The Independent Women's Forum has issued its First Annual Report Card on the Status of Women. Here is the rundown: A for education (more women are going to college than men, more are earning Master's degrees, and within a generation women will earn more doctoral degrees; women also get better grades than men). A for wages (the wage gap is closed when you allow for age, education level, experience, and similar factors; single women living alone with full-time jobs are actually earning more than men). B- for workplace flexibility (the outmoded Fair Labor Standards Act forbids hourly wage earners from seeking comp and flex time). B for women and the law (half of law students are women, but laws mandating special treatment for female employees, students, and contractors entrench the idea that women can't make it on their own). C- for retirement and social security (women are shortchanged in numerous ways by the current social security system).

The report card creates a good picture of what the present moment looks like through the eyes of equity feminism, with its focus on equal opportunity under the law and its distrust of ideologically-oriented feminisms that take as their founding premise the historic--and ongoing--oppression of women. So I give it an A for offering an alternative way of looking at the place of women in the U.S. today--one that is not angry, or separatist, or predicated on either a touchyfeely celebration of women's "difference" or a painful conjuring of women's victimization. I give it an A, too, for its emphasis on hard criteria--numbers, laws--and for the courageous way it suggests that laws mandating special consideration for women are themselves discriminatory.

But I grade the report card down on two counts. I give it a B- for failing to back up its claims adequately. Equity feminism depends for its credibility on its conscientious and responsible use of data to back up its arguments--arguments that almost invariably dispute the less reponsible and less conscientious claims of gender feminists (a case in point: Christina Hoff Sommers' systematic dismantling of gender feminism's favorite stat, that one in four women is raped during her lifetime). The IWF report card should have supplied links that would allow interested readers to see the IWF's reasoning on various points, look at the numbers themselves, read debates about how to interpret those numbers, and so on. This kind of careful assessment of data is what equity feminism does well, and the IWF should make it possible for readers to take part in that process and learn from it. Otherwise, the people at IWF are guilty of playing just as fast and loose with information as those they oppose.

I also grade the report card down for an inherent structural flaw. In focussing on women's status, it fails to take into account the emergence of a new kind of gender gap in our culture at the same time that it makes that gap visible to the discerning eye. I refer to the A the IWF gave women in education. That A speaks to the increasingly high quality of women's education in the U.S. But it also exposes the increasingly low quality of men's education. To give women an A for essentially beating the guys is to encourage a peculiarly dismissive and contemptuous attitude toward men--an attitude that has far more in common with some of the nastier veins of gender feminism than with the sort of fairminded fair play advocated by the IWF and organizations like it. It would have been nice if the blurb about the A in education had acknowledged that the disproportionate achievements of women in school suggest the need for greater attention to the education of boys and young men.