If we're genuinely committed to improving the circumstances of women, we need to get the facts straight
by Christina Hoff Sommers
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.
FACTS: This injustice confection is routinely
quoted by advocacy groups, the World Bank, Oxfam and the United Nations. It is
sheer fabrication. More than 15 years ago, Sussex University experts on gender
and development Sally Baden and Anne Marie Goetz, repudiated the claim: “The figure
was made up by someone working at the UN because it seemed to her to represent
the scale of gender-based inequality at the time.” But there is no evidence that
it was ever accurate, and it certainly is not today.
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.
FACTS: No matter how many times this wage gap claim
is decisively refuted by economists, it always comes back. The
bottom line: the 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the
average earnings of all men and women working full-time. It does not account
for differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure or hours
worked per week. When such relevant factors are considered, the wage
gap narrows to the point of vanishing.
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. [meaning they
are not smart enough to make good choices] 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.
Conclusion:
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.
