# How America pays for its misogyny Date: 2024-09-24 --- --- ### How America pays for its misogyny I read a blog explaining how Russia is paying for its misogyny because women are neither allowed to fight nor work in the industries from which the military recruits men. As [Claudia Goldin](https://scholar.harvard.edu/goldin/biocv) explained in her award winning research, misogyny in America works by under valuing women’s work. For instance if a woman produces more than a man but spends less consecutive hours in the office, she is paid less. Consecutive hours in the office is one key to misogynistic evaluation of performance. However, as capitalism in America continues to falter, the toll taken by misogyny becomes, like in Russia’s war economy, ever more clear. First off our meritocracy is in a shambles. Women are the sole proprietors of the most advanced machinery in the know universe, reproduction. Yet not only does our society not fully admit their ownership of their bodies, we negatively reward using that technology. In fact we don’t even provide prenatal care for 2.3% of pregnant women and birth rates are at a [record low](https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/20/health/us-birth-rate-fertility-final-data-2023/index.html). Early child rearing and education suffers the same misogynistic fate. Raising a child does not even show up in GDP and [in addition](https://www.epi.org/publication/teacher-pay-in-2022/): > Teacher pay has suffered a sharp decline compared with the pay of other college-educated workers. On average, teachers made 26.4% less than other similarly educated professionals in 2022 — the lowest level since 1960. Underpaying for education has a myriad of very bad effects, but one that immediately comes to mind is the [rise of fascism](https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/08/09/an-examination-of-the-2016-electorate-based-on-validated-voters/): > Among Clinton voters, 43% were college graduates, compared with 29% of Trump voters. And while non-college whites made up a majority of Trump’s voters (63%), they constituted only about a quarter of Clinton’s (26%). In fact misogyny has always been [tied to fascism](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/04/what-do-incels-fascists-and-terrorists-have-in-common-violent-misogyny): > Translated from German into English as “Male Fantasies”, Theweleit’s expansive book shows us how misogyny is at the root of fascism. In the writings of “soldier males”, as he calls them, we see women sorted into two types — the “white”, sexless, patriotic “sister” on the one hand, and the sexualised, threatening “red” woman on the other. In the latter category the young men put any women who they found discomfiting: prostitutes, the sexually active, proletarian women, the communist women who fought them, and Jewish women. The feedback loop between not funding education and misogyny is very straightforward — less education, more misogyny, even less education, etc. However, we can’t ignore that some of America’s most educated are equally misogynistic. In the [finance sector](https://www.adp.com/spark/articles/2019/09/assessing-the-gender-pay-gap-in-the-finance-sector.aspx): > The average hourly wage for male workers is $40, while the average rate for female workers is only $27 per hour. As a whole, the industry has an average wage of just under $33 per hour. [and](https://www.investmentbankingcouncil.org/blog/breaking-stereotypes-womens-rise-in-investment-banking) > Women constitute 53 percent at entry level in banking but less than one-third of Senior Vice President (SVP) and Chief Executive Officer (C-suite) levels. This forms another feedback loop as the finance sector controls much of the funding in general. As important as DEI efforts are, even their success is not a fix. Replacing tech bros with tech gals would be a great improvement, but still leave tech at the top of a skewed meritocracy. ![Federal R&D Funding by Agency, 2022 ($millions)](https://disrael.github.io/blogs/assets/how-america-pays-for-its-misogyny-7dcbc67c3a.png) *Federal R&D Funding by Agency, 2022 ($millions)* Of course we can’t say for certain that DoD R&D budget being much more than double of the NIH is misogyny. After all it’s a dangerous world with war obsessed countries like Russia out there. Plus poor biotechnology is [trying hard at misogyny](https://www.cpace.csulb.edu/news/article/csu-consortium-helping-to-close-gender-gap-in-biotech-and-life-sciences) also: > According to a 2023 editorial in the journal Nature Biotechnology, women comprise nearly half of the employees at biotech companies in the United States and Europe, but only about 20% of them hold executive leadership positions. But please half the employees in biotech are women and only a quarter in computer science and not even a fifth of the military — biotech needs to try harder if it wants more funding. Fortunately the solution to misogyny is simply for men to realize where the real merit is and [act accordingly](https://fortune.com/asia/2024/09/19/china-full-time-dads-upend-norms-half-chinese-men-say-stay-at-home/) — “*China’s rising wave of ‘full-time dads’ upend norms as more than half of Chinese men say they’d stay at home.*”