Onward, Gender Soldiers by Heather Mac Donald – City Journal

A front-page article last week opened with what the editors apparently believed was an important and troubling observation: \”In an Oval Office meeting on Dec. 29, 11 of President Obama’s top advisers stood before him discussing the heated fiscal negotiations. The 10 visible in a White House photo are men.\” The Times helpfully provided the smoking-gun photo—the ten males awkwardly arrayed far across the room from a seated Obama, some in three-quarter view, like beauty contestants. That the president’s press office circulated the image at all is the only newsworthy item in the Times’s otherwise drearily formulaic article. Who would have guessed that the Obama White House still possessed enough lingering innocence regarding gender politics to release such a red flag to the media, apparently under the misimpression that the image simply recorded a meeting of the president’s inner circle rather than provide a searing portrait of the patriarchy in action? The administration and its successors will never make such a mistake again.

Having established the state of national emergency, the Times went on to ring the usual changes on the bean-counting theme, carefully charting each agency’s gender breakdown and quoting \”experts\” in the heretofore unknown field of the \”representation of women in government and business\” on the administration’s dereliction of its female- hiring duties. The fact that the White House itself is virtually half-female did not assuage the Times’s righteous indignation.

The Times offered no examples of a patently superior female candidate being rejected for a second-rate male, beyond citing Michèle Flournoy as a plausible candidate for Secretary of Defense (Obama has nominated Chuck Hagel) and three other names for chief of staff and Treasury Secretary. Flournoy was a think-tank defense wonk whose READ via www.city-journal.org

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