An Illusion Of Achievement
Young women in this country who claim to not know what feminism means now are simply not paying attention
One of the most revealing and fascinating aspects of the 2016 election is the division of perception and reality between young women who are drawn to an idealistic socialist who is in his mid 70s and older women who are supporting a moderate and far more experienced female candidate who is a decade younger. For the first time, females who have grown up assuming equality of opportunity and choice are being confronted by older women who actually have lived long enough to know the limits of these assumptions. The latter includes women from their late 20s into their 60s and 70s.
It appears to females in their late teens and early 20s that the playing field is level in most academic endeavors, and indeed women earn more university/college degrees and graduate degrees than men. The levelness of the field remains into early employment, but women who have been in the workforce for several years to a decade or two confirm how the field becomes steeper for women overall than their male coworkers, who receive more frequent promotions and larger compensation increases. In addition, the working environments are different for women, who even when in middle and senior management are still the ones who serve coffee and order lunch for meetings.
When it comes to meetings, and being heard in general, women have to lean in to be recognized as participants who bring value and innovation…with highly mixed results. Even then, the ideas from males at the table typically receive more attention. My COO wife observes that men have too much testosterone and not enough collaborative participation, and tend to work in silos instead of partnering with others. When she talks, they listen because it has become a regular consequence that she offers solutions that her male counterparts seem oblivious to. She says young women are inexperience and naive, and have no clue what they are going to face in the workplace. Recognition in corporations, and even in academic and scientific institutions, is not guaranteed or often likely.
Outside the workplace, women are treated with less respect and their issues regarding reproductive care and access to health care services are largely ignored or controlled by government in the hands of conservative males. The state within which a woman resides can be hostile to her rights and needs or open and supportive of these. As usual, the state where I happily reside, California, is ahead of the curve. An example is that beginning in April, women can obtain contraceptives without a doctor’s prescription, removing an expensive barrier to an essential aspect for the lives of females.
Older, more experienced women, who know well what the reality of equality is for females, are supporting the candidate who would become the first female president (long overdue) because when it comes to gender and race, nothing is more empowering that role models. Young women embrace idealism without 1) grasping how poorly it functions in the real world and 2) understanding that their sense of having no barriers is an illusion. Despite how much left-of-center socialism offers citizens in other countries, the U.S. remains an outlier in combining democracy, capitalism and socialism, and thus no far-left candidate is likely to be elected and even less likely to successfully implement such programs.
Unlike centrist pragmatism, ideology (and thus idealism) — be it far left or right — wants to apply principles and values without acknowledging context. Feminism, which center-left embraces and center-right tolerates (more or less), requires both cultural shifts and governmental activism to make a difference. Even in societies with significant socialism, females continue to be denied truly functional equality and representation. Young women in this country who claim to not know what feminism means now are simply not paying attention, and they reject the advice of older women — who understand what feminism really means — with the truly marginal response that they can think for themselves and make their own decisions. Yes, but on what basis.
Despite being intelligent and sure of themselves, too many young women are missing a lot of information. Enthusiasm and activism will not change what they will encounter in adult life, and rather than seek information and insight from women who have been there, they focus on a candidate who is not female and has not experienced what that truly means, and who is fixated on his message but has no pragmatic answers on how it would be implemented and paid for in a political reality of extreme divisiveness and governmental dysfunction. These young females are part of the problem rather than the solution, but don’t know it. Thus, another illusion of achievement.
