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Now, this treaty-this is my point. This treaty, in conjunction with the counterfeit gender research could be a toxic combination. If CEDAW is ratified, expect more rancor, more lawsuits, more divisiveness.

A final point. The United Nations has a history of using its human rights doctrines and commissions for scoring points against western democracies, all the while carefully refraining from censuring countries that notoriously abuse the rights of its citizens. The United States was excluded from a Commission on Human Rights last year, petulantly expelled from the Commission on Human Rights, and on every occasion it seems the United States is alone.

I do not consider it a bad thing to be alone, because we are alone in defending little Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East. Anyway, there is no reason to believe the ČEDAW would not be used in a highly political way as well.

Women in the developing countries need our help. We are morally bound to assist them in ways that are constructive and reflect the ideals of fairness and common sense that have lifted American women to a level of freedom unprecedented in human history. Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Dr. Sommers follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS

THE CASE AGAINST RATIFYING THE UNITED NATIONS CONVENTION ON THE ELIMINATION OF ALL FORMS OF DISCRIMINATION AGAINST WOMEN (CEDAW)

Although I shall be arguing that we should not ratify the CEDAW convention, I want first to speak as a feminist who would very much like to see a realistic international effort for securing women's rights.

American women have been the beneficiaries of two major waves of feminism. In the First Wave, led by the great foremothers, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, women won basic political and legal rights, including the right to vote. The Second Wave, which came in the sixties and early seventies, advanced women economically and socially. Employers could no longer legally restrict a job to one sex. A company could no longer refuse to hire a woman because she had children. Such laws have been critical to the well-being and success of American women and most of the reforms of the First and Second Waves are appropriate and necessary for women everywhere.

With this historical progress, American women have achieved virtual equality with men. There are still some unresolved equity issues, but overall, we are now among the freest and most liberated women in the world. In some ways, we are not merely doing as well as men-we are doing better. We live longer, we are better educated, we have more choices on how to lead our lives. By any reasonable measure, equity feminism is the great American success story.

When I lecture about the history of the women's movement on college campuses, students often ask what's next for the Third Wave. My answer is always the same; we have to help women in other parts of the world secure the freedoms we now take for granted. There are countries, especially in Africa and Asia, where women have not yet had their Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony; as for second wave reforms, they are light-years away from them.

American women have much to tell the women of the world. We can and should help women everywhere to achieve the kind of equity we have here. But joining the CEDAW convention is the wrong way to do that. I have several reasons for opposing ratification of this treaty. I will focus here on two or three that I regard as decisive. The CEDAW convention has many admirable and sound goals that any person of conscience must support. But it was formulated in the 1970s and it promotes several reforms that we now know to be harmful. These programs looked promising, exciting and progressive in 1975, but since then we have come to realize that they undermine economic prosperity. Article 11, for example, calls for governments to set wages. It demands "The right to equal remuneration. in respect of work of equal value." This is the policy we call "comparable worth." Americans have rightly re

jected comparable worth as unjust and unworkable at home. So, why should we advocate it for women anywhere?

Article 11 also demands that governments provide paid maternity leave, and provide the "necessary supporting social services to enable parents to combine family obligation with work responsibility and participation in public life... through the establishment and development of a network of childcare facilities." All very salutary, except that experience shows that such programs tend to burden a country's economy to everyone's detriment. American women have benefited from a free, open and economically dynamic society: shouldn't we be promoting policies that bring these advantages to needy women everywhere?

The treaty includes several sweeping demands that are socially divisive and likely to create unnecessary misery. Article 5, for example, calls for all governments to “modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women with a view to achieving the elimination of prejudices and all other practices which are based on... stereotyped roles for men and women." What exactly does this provision entail? Of course, some gender stereotypes are destructive and prejudicial and we must call disparaging attention to them. (Typical examples include generalizations that women are irrational, that they are less intelligent than men, that they are politically immature, etc.) But, other male/female stereotypes are descriptively true. In the 1970s, many feminists believed that truly liberated men and women would become more and more alike—that a gender-just society would eventually become androgynous. Gender was supposedly an artificial social construction that gave men the advantage. Well, today, only a handful of scholars in Women's Studies programs still believe that.

A growing body of research in neuroscience, endocrinology, and psychology over the past 40 years provides evidence that there is a biological basis for many sex differences in aptitudes and preferences. Males have better spatial reasoning skills, females better verbal skills. Males are greater risk takers, females are more nurturing. (There are exceptions, but these are the rules.) As the Rutgers University anthropologist Lionel Tiger has said, "Biology is not destiny, but it is good statistical probability." Unfortunately, much in CEDAW is premised on the false idea that all gender preferences are socially constructed.

I am

Of course, in recognizing the obvious differences between men and women, not for one moment suggesting that women should be prevented from pursuing their goals in any field they choose; but I am suggesting we should not expect or aim at parity in all fields. More women than men will continue to want to stay at home with small children and pursue careers in fields like early childhood education or psychology; men will continue to be heavily represented in fields like helicopter mechanics and hydraulic engineering.

A few years ago I took part in a television debate with celebrity lawyer, Gloria Allred. Ms. Allred was representing a 14-year-old girl who was suing the Boy Scouts of America for excluding girls. Allred characterized same-sex scout troops as a form of “gender apartheid." She spoke of the need to “socialize" boys to play with dolls so they could be more nurturing and less fractious. CEDAW will give all the Ms. Allred's in this country a treaty of their own to create mischief.

Consider, for example, how hard-liners could deploy Article 10 of the treaty: It calls for the "elimination of stereotyped concepts of the roles of men and woman at all levels in all forms of education ... in particular, by the revision of textbooks and school programs." Our textbooks and school materials cannot endure any more political corrections. The New York Times recently ran a story about how politics of textbook revisions is now out of control: great works of literature were recently scanned for insensitivity and altered by censors before intense lobbying eliminated the practice. The CEDAW Treaty demands this kind of textual revision-which amount to censorship inconsistent with American civil liberties.

Can there be anyone in the United States, apart from a small coterie of feminists activists and academics, who would favor empowering a committee of foreign bureaucrats to oversee American social mores-or intrude into public education by distorting the textbooks our children read?

the treaty could do us harm by promoting male/female resentments and divisions at a time when the country badly needs social unity. Most American women feel blessed to live in a country where, for the most part, the men are fair-minded, decent and supportive of women in their quest for equality. We are proud and grateful to be part of a society that has afforded us unprecedented freedoms and opportunities. But this very favorable view of American men and of American society is not shared by the hard-line feminists in our universities. These activists/scholars tend to take a dim view of American society, routinely referring to it as a “patriarchy,” a "male hegemony," a culture that keeps women socially subordinate. One leading textbook in women's studies talks of an epidemic of gender "terrorism” plaguing the

average American women. Another calls the United States a "Rape Culture." Now, Bosnia, for a time, was truly a rape culture. Afghanistan, under the Taliban, routinely practiced gender terrorism. To apply such terms to the United States is ludi

crous.

The activists and scholars who characterize America as a sexist society_sincerely believe we are in a gender war. In all wars, the first casualty is truth. Too much of what we hear from contemporary women's organizations is outrageously false. Too much of what passes as gender scholarship is ideological and factually wrong: American men are depicted as violent predators and American women their hapless victims. If you ask me to reduce the philosophy of academic feminism to a single phrase it be this one: Women are from Venus, Men are from Hell.

For the past decade, moderate feminist academics like myself, and a growing number of dissidents scholars such as Camille Paglia (University of the Arts), Daphne Patai (University Of Massachusetts), Betsy Fox-Genovese (Emory), Noretta Koertge (University of Indiana), Judith Kleinfeld (University of Alaska), Jennifer Braceras (Harvard Law)—to name only a few-have been hard at work correcting the misinformation, challenging the naive hostility to the free market system, and calling for an end to the male bashing-rhetoric that is standard fare at most of our colleges and universities. We have made slow but steady progress in opening up the national discussion on gender to diverse perspectives, but thinking on these matters on campus and in the major feminist organizations remains dismayingly rigid and intolerant. For the time being, the organized women's movement in this country is dominated by ideological gender theorists and by well-intentioned, but misinformed, women's groups that take what these theorists say seriously.

Now what does this have to do with CEDAW? If the United States signs the treaty, it would dramatically increase the power of the misguided gender scholars. The treaty calls for the elimination of sexism. Reasonable people believe that our American society has already achieved this goal in most of the ways that count. If you compare us with the rest of the world, we are a shining example of gender equity. Unfortunately, most campus theorists do not agree with that. They believe that American women live in a male supremacist society; and they can cite twenty years of feminist "scholarship" to persuade themselves and us that they are right. What they actually cite is a body of statistically challenged gender ideology.

This treaty in conjunction with the counterfeit feminist research could be a most toxic combination. If CEDAW is ratified, expect more rancor, more lawsuits, and more divisiveness. Gender bureaucrats from the United Nations will join the feminist ideologues and the United States will be subject to relentless legal assaults for alleged violations of the treaty.

The United Nations has a history of using its human rights doctrines and commissions for scoring points against Western democracies-all the while carefully refraining from censuring countries that notoriously abuse the rights of their citizens. The United States was banished from the Commission on Human Rights for a year. The UN's 2001 Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa turned into a shameful anti-Semitic condemnation of Israel. There is no reason to believe that the CEDAW would not be used in a highly political way as well.

Women in the developing countries need help. We are morally bound to assist them in ways that are constructive and that reflect ideals of fairness and common sense that have lifted American women to a level of freedom and unprecedented in human history. CEDAW is not the way.

Senator BOXER. Thank you so much.

Our final speaker will be Ms. Jane E. Smith, chief executive officer of Business and Professional Women/USA.

STATEMENT OF MS. JANE E. SMITH, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, BUSINESS AND PROFESSIONAL WOMEN/USA, WASHINGTON, D.C.

Ms. SMITH. Thank you. Good morning. I am Jane Smith, CEO of Business and Professional Women, and I want to thank Senator Biden and Senator Boxer and the members of the committee for inviting me to be here today. We do thank you and ask that the longer statement be placed in the record.

Senator BOXER. Without objection, so ordered.

Ms. SMITH. Business and Professional Women is a bipartisan organization of 30,000 women in 1,600 federations around the country, and we are an organization representing equity for women in the work place, but I also represent, as a member of the steering committee, the National Council of Women's Organizations, a nonpartisan network of 160 women's organizations collectively representing 7 million women in the Nation, but I would also like to say that I am the immediate past president of the National Council of Negro Women, having managed programs in Zimbabwe, Egypt, Eritrea, and Senegal, and also worked at the Carter Center, where we worked around the world for the democratization of cultures, and it is with those experiences that I come.

The treaty for the rights of women is an instrument that BPW wants ratified to address discrimination against women in their political, cultural, economic, social, and family values. We believe in having formal representation of being a member of treaties, of conventions that speak to human rights for people here in the United States and around the country.

We have examined this as a business plan because we are businesswomen, and we see best practice models in this treaty that can be used by many of us all over this country and around the world. None of it is perfect, not even practices here in the United States, but we have here a road map of where we hope to go, and it shows us how we can get there. BPW therefore supports ratification of the treaty for the following reasons.

First, in ratifying the treaty, the United States heightens its credibility as a world leader of human rights. To do so is to do what is right, and to do so is to be able to have a position on what is right.

Second, the treaty offers the United States an opportunity to share its progressive work on the rights of women with less advanced nations.

Third, the treaty provides a plan for ending discrimination against women, thereby offering an opportunity to better our Nation.

Now, while BPW's members and American women in general have made tremendous strides toward equality in the last 80 years, women around the world continue to experience discrimination in all facets of their lives. As many have said before me today, this discrimination is no better exemplified than in Afghanistan. BPW in 1956, when our members visited Afghanistan, stood in support of a program for opportunities for girls. We published it in our magazine and spread it around the United States. 40 years later, BPW's members continue to show support for these women in Afghanistan, and we do understand many similar situations around the world.

The United States works with impoverished countries around the globe on a daily basis, providing instruction on issues from irrigation to voting procedures to inoculations, but most importantly the United States instructs countries on human rights issues, even though we are not perfect, encouraging other nations to adopt policies in line with democratic principles that we stand for even though we often do not live up to them.

Yet we are the only industrialized Nation that has not ratified the treaty for the rights of women. Our members ask how can we have other countries ask us to provide guidance in human rights when we are not ready to stand for that.

A personal editorial note, as an African American, I will always be grateful to the American citizens who took a formal position on my freedom. Unfortunately, life for Afghan women and other women around the world is only a snapshot of what is going on. We could talk about the things that need to be worked on in Peru, and Thailand, and Brazil, and Pakistan, and Zimbabwe, and then on the other hand we could talk about those things that are still not perfect but going on well in Uganda, United States, Costa Rica, Canada, India.

All of these examples, pro and con, even though none are perfect, illustrate that the treaty for the rights of women has proven to be a valuable tool in broadening the basic rights of women and girls as a formal tool, as a formal plan, as a formal guideline. Although I have focused much of my remarks on what goes on both here and around the world, we have to say one more time that it would only be collective as Mrs. Bush, as the administration, as the women's organizations in the United States have brought to the table in facing Afghanistan. Despite all of the successful work that we have done on this this year, for some reason many of us cannot still see that ratifying the treaty is definitely the way to go.

On behalf of Business and Professional Women/USA and the National Council of Women's Organizations, I thank the committee for this opportunity to testify, and if we had had time I would have welcomed questions. I thank you specifically, Madam Chair. [The prepared statement of Ms. Smith follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF JANE E. SMITH

Good morning. I am Jane Smith, Chief Executive Officer of Business and Professional Women/USA. On behalf of Business and Professional Women/USA (BPW/ USA), I want to thank Senator Biden, Senator Boxer, Senator Helms and the members of the committee for inviting me here today. I applaud Senator Biden for holding this hearing and Senator Boxer for chairing it. I welcome the opportunity to represent the working women who are members of my organization to discuss the importance of ratifying the Convention to End All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, often called the Treaty for the Rights of Women.

Business and Professional Women/USA is a bi-partisan organization that promotes equity for all women in the workplace through advocacy, education and information. BPW/USA represents the interests of 30,000 working women who participate in 1,600 local organizations across the nation, including every Congressional District. I am here today also as a Steering Committee Member of the National Council of Women's Organizations. In this capacity, I represent a nonpartisan network of 160 women's organizations, collectively representing seven million women nationwide.

The Treaty for the Rights of Women is an instrument to address discrimination against women in their political, cultural, economic, social, and family lives. As Chief Executive Officer of Business and Professional Women, I view it as a business plan because the treaty provides a "best practice" model for improving the rights of women. It offers us a road map of where we hope to go and shows us how we can plan to get there. Research has taught us that improving the lives of women impacts greatly the quality of their families' lives, and ultimately the quality of their nations.

BPW/USA supports ratification of the Treaty for the Rights of Women because it provides a plan for ending discrimination against women, thereby offering an opportunity to better our nation. Additionally, in ratifying the treaty, the United States heightens its credibility as a world leader on human rights.

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