Beyoncé Wrote an Essay Called “Gender Equality Is a Myth”

Well played, The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back from the Brink, we are all probably going to download all 500 virtual pages of you while you are still free (January 12–15, get it while the getting’s good). Here is Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s contribution, via the Shriver Report website:

We need to stop buying into the myth about gender equality. It isn’t a reality yet. Today, women make up half of the U.S. workforce, but the average working woman earns only 77 percent of what the average working man makes. But unless women and men both say this is unacceptable, things will not change. Men have to demand that their wives, daughters, mothers, and sisters earn more — commensurate with their qualifications and not their gender. Equality will be achieved when men and women are granted equal pay and equal respect.

Humanity requires both men and women, and we are equally important and need one another. So why are we viewed as less than equal? These old attitudes are drilled into us from the very beginning. We have to teach our boys the rules of equality and respect, so that as they grow up, gender equality becomes a natural way of life. And we have to teach our girls that they can reach as high as humanly possible.

We have a lot of work to do, but we can get there if we work together. Women are more than 50 percent of the population and more than 50 percent of voters. We must demand that we all receive 100 percent of the opportunities.

Bold moves from Beyoncé! Actually, these are not particularly bold moves, but we shall love her for them and also assume our zero-tolerance stances towards any man or woman who would find anything about this controversial. Bey is as completely right as she is obvious, we’ve seen her on fire elsewhere (NSFW), and for every softball in here (LeBron James has written “America’s Working Single Mothers: An Appreciation”), there are a dozen essays that will make for interesting reading. If you feel like getting into more specifics about this, here’s a recent, extended Pew study on the generational, racial, perceived and self-reported gaps and changes in workplace equality. [Shriver Report]