RALEIGH — If you’re looking for a job these days, there’s a good chance you’ve interviewed with a company run by a woman. Nearly one in four chief executives is a woman, reports the U.S. Department of Labor, based on 2008 figures. In fact, so many women are now in charge that DOL will likely soon remove chief executive from its list of nontraditional occupations for women.
A job is classified by the feds as nontraditional only if women comprise 25 percent or less of the work force. Doctors, lawyers, and chemists already have fallen off the list. If trends continue, criminal investigators, detectives, and software engineers will follow, since women account for one in five workers in these fields.
You’d never know about these achievements by listening to feminist rhetoric about the state of women in society. That’s a shame. Many outspoken feminists helped spur, or have witnessed, the rise of women in America. They should be proud. Instead, they remain married to the same old complaint: Women are victims of a patriarchal, oppressive society that fails to both recognize their worth and provide the opportunities it doles out to men.
Every now and then, a well-known feminist treats us to a new twist on the Big Bad Men fable. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd recently targeted President Obama’s golfing buddies as proof that even the president who, as she told the L.A. Times’ Patrick Goldstein, “loves smart women,” can’t be counted on to change male-dominated Washington.
“I mean, Obama still goes off golfing with the guys for four hours at a time. I give him credit for appointing a lot of women to important posts, but I would never have predicted that the first black president would have a lot of the same man-cave tendencies as the guys who came before him,” Dowd told Goldstein.
While Dowd spends time on this silliness, many women have been concentrating on much more important things.
Since the 1980s, women have dominated higher education, earning the majority of bachelor’s and master’s degrees. In 2005-06, women earned 57.5 percent of all bachelor’s degrees and half of the bachelor’s degrees in business. During the same period, women earned 60 percent of master’s degrees and nearly half of doctoral degrees in all disciplines. At Harvard, Princeton, Penn, and Brown, women run the show.
Educational achievement has paid off in the marketplace, despite feminist criticism of the “wage gap.” The Bureau of Labor Statistics survey shows women earn 80 cents for every dollar earned by a man. Problem is, the gap reflects only the difference between the median wage of a female full-time worker and a male full-time worker. It ignores differences in experience, education, and hours worked — factors we choose based on personal priorities that, many times, have nothing to do with the workplace.
For women interested in politics, achievement is also the lesson of recent history. The careers of Nancy Pelosi, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Sonia Sotomayor, and Michelle Bachmann certainly haven’t been hurt because they’re women.
In 2009, 90 women served in the U.S. Congress — 17 in the Senate and 73 in the House. Six states have a woman in the governor’s mansion, including our own.
If all this achievement is due to an oppressive society dominated by men, then count me among those who hope things never change.
Donna Martinez is an associate editor of Carolina Journal and co-host of Carolina Journal Radio.