Feminism Has Become A "Poor We!" Industry
The line that I use to describe it is that feminism now involves women demanding to be treated like eggshells, not equals.

Christina Hoff Sommers feels similarly. Here's an excerpt from her Vox interview with Sean Illing. Sommers tells him:

Women are assumed to be the have-nots because a massive lobby devotes itself to proving Venus is worse off than Mars. Mars's afflictions go unnoticed. In fact, modern life is a complicated mix of burdens and advantages -- for each sex.

When it comes to being crushed, mutilated, electrocuted, or mangled at work, men are at a distinct disadvantage. Most backbreaking, lethally dangerous jobs -- roofer, logger, roustabout, and coal miner, to name a few -- are done by men. We are often reminded that only 24 women are CEOs of the Fortune 500. But what about the Unfortunate 5,000 -- that is approximately the number of men killed on the job annually.

Education beyond high school has been called the passport to the American dream. Increasingly, women have it and men don't. From the earliest grades, our schools do a better job educating girls. Women now earn a majority of associate, bachelor, master's, and doctoral degrees, and their share of college degrees increases almost every year.

Today, the women's lobby deploys a faulty logic: In cases where men are better off than women, that's injustice. Where women are doing better -- that's life.

Why play this game? Men and women are not two opposing teams competing for some trophy. We are in this together; our fates are connected. As one wit has observed: "Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. Too much fraternizing with the enemy."

My best advice: Let's dispense with the divisive gender politics and get on with the fraternizing -- or sororitizing, as I prefer to say.

And here she is on the "wage gap":

For me, the rhetoric around the wage gap is evidence that the women's movement is failing to change with the times. As many economists have noted, 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 points are considered, the wage gap narrows to the point of vanishing.

Wage gap activists will reject this analysis, of course. They reply that 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 another fallback position: They say that women's education and career choices are not truly free -- they are driven by powerful sexist stereotypes.

So, on their view, women's tendencies 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: It is 2016. 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.

American women want their freedoms, but it is not clear they want to be just like men. I remain fascinated by the implications of a 2008 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. A group of international researchers compared data on gender and personality across 55 nations. In all the countries studied, women tended to be more nurturing, risk-averse, and emotionally expressive. Men were more competitive, reckless, and emotionally flat.

But the personality differences between men and women were largest in the wealthier, egalitarian countries. Why should this be the case? The authors hypothesize that in prosperous, egalitarian nations, there are more opportunities for self-actualization. Wealth, freedom, and education empower men and women to be who they are. What if gender disparities are sometimes evidence not of discrimination or hidden bias but of happiness and social well-being. I wish we had gender scholars open-minded enough to consider that possibility.