Value her for who she is...

...not what she looks like.

That's the message of this ad produced by Verizon.

It makes me cringe to see how our culture has taken backward steps in the past few decades when it comes to its expectations of women and girls.

Yes, there are more women in the professions and in the workplace, generally. But the culture seems to tell women, "You have to be more capable than men doing the same work, June Cleaver, and a siren."

This fact strikes me whenever I turn on a cable news or sports channel. Male anchors are well-covered in suits and ties while female anchors are often scantily clad with elevated hemlines.

It's absurd.

"...the biggest thing is that we're not scared about leaving the house"

The words are those of a Pakistani woman talking about being able to work at a fast food restaurant. Interesting.

No Matter What 'The Truth About the Pay Gap,' It's Still Disturbing

This article from the libertarian ReasonOnline suggests that the pay gap between men and women in the workplace--women make only 77 cents for every dollar made by men--has less to do with gender than two other factors:

• ...women with college degrees tend to go into fields like education, psychology and the humanities, which typically pay less than the sectors preferred by men, such as engineering, math and business. They are also more likely than men to work for nonprofit groups and local governments, which do not offer salaries that Alex Rodriguez would envy.
• As they get older, many women elect to work less so they can spend time with their children. A decade after graduation, 39 percent of women are out of the work force or working part time -- compared with only 3 percent of men. When these mothers return to full-time jobs, they naturally earn less than they would have if they had never left.

Valid points, maybe. But even these two facts present us with some disturbing issues:

1. Why are "fields like education, psychology and the humanities" or employment with "nonprofit groups and local governments" so little valued? As I mentioned to my son, who forwarded the ReasonOnline article to me and had the same reaction to it as I have, it says something bad about our society when a talented baseball player like Rodriguez is paid hundreds of times more per year than the person who teaches a first grader how to read, or the therapist who helps a troubled teen, or the History professor who reminds us of useful lessons from the past, or the director of afterschool programs, like the Boys and Girls Club, that keeps young people out of trouble, boosts their performance in school, and teaches them to dream of a better life. (By the way, I've got nothing against Rodriguez, who may turn out to be the greatest player in the history of my favorite sport, baseball, and who is a product of and a spokesperson for the Boys and Girls Club movement. As someone who serves on the corporate board of our local B&G Club, I appreciate Rodriguez's involvement.)
2. Do we value those in helping or nurturing professions less because they're mostly filled by women? If that's the case, we're once more dealing with the ugliness of sexism and a gender-based pay gap.
3. And how much lost income should a woman--or a man--endure for taking time off to be there for their kids? Granted, during the time of their absence from the fulltime workforce, stay-at-home parents are losing out on experience and exposure to new ways of doing things in their fields. But, they also are gaining experience in interpersonal skills and the management of time and other resources. Many employers find that women who have taken time away to be with their kids become great managers, better managers maybe than they would have been had they not taken time away from full-time employment. How much of the twenty-three cent pay gap between genders would be erased if employers recognized the value of the stay-at-home experience in the paying work environment?

ReasonOnline says:

June O'Neill, an economist at Baruch College and former director of the Congressional Budget Office, has uncovered something that debunks the discrimination thesis. Take out the effects of marriage and child-rearing, and the difference between the genders suddenly vanishes. "For men and women who never marry and never have children, there is no earnings gap," she said in an interview.

I'm not sure the discrimination thesis really has been "debunked." Instead, I think that the discrimination behind the pay gap is more multilayered and more complex than it's usually portrayed as being. What do you think?

[For another slant on the gender pay gap, see here.]

God Calls Women (and Men) to Public Ministry

[This is the newspaper column version of this post.]

My weekly sermons appear on two different web sites and sometimes, readers send me their comments. One commenter liked a recent sermon in which I said that the Bible’s definition of a saint is anyone who turns from sin and believes in Jesus Christ.

One thing this commenter wrote disturbed me. She wrote: "I'm also a priest - Though I believe women should keep silent in the 'church.'" She cited 1 Corinthians 14:35, where the first century preacher Paul writes, "it is shameful for a woman to speak in church," as the reason for her position. I don't agree with this interpretation of the passage. To me, it ignores the context in which Paul was writing.

Chapters 13 to 15 of Paul's first letter to the church in the Greek city of Corinth deal with what's called, "the gift of tongues." This is a rare gift God gives to some Christians, mostly to help them praise God in a way that brings them personal comfort.

At Corinth, there were Christians insisting that their possession of this gift made them spiritually superior. They often disrupted worship, many different people speaking in tongues at once. Without someone to interpret the meaning of these strange utterances, these people were making other members of the Corinthian church feel excluded and causing visitors to worship to think that Christians were kooks.

Paul told the Corinthian Christians that, at most, only three people should speak in a tongue and that even they shouldn't do it unless there was someone else able to interpret them so that everybody could benefit. Otherwise, Paul said, people should keep their mouths shut. "For God is a God not of disorder but of peace," he says.

Within the context of discussing disorder in worship, Paul then says that women shouldn't speak in worship. What's up with that?

The Corinthians and other first-century Christians apparently configured their worship in the way Jews historically had in their synagogues, men forming an inner circle or semi-circle in an area closer to the rabbi and readers and explicators, women and children consigned to somewhere behind a grated or meshed divider. Some women at the Corinthian church, unable to hear all that was being said, were calling out to their husbands, asking them to repeat things. To Paul, this was another disruption of worship.

But does any of this mean that women shouldn’t be preachers, worship leaders, readers, minstry leaders, musicians, or worship participants? I don’t think so at all!

Jesus, of course, bowed to the conventions of first century Judea when He only called men to function as apostles, leaders of the early Church. He did this, I believe, knowing that in that time and place, only men would be accepted in the role of leaders. But unlike other first-century Judeans, Jesus spoke to women with the same consideration and respect He afforded men. Even a casual reading of the Gospels in the New Testament will bear this out. And it always tickles me that Jesus chose women to be the first to proclaim the Good News of His resurrection (Matthew 28:1-10).

No wonder then, that the same Paul who wrote 1 Corinthians 14:35 also wrote: "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28).

In 1 Corinthians 14, Paul makes clear that speaking up in worship is no right. It's a call. But I believe that the God Who calls people to play their parts in the ministries of the Church calls women just as He calls men.

[Mark Daniels is pastor of Friendship Lutheran Church, 1300 White Oak Road, Amelia.]