Vol. 3, No. 7: April 27, 1999

Ally McBeal and the End of Feminism

Sometimes powerful social commentary comes from the most unlikely places. Consider the treatment of gender discrimination on the latest episode of "Ally McBeal."

The story line involved a suit filed against a law firm by a new mother whose reduced hours had removed her from partnership consideration. The managing partner defends his decision to side-track the accuser’s career by giving voice to the plight of modern employers.

For the defendant’s firm to stay competitive, attorneys must bill 2,000 hours a year and partners must work on some weekends. When the plaintiff cut back her hours at the office to attend to her new family, she made a choice that hindered her overall job performance. "I only care about an employee’s performance at work," the partner testified, adding later that "[raising your children] is probably a better way to spend your time, but I have to run my business." With that, the show cut to the heart of a common dilemma.

To grant partnership to the new mother, despite her reduced hours, would mean that she received special treatment because of her personal choices, while her colleagues – men, or women without children – would have to meet a higher standard of performance before receiving the benefits of partnership. To paraphrase another character on the show, to get equal results, you have to treat people unequally. Meanwhile, every hour of work at a law firm has a dollar amount attached that gets billed to a client, and so lost time is truly lost money. But once made, an exception must be granted to all comers. Lowering the standards of success is never a singular event and creates the very real possibility of jeopardizing a firm’s competitiveness. And this isn’t a problem that’s going away.

As Naomi Lopez reports in the Pacific Research Institute’s Free Markets, Free Choices II: Smashing the Wage Gap and Glass Ceiling Myths, women have more than doubled their salaries, in real terms, over the past 50 years. As more women pursue higher education and seek professional career tracks, their professional success should only continue. Still, men and women continue to make different life choices, choices that necessarily impact their careers.

Many businesses are responding to the loss of talented female employees by offering increased flexibility. One of the hottest business trends right now is task-based management, where performance is measured not in hours but on a project-by-project basis. This approach, especially popular in high-tech industries, is more friendly to a working mother’s schedule than the practice of placing a premium on the hours a person logs at the office.

This is not to say that working mothers shouldn’t practice law. It is simply to point out that we all make choices, and none of us should be entitled to special treatment because of those choices. Equal results based on unequal treatment amounts to no kind of equality at all. But that idea runs counter to prevailing thought, which the writers of Ally McBeal writers proved unable to resist.

The plaintiff won in the end, but not without a serious challenge to the anti-choice assumptions of sex discrimination. Even in Hollywood, it is no longer politically correct to accept feminist dogma without question, and that represents true progress. As they used to say in the sixties, "The times, they are a-changin’."

—Katherine Post