What Do Women Want? (the politics edition)

A National Review article discusses Hillary Clinton's unfavorability ratings among women, which are almost as bad as Donald Trump's same ratings. This Bloomberg editorial goes even further into Trump's lack of love from the fairer sex (not counting his many wives, of course).

This all begs the question: What do women want from presidential candidates?

I asked Google, and got 67,500,000 results.

There was one editorial entitled, "What do women want in a presidential candidate?" I was thinking, alright, someone has considered this question! Unfortunately, the article was posted 9/2/2012.

There was a more current editorial from 2015, "What women want from their next presidential nominee", but that was about what Republican women want. Based on the significant mention of Carly Fiorina, I would say Republican women are disappointed now.

One of the articles I read mentioned "reproductive rights". Last time I checked, nobody was against reproductive rights, except for the Chinese government.

Then I found this gem of an article: "5 Important Issues That Matter to Women in the 2016 Presidential Election". Could this be the answer to my prayers? Well...the article was in Teen Vogue. Isn't that where everyone goes to get their political answers? The ad at the top of the page just added to the seriousness of the discussion: "Claim your prom dress". Count me among the click throughs on that!

But without further ado, here are the 5 things women (especially Teen Vogue readers) want from their presidential candidate this year:

1. Access to Planned Parenthood: The article mentions how right-wing politicians are against Planned Parenthood because of abortion, even though only 3% of PP's annual services are abortions. The article goes on to talk about all the great things PP does, such as "helps millions of women gain access to contraception, cancer screenings, and STD tests". Last time I checked, doctors provide those services too. Thanks to Obamacare, even the poor women have access to doctors now! I guess we can check this off the women's presidential candidate wish list...

2. Paid Family Leave: I love one example the article gives:

"For many workers, staying home to take care of a sick child or an aging parent means losing a paycheck — or worse, even losing a job,” Hillary Clinton said in a statement about paid leave. “That is an impossible choice we shouldn’t ask anyone to make — and yet American workers are forced to make it every day.” Clinton is hoping to pass laws which guarantee up to 12 weeks of family leave.

That will be great! Because we all know kids are never sick for longer than 12 weeks, and an aging parent will get young again after 12 weeks. Thanks Hillary!

3. The Gender Pay Gap: Consider this line from the article: "...women still earn just $.79 for every dollar men do, even when job experience and education are the same as their male coworkers." Now consider this: If the average woman took an average 12 weeks unpaid leave every year (see number 2 above), then they would lose about 1/4th of their pay, which would work out to the average woman making just $.75 for every dollar men do. Ergo, they are already ahead of that ratio, so if we just add paid family leave, bingo!

4. Minimum Wage Increase: The article starts this section with:

"According to the Department of Labor, nearly 6 in 10 minimum wage-earning employees are women. That means a boost to the minimum wage nationwide would help female laborers tremendously."

Just one problem: According to this article, there are only 3 million people earning minimum wage or less. Increasing the minimum wage only "helps" 1% of the American people, of which only 0.6% are women. This is such a small slice of women as to be negligible (kind of like the percentage of women who read Teen Vogue). I think we can safely scratch this one from the list.

5. Debt-Free Education: In other words, screw this loan stuff and give us our free education! Maybe treat higher education like we already treat elementary and high schools, because we know how well that's worked! I think this belongs under the "be careful what you wish for" category, but if you women really want this, ok. Although I think this may be one of those things we might pass off as a failure of our current educational system...

In summary, what women want is this: They want to go to a free college, and then get a job where they get a quarter of the year paid vacation, but still get paid as much as their male co-workers who still have to work while the females are out. They also want to have Planned Parenthood for their anti-reproductive needs. At least we know what women will be doing for 3 months out of the year...