Gender, Likability and Opportunity Are reporters too busy telling tales about female politicians to notice female non-politicians? By James Freeman
https://www.wsj.com/articles/gender-likability-and-opportunity-1154688864
Did you notice Friday’s news that the American jobs boom is proving especially beneficial to U.S. females? For some reason media folk seem focused only on two particular job seekers who tend to look for work in Washington, D.C.
Nationwide, conditions are highly encouraging. “Women have been driving this year’s improvements in labor force participation,” notes the Journal’s Lev Borodovsky. “Participation among women aged 25-34 years hit a multi-year high.”
Whether young or old, U.S. women are not just entering the labor market; they are gaining jobs. In the last 12 months, the number of employed U.S. women age 20 years and older has increased by more than 1.6 million, according to the Department of Labor’s household survey.
Labor’s separate establishment survey of employers shows more good news for female job seekers, with women rising as a percentage of the U.S. workforce. At the margin, as America approached the end of year two of the Trump era, it appears the U.S. economy was becoming more hospitable to women relative to men. This doesn’t easily fit into the popular media narrative about our times, so it may soon be lost in a flood of politicized analysis.
Money isn’t everything and not every new job represents a happy story. Some new hires are working by necessity more than by choice. But the overall picture is one of expanding opportunity and the robust job market for women surely exerts a positive impact on many more lives than most politicians will.
Though the latest economic news is particularly good for the gals, the guys also have a lot to celebrate given what can only be considered a blowout month of job creation and rising wages. Outside of government, both sexes seem to be waging a war on the post-2008 new normal.
But of course it’s what happens inside government that fascinates most of the press corps. Therefore many reporters have lately been most concerned about the opportunities available to two particular members of the U.S. labor force who, respectively, attended Yale’s law school and taught at Harvard’s.
Despite their expensive skills, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) are, in a popular media telling, not well liked because of sexism. Annie Linskey and David Weigel recently wrote in the Washington Post:
Just hours after Elizabeth Warren announced her plans to run for president, a question began surfacing about a possible weakness. It wasn’t derived from opposition research into some facet of her life. It had nothing to do with her policy ideas.
It was the question often asked of female candidates and rarely of men: Is she “likable” enough to be president? Others put it another, potentially more devastating, way: Is she too much like Hillary Clinton to be the nominee?
In response, this column’s most celebrated alumnus took to Twitter on Friday to post a series of dispatches demonstrating that not only had the question often been asked of men, and not only had the Washington Post often been the outlet doing the asking, but that a Post writer had actually deemed Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 opponent—now-President Donald Trump—less likable than Mrs. Clinton.
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