By George E. Curry
NNPA Columnist
Women serve in almost every high-powered job in the United States: CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, Senators, university presidents, race car drivers and even astronauts. Yet, there are some male bozos who think women should be treated as inferior beings.
Conservative blogger and Fox contributor Erick Erickson is the latest man to come out of his cave.
After the publication of a Pew study that found that women are the primary or sole source of income in 40 percent of all American households that have minor children, Lou Dobbs had the poor judgment to assemble an all-male panel May 29 for “Lou Dobbs Tonight” to discuss the report.
LOU DOBBS: Erick, your thoughts on this study and what it portends?
ERICKSON: Lou, I’m so used to liberals telling conservatives that they’re anti-science. But this is — liberals who defend this and say it’s not a bad thing are very anti-science.
When you look at biology, look at the natural world, the roles of a male and female in society, and the other animals, the male typically is the dominant role. The female, it’s not antithesis, or it’s not competing, it’s a complementary role. We as people in a smart society have lost the ability to have complementary relationships in nuclear families, and it’s tearing us apart.
And what I find interesting in the survey is that three-quarters of the people surveyed recognize that having moms as the primary breadwinner is bad for kids and bad for marriage, and reality shows us that’s the truth.
After pushback from a lot of women, many of them conservative, Erickson tried to clean up his remarks the next day on his radio show, but only made matters worse.
It is a fact that children in a two parent, heterosexual household tend to have a more stable upbringing and a better chance of success than those of single parents or gay parents. This is a fact. This is not to insult gay parents. This is not to insult single parents. It’s just a fact. And the, of the subset of children who are raised in a two-parent, nuclear, heterosexual household, children where the father is the one who is the leader of the family, or the breadwinner of the family, however you want to say it, tend to out-perform those where the mother is the primary provider of the family outside of the home. Those are the facts. All I have done is pointed them out.
… And I understand that some women believe they can have it all, and that’s the crux of the problem. I have to tell you, as a man, where women are told that men have so many more advantages in society, we can’t have it all. Women, you can’t have it all either. Life is a series of compromises and choices.
“America Live” anchor Megyn Kelly challenged her Fox News colleague.
KELLY: So I’ll start with you, Erick. What makes you dominant and me submissive, and who died and made you scientist-in-chief?
ERIKSON: …This isn’t healthy for society when we think that roles of gender are completely — can be interchangeable. No one’s saying women can’t be or shouldn’t be a breadwinner or even the primary breadwinner. It’s just that when we forced ourselves to this point in society where they have to be, that’s not a good, healthy thing for society.
Other women Fox contributors also weighed in.
“I’m sincerely confused as to why you used behavior of animals to suggest that women shld stay at home,” Fox political analyst Krisen Powers tweeted.
Katie Pavlich wrote on her Twitter account, “Not offended by idea of a strong male leading the household, offended he implied women aren’t capable of doing so.”
MediaMatters, the press watchdog group, noted, “What the study highlighted, and what Erickson and his fellow Fox News commentators ignored, is the persistent class divide among mothers. According to the data, married mothers who earned more than their husbands were ‘disproportionally white and college educated.’ The single mothers, on the other hand, were ‘more likely to be black or Hispanic, and less likely to have a college degree.’ They also made significantly less: single mothers in the study had a median income of $23,000, about a quarter of the median income of couples with a female primary earner. If those single mothers were never married, their median income dropped to $17,400, hovering near the poverty threshold.
“Furthermore, though more women may be ‘breadwinners,’ women still earn significantly less than men. The report showed that 75 percent of husbands still make more than their wives. In fact, women’s wages decreased in 2012, causing the gender-wage gap to widen with women earning only 80.9 percent of what men earned, or about $163 dollars less per week.”
George E. Curry, former editor-in-chief of Emerge magazine, is editor-in-chief of the National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service (NNPA.) He is a keynote speaker, moderator, and media coach. Curry can be reached through his Web site, www.georgecurry.com. You can also follow him at www.twitter.com/currygeorge and George E. Curry Fan Page on Facebook.