But equal opportunity in the workplace has not resulted in equal achievement, and not all of this is the fault of continuing chauvinism. Women bear the children and, far more often than not, they wish to be the primary carer for those children. At its most strident, feminism can be mistaken for an ideology designed to make women feel they are wrong to want that.
Because if women did want that, what would happen to feminist goals? They would dissipate. You can't have affirmative action, or equal numbers of parliamentarians, CEO's, doctors, lawyers, engineers and so forth if not enough women want to work in such top positions.
Here's the truth: the world is run by men and it always will be. This is not a conspiracy meant to keep women down. It's simply a fact of life based on biological and psychological realities. Women have the babies and want to raise them. Men don't. Men are therefore free to climb the social, economic and political ladder, and women are not and, in general, do not want to-- or at least not at the cost of sacrificing motherhood.
That is not to say that women do not deserve opportunities. But there is a difference between desiring equal opportunities and equal outcomes, and it's the latter which makes feminism unpopular because it ingrains in feminist women an overweaning sense of entitlement. No, you are not entitled to a job equal to a man with equal seniority and equal pay if you decide to stay home and raise the children instead. That is what choice is about. There are opportunity costs, and it could mean that if enough women make those disadvantageous choices, women will be collectively less better off than men but that is their collective choice which, and here's the part they don't get: feminists do not respect that choice.
They cannot respect that choice because it contradicts their ideological goals as I said above. It contradicts their quest to "empower women", to make their numbers equal in every sphere of society; and if those numbers are not equivalent, they want their clout to be collectively equivalent to men's even if they have not earned that clout.
So when women decide to take up jobs in pink ghetto sectors where the pay is lousy, feminists do not respect that choice. They want women in higher paying jobs. And if women decide to work part-time rather than full time, feminists do not respect that choice: because it means women are not earning as much money as men. And so forth.
Feminists make women the victims of their own preferences and their own choices.
Worse, feminism has accidentally promoted the idea that it's pretty easy to work and have children, with the right support in place. On even an average income, it's never easy, even once children are at secondary school (though it's certainly easier then). Your priorities change. Work is no longer the most important thing, for a while anyway. Ambition can dissipate.
For many women, that's a self-evident truth. But feminism forbids women from admitting too many self-evident truths, for fear that the utterance of them will encourage discrimination.
The reality is feminism is reluctant to admit these self-evident truths because it would sow the seeds of its own implosion. When you see reality as it is, feminism simply does not make sense.
Feminism is a doomed ideology. Its own premises are faulty. It claims to be about women, but it has stopped listetning to women long ago. It has lost any genuine claim to representing them or their interests.
