Equality or Discrimination?

Women now receive equal prize money for winning major tennis championships. Even though the commentators hail this as a great success, it is hard to understand how one claim that this is equality when men play more tennis (5 sets as opposed to the women’s 3), are undeniably better, and draw the majority of the crowds and television audience, which brings in the money.

We have seen variations of this in schools where the law title IX requires high schools and universities receiving federal money to treat women’s and men’s sporting programs equally even though the women’s programs bring in almost no money.  It also doesn’t take into account the fact that more men prefer to play sports than women. It’s like a man walking into a bar and paying five dollars for a drink and then a woman walking in and paying nothing for the exact same drink. This happens all the time in our society, but the point is that they brought unequal resources and therefore the outcome may have been the same (they both received a drink), but it was not equal or equitable.

In our crusade for “equality” we have forgotten that sexes are in fact different.  We have biological differences. We think differently. The testing shows an undeniable difference in our IQ distributions. That is not necessarily to say that one sex is smarter than the other, but that the distribution of scores is different. Almost every intelligence researcher will acknowledge that women are more likely to have scores near average while men are more likely to have a greater degree of variability in their intelligence. This is significant because it means that men are far more likely to be highly intelligent or incredibly stupid. Therefore, jobs requiring high intelligence will more likely than not be comprised of a higher quantity of men than women. So when we see more men in the fields of engineering or high level mathematics (as we do) we should not assume it is due to inequality, or that something needs to be done to fix it (as many liberals have proposed).

Tennis rewards are the least of our problems, as men have become targets of this type of discrimination in almost every aspect of life. Feminists claim there should be more women in management, leadership, etc, but it is just as logical to say there should be fewer women in these positions. If the sexes possess different talents and skills, which they most certainly do, then it is ridiculous to think that women should comprise an exactly equal proportion of most fields.  In some fields there should be more women, and in others there should be less.

Feminists constantly harp on unequal pay as evidence of discrimination. The truth is that there may be dozens of reasons why this pay gap exists which have nothing to do with discrimination. For example, women are more focused on having children, which often hurts long-term career prospects. Women value personal relationships more than business success. The point is that the pay gap may exist because of the “glass ceiling,” the boys club, or whatever else feminists want to call it, or it may exist because of legitimate factors. It is illogical, and patently unscientific, to take something like a pay gap between genders and assume a cause, like discrimination, without evaluating all the evidence.

Feminists love to discuss the oppression they suffer, but they rarely bring up the benefits. Men often pay for drinks, dinners, vacations, houses, cars, etc… Women usually receive more resources during a marriage and in the divorce, including child support and alimony, than they contributed to the partnership. Men are even forced to pay taxes to support women’s maternity leave and, as employers, are also forced to let them take this leave, which can be incredibly expensive if they have to hire new employees, train them for a few months and then fire them upon the return of the mothers.  Men also have no say in whether a child is put up for adoption or aborted, yet are responsible for paying child support. Women receive significantly lighter sentences in the court of law for committing the exact same crimes. I’m all for equality, but we need to make sure that it is real equality rather than the reverse discrimination masking itself as equality.