This TV Star Doesn’t Consider Herself a Feminist
Katrina Trinko /
Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting doesn’t consider herself a feminist.
“The Big Bang Theory” star danced around the question in a new interview.
“Is it bad if I say no?” she told Redbook magazine. “It’s not really something I think about.”
Then she elaborated:
Things are different now, and I know a lot of the work that paved the way for women happened before I was around. … I was never that feminist girl demanding equality, but maybe that’s because I’ve never really faced inequality.
Cuoco-Sweeting, who is 29, has a point: Feminists from past eras did achieve many of the goals.
We’re no longer stuck in an era where women can’t hold many jobs or receive the same level of education as men.
In fact, today young women often are outpacing young men.
Consider this data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in a study released in March: “By 27 years of age, 32 percent of women had received a bachelor’s degree, compared with 24 percent of men.”
That’s a sizeable gap.
Young women also are earning more than their male peers in some situations: “Census data from 2008 show that single, childless women in their 20s now earn 8 percent more on average than their male counterparts in metropolitan areas,” wrote American Enterprise Institute’s Christina Hoff Summers in a 2012 U.S. News and World Report article.
In fact, Cuoco-Sweeting herself is a prime example of a successful woman: She makes $1 million per episode.
Now, it’s true that not every feminist goal has been achieved. Although it’s certainly possible fewer women than men would like to be executives or politicians, it would be great to live in a world where more than 5 percent of the CEOs of Fortune 500s were women and where more than one out of five senators were women.
It’s also concerning that we live in a nation where legislation that would have banned abortion on the basis of sex selection couldn’t pass in the House of Representatives two years ago. Shouldn’t feminists want to make sure that unborn girls aren’t discriminated against?
But for many, perhaps even most, women, serious sexism isn’t a problem they have to face in their day-to-day lives.
That’s something we should celebrate: that women don’t have to spend time and energy fighting for equality anymore, that they are free to focus on other things instead.