Onward, Gender Soldiers

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City Journal:

Heather Mac Donald

Onward, Gender Soldiers

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

18 January 2013

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