincts of women or amplifies them in some way you write about in the 70s and I'd never heard this these consciousness-raising sessions right to sort of elevate your consciousness outside of the the patriarchy constructed identity that has been left to you and and the title of it one of them was sisters I mean what what does feminism or do you think I guess the first question would be do you think that feminism encourages dark instincts and women of you know sort of resentment or dissatisfaction and and do you think that there's maybe a parallel there with the worst instincts of men different but both kind of dark sides of human nature well I do think that feminists in their hostility to men and in their willingness to cheat are all men as as as a problem so for example on most college campuses now you will hear the phrase toxic masculinity this is the thought to be the way to deal with rape and sexual assault is that we have to sort of bleach this out of men's natures and if we can do that then well of course what does that say to men says that there's something toxic about being a male and you know instead of saying most of you are great people and we know that and but but a few are bad and here are the things that we consider bad and you know that's what they are but just to call it toxic masculinity it just embitters relations between the sexes I think that one of the things that has caused a backlash and I don't recommend this but I had to do it for my research on my book the manosphere online is full of furious angry men who hate women it's missing misogyny on steroids and it's partly a reaction to what they perceive to be the the man-hating feminists so it there we need to have a lot more appreciation of masculinity that is that the best things about men so one of the things I was taught that I purposely put into this book were examples of men doing things just because that's how men are that's the best that men are so in the Aurora Colorado theater shooting when this gunman opened fire on all those people four men put their own bodies over their girlfriends to save their lives and three were killed in on the on the train in France when a terrorist came out and was firing on people six men jumped to their feet they had no they had nothing they just put their bodies in the way and they went after him that kind of self-sacrifice that kind of instinctive protectiveness toward women is exactly the sort of thing we should honor and men and that is how you channel in my judgment they are natural aggression their natural rambunctious Ness and you channel it toward goodness so you you say yeah you have a lot of aggression but you should be using it to protect the weak and you should be using it toward good and not toward god forbid hurting women or or children but you're the protector and I just think that would be a lot healthier if we had more of more appreciation among feminists for what's noble and best in men so a lot of so I think there's critique from both the right and the left of feminism for this reason it seems to address the concerns of a small minority of wealthy mostly wealthy or upper-class college-educated women who have careers rather than jobs for example it seems like there are a lot of people who are left out of that and when you talk about sort of positive role models for masculinity I think the natural next question is what happens when boys don't have that when women don't have those kinds of role models whether their husbands or at least you know committed boyfriends somebody who's committed a man who's committed to helping raise his sons and daughters but it seems that that sons really need that that role model I mean what has been the impact of feminism on the family for let's say the majority probably the majority of people but but people who aren't wealthy college-educated career-oriented and I think but they said I think the left also has that critique it's called white feminism right so I'd be interested to hear your take on that yeah one of the feminists that I quoted the book her critique of betty Friedan was bell hooks who's one of those black feminists but so it's a it's a huge subject we have created a caste system in America where the upper third the people who go to college tend to follow what sociologists call the success sequence they tend to get educated get a job get married and have children in that order and by the way they tend to stay married the old the the statistics about 50% of marriages ending in divorce not among the educated they tend to stay married that that wasn't true in 1980 but it has become true in recent decades whereas people in the the other two-thirds of America people without college degrees and especially those who drop out of high school they tend to have children before they get married lots of women in that cohort don't even feel that there are many men around who could be husbands they look at the men that they see and they're kind of wastrels you know they're not earning money and they're not I was just talking to a makeup lady just the other day at a TV studio that I was where I was talking about this book and of course we talked about the topic of my book and she talked about how hard it is to find a man who is willing to work as hard as she works and so how did that happen well one of the things that we know is that when men and what when boys and girls are raised by single parents it's much harder on the boys than on the girls the boys when they reach adulthood are much less likely to be employed they're less likely to go to college or to be ambitious they're more likely to go to jail they're more likely to have problems with alcohol and drugs the girls have problems too they're more that compared with girls who grow up with a father and mother no question but for boys in particular the fatherlessness that has been entrenched over the last several decades has been devastating and it's a vicious cycle because they didn't grow up with a male role model they didn't grow up with the unique things that fathers bring to the picture and so therefore they're not able to step up and be the kind of pillars of families themselves let me talk for just a minute about some of the uniqueness of fathering and mothering because I stress this because I think we've gotten away from that and it's really interesting so fathers and mothers bring different things to parenting and one of the things that has been noticed in the literature is that fathers have a natural tendency to roughhouse with their little boys and it turns out that the roughhousing is incredibly important for a boy's development of so control that if they don't get that they don't learn how to moderate their aggressiveness and they don't learn a lot of literally awkward stuff and they don't learn some really important lessons about life that then can get them into trouble as they get to be adolescents and big and so forth also children who have a father in their home of a there who grow up with their fathers have a lot more boys and girls have much more self-confidence are much ready or face the world then children who don't and again the boys are looking for ratification of their manliness often in bad ways when they don't have a father so we're talking now about the needs of boys but to what extent especially as a mother do you find that ideas of strict equality that feminism brings to the table and and the attendant problems or arguably attendant problems with family breakdown how much of that is the needs of adults or I shouldn't even say that needs the desires of adults slamming into the concrete needs of children and families yeah well the first thing that kids need is married parents you know it really that is overwhelmingly the thing they need so if you you know you work you don't work whatever if you if your parents are married you the kids are more likely than not to turn out just great but regarding the whole family balance thing one of the reasons that I wanted to write this book is that I felt really happy with my own choice to cut back when my kids were young this made me happy I loved being a mother it's not for everyone but a lot of women agree with me and I have the data in the book women who have a choice for example 76 percent of married women prefer either part-time work or no work outside the home when their kids are young it's a pretty large percentage and you know there's a lot of worry that you know women are being harmed by this and I sort of think that's the wrong way to look at it if you make career sacrifices to be with your kids or your husband does or somebody does you've gained so much in the health and well-being of your family which is in the end the most important thing in life so you know you may earn less over a lifetime I mean I think that's pretty clear women do earn less over their lifetimes than men because they choose to less to work less but that doesn't mean they're the losers it just means that they've made trade-offs and they've made decisions about putting the welfare of their kids first and I think that's very admirable and I think we need more of it so you mentioned the pay gap and there's a lot of research out there that for example for young unmarried childless women actually they make more than men seven percent more on average but those average statistics don't really dig into what it means to have equal pay for equal work right it doesn't talk of it we're talking about a vast array of different career choices different major choices in college different hours demands salary history all kinds of things so there is the argument on the right that essentially the demands for equal pay that come from the feminists left are instead of now fighting against the patriarchy which no longer has much power they're actually fighting against the individual choices of women like yourself who made this choice that made you very happy but in in the statistics and the Obama administration your salaries is part of the 77 cents on the dollar right that's right and you know there are other areas where personal choice is I think at work so for example women dominate the helping professions you know they like 80% of the veterinary students right now are women and they are edging men in a lot of fields in medicine like Pediatrics and other family medicine they are attracted to professions like psychology that involve interpersonal interactions men are more drawn to technical subjects there's a quoting here that I totally love it was from a woman to engineer who explained why she left engineering and went into another field and she said you know what all the special programs in the world and all of the special efforts to get women into tech is not going to make me really care how my dishwasher works and that's how a lot of people do feel so anyway there's a there's an element of people finding their own way and people making free choices that that gets described as some sort of coercion and I think it probably isn't I think that people especially in richer first world societies you see this in Scandinavia you see it in the in Europe where women have choices they tend not to go for the biggest bucks but to go for flexibility you know flex time working with people or animals working with some things that they find meaningful whereas men are have different priorities and you don't see that in places where in poorer countries where the need to make the money is more urgent right so there have been some comparisons on pay for example that in Rwanda pay for women actually is increasing very quickly and it's funny because they compared Rwanda to series of other countries like Sweden and Norway that have made enormous efforts to try to equalize the salaries and career tracks of men and women by for example forcing paternity leave and and it was interesting because of course Rwanda has that imbalance because there's a generation of men missing so how much does where does the sort of ideological impulse happen stop and individual choices begin right we heard that the personal is political that was part of the the feminist call of the second wave feminist call Betty Ferdinand and the other feminists that you mentioned in the 60s and 70s off there be to be a line between the political or the and the personal or our women's choices inherently political and subject to sort of larger societal to be I just would love to see us get away from measuring women's progress and men's progress separately I just think we are linked and our fates as we said earlier are connected and to see it in terms of a competition between the sexes is a very unhelpful and reductionist and and and actually doesn't teach us very much I do think that of course there are instances where women are discriminated against in the workplace and that is illegal and it has been since 1963 and you know that's good but but this sort of relentless focus on those kinds of things which you know they happen but honestly in our society compared with some of the things we were discussing earlier like the decline of family life and what that's doing to to middle and lower class people in America and how blighted their lives are because they don't have that stability I think those are much more urgent matters for us to be worried about then whether you know the next CEO of Google is a is a woman so I'll ask one final question and then we'll take your questions and and I'm really looking forward to that because I think obviously we have some differences but we come at this both from a skeptical perspective of feminism and I'm sure that given the audience of this festival there will be a lot of you who have a different perspective so the final question I would ask then is do you think that as you do mention that you think that some of the games with um movement have been positive do you think that today feminism is a net negative or a net positive for the modern woman I think it's a net negative because the the most important the the denial of of reality that you have to undertake we didn't even touch on abortion which i think is a is a serious or divorce right which are which are serious serious problems so yeah on that I I do think again I don't wish to be misunderstood of course women should have choices they should do what they want I don't think that anybody who doesn't want children definitely should not happen and there shouldn't be the expectation so in that sense I you know I think it's been it's opened up so many opportunities so rather than answer your question is positive negative I would just say that we have to bear in mind that that were grownups and that life is full of trade-offs and that you you have to decide you cannot you know it's kind of a childish approach to say I want it all and what's in it for me and having it all and you know all of that focus on me me me I mean one of the best things about us is when we care for each other and when we're part of a the family is the first network of mutual aid and the best one that's ever been devised and maintaining its strength is is I think a real challenge of our time and if if feminists would get on board with that then I would happily I would happily call myself one so you would become of one of the the one-third yes like to open it up for questions I would ask that first of all that it be a question although you're more than welcome to frame that hi you wish and also that you would wait even though we're kind of in an intimate environment here and we can probably all hear each other you wait for the mic because there's a video recording so we won't be able to hear your questions on the video recording if you don't wait for the mic um right here in the back of the blue shirt thank you so to your comment about women staying home with their children and that being maybe that in the best interest of the children my question to you is how do you rationalize that in an economy where two incomes are increasingly needed and in such a fast changing economy with AI it's harder to step out and then find employment once you get back in yeah no I wouldn't deny that those are real challenges it's um it's hard to get by on one income and it is hard to get back or it can be a little bit tricky to get back into the workforce after you've been out there is the option of part-time work which helps to ease that which is what I did when I was when I was home with my kids but then again I would just say compared to what right I mean it is would you would you say that if you knew that you're taking another year or so to get back into the workforce after you had taken a break would mean that your child would not wind up with learning disabilities or with the you know with social problems or with any other kinds of issues because you were there or that you helped them but those with those challenges you know it's a balance I would add one thing to that I think we're gonna see an enormous opportunity now that we do have a lot more working from home a lot more remote and a lot more gig economy style employment actually you know where I write the federalists we have an enormous number of talented women who actually left the workforce at least full-time workforce when they have children and because they wanted to they made that choice happily but they found a voice writing now from home in a way that's flexible and allows them to meet their family commitments but I mean I realized that media is kind of anything and you're talking about for example laws the same way I have a law degree I mean big wall is the same way there are fields in which if you take the off-ramp it's very hard to get back on yeah but I think there will be more of those opportunities in the future and I believe you correct me if I'm wrong I'm sure the statistic is in here somewhere but still got the largest plurality of women say that the ideal situation for them once they have children is part-time work that's right yeah I'm asking this question just so I can better digest what you what you discussed can you as clearly as you can please define the term feminist and also feminist movement just so I can relate that to what was discussed today well you've asked an impossible question because the movement has has meant many different things to different people over time it it has meant the the original feminists were the suffragettes who wanted just political rights then the the equity feminists came along and then the gender feminists and there have been many other tributaries since then so it isn't as easy as to say being a feminist means that you believe in women's equality it would but it's just not because it has come to encompass a lot of other things beliefs about sexuality about family about the workplace about abortion and so it's a it's a whole grab bag of things and it will you'll get different answers I bet if you go to feminists ENCOM you would get a better a different definition than if you went to Think Progress so it's just it's impossible to say what the actual definition is or for that matter ask ten women who do identify as feminists what their definitions would be outside of the the media and academic world just ordinary women so what would you say in the end is the reason why women are not getting paid equally to men the the reason is that those that $0.77 statistic is derived by taking the earnings of all men and comparing them to the earnings of all women which is a meaningless thing because it you have to compare like with like so you have to compare people with the same training the same education and so forth same number of hours on the job experience all of that and compare like with like and there are a number of studies that have done that and Inez was referring to one that referred that compared young people just starting out in their careers with similar abilities and and backgrounds and and qualifications and when you compare their salaries they're the same where the gap starts to show up and there was a good piece in this about this and then upshot in New York Times is when women start having kids and then they start to cut back on their work hours and so their income does decline so I think that's pretty much it it's about motherhood that's why there's a there's a pay gap but it doesn't mean that women are paid less than men for doing the same work just because they're women it's a matter of hours worked so one interesting development in this discussion about where the pay gap comes from is that recently uber released its payment data so uber pays its drivers on the basis of a formula right there are no human decision-makers in determining how much a driver gets paid it's purely determined by formula and it turns out that google has a seven to nine percent gap in earnings between men and women and so it's not to say that there's no such thing as discrimination or sex discrimination in the workplace in terms of income but I think there there been a lot of studies that that show that once you eliminate some of the more obvious factors like what major you're in how many years you've been in the workforce motherhood or number of hours worked which is often connected to motherhood those the gap starts to shrink radically so when there are do differences in the way people approach their work situations and I it would be I would be remiss if I didn't say that there is some data showing that women are just less likely to demand raises less likely to put themselves forward and be confident there's something about testosterone that makes men think they're so great and that they deserve more money and there's something about women that makes them think well you know maybe this person deserves it more than I do um do you find there's the difference in generations between those who identify as feminists and maybe not necessarily feminists and women why don't you take that one well I mean but I don't have the statistics I'm not sure if you do off the top of your head I I mean I do think that the boomer generation strongly identifies as a feminist I think a lot of rumor but that's just my impression it may be wrong I don't have a poll or a survey to back that up and and that at least I'm a millennial and I felt that it was not particularly relevant to my life but I would be very curious if anybody in the audience has a pull data on that but it does seem to me to be a stronger identification either for or against with boomer women one thing that that was revealing I think was the attitude of millennial women toward the Hillary Clinton candidacy where to support what you're saying there were a lot of boomer women who felt like this was a really important milestone and the first woman president and so on and the younger women they felt you know I I don't have this need for this symbolic thing about the first woman president I feel like you know things are pretty good I don't think I face that much discrimination obviously there's some but but there was much less of a felt need to make that statement on the part of younger women many of whom voted for Bernie thank you for your talk um I'm gonna play the devil's advocate okay um okay so you mentioned you know the role of the father in families I just wonder what the implications of your argument are on female seeming sex couples who have sons the second question I have as you've met you talked a lot about the consequence the consequences of the evolution of feminism you know like the side lighting of masculinity and the cheating men and women in spider reasoning I agree with that I was just wondering what the causes of this of this evolution or these so-called failures of feminists and they were referring to it I wonder you know is there any validity in the argument that the dark side of feminism was brought up by patriarchy okay can you remind me of the first one now because there are two questions oh well the first one is about how you mentioned you know the role of the father and how do you know oh yes right so you know the there's a I can't remember his name right now but there's a guy who worked for Barack Obama in the Barack Obama White House who grew up without a father and he is part of a mentoring group that helps provide male role models for young men because he said there was one person who came into his life it was a coach or someone who really changed the trajectory of his life because he he was a man and he said I love my mother and everything but I needed that male guidance and so he's about making sure that that's more available for other young men who were growing up without fathers and so for same-sex couples I would say that that is something that they're gonna have to seek out they're gonna have to find somebody either a brother or someone who can provide that male role model for their sons because it does seem to be very critical for their for the boys development as to the patriarchy look I mean throughout human history people have been treating each other very badly but the idea that men have always oppressed women and that feminism had to come along and free us I just think it's overly simplistic I mean the fact is throughout much of human history we all just scratched out a living and and starved and grew ill and that was the human condition and men's work and women's work wasn't that different in an agricultural economy everybody worked everybody worked six days a week or if you were a farmer and you had to milk your cows and other animals you had to work seven days a week and so the this this whole I don't know I just stood I have a whole chat section about what life was like right before Betty Friedan's book was published and it's it's kind of arresting to realize just how poor and struggling America was at a time when she was portraying it as having been this you know fantastic life of Riley for men and the drudgery for women well actually that's that's such a distortion the decade of the 1940s of course was that was the war the decade of the 1930s was the worst catastrophe economic catastrophe in our history and and people were ready after the war and in the 1950s and after the incredible disasters that had befallen them over the last 20 years to settle down to have a little bit of domesticity to have their house in the suburbs the country though the economy was roaring and she pathologized all that and she said how this is this is really just you know it's it's it's sick and it's awful and it oppresses women and I think that was extremely exaggerated and as I show in the book even her claim that women were discouraged from developing themselves in the 1950s is belied by other studies that have shown that if you look at women's magazines for example in the 1950s there are lots of lots of examples of you know women pilots and women engineers and women doctors and women human rights activists and so on being upheld as models there was one story that was about a mayor of Seattle who was okay it wasn't that they described her in a way that wouldn't be done today but they said you know she's five - and she tips the scales at about you know 90 pounds or whatever but boy is she tough on you know the organized crime okay this was the 1950s that's not the picture that has come down to us from the feminists they've not accurately presented where women used to be and so their prescriptions are therefore flawed in my judgment so on that note of some continuity in the drudgery and difficulty of life and we're gonna have to wrap this up thank you so much the Aspen ideas festival thank you