2021 was the year in which the correct solution to any problem was more gender equality. Sexual harassment in parliament? We need more gender equality. The pink recession? We need more gender equality. And so it droned on. It can’t be long before we hear a certain cadre of sports administrators suggest greater gender equality will fix Queensland’s lousy scores in the State of Origin.
At the end of 2020, looking for another headline in newspapers more than happy to run their emotionally charged agendas, the well-heeled gender queens complained that gender progress had stalled because the country was suffering from “gender fatigue”.
Gender fatigue? Don’t. Even. Start. The real source of gender fatigue is that 2021 mirrored 2020. Just another boring year when the nation’s gender activists treated objective facts as about as relevant to serious debates as the rest of us regard the endless emoting from Malcolm Turnbull about Scott Morrison.
Yes, it is true that men in parliament are usually the perpetrators of sexual harassment but it is also true that women in parliament are more frequently the bullies. So, more gender equality in parliament may reduce sexual harassment but may increase bullying.
Whether we had a pink or a blue recession is not only contestable but might be irrelevant if we are now having a pink but not a blue recovery. Sadly, in the interminable gender war emotion counts, not facts.
Now clearly there have been major problems in the way society treats women. Just as clearly, well-targeted and genuine anger has been the catalyst for some long overdue reforms in gender matters.
But the level of hysterical overreach in some of the policy prescriptions now on offer is not merely tedious but is beginning to cause significant unanticipated consequences and increasing levels of inequity. While sexist generalisations are now supposed to be unacceptable – except of course when directed at men – some of the more strident claims risk proving true the nasty old gibes about women being irrational and illogical.
So, let’s hope 2022 will be the year of calm, rational and logical analysis of policy in all things gender.
Let’s start with quotas. It’s bad enough that they are condescending, inflexible and paternalistic. Worse, they frequently produce perverse and unfair consequences. Since at least the 1980s, Australia’s major legal and accounting firms have provided powerful evidence that market-based reasons for hiring women (namely to supply skilled labour in growing industries) yield more sustainable and natural foundations for gender equality than top-down quotas enforced by fiat.
I made the point frequently in 2021 that artificial 50-50 quotas in industries where the natural female candidate pool was only 25 per cent is simply a recipe for promoting women too early and (at least in some cases) beyond a woman’s skill and experience level. While artificial quotas certainly enriched some women and gave them unnaturally accelerated careers, it significantly punished some men and was of dubious social benefit. It is, for example, hard to fathom why policies that clearly preference middle-class women over, say, working-class men are a good idea.
So, for 2022, whenever there are emotional, heartfelt cries to establish or continue quotas, can we at least ask a few basic questions? Why have quotas in this industry and not others? Why have quotas at senior levels, not at the intake stage? What percentage quotas, introduced over what time period, and with what sunset clauses, will yield a natural and self-sustaining gender balance without violent disruptions to the labour force and without undue inequity or undesirable knock-on effects?
The so-called gender wage gap is also long overdue for careful analysis and rigorous scrutiny in 2022. The ideologues say the gender wage gap, which may be defined for the purposes of this article as the difference between the aggregate of all the wages earned by full-time female workers in the economy and the aggregate wages of full-time male workers, should be nil. This reeks of old-time Marxist lunacy. We should be seeking equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome. Moreover, this is a fraudulent debate because it quite deliberately ignores all the relevant variables apart from gender. Why do we collect bald aggregate statistics without controlling for any of the other underlying reasons for any discrepancy? Why do we publish these figures without any accompanying attempt to ask whether the gap is caused by deliberate and considered choices made by women? For example, what if the gap is caused by choices voluntarily made by women about what careers they choose or about how long or how hard they work?
Given that it has been illegal for many decades to pay a woman less than a man for the same job because she is a woman, perhaps any wage gap results from different skills or experience rather than from discrimination. Ultimately, there are only two ways to eliminate the “gender pay gap” – ensure men and women make the same choices in all respects irrespective of choice or biology or, if you can’t do that, you just have to pay women more for the same work. Ideologues prefer the latter.
When, in 2022, the latest version of Lisa Wilkinson complains that she earns less than a man like Karl Stefanovic because of the gender wage gap, can we please ask a few hard, analytic questions before jumping to overwrought screams of oppression?
And for 2022, can we please skip the lynch mobs, the Salem style witch-hunts and the abandonment of every fundamental legal principle we cherish? If an Andrew Laming is accused of upskirting, can we please accord him the presumption of innocence before uploading to Twitter? Or when we are told we must “believe the woman”, can we please remember Anthony Broadwater, who spent 16 years in jail for allegedly raping Alice Sebold. Sebold wrote a celebrated memoir about the event but now acknowledges she wrongly identified Broadwater as her attacker. Sebold has rightly apologised for the mistake, but let’s remember this travesty when we next hear the “believe all women” mantra.
And when we are told the next incarnation of Tim Paine should be sacked, can we please remember that for centuries we have rejected double jeopardy and retrospective punishment? By all means, punish the guilty and spare no effort in seeking to protect women from violence. But in 2022, can we please have a little nuance, a little less emotion, and remember the legal principles that have served us so well for so long?
Why does all this matter? And, in particular, the sisterhood may ask, between their Twitter tirades, why does this matter to me, a middle-class woman? After all, men have been oppressing women since time immemorial, so who cares if we are living through a bit of rough justice to reach a better place? Or to put it more crudely, why don’t I just take the money and run too? Why dob on the sisterhood when they are finally cashing in?
The altruistic answer is the ethical one – two wrongs never make a right. Ethics fuse with equity and love. Those of us who love our sons as much as our daughters are distressed to see the casual acceptance of increasingly poor outcomes for our sons.
Take the 2021 NAPLAN results, which revealed that one in five teenage boys is semiliterate in high school, with boys twice as likely as girls to struggle with reading and writing at age 15. But nobody seems to care.
The other answer as to why logic matters more than emotion and ideology is more sobering, especially for us girls. Overreach is never sustainable and usually counter-productive.
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