Today is Equal Pay Day, an annual reminder from the National Committee on Equal Pay that women earn only 77 cents for every dollar a man earns for the same work. Of course, the “wage gap” is a feminist lie that fails to account for differences in career choices and the number of hours worked, but this year, thanks to pro-lockdown tyrants, in some sense it’s more real than ever and many women are feeling pretty great about it.
The latest Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report shows that as men continue to regain jobs they lost during lockdowns banning them from work, women are not, bringing women’s labor-force participation to a 33-year-low. Nearly 2 million women have left the labor force entirely since February 2020. Fortunately, along with wiping out millions of jobs, the lockdowns also seemed to wipe out the long-held stigmatization of many women’s choice to prioritize caregiving over their careers.
For feminists and corporate leftists who will be no doubt bemoan the wage gap in their marketing emails today, these numbers are bleak. Democrats see more women focusing full-time on their families as a crisis, which is why Biden hoped to use his American Families plan to “invest” in outsourcing child care for the sake of sex equality. “Biden’s plan will reverse the she-cession,” one CNN headline read.
“When a parent drops out of the workforce, reduces hours, or takes a lower-paying job early in their careers — even temporarily — there are lifetime consequences,” Biden said, unknowingly admitting the lifelong benefits, physically and emotionally, for children whose mothers are their primary caregivers.
Of course, it’s true that many women did not take a step back in their career by choice, but were forced to by corrupt teachers’ unions and a feeble national child care infrastructure beholden to frantic bureaucrats. While some women chose to reduce their hours, others suddenly became full-time homeschool parents or could no longer justify the rising costs of child care eating up most of their paycheck.
Yet, whether it was a welcome change or not, lockdowns gave many women the freedom to be paid less and not feel ashamed about it. The normalization of remote work and flexible schedules made it easier for many moms to reject the false choice of work and family, but also the freedom to choose only family – feminine mystique be damned.
The lockdowns were not just illuminating for working moms. As Helen Roy recently wrote in the American Mind, coronavirus also “killed the girlboss.”
Alone in their apartments, they perceived a lack of love in their lives, and many became acutely aware of what two years of lockdown—precisely as they crested thirty years of age—might mean for their coupling prospects and fertility. All of a sudden, the difference between 28 and 30 felt more dramatic. This biological self-awareness brought several more questions to the surface. The anti-birth control movement found traction on TikTok and Instagram, as well as several more trends relating to slow living, femininity, anti-work, and anti-hookup culture.
When even unmarried, childless women are waking up to these conclusions, we know the messages of third-wave feminism have finally run their course and have nothing to show for it except in-kind donations to Big Pharma and women’s-only co-working spaces. Much to Hillary Clinton’s disappointment, feminism is no longer about the pantsuits, the c-suite, or even the pay gap. It’s about the freedom to choose, including choosing to put family first.
So as you are fed the annual lies about gender inequality today and every day, remember that many women are indeed making less money than men and are perfectly happy with their choice.
