Have Women Gone Too Far? | Female Empowerment

Column Asks Whether We’ve “Gone Too Far In Search Of Empowerment”

10:41 am, December 9th | by Amy Tennery

“Women have crafted a new role for themselves in the modern world, but I can’t help wondering if that could be our undoing” — so begins the face-palmiest of face-palming editorials from the Gulf Daily News of Bahrain.

To be fair, the column, written by Reem Antoon, makes the point that women tend to take on a disproportionately large amount of the household chores, even before they head into work (Antoon laments, “by contrast, men spend their breakfast time performing such tasks as reading the newspaper”). And Antoon also wonders why it is that, as women have evolved to take on a greater role in the workplace, “shouldn’t men be able to change too?”

But the undoing of the piece comes in its rhetorical question: “Have women gone too far in their search for empowerment?” Answer: No.

Antoon argues that “men function differently because their brains are designed to do so,” as though they’re hardwired to hold women back by saddling them with the bulk of the house chores, and that “men are biologically designed to be selfish.” Guess what else they’re biologically designed to do? Fight, cheat and steal — but they don’t (generally) because that’s not how people function in a rational society. Just because we’re all hardwired to aggressively compete for survival doesn’t mean we roam through the streets like marauding pack of wolves.

We’re not up against genetic blockage. And, no, we haven’t “gone too far.”

TAGS: women in business | women in the workplace | women's empowerment