What’s next in social engineering? Gender quotas on motherhood?

IF breastfeeding promotes sexist stereotypes, gender quotas on motherhood can’t be far off, writes Miranda Devine.

Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins. (Pic: David Geraghty)

THE latest ridiculous plan from the Human Rights Commission to force gender quotas on businesses is an insult to sensible women, and an attack on men.

Companies which refuse to hire token women and discriminate against men would risk losing lucrative government contracts, under the proposal from Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins, who obviously has too much time on her hands.

She claims that forcing government contractors to employ at least 40 per cent women is necessary to beat the alleged gender pay gap.

It’s a crackpot attempt at social engineering which never works without coercion and will simply overburden businesses already drowning in red tape.

Companies will be less efficient if they are denied the ability to hire the best person for the job, which will make government contracts more expensive, with the silly taxpayers, male and female alike, paying the bill.

Of course, gender quotas already apply across the public service, including in the Australian Defence Force, the Australian Federal Police and various state police forces, as part of the “diversity” agenda.

None of this has anything to do with fairness or equity but is just another way to infect every enterprise in the nation with the virus of identity politics, whereby people are divided by sex, race, religion and sexuality rather than by who we are.

Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins wants government contractors to employ at least 40 per cent women.

On the one hand, we are exhorted to ignore biological determinism and on the other hand to be its slaves.

And if you think identity politics is illogical, you will be charged with “unconscious bias”, which is the rhetorical voodoo used to hide flaws in the thinking of social engineers.

Frankly, Ms Jenkins should get her own house in order. Since 1988 the job of Sex Discrimination Commissioner has been held by eight women and only one man — and John von Doussa stepped in only in an acting capacity for a few months in 2007.

If she is to have any credibility, Jenkins must immediately sack herself and appoint a man to the job, maybe Mark Latham, who could go about redressing the imbalance of successive grievance feminists. In 30 years it will be time for another woman to get back in the saddle.

The fact is that some industries, such as construction and mining, have more men than women working in them.

Forcing gender quotas on companies may not have the desired results. (Pic: Terry Pontikos)

That’s because women generally aren’t attracted to dirty, dangerous, physically demanding or remotely located jobs. Maybe women don’t want to spend all day carting sheets of gyprock up five flights of stairs until their muscles turn to jelly, and they wouldn’t be good at it, either.

And what about those industries, such as nursing and teaching, that are majority female? Should women be forced out of jobs they want to do into jobs they don’t want to do and aren’t very good at?

At the risk of being labelled sexist, I found it a lot easier to obey the instructions of lollipop men at construction sites when they were actually lollipop men and not female backpackers too busy checking their mobile phones and tanning their legs to bother directing traffic. And we want more of this?

What’s the point of swapping people from a job they’re good at to a job that doesn’t suit them just to satisfy some arbitrary target dreamt up by social engineers who don’t do real jobs?

God forbid we suggest that there are biological differences between men and women that account for their differing education and career choices, which in turn account for the so-called gender pay gap.

No, that would be to succumb to “sexist stereotypes”.

Taken to its extreme, this obsession with gender leads us to the truly nuts idea from the United States that it is “ethically inappropriate” for government and medical organisations to promote breastfeeding as “natural” because it “enforces rigid notions about gender roles”, according to a study in Pediatrics magazine.

What’s next, a gender quota on motherhood? (Pic: Supplied)

“Coupling nature with motherhood… can inadvertently support biologically deterministic arguments about the roles of men and women in the family (for example, that women should be the primary caretaker),” the study says.

“Referencing the ‘natural’ in breastfeeding promotion… may inadvertently endorse a set of values about family life and gender roles, which would be ethically inappropriate.”

Forget that breastfeeding is scientifically proven to be best for babies. Forget that breast milk is uniquely tailored for each baby with all the vitamins and nutrients it needs for the first six months and automatically changes composition as the baby grows. Forget that breast milk is packed with disease fighting antibodies. Forget that breastfeeding also benefits the mother, and releases chemicals that help bond mother with baby.

Let’s just pretend women don’t have this miraculous talent for feeding their babies and force them to pay good money to buy a powdered artificial substitute. Just so we can all pretend that being a mother has nothing to do with being a woman.

In case you think this is an aberration, remember the British Medical Association’s edict that doctors should use the term “pregnant people”, not pregnant woman or “mother”.

Gender quotas on motherhood have to be next.