Talent pools vary over time, and males and females are not necessarily drawn to the same fields or activities in identical numbers

Onward, Gender Soldiers

Heather Mac Donald

The New York Times trains its obsessive eye on the Obama administration.

What are the chances that the Obama administration has ever rejected the most qualified candidate for a job because that individual was female, rather than let out a large “Huzzah” and rush her name to the Senate? Exactly zero. Every executive appointment triggers a frenzied search for “diverse” candidates, with a (white) male chosen only if he is head and shoulders above the competition. And yet here comes the New York Times applying that hoary journalistic topos—“Count the females”—to the Obama administration, declaring that the White House has a problem because “only” 43 percent of its appointees have been women.

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.

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