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  3. Amidst troubling reports of our nation’s economic woes and pressing national security issues, one news story earlier this month

Amidst troubling reports of our nation’s economic woes and pressing national security issues, one news story earlier this month

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问题     Amidst troubling reports of our nation’s economic woes and pressing national security issues, one news story earlier this month received fairly little attention: President Obama’s March 11 executive order establishing a White House Council on Women and Girls. While the Council’s role is likely to be more symbolic than practical, its creation, and the accompanying rhetoric, suggests that the Obama White House is bringing a blinkered, outdated approach to gender issues—one that, far from transcending ideological divisions, takes us back to a narrow and dogmatic feminist ideology.
    In his remarks at the signing, Barack Obama noted that women have made great strides since the days when his grandmother encountered a glass ceiling after reaching the level of bank vice president. Yet, despite the broken barriers, he argued that "inequalities stubbornly persist": "women still earn just 78 cents for every dollar men make"; "one in four women still experiences domestic violence in their lifetimes"; and, despite being close to half the workforce, women make up only 17 percent of members of Congress and 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs.
    But are these inequalities rooted in discrimination and fixable by the government? Numerous studies show that when differences in training, work hours, and continuity of employment are taken into account, the pay gap all but disappears. Most economists, including liberal feminists such as Harvard’s Claudia Goldin, agree that while sex discrimination exists, male-female disparities in earnings and achievement are due primarily to personal choices and priorities. Women are far more likely than men to avoid jobs with 60-hour workweeks and to scale down their careers while raising children. They are also more likely to choose less lucrative but more fulfilling jobs.
    Indeed, one might ask why the only gender-specific issues that seem to deserve federal attention are ones that affect women. Why not look at the fact that men account for 80 percent of suicides and 90 percent of workplace fatalities(as well as 70 percent of nonfatal on-the-job injuries)? What about the troubling trend of boys and young men lagging substantially behind their female peers in education, with women earning nearly 60 percent of college degrees at a time when a college diploma is increasingly essential in the job market? Why not talk about the marginalization of fatherhood and the fact that many men who want to be involved in their children’s lives are denied that chance?
    This is not a call for a new federal bureaucracy for "men’s issues". However, the discussion of gender equality in our culture needs to include these issues. For the White House to exclude them while calling for a new effort to combat inequality is at best myopic.
The establishment of White House Council on Women and Girls shows that Obama ______.
选项 A、paid more attention to women’s issue than to anything else
B、failed to pay enough attention to America’s economic crisis
C、prefers to use impressive rhetoric in defending things he does
D、clung to outdated ideas and theories about sex discrimination
答案D
解析 根据第一段中的“President Obama’s March 11 executive order establishing a white HouseCouncil on Women and Girls，．．．suggests that the Obama White House is bringing a blinkered，outdated approach to gender issues…”，D应为答案。
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