Updated: Jun 17, 2016 7:20 PM EDT | Originally published: Sep 02, 2014
Christina
Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute
and author of several books, including The War Against Boys. She hosts a
weekly video blog, The Factual Feminist.
Much
of what we hear about the plight of American women is false. Some faux
facts have been repeated so often they are almost beyond the reach of
critical analysis. Though they are baseless, these canards have become
the foundation of Congressional debates, the inspiration for new
legislation and the focus of college programs. Here are five of the most
popular myths that should be rejected by all who are genuinely
committed to improving the circumstances of women:
MYTH 1: Women
are half the world’s population, working two-thirds of the world’s
working hours, receiving 10% of the world’s income, owning less than 1%
of the world’s property.
Precise figures do not exist, but no serious economist believes women
earn only 10% of the world’s income or own only 1% of property. As one
critic noted in an excellent debunking in The Atlantic, “U.S. women alone
earn 5.4 percent of world income today.” Moreover, in African
countries, where women have made far less progress than their Western
and Asian counterparts, Yale economist Cheryl Doss found
female land ownership ranged from 11% in Senegal to 54% in Rwanda and
Burundi. Doss warns that “using unsubstantiated statistics for advocacy
is counterproductive.” Bad data not only undermine credibility, they
obstruct progress by making it impossible to measure change.
MYTH 2: Between 100,000 and 300,000 girls are pressed into sexual slavery each year in the United States.
FACTS: This sensational claim is a favorite of politicians, celebrities and journalists. Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore turned it into a cause célèbre. Both conservatives and liberal reformers deploy it. Former President Jimmy Carter recently said that the sexual enslavement of girls in the U.S. today is worse than American slavery in the 19th century.
The source for the figure is a 2001 report
on child sexual exploitation by University of Pennsylvania sociologists
Richard Estes and Neil Alan Weiner. But their 100,000–300,000 estimate
referred to children at risk for exploitation—not actual victims. When three reporters from the Village Voice questioned Estes
on the number of children who are abducted and pressed into sexual
slavery each year, he replied, “We’re talking about a few hundred
people.” And this number is likely to include a lot of boys: According
to a 2008 census
of underage prostitutes in New York City, nearly half turned out to be
male. A few hundred children is still a few hundred too many, but they
will not be helped by thousand-fold inflation of their numbers.
MYTH 3: In the United States, 22%–35% of women who visit hospital emergency rooms do so because of domestic violence.
FACTS: This claim has appeared in countless fact sheets, books and articles—for example, in the leading textbook on family violence, Domestic Violence Law, and in the Penguin Atlas of Women in the World. The Penguin Atlas uses the emergency room figure to justify placing the U.S. on par with Uganda and Haiti for intimate violence.
What is the provenance? The Atlas provides no primary source, but the editor of Domestic Violence Law cites a 1997 Justice Department study,
as well as a 2009 post on the Centers for Disease Control website. But
the Justice Department and the CDC are not referring to the 40 million
women who annually visit emergency rooms, but to women, numbering about
550,000 annually, who come to emergency rooms "for violence-related
injuries." Of these, approximately 37% were attacked by intimates. So,
it’s not the case that 22%-35% of women who visit emergency rooms are
there for domestic violence. The correct figure is less than half of 1%.
MYTH 4: One in five in college women will be sexually assaulted.
FACTS:
This incendiary figure is everywhere in the media today. Journalists,
senators and even President Obama cite it routinely. Can it be true that
the American college campus is one of the most dangerous places on
earth for women?
The one-in-five figure is based on the Campus Sexual Assault Study,
commissioned by the National Institute of Justice and conducted from
2005 to 2007. Two prominent criminologists, Northeastern University’s
James Alan Fox and Mount Holyoke College’s Richard Moran, have noted its weaknesses:
“The
estimated 19% sexual assault rate among college women is based on a
survey at two large four-year universities, which might not accurately
reflect our nation's colleges overall. In addition, the survey had a
large non-response rate, with the clear possibility that those who had
been victimized were more apt to have completed the questionnaire,
resulting in an inflated prevalence figure.”
Fox
and Moran also point out that the study used an overly broad definition
of sexual assault. Respondents were counted as sexual assault victims
if they had been subject to “attempted forced kissing” or engaged in
intimate encounters while intoxicated.
Defenders of the one-in-five figure will reply that the finding has been replicated by other studies. But these studies suffer from some or all of the same flaws. Campus sexual assault is a serious problem and will not be solved by statistical hijinks.
MYTH 5: Women earn 77 cents for every dollar a man earns—for doing the same work.
Wage gap activists say women with identical backgrounds and jobs as men still earn less. But they always
fail to take into account critical variables. Activist groups like the
National Organization for Women have a fallback position: that women’s
education and career choices are not truly free—they are driven by
powerful sexist stereotypes. In this view, women’s tendency to retreat
from the workplace to raise children or to enter fields like early
childhood education and psychology, rather than better paying
professions like petroleum engineering, is evidence of continued social
coercion.
Here is the problem: American women are among the best
informed and most self-determining human beings in the world. To say
that they are manipulated into their life choices by forces beyond their
control is divorced from reality and demeaning, to boot.
MYTH 6: Men are the privileged sex
FACTS: Neither sex has the better deal. Modern life is a complicated mix of burdens and advantages—for each sex.
Women are assumed to be the have-nots because a massive lobby devotes
itself to proving Venus is worse off than Mars. Mars’ afflictions go
unnoticed. So let’s consider a few of them.
When
it comes to being crushed, mutilated, electrocuted, or mangled at work,
men are at a distinct disadvantage. Most backbreaking, lethally
dangerous jobs—roofer, logger, roustabout, and coal miner, to name a
few—are done by men. The Labor Department reports
that nearly 5,000 American workers die from workplace accidents each
year. Ninety percent, more than 4,400, ARE male. We are often reminded
that only 24 women are CEOs of the Fortune 500. But what about the
Unfortunate 4,400?
Education beyond high school has been called
“the passport to the American dream.” Increasingly, women have it and
men don’t. From the earliest grades, our schools do a better job educating
girls. Women now earn a majority of associate, bachelor, masters and
doctoral degrees and their share of college degrees increases almost
every year. The intersectional narrative tells us that males—especially
those of the white variety--are the group most in need of atoning for
their privileges. But recent government data show that Hispanic and Native American women are now more likely to attend college than white men.
Finally,
consider the mother of all gender gaps: life expectancy. On average,
women outlive men by about five years. The numbers are starker when you
factor in race and ethnicity. In the U.S., Hispanic and Asian women can
expect to live to 88 and 85, respectively. For white and black men, the
ages are 76 and 72.
Today’s
women’s lobby deploys a faulty logic: In cases where men are better off
than women, that’s injustice. Where women are doing better—that’s life.
Final verdict: If Mars needs to check his privilege, then so does Venus.
Why
do these reckless claims have so much appeal and staying power? For one
thing, there is a lot of statistical illiteracy among journalists,
feminist academics and political leaders. There is also an admirable
human tendency to be protective of women—stories of female exploitation
are readily believed, and vocal skeptics risk appearing indifferent to
women’s suffering. Finally, armies of advocates depend on “killer stats”
to galvanize their cause. But killer stats obliterate distinctions
between more and less serious problems and send scarce resources in the
wrong directions. They also promote bigotry. The idea that American men
are annually enslaving more than 100,000 girls, sending millions of
women to emergency rooms, sustaining a rape culture and cheating women
out of their rightful salary creates rancor in true believers and
disdain in those who would otherwise be sympathetic allies.
My advice to women’s advocates: Take back the truth.
Christina
Hoff Sommers, a former philosophy professor, is a resident scholar at
the American Enterprise Institute. She is the author of several books,
including Who Stole Feminism and The War Against Boys, and is the host of a weekly video blog, The Factual Feminist. Follow her @CHSommers.
