(Op-ed Article)
TAMPA – Florida – Earlier this December the Mayor of Paris’ office was fined around the equivalent of $110,000 for breaking gender-equality laws in employment. But not for hiring more men than women, but for hiring too many women for top posts for it to be 50/50 in terms of gender.
Mayor Anne Hidalgo was also the first female mayor of Paris, supposedly a big step toward gender equality in the eyes of many. I don’t personally see why gender is even considered by employers or voters but feminist laws like the “50/50 employment” one seem to be starting to backfire.
“How can it be one rule for one group and different for another?” many would say, and that the Mayor should accept the fine graciously as it is about equality after all. It is not just adult, Western women that face discrimination in the world. But putting all that aside, aren’t these sorts of rules in governments starting to backfire on women themselves?
Just as I see nowadays many getting annoyed when their progressive-minded friends say they don’t need to get married and have children, I think some women will look at this fine as a sign of which direction the women’s movement is taking them and be alarmed.
I personally think it could possibly be a positive thing for some women to wait longer to get married and have children or even not at all, but not all women. I understand that some of them do not like being told by people, such as feminists, that it is “the thing to do nowadays”.
However, opponents could point out that this may not have resulted in any news stories at all had the genders been switched, and it does appear that the Mayor thinks this fine, imposed in the name of equality, was not right.
The mayor herself quipped sarcastically that the city’s management had become “too feminist”. This could suggest that her ideology, her views, and her definition of feminism are not all about what feminists insist, that their movement is only about equality between the sexes, but in fact, chasing superiority and dominance.
Of course I don’t know this and she could just have been making a not-so-serious joke. But it opens up a lot of questions. Not just about the impact of these sorts of feminist-laws being tried out in countries like France on men and boys, but also on women and girls.