It’s a shame that people tweet before they think. An advisor for Georgetown University, Jeff Bernstein, resigned from the university’s Master of Science in Foreign Service Program on Monday in wake of his recent poor behavior on Twitter. In response to conservative millennial commentator Allie Stuckley’s tweets saying that the #MeToo movement was symptomatic of a “broken (sinful) world,” Bernstein tweeted at her “Wishing you a #metoo moment. Maybe then you won’t be so insensitive.”
Bernstein later privately apologized for his behavior. Georgetown University’s public statement on the issue clearly condemned his reprehensible action as well.
First, Suckley’s assertion that “we live in a broken (sinful) world, and sexual assault and harassment is symptomatic of that brokenness” is barely distinct from the leftist argument that patriarchy and toxic masculinity are both ingrained in the very structure of society. Both lenses condemn sexual violence. Both lenses claim that there are ways to try to improve the treatment of women. Virtue—regardless of whether one uses a secular or Christian justification for it—and viewing individuals as persons with inviolable worth are two important features of both conservatism and modern feminism. To condemn a woman for advocating for morality is absurd.
Second, there is no excuse for Bernstein’s uncouth, unacceptable behavior. The blatant hypocrisy in wishing sexual assault upon someone while simultaneously condemning sexual assault is both palpable and indecent.
Third, in general, the modern social justice movement sometimes suffers from a self-defeating insincerity. No reasonable person disagrees with equal treatment. No American conservative tries to dismiss the legal protections provided by the Civil Rights Act or the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act— the newly re-introduced Equality Act to amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include protections on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity has strong bipartisan support. By creating a false narrative that conservative values run counter to decent treatment of others, modern social justice warriors alienate the very people who might seek to support their movement on the basis of classical liberalism and a care for freedom. Bernstein’s incompetence, short-sightedness, and unfounded anger is only one of the many examples of this sad phenomenon.
About the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act:
Women’s advocates have long insisted employers pay women less than men for doing exactly the same work in the exact same occupations and careers, working side-by-side with men on the same job for the same organization, working the same number of hours per week, traveling the same amount of time for work obligations, with the same exact work experience and education, with exactly the same level of productivity.
If women’s advocates know women are paid less, working women surely know it. So where are the millions of lawsuits? If the women don’t know they’re paid less, and the advocates do know it (how would THAT happen?), why haven’t the advocates notified them? And why haven’t they named the employers to embarrass them and helped the women sue?
It’s mostly ideological noise to help secure female votes for Democrats.
Here’s how I come to that conclusion:
Although insisting women are paid less for the exact same work, women’s advocates also seem to think employers are cut-throat competitors whose prime modus operandi is greed. (“Corporate greed” may be one of the Left’s more salient rallying calls.)
Thus they no doubt believe employers would hire only illegal immigrants for their lower labor cost if they could get away with it (many do get away with it), or would move their business to a cheap-labor country to save money (many do this even more since “the onrush of globalization, which enables companies to find cheap labor abroad” http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2017/06/02/how_elites_got_us_into_trouble_–_and_can_help_get_us_out_134069.html), or would replace old workers with young ones for the same reason.
So why do these same advocates think “greedy, cut-throat employers” would NOT hire only women if, as the advocates say, employers DO get away with paying females at a lower rate than males for the same work?
Many of America’s most sophisticated women choose to earn less than their male counterparts:
“Female physicians worked about 5 hours fewer per week than their male counterparts through age 54….” https://www.aamc.org/download/426242/data/ihsreportdownload.pdf?cm_mmc=AAMC-_-ScientificAffairs-_-PDF-_-ihsreport
“In 2011, 22% of male physicians and 44% of female physicians worked less than full time, up from 7% of men and 29% of women from Cejka’s 2005 survey.” http://www.amednews.com/article/20120326/business/303269974/1/
“Hanson noted that 34 percent of women pursuing graduate degrees are in an education field, where the median salary is less than $70,000, while that field attracts only 13 percent of men in grad school. By contrast, men are over-represented in fields like internet technology and business, where median earnings are over $100,000.” http://www.nasdaq.com/article/grad-school-can-be-worth-it-if-you-pick-wisely-20180110-01206
“…[O]nly 35 percent of women who have earned MBAs after getting a bachelor’s degree from a top school are working full time.” It “is not surprising that women are not showing up more often in corporations’ top ranks.” http://malemattersusa.wordpress.com/2014/04/25/why-women-are-leaving-the-workforce-in-record-numbers/
“Compared to men, women view professional advancement as equally attainable, but less desirable” http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/09/15/1502567112.full.pdf
“Women Dominate College Majors That Lead to Lower-Paying Work” -Harvard Business Review, April 19, 2017 https://hbr.org/2017/04/women-dominate-college-majors-that-lead-to-lower-paying-work
“A study of students graduating from Carnegie Mellon found that 57% of males negotiated for a higher starting salary than had been offered, compared to just 7% of females. As a result, starting salaries of men were 7.6% (almost $4,000) higher than those of women.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maximilian-martinez/important-considerations–in-assessing-the-gender-wage-gap-in-medicine_b_6566762.html
Men help create the gender wage gap by choosing jobs that pay enough to support themselves, a wife, and children.
See:
“Why the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and all other equal-pay efforts have failed” http://malemattersusa.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/will-the-ledbetter-fair-pay-act-help-women/