Gender Equality

The idea behind gender equality in the post-modern era is that all genders are equal in all respects.

What does "equal" mean, you ask? Given the evident differences among genders (in pre-post-modern times, one would have said "between genders") the term "equal" is clearly problematic. Are apples and oranges equal?

Yet gender equality is a prerequisite concept for equal justice under the law in the eyes of progressives. In practice, this leads to many distortions.

Left to themselves, college team sports tend to favor men over women. Thus, to right this apparent injustice, Title IX was introduced to ensure that college men's football did not command the lions' share of funding, even when a college was seeking to build on its reputation and alumni donor base.

Left to themselves, companies might tend to pay men more than women for an equivalent job title, based on naturally occurring differences in dedication to the work that might exist between, say, mothers and fathers with children in school. Differences in academic salaries might be accounted for, at least in part, by measurable differences in intellectual endowment (especially differences in verbal vs. spatial ability and differences in statistical variance, and, thus, greater differences at the second and third standard deviations). When employment and salaries are discussed, it is not permissible to point to differences is social IQ (which tend to advantage women at the upper scales) or mathematical reasoning (which tend to advantage men at the upper scales). Nevertheless, progressives believe existing laws correcting salary disparities are insufficient, and a new Paycheck Fairness Act is needed.

On the other hand, with all of the attacks on male domination in the culture, we are seeing a major decline in male academic performance, with the result that women account for more college degrees awarded than men by a substantial margin. This fact does not seem to have disturbed many progressives, even though it is unquestionably a marker of cultural decline.

Nor does the social pressure placed on women to excel in the workplace, vs. at home with early child rearing, seem to have improved the general happiness or sense of fulfillment of women or, for that matter, the prospects for a flourishing post-modern civilization. Indeed, societies that focus on minute differences in "gender justice" often experience below-replacement fertility rates, higher rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock births, and numerous other indicators of general social decline.

Meanwhile, genuine problems, like increasing rates of sex-selective abortion, sex trafficking (including sexual slavery), female genital mutilation, teenage suicides, STD infection rates (anti HPV vaccination being a notable exception), etc. are comparatively neglected.

But, clearly, none of that matters when the female priesthood is at stake.

Any serious study of progressivism, however, recognizes that, in the progressive mind set, the whole notion of priesthood, in the sense of a ministerial religious function inherently involving ritual sacrifice, is regarded as a vestigial artifact of primitive culture. So, the obvious question arises, why all this interest in a female priesthood among progressives? Why aren't they, rather, focused on relegating all priesthood to the margins of society? Why, on the contrary, is the female priesthood regarded as an essential cultural litmus test of progressivism?

One may as well ask why progressives are not upset that there are no major female football teams.