The virus is spreading, and it’s eating into everyone’s brains, rendering human beings incapable of critical thought. The virus I speak of is the parity pledge, and it was loosed on the world on March 8, 2016. For now, the pledge is voluntary, albeit encouraged by various government entities, corporations, NGO’s, and high-profile individuals. As the virus spreads, will it mutate into from voluntary to mandatory? Are we all doomed to be parity pledge zombies?
Just type “pledgeforparity” into your search engine and check out the results. I got about 343,000 hits. Start scrolling through the results and it quickly becomes apparent that the only type of parity they’re talking about is gender parity. And not regarding draft registration.
The parity pledge was an integral part of the International Women’s Day “celebration.” This was hardly a seat-of-the-pants, spontaneous posting but a well-orchestrated and coordinated effort.
Supposedly, the pledge came about because of some number crunching by the World Economic Forum pertaining to the late 21st Century and the early 22nd Century. Well, I’m always skeptical of computer models anyway (you know, garbage in, garbage out), especially ones that make predictions about what the world will be like more than 100 years from now. Is anyone smart enough to write a program that takes into account every war, revolution, technological advance, demographic change, ecological disaster, political development, and sundry other events that might occur in the next ten decades?
At any rate, in 2014, the World Economic Forum predicted that “true global gender parity,” whatever that means, wouldn’t be achieved till 2095. Oh, poo! Most of us won’t live to see it!
Then just one year later, the WEF re-crunched the numbers and announced that the egalitarian utopia wouldn’t arrive till 2133! In other words, a baby girl born today will live in chains her whole life unless she lives to be 107.
If you put any stock in these predictions, you would likely conclude that the Feminist Express had lost a lot of steam from 2014 to 2015, and that should be no surprise. As polls show, more and more women are distancing themselves from the dreaded “f” word. But feminism is still an essential item on the elites’ global goals agenda, and they refuse to let it die a natural death.
So how to give the women’s movement a booster shot? By starting a pledge campaign!
If you want to do your part, you can go to the International Women’s Day website and make a pledge to:
Help women and girls achieve their ambitions
[because boys always operate under optimum conditions and never fail to achieve their ambitions]
Challenge conscious and unconscious bias
[because lawyers, bureaucrats, politicians, talking heads, policy wonks, and “cultural critics” just don’t have enough to keep them busy]
Call for gender-balanced leadership
[because it’s bulletproof virtue signaling]
Value women and men’s contributions equally
[regardless of how valuable or negligible those “contributions” may be]
Create inclusively, flexible cultures
[because they are easier for globalist elitists to manipulate…not like those pesky Muslims]
The number of people and organizations who took the pledge is mind-boggling. All walks of life are represented to legitimize the concept of gender parity. Maybe you think gender parity is bunk or – horror of horrors – maybe you’ve never even heard of the concept. Well, you may be hidebound, but you’re not hopeless. The remedy is simple. Just take the pledge and climb aboard.
There’s no way I can convey the vastness of this parity pledge apocalypse, but let’s look at a few representative samples.
Predictably, various celebs, such as Taylor Swift, Gal Gadot, and Gillian Anderson took the pledge. Somewhat lower on the showbiz food chain, there was a program called “Turn the Tables on Gender Gaps in Dance Music.” To back up the pledge, the recommended action was for DJ’s to feature only the work of female producers, musicians, and songwriters on International Women’s Day.
One website, www.christiantoday.com, features an article by one Dr.Elaine Storkey, a sociologist and theologian, who assures us that the pledge for parity is compatible with Christianity. Well, I’m not a card-carrying theologian, but I’ve read through the New Testament a few times, and I don’t recall the subject ever coming up. In fact, Christ’s board of directors (a/k/a disciples) was all men!
Upping the ante from pledge to practice, the National Film Board of Canada proudly announced that henceforth half the films it finances will be directed by women. (Justin Trudeau strikes again?) Don’t know whether or not you like chick flicks, hockey fans, but your tax dollars are going to subsidize them even if no one shows up to see them.
Believe it or not, a global warming website, climatesolutions.org, asserts that gender parity can fight global warming while admitting that women make 80% of the consumer choices that affect climate. So are they laying a guilt trip on women? Oh, no! You see, the solution is more women in leadership!
Predictably, lots of corporations (Virgin Air and Ericsson are two of the more recognizable) are represented. I’ve never heard of a lot of the companies, but they all seem to involve indoor jobs with no heavy lifting. I didn’t see any companies where people got their hands dirty growing food, drilling for oil, manufacturing automobiles, making steel, pouring concrete, putting up buildings, grading highways, and doing other needful things.
Well, these days we hear a lot about public-private partnerships, and the parity pledge appears to be one such fusion. It’s no surprise that various government spokesmen (sorry, spokespersons!) have taken the pledge. At the gov.uk website, for example, one Bharat Joshi, British Deputy High Commissioner “wholeheartedly” pledges his fealty to gender parity. Typically, he does the good news/bad news shuffle: “We have much to celebrate,” but the “glacial pace of progress” is unacceptable.
In Australia, the City of Ryde, a suburb of Sydney, had a two-hour program at the civic center where people could take the pledge and share “experiences, expertise and contribute to the planning of a series of workshops that aim to empower Ryde women of all ages in achieving their ambitions.” All that, plus morning tea!
One of the recurring buzz phrases is “Gender-balanced leadership.” One day soon it may be as sacred as “diversity” or “sustainability.” In other words, it is a concept that is absolutely, positively beyond reproach, and if anyone questions it…hmm, better keep an eye on that guy.
The word “balanced” is key. With few exceptions, balance has good connotations, while imbalance has bad connotations! As a result, “gender-balanced leadership” sounds warm and fuzzy, doesn’t it? Not stark like “quotas” or mean-spirited like “affirmative action.”
This global pledge of allegiance to gender balance (do you put your right hand over your genitals when you take the oath?) was probably inevitable. The United Nations charter, drafted in 1945, says it is “promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.” These sentiments may be global, but they are hardly earth-shaking.
Then mission creep rears its ugly head. Predictably, “fundamental freedoms” morphs into equality: “It is absolutely essential that gender equality is promoted and ensured through internationally agreed strategies, standards, programs and goals, such as the Sustainable Development Goal on gender equality.”
Well, once you go from freedom to equality, the next stop is quotas and timetables. And the UN is now on board with that. They are currently promoting a program called “Planet 50-50 by 2030: Step it up for Gender Equality.”
Sounds like an ambitious goal, but some people don’t want to wait till 2030. One of the parity pledgers is Kevin Maggiacomo, CEO of Sperry Van Ness, a commercial real estate outfit. He was “a man on a mission to create gender-balanced leadership in all organizations worldwide by the year 2020,” so he did a TEDx talk on same and started a movement (see 5050×2020.org).
In fact, Maggiacomo has a pledge of his own, and you can sign it at the website. This one says simply “I am in favor of creating a better world by achieving a healthy gender balance in leadership by 2020.” Geez, that’s only four years from now! Like Jerry Reed sings in Smokey and the Bandit, “We’ve got a long way to go and a short time to get there.”
The pledge section of the website includes numerous comments (the usual platitudes and pablum) from people who have taken the pledge. Nothing to see here, folks…until you get to a telling comment made by some guy named John Macliver, who says:
Gender balance means leveraging 100% of the working population as opposed to half.
Think about that for a minute. Maybe that’s what all this folderol is really about.
Remember, the number crunching that inspired the pledge came from the World Economic Forum, not the American Association of University Women, the National Organization for Women, Mary Sue, Jezebel, or any other women’s group. No, it was a bunch of economists. Apparently tired of counting beans, they have turned to counting vaginas.
Well, practitioners of the dismal science are rarely characterized as bleeding hearts, so why the interest in gender parity? I have two words for you: (1) supply, and (2) demand.
Barring government intervention, wages will be subject to supply and demand. Inject large numbers of women into the workforce and it will depress wages. Since women are generally willing to work for less than men, the effect of their participation is even worse than injecting more men into the system. But keeping wages (i.e., costs) down is good for business, so it must be good for society, right? “The chief business of the American people is business.” Calvin Coolidge’s very words way back in 1925. That philosophy has since gone global.
All right, so business has an interest in getting more women into the workforce. But what about all those government entities? What’s their motivation for taking the pledge, aside from virtue signaling? Well, more women doing paid work means not only more family income but more state and federal income tax revenue. And putting more women in the workforce means more disposable family income for non-essential goods and services, which means more sales tax revenue for the states.
The stay-at-home wife is a bad global citizen because no matter how much or how little work she does, none of it can be taxed!
The modern American wife cooking and taking care of her kids at home…bad! The modern American wife earning money to pay for child care workers and take-out food…good!
Third world women weaving and sewing at home…bad! Third world women sewing in sweatshops for low wages…good!
Also, keep in mind the increasing numbers of men, MGTOW or whatever, who are opting out of the rat race. If men work only enough to take care of their own needs and wants, then that represents a lot of lost taxable income. Bad for the state, but good for individual men. As the protagonist of Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (published in 1959) put it, “I had to prove to myself that I was a man. Not just a producing, consuming economic animal…but a man.”
If women want to be reduced to producing, consuming animals, then have at it. Better you than us. Maybe one day you’ll discover there’s more to womanhood than being an economic animal.
Previous generations of men fell for it. Now it’s the women’s turn to be suckers. But, ladies, just because you’re a worker doesn’t mean you’re consigned to a treadmill. You can rise through the ranks! See, here’s living proof! Look at the makeup of our board!
Of course, the more women in the workforce, the lower the birthrate goes. I have read some conspiracy theorist claims that reducing the world’s population is another key item on the elitist agenda. I don’t know if it’s on the agenda or not, but fewer people is the inevitable effect of more women working during their peak fertility years. On the bright side, fewer people means less social justice warriors.
One day soon “Parity Pledge” verbiage may join the mandatory “Equal Opportunity Employer” boilerplate on the company bulletin board. Given the wedding of government and commerce, is it too much to speculate that one day taking the pledge may be much like a loyalty oath during the McCarthy era? Refuse to take the pledge; then the job offer will be rescinded.
Even worse, your refusal may make you a person of interest to the government. You might end up on a no-fly list. You might get a visit from the FBI or Homeland Security. The definition of terrorist has proved to be remarkably elastic.
If I live long enough, maybe one day I’ll be hauled off to a re-education center where I will be transformed from a dissident into an upstanding global citizen.
Then again, given my advanced years, they’ll probably just burn me at the stake. If that’s what it takes to keep me from turning into a gender-parity zombie, then so be it.
