The Student News Site of Florida Gulf Coast University

Eagle Media

Eagle Media

Eagle Media

The ‘Fearless Girl’ statue is misleading

While the “Fearless Girl” statue can be a good symbol for women, it is being used to promote an extremely illogical argument.

On March 7, the statue was installed to celebrate International Women’s Day. It quickly became a popular tourist spot.

Last week, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the monument will stay on land belonging to the Department of Transportation.

According to the New York Times, the artist of the statue, Kristen Visbal, said, “She was created to bring attention to the courage and unrealized power of women in so many fields, and she has clearly struck a nerve.”

Story continues below advertisement

Additionally, ISS Analytics has noted that women only account for 16 percent of U.S. corporate boards.

The statue clearly is a symbol for women to feel emboldened in taking more positions in corporate America, which is a good message for women.

However, the message for the statue becomes pointless when considering the main people using the statue and its purpose.

Since the statue has been placed, many prominent Democrats have come out to support it and have used it as a rallying cry for modern day feminists, which is a strong base for political support.

Many modern day feminists believe that a gender gap exists in many industries like corporate businesses. They think that women occupying only 16 percent of corporate positions is abhorrent. They demand that society must change in order to make workforce more equal between genders.

Unfortunately, they never elaborate the exact distribution between the two genders.

They simply demand that companies hire more women, but they don’t ever declare what they consider to be the acceptable percentage.

They also ignore professions that have already have a majority female workforce. However, under their are own logic, isn’t sexist for them to be silent on the sexism against men in certain professions?

Instead, they always rail against the unequal amount of women compared to men in many sectors like corporate positions, political offices and various media positions.

Interesting to note, they rarely call for more women to be coal miners, plumbers or oil rig workers, which are good-paying, male-dominated jobs that are also very dirty and/or dangerous occupations.

They only care about women getting jobs that can get more attention, which technically most women can’t achieve simply because there is a very small amount of those actual jobs.

It is even more illogical considering that they never consider the actual skill and abilities of the people they either want to get hired or replaced. They only demand that more women be hired in a particular profession.

While there are many talented women in the corporate field alone, there are also many talented men, and the same can be said about many other jobs. It is foolish for a business to hire more women simply for the sake of achieving an ideological goal.

If a business wants good employees, they hire qualified applicants. If there are equally skilled applicants, gender should not be a deciding factor, but in that scenario, a wrong and right choice does not necessarily exist because those seeking the job are more or less equal on their abilities.

Many modern day feminists place little value on skill. They demand that businesses hire women over men who are more skilled just because of gender.

Ironically, those demands hurt businesses that hire the most skilled individuals, which allows for them to grow and hire even more employees, including women.

Even the position of the statue, in front of the iconic “Charging Bull,” is misleading. It appears that the girl is standing up to a corporate symbol of sexism. In reality, the bull is a symbol of a strong economic market.

Honestly, it will be great if more women are hired onto corporate boards as long as they’re qualified, but we should never advocate that women be hired simply for the sake of politics or illogical ideological positions.

Leave a Comment
More to Discover

Comments (0)

All Eagle Media Picks Reader Picks Sort: Newest

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *