Patricia Arquette won her first Oscar on Sunday for her role in Boyhood, where she played a mother raising two kids by herself. In her Oscar speech, she could have encouraged women and bolstered motherhood. Instead, she chose to advance the feminist political agenda which embraces the ideology of victimhood.
During her speech, Patricia Arquette rallied Meryl Streep and other A-List liberals stating, “[t]o every woman who gave birth—to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation—we have fought for everybody’s equal rights. It is our time to have wage equality once and for all, and equal rights for women in the United States of America.”
Someone should remind Arquette that for more than 50 years there have been laws on the books such as The Equal Pay Act and the Civil Rights Act, which protects employees from gender-based wage discrimination. She clings to the worn-out rhetoric that women earn $.77 for every dollar that a man does. Regrettably, she fails to recognize that this wage gap has been categorically over-exaggerated and debunked by news sources from Breitbart to Forbes.
The reality is that discrimination is no longer a significant reason why women earn less, on average, than their male counterparts. It really comes down to choice – more women than men choose to take time off to raise a family or to care for their parents. In fact, when variables like career choices or time spent out of the workforce are addressed, the so-called “wage gap” largely disappears.
Women often have different preferences and priorities than men do when it comes to their jobs. They may choose personal safety, leave time or flexibility as tradeoffs for lower pay, and that’s okay. Flexibility is something to be encouraged!
Women’s career plans come in all different shapes and sizes. They have different needs. The last thing women need is a one-size-fits-all government policy. Stop trying to force ill-conceived policies on women that will ultimately hurt them in the workforce! In the rare instances of sex-based wage discrimination, there are already laws on the books which address it. That is something which all women should applaud.