Fox News Host: There Is No War On Women, They Get “Exactly What They’re Worth”

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

During President Obama’s State of the Union he mentioned that the United States still has a long road ahead of it in terms of women’s equality, especially in the work place.

Today, women make up about half our workforce. But they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That is wrong, and in 2014, it’s an embarrassment. A woman deserves equal pay for equal work. She deserves to have a baby without sacrificing her job. A mother deserves a day off to care for a sick child or sick parent without running into hardship – and you know what, a father does, too. It’s time to do away with workplace policies that belong in a “Mad Men” episode. This year, let’s all come together – Congress, the White House, and businesses from Wall Street to Main Street – to give every woman the opportunity she deserves. Because I firmly believe when women succeed, America succeeds.

It was a fairly uncontroversial statement in a admittedly uncontroversial State of the Union. Who could possibly disagree that women deserve to be treated the same as men at their jobs?

This morning, as Fox News sifted through all of their “fair and balanced” issues with the State of the Union, host Martha MacCallum decided that the war on women rhetoric was particularly offensive. Her argument boiled down to the war on women isn’t real because women are just worth less than men.

The discussion was led by the typical 2:1 ratio of conservatives to liberals and men to women. Weighing in for the Republican party was Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Martha MacCallum. The sole liberal (as usual) was an increasingly exacerbated Alan Colmes.

Carlson’s argument was that men are the “real” victims of the “Obama economy.” Martha – channeling Mike Huckabee – declared that women just needed liberals to stop treating them as victims and everything would be okay. Colmes just tried keep up.

“I disagree that there is not a war on women when they’re not making as much as men for the same jobs,” Colmes replied. “The numbers don’t lie in terms of sick leave, pregnancy and women are forced out of the workplace when they have to leave.”

MacCallum interrupted: “I think most women do not want to be treated as sort of a special class of citizen. They want to go every day, they want to get paid for being a professional for doing their job really well, and they don’t want to be treated like some special group of people who have to be given a little special handout just to make sure they’re OK.”

“Special handout?” Colmes shot back. “It’s equal pay for equal work, it’s having sick leave, it’s having pregnancy leave.”

“Women get paid exactly what they’re worth,” MacCallum declared. [source]

And that was Republican idea laid bare. Women simply can’t do as much as a man and therefore don’t deserve to get paid as much. Later in the segment, MacCallum refers to it as a “biological reality.”

The biological realities aren’t the problem though. As the President mentioned in his speech and Colmes referred to in the Fox segment, the real problem is that women are often the ones who must sacrifice for the family. Pregnancies, moves, and cutting back on hours at work to raise kids, all disproportionately fall on the backs of women. When economists did a study to find out how the gender gap really looked, they found that education and work experience hardly mattered:

Right out of school, they found only a tiny differential in salary between men and women, which might be because of a little bit of lingering discrimination or because women are worse at negotiating starting salaries. But 10 to 15 years later, the gap widens to 40 percent, almost all of which is due to career interruptions and fewer hours. The gap is even wider for women business school graduates who marry very high earners.

[source]

So a sweeping Equal Pay Act won’t completely solve the problem, because it isn’t just about direct pay. Other things need to be considered such as greater protection for women to leave for a pregnancy or sick leave and return on the track to advancement in her job.

An ironic touch to the conservative outrage is that they are the ones who passionately fight against employers being required to provide health insurance that covers birth control. It seems obvious that allowing women to decide when she has children would be a benefit to her employer as well as the right thing to do for the woman. But then again, that wouldn’t look very much like an episode of “Mad Men” and for conservatives, those were the good old days.

http://iacknowledge.net/fox-news-host-there-is-no-war-on-women-they-get-exactly-what-theyre-worth/

[We Keep Receipts 9,238]

Remember, the FNC is going to find fault with anything the POTUS has to say. It's a given.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Totally. What a bizarre debate though.

[GandD 5,966]

"biological reality"

Jesus F***ing Christ

[Peikko 1,575]

Fox tribal drums only speak the truth!