Women's Running continues to trumpet the dubious value of raw victimhood
Wanting to see inequalities reduced is one thing, but purposefully ignoring evidence of progress and inviting others into the misery-tent is a bad editorial stance
Women’s Running published something resembling an editorial by Erin Strout on March 15. Titled “Splits: The Gender Wage Gap is an Ongoing Women’s Health Crisis,” the piece, categorized under the site’s “Wellness” tab, differs from Strout’s usual formula in that it is a sloppy, stupid piece that she appears to have rushed through. Usually, her pieces seem well-researched, at least on her favored sides of issues, even if they invariably turn out sloppy and stupid anyway.
March 15, best known as the Ides of March, was designated Equal Pay Day for this year. Not until recently were national holidays enacted with the sole and specific goal of amplifying online grievances, and this is one of them. Strout’s column is about how much less money women make than men do at both the most zoomed-out level and by specific ethnic group.
According to the National Women’s Law Center, women working full time, year-round in 2020 were paid 83 cents for every dollar paid to men.
Comparing all women workers with all men workers, regardless of how many hours they worked? In 2020, women were paid 73 cents for every dollar paid to men.
The wage gap isn’t just sexist, of course. It’s also racist. Black Equal Pay Day isn’t until September 21—Black women earned 63 cents for every dollar a white, non-Hispanic man earned in 2020. Native American women took home 50 cents for every dollar men were paid. Latina Equal Pay Day lands on December 8 because Latinas were paid 49 cents for every dollar the white man deposited in 2020, according to the American Association of University Women.
I’m thinking that if economic hardship is a pressing thing, and the government’s entire response is to issue a series of holidays dedicated to highlighting every injustice even as life itself becomes unaffordable for formerly stable people (more on that below), then idiots like Strout should be shouting at the government, not memorizing the days on which people like her will recycle the same boisterous screaming, none of it remotely intended to serve any purpose besides public venting.
Strout then explains, hopefully to no one’s astonishment, that poorer people suffer a variety of adverse life incomes. She cites a study that was obviously commissioned to establish that women get the shaft.
A 2016 study published in Social Science & Medicine surveyed 22,581 working adults and found that women who earned less than their male counterparts had a 2.5 times higher chance of major depression and four times greater odds of anxiety than men of the same age, education, family composition, and occupation. The research also showed that when women’s income was greater than their male counterparts, women’s odds of depression and anxiety were equivalent to men’s.
It looks like the study separated women into groups based on how much money they earned compared to men, controlling for vocation and other variables, and then evaluated how much depression women in each group reported experiencing compared to men.
First, it’s not surprising that poorer women report being unhappier than better-off women, all else the same. This is universal.
Second, women as a group experience depression and anxiety at about twice the rates men do. While this obviously sucks and bears looking at, if the research crew behind the Social Science & Medicine study didn’t account for this background reality, the numbers Strout gives aren’t especially helpful.
Third, a far better way to evaluate the specific effects of income on depression would be to stratify those 22,581 workers by income level, then evaluate how much depression the women in each group experienced compared to men. Statistical methods could then be used to filter out the higher overall societal rates of anxiety and depression among women to see how much of the mental-health differences reported in the Social Science & Medicine study were driven by income differences.
Regardless, seeing phrase “Every dollar the white man deposited” in what is ostensibly a running magazine, or anywhere, made reading this essay worth all five minutes. And since Women’s Running is ostensibly a running magazine, and presumably wants to offer some of its female readers encouraging information amid the continual release of Erin Strout’s disturbingly moist verbal flatulence, here are some facts to balance the gloom in Strout’s essay.
On Monday, the Pew Research Center headlined a gender income-gap report with “Young women are out-earning young men in several U.S. cities.” Included in the report is that “in 22 of 250 U.S. metropolitan areas, women under the age of 30 earn the same amount as or more than their male counterparts.” Okay, maybe that number would have to be somewhere between 126 and 250 to satisfy Strout. But if it represents an upward trend, it’s certainly worth reporting on—even if the benefit is preferentially to college-educated women (anyone working in a big city is more likely to be working a job requiring a degree), not the members of lagging communities Strout is allegedly stumping for.
There are 1,227 U.S. collegiate men's cross-country programs and 1,307 women's programs. That's 6.5 percent more on the women's side. For track and field, the numbers are 949 and 1,017, a 7.2-percent "advantage" for women.
Also, NCAA D1 women's programs are allotted 18 full scholarships between cross-country and track combined. For men, the number is 12.6. Functionally, that is a huge difference. At schools offering cross-country but not track, women's teams get six scholarships while men's teams receive five.
As of 2018, the number of women runners may have surpassed the number of male runners for the first time. For all of the efforts of cads like me to bar the door, Erin Strout’s sunshine-and-rainbows approach seems to be sucking bitches in.
In October 2020, Strout and Women’s Running asked, “Can We Run Away From Politics?” If the answer was “no” in Strout’s eyes then, I don’t see why politics aren’t a central theme in her and WR’s judgment now. Is that because the U.S. features a different president, one under whom inflation has skyrocketed, no serious restorative bills have been passed, ineffective vaccines have been distributed and pushed to the limit, and the country is being invited to cheer on an overseas war? I don’t find these banalities central to my running, but if Strout does, why isn’t she calling on this administration to stop fucking over poor people while the ultra-rich and Ivy League institutions enjoy unprecedented windfalls?
Strout has portrayed the typical opponent of allowing apostate males into female sports as a science-challenged conservative bigots. If that’s fair, why can’t we* saddle President Joe Biden (Junior) with responsibility for skyrocketing prices of commodifies like food that everyone has to buy? My gut tells me that if Person A earns 49 or 50 or 63 or 73 or 83 cents for the same amount of work Person B is paid 100 cents to do, then Person A is likely to feel the pinch of a sudden and jarring rise in food prices far sooner than Person B. Perhaps Strout should be aiming her e-queefs in the direction of the White House and the crew she presumably votes for.
And on the matter of matching value to financial reward, Erin Strout is in a tenuous position to be pushing for such a scheme to be realized. Strout, quite simply, would not be getting writing assignments were it not for the specifically diseased cultural environment into which the U.S. has unquestionably fallen. Morons like her would have been relegated to Twitter and their own blogs had #MeToo not given them platforms to complain about unrelated matters in around 2017 and the running media not decided in 2020 along with the rest of the country that no words or actions by a person of color expressing a grievance could even be challenged, no matter how brazenly false or caustic, and correspondingly that it was appropriate to use terms like “whiteness” and “white supremacy” to characterize citizen running generally.
White women with longstanding victimhood complexes like Strout, along with a far smaller contingent of sufficiently soy-poisoned men, have found it very easy to hop convincingly aboard the Wokeness train no matter how bad their premises and their writing are. I have a feeling Strout is dimly aware of having lucked into work thanks to whining about how hard it is for women to get a chance, but only dimly. It’s fascinating to watch the ways in which she has insulated herself from the reality of her own incompetence.
Like others too emotionally labile to tolerate any criticism of their ideas, even the gentlest put-downs of the most spurious brain-farts, Strout carefully curates her social-media feeds—including occasionally protecting her tweets or assigning them limited lifespans, always the sign of an ethically healthy journalist and person—so as to obviate noise from “bad people” (i.e., any critics) while signaling other resentment-fueled social-media operatives to join in. Social-media sites do most of this silo-ing without the conscious participation of users, but Strout relies especially heavily on a constant torrent of “Yes! Blame others!” to keep her wobbly mojo afloat.
Strout, therefore, doesn’t want any of the problems she complains about to disappear. What if that actually happened, or at least enough apparent progress was made in the direction of parity that she and her fellow harpies were forced to acknowledge it? She’d be out of work, that’s what. At least as a writer. Strout’s entire lens is unfairness and inequality; she hasn’t learned a damned thing about running itself during any of the interviews she’s done, because even if she were interested, she only does those interviews and profiles because they make her feel important. She doesn’t understand or care about her subjects on journalistic levels that matter, as this eye-watering display underscores.
I could sit down and create a list of tabs and navigation tree for Women’s Running that would instantly make it twice as good a resource for women and girls in about four hours. I could supply whoever is running the thing—I don’t know if anyone has been hired to replace Jen Ator, who has done just as much work for the magazine since departing as she appeared to do while occupying the title of editor-in-chief. But I could furnish that person with an exhaustive list of experts in various areas they could rely on for article support. So could dozens of other people, though, and since I strive to avoid anxiety and depression, I don’t think I should proceed with that plan.