Last week, I fell asleep one night and when I woke up in the morning, it was 1952.
At least that’s what I felt like as I perused the news and came upon a not-so-glowing review of a certain piece of Justice Minister Peter MacKay’s “wisdom.”
MacKay was at an Ontario Bar Association meeting two weeks ago when he responded to a Toronto Star article in which he was asked why so few women and visible minorities sit on federally appointed court benches.
In the article, MacKay gave the reason that women aren’t applying.
It seems reasonable that they can’t get positions they don’t apply for.
But wait. The intrepid report goes deeper. Why aren’t women applying?
MacKay’s response: because they’re too busy being mommies.
Women have a greater bond with their children than men, he reasons. They see the long, demanding journey toward those highly esteemed positions in Canada’s court system as taking away from their ability to live up to that special bond.
Last week, in the face of much criticism, MacKay elaborated on those comments and stood staunchly by them.
He told reporters there is “no question” that women have a greater bond with their children than men, especially when those children are really young.
MacKay smirked at reporters and told them, “We need more women to apply to be judges. It’s that simple.”
However, he’s not sharing the number of applications by women for judge positions to back up his statement that not enough are applying.
How noble, that in their quest for parental superiority, women sacrifice their own ambitions. How very motherly of them to be the martyr for their babies.
Somehow, the omniscient narrator of mothers’ lives, MacKay knows the bond women feel with their babies.
Throw in the towel, ladies. Mystery solved. We can work all we want, but now we know that we are doomed to sacrifice everything for the well-being of our babes, because ambitions take away from that well-being.
What about the 81 women who work as federally appointed judges in Canada? How did they get to be there?
Should we be concerned about the well-being of their children?
But don’t worry, it’s not our fault. It’s Mother Nature’s fault. It’s just the biologically predetermined risk you take when you are a female parent.
Actually, wait. MacKay, in his infinite wisdom, said it is our problem because we’re not applying, therefore we can’t get positions we don’t ask for. Neener-neener.
The notion behind MacKay’s comments is so stupid it would be laughable if it wasn’t so widely held. It’s that old, out-of-date opinion that the most important job for a woman is motherhood, so it goes against the natural order when she follows her ambitions in other areas.
Being a mother is very important. But it also says nothing about the importance of other ambitions.
Making being a good parent and a good employee mutually exclusive things is so, incredibly, frustratingly limiting to women.
By falsely putting mothers on such a pedestal, framing them as martyrs who forego their own ambitions for the sake of their children, he’s simultaneously villainizing those women who do stay in the workforce and — gasp — excel by framing them as mothers who value their bonds with their children less than those pious others.
The horror.
In reality, women are just as diverse as men in their abilities, ambitions, and yes, even their bond with their children.
Not only is it a catch-22, it’s wrapped in layers of guilt for inevitably failing to meet undue expectations to excel in both arenas at all times in order to justify merit for being in both.
There is nothing wrong with deriving satisfaction and meaning from life from parenting, and that applies to both sexes.
The problem here is that MacKay falsely pits that against women deriving satisfaction from other areas of life, such as those outside the home.
Really, if MacKay is so concerned about women’s relationships with their children, maybe he should make comments relating to issues with adequate, affordable child care; women’s health rights; or maybe, just maybe, encourage equality of the importance of both motherhood and fatherhood.
So you want to be a lady judge? Throw your application in the pile, but fair warning: no guarantee you’ll be treated with respect once your resume ends up in the hands of Canada’s highest-ranked justice official.
If you need more evidence of MacKay’s gender stereotyping, look no further than the emails he sent to Department of Justice staffers on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.
He commended mothers for their ability to work full time in and out of the home, changing diapers, packing lunches, running after school buses, and planning dinner.
On Father’s Day, he didn’t mention any household chores, and instead commended fathers for guiding and loving their children to shape who they will become in the future.
It makes absolutely no sense to stereotype parental roles in this way. Both parents change diapers. Both parents teach their children in the hopes they’ll become wonderful people.
It is no coincidence that the emails to male parents and female parents were very different, and how convenient that his camp can simply shrug and say, “But they were innocent well wishes!”
Sure, they were innocent well wishes made from the trenches of an idiotic mindset. Sure, just like it’s womankind’s noble quest for parental superiority that makes its members reluctant to apply for positions in the oh-so-fair federal court system.
It couldn’t possibly be that archaic attitudes such as MacKay’s discourage women from applying to an old boys’ club.
