Feminists Are Undermining Their Cause by Advocating Quota Over Merit

A woman holds a sign reading "Feminism = Equality" as she takes part in a nation-wide women's strike for wage parity outside the federal palace in the Swiss capital Bern on June 14, 2019. Nearly 30 years after staging a first strike, women across Switzerland stage mass demonstrations for equal pay. Events planned throughout the day range from pram marches, to whistle concerts, to extended lunch breaks and giant picnics, with huge demonstrations planned on June 14 evening in several cities, including in front of the government in Bern. (Stefan Wermuth/AFP/Getty Images)

Commentary

I wonder if, when 17th-century writer William Congreve inspired the proverb, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” he wasn’t talking about women in relationships, but the future of women who compose the modern-day feminist movement?

Feminists have worked to accomplish gender parity under the law, at work, and in society for decades. However, in the past few years, today’s feminist movement has ratcheted up its emphasis on bean-counting and quotas over merit and excellence. Anger has driven feminists to accomplish this at significant cost—revising history, lowering standards, and even compromising women’s own needs and goals—and advocating for gender quotas ensures their cause fails.

Feminists used to aim for lofty goals such as voting or equal pay; now, they aim to revise male-centered history, treating their outrage over our patriarchal past like a salve on a wound. NPR reported in August that several universities were relocating or altogether banishing portraits of men with academic accomplishments.

“I think every institution needs to go out into the hallway and ask, ‘What kind of message are we sending with these oil portraits and dusty old photographs?’”asks Leslie Vosshall, a neurobiologist at Rockefeller University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

School officials at Rockefeller, the Yale School of Medicine, the department of Molecular & Integrative Physiology at the University of Michigan, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, which is one of Harvard’s teaching hospitals, are all playing down the patriarchal scientific achievement—and those are just the ones mentioned by NPR. The solution? Move the portraits of men to a “less noticeable spot” or in some cases, also feature female pioneers of science.

Commending accomplished women makes sense; gaslighting future students, as if previous contributions didn’t happen at all, is a pipe dream fueled by irrational jealousy under the guise of fairness. Never mind that some of the men featured spearheaded monumental scientific or medical breakthroughs—they’re offensive because they’re male and the portraits fail to showcase an equality that not only didn’t take place, but strives to pretend women achieved the same things and just didn’t get the recognition.

The trend to revise current processes in order to accommodate feminists’ outcry for gender recognition, regardless of actual merit, goes far beyond wall portraits and extends to male-dominated vocations, government, and even transgender issues.

Vocation Quotas

The gender gap is especially obvious in many vocations and exists for a variety of reasons, beyond just sexism. However, instead of encouraging women to exceed expectations in these fields—or to admit perhaps that men and women are innately wired differently, possess different strengths, and make different life choices regarding family—some occupations are simply lowering the bar to ensure a gender quota, regardless of merit, is met.

The University of Technology–Sydney recently announced it will lower the engineering entry bar for females, as part of a plan to encourage more women to go into STEM. In 2015, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his cabinet would comprise half women, despite no evidence before (or since) that such parity would make a marked difference in Canadian politics.

The U.S. military has done the same thing in multiple branches at various levels, capitulating to the feminist mob, contradicting the fact that high physical standards help maintain national security—which is, in fact, the military’s top goal—not gender equality. Strangely, women ignore how insulting this is and instead, applaud the faux progress.

Still, feminists remain unsatisfied. They decry studies that show sex differences between male and female brains are normal and healthy—even if they fit stereotyping. They ignore that the tendency to pair men with science and technology and women with marketing vocations isn’t a result of some kind of nefarious unconscious bias that needs the help of a consultant to undo, but the reflection of men and women’s natural tendencies due to innate physical and physiological differences. This flies in the face of their gender quota goal.

Despite the hype, not all women want it all, all at once. In 2018, CNBC reported that only 24 females made up Fortune 500 company CEOs, even fewer than the year prior. Instead of examining why, feminists just express disappointment that their quota remains elusive. Could it be that women have goals unrelated to being a Fortune 500 CEO?

A mother and former news anchor wrote an essay for The Atlantic about how hard it is to balance being a news reporter and a mother. Though she remarked that a flexible job would have certainly been easier, her conclusion was that the industry as a whole should change, so that more women could be represented as news anchors—even if women have started to realize they’d rather adjust their career goals to also enjoy their families.

The cause to ensure gender parity in the United States was most certainly noble at first. However, modern-day feminists demand gender quotas be filled at all costs, even if it means they must revise history, lower standards at the workplace, and sacrifice women’s goals to accomplish it.

That’s not equality, that’s checking off gender quotas instead of favoring merit—the antithesis of why women demanded equality in the first place.

Nicole Russell is a freelance writer and mother of four. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Politico, The Daily Beast, and The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter @russell_nm.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.