Feminists Don’t Care About the Gender Gap in Ballet. Why Should We Care About the One in Tech?

That’s the excellent title of an excellent op-ed in the Washington Examiner by ballet dancer Madison Breshears, who is also a legal assistant and writer in California. Here’s a “money quote” (italics original):

I was sitting in a ballet studio, warming up before class, when I was unexpectedly prompted to revisit the idea of the “gender gap.” Surrounded by that standard 20:1 female to male ratio, I asked myself, where is the public outrage? If we tend to assume that occupational gender disparities are invariably the result of injustice, then, by all accounts, ballet was suffering from an epidemic of anti-male sexism.

But that obviously isn’t the case, and you don’t need to launch an investigative campaign into casting or hiring practices to know why. Men, on average, simply are not as interested in ballet as women. It isn’t even close, and thus neither are the numbers of men and women in ballet.

The selective outrage of feminists over disparities like the one in tech is revealing. There is a conspicuous shortage of school programs, campaigns, marches, and hashtags to end the gender gap in, say, teaching, or counseling, which are professions overwhelmingly dominated by women. Nursing is a pretty good gig — it pays well, is flexible, and nurses can find work anywhere. So, where should we look for the anti-male bias that made it so that more than 90 percent of nurses are women?

And here’s the conclusion:

I salute women who work in fields where they’re outnumbered, but I don’t appreciate or support policies that patronize women at men’s expense for the sake of “diversity” in any occupation, under any circumstances. My female friends in STEM agree, and they aren’t the ones pushing for these ridiculous reparations.

As for the radical feminists, you might ask them, if they feel so strongly about equal representation, why didn’t they themselves pursue a degree in engineering? Expect to hear something like, “well, I did always prefer English, and calculus was such a bore.”

MP: The chart below displays another gender gap that gets no attention, no concern, no funding, no special programs, no activism, no hand-wringing, no advocacy, etc. — the huge and growing “gender college degree gap” that started nearly 40 years ago favoring women. According to Department of Education forecasts, within less than a decade there will be 150 women earning a college degree in 2026 for every 100 men. But there are still thousands of women’s centers on almost every college campus across the country, funded by taxpayers, parents and/or students, to ensure that women are successful in college? Seems like that mission was accomplished back in the 1980s, can’t the radical feminists declare a majority victory for women in higher education and move on to other more important causes?