The Conversation About Women That We Don’t Need To Have

Conservatives want to support healthy family formation. But that can’t require sacrificing meritocracy or the very concept of a limited government. 

At the Heritage Foundation last week, a panel of conservative women met to discuss women’s roles and how to encourage and support young mothers. The room was filled with young women, including mothers caring for fussing babies while also intently listening to the conversation. Decades of radical feminists demonized motherhood as a waste of women’s intellect, the panel explained. Women should reject this and recognize the profound value mothers provide their families and the world by instilling children with good character. Relationships, not career success, are what people value most at the end of life. Such wisdom should be imparted to the young. 

Given declining birth rates, it’s also important to consider how to make childbearing more appealing. How to encourage men to take pride in roles as providers and protectors is a worthy topic. Young women deserve advice about being as intentional in pursuing a fulfilling personal life as in pursuing a career. We all should consider how society – churches, neighborhoods, businesses, extended families and more – can better support families raising young children.

So far, so good.

Yet this panel not only wanted to explore ways to nurture a more family-friendly society, but to get government involved in subsidizing traditional families – with a working father and stay-at-home mother caring for children – specifically. There was a desire not just to end government programs penalizing marriage or undermining one-income families, but to push the pendulum toward the opposite.

For example, the panel considered whether it was time to talk about a system where men (yes, specifically men) who were breadwinners for a wife and children should be paid more than other workers, in order to uplift and encourage the creation of that traditional family structure. The panel recognized that this is inconsistent with current law, yet seemed happy that such conversations were happening and hope that such policies might be possible in the future.

Conservatives should resoundingly and unhesitatingly reject this premise. The United States should not consider policies that would discriminate in favor of men with wives and children, and entitle them to more support or higher pay because of that status.

A single moment of consideration should be enough to recognize how fundamentally and grotesquely unfair this would be. Never mind that married fathers are already the highest-earning group (undoubtedly because many take on unattractive and extra work to earn more to support their families), but how would such a system treat a widow who needed to work to support her family after the loss of her husband? What about a woman whose husband left her? Optimistic young women might not want to think about it, but it does happen. Would that mother, forced to work, not deserve this fictional breadwinner’s bonus?

Many married couples prefer to share responsibilities of home and income-earning. While the two-income trap can be real, many families aren’t trapped; they embrace a two-breadwinner model for the extra financial security and other benefits. Neither government policy, nor conservative thought leaders, should seek to discourage that.

Overlooking the obvious unworkability and even cruelty of such a system, this “conversation” rests on a dangerously mistaken notion of the proper role of the state and of employers. Employers do not hire people in order to pay them nor to support their families. That is a secondary benefit. Companies exist to provide goods and services that people want, to make a profit and returns for investors. Companies hire employees to deliver that good or service. Employment is not an end in itself nor should it be, not for businesses, nonprofits, or the government. 

Of course, in the process of serving customers and shareholders, employers should consider the well-being of employees, including supporting those with young children or other caregiving responsibilities. It would be shortsighted as well as cruel to fire an employee when he or she was sick or needed a little more flexibility. Yet employers shouldn’t have one set of rules for one group of workers over another.

Conservatives know the dangers of this. Conservatives have just fought nobly against this concept – which is indistinguishable from DEI, save for which group would get preferential treatment. With DEI, conservatives recognized that it was unfair and immoral for companies to discriminate on the basis of race, sex, and sexual orientation to promote the interests of those considered “diverse” over those who were not. Yet it should be obvious that it is just as unfair and immoral to discriminate in favor of working, married fathers over other groups. It would be short-sighted, as well as wrong, since leaving the framework in place for discriminatory social engineering employment practices would inevitably be hijacked by the left and used to promote their favored groups when they regain power.

For conservatives, the political dangers of embracing such lopsided messaging around women should be obvious. Yet that’s the least important reason to reject attempts to move the Overton window to include discrimination in favor of married, working fathers. Rather, conservatives should do so because it’s discriminatory and antithetical to a meritocracy.

That should be reason enough. 

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.