The bill is offensive. Establishing positive discrimination demonstrates the social Minister and the feminist Prime Minister underrate women. Worse, women in positions of great public and private responsibility will now be suspect in the eyes of both men and women.

 

The bill steals private companies’ freedom to structure their operations as they see fit and instead imposes egalitarian hiring practices, working hours and classifications that irreparably damage their freedom to act. It does not respect either the rights of the men who will be unable to obtain the job they deserved because of the blind distribution of labor through a quota system. The text also tries to force the private media to perform arbitrary gender equalizing in matters such as sales and advertising, which is both obscure and worrisome. If this interfering with individual freedom were not enough, the administration announced it is also planning to take over education on discrimination. From now on the parent’s responsibility for educating their children about this ethical matter will be undermined by “training in matters of equality”, a program to be added to the educational system.

 

But the socialists have gone much further. It is not only forbidden to prefer to choose more men than women or more women than men to perform certain jobs, but if someone claims to have been discriminated against, the burden of proof is now reversed. That is, the accused is presumed guilty until the accusation is proved false. Proving such a thing is, by the way, almost impossible.

 

The Ministry of Economy will not sink Spain’s economy (at least not much more than the previous government did) but rather it will be sunk by heavy regulatory burdens on every imaginable social and economic grounds. In this sense, and just to mention three instances, the coactive equalizing suggested by the government would prompt many companies to downsize because the plan interferes more in the decisions of owners and managers in companies with more than 250 employees; it will raise the cost per employee by establishing a disproportionate and wrong “right” to reconcile personal and professional life; and finally, it will provoke an earthquake in the insurance world by forbidding gender discrimination in premiums.

 

To make things even worse, the law will not manage to make women equal to men. Not only because it will substitute public recognition by public suspicion but also because the new law will harm jobs currently discriminating in women’s favor (due to relative higher productivity of women in such jobs), while other jobs in which (because of the opposite reasons) the discrimination favors men it will hurt the company and, in an indirect way, the women.

 

The Bill for the Equality of Women and Men is an insult to women, an intolerable intrusion into individual freedoms, an economic burden, an outrage against a fundamental juridical principle and a serious mistake. It will significantly harm women as a whole. I have no doubt that a great majority of women will rebell against this humiliating nonsense in defense of their gender. Just remember, in general, we men don’t underrate your gender like Caldera and Rodríguez do.