Voices of Freedom - Interview wth Carrie Lukas

Episode Date: October 5, 2023

The free exchange of goods and services has profoundly improved living conditions throughout the world. In the past two decades alone, free markets have helped reduce the child mortality rate by almost half and have lifted 130,000 people out of extreme poverty.  Yet according to a recent poll, twice as many people believe that socialism, rather than the free market system, can best meet everyone’s basic needs. Breaking it down further, men are far more likely to have a favorable view of free markets than women (68% vs. 48%).  Carrie Lukas is our guest on this episode of Voices of Freedom. She is working to change the way women think about free markets, and to promote a better understanding of how liberty-oriented policies open opportunity for individuals and families. Topics discussed by Carrie Lukas and Rick Graber, President and CEO, The Bradley Foundation, include:   Debunking the myth that free markets are incompatible with compassion What conservatives can do to show women how their policies advance opportunity The impact that federal paid family leave would have on parents Solutions to the issue of childcare affordability and accessibility The reasons for the pay gap between men and women Whether DEI policies have their intended effect How efforts to redefine gender are harming society Carrie Lukas is the president of Independent Women’s Forum, vice president of Independent Women’s Voice, and a member of Independent Women’s Network. She is the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex, and Feminism, Checking Progressive Privilege, and Liberty Is No War on Women.  Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, USA Today, and numerous other outlets.     ·          ·          ·          ·                 

Hello and welcome to Voices of Freedom, a Bradley Foundation podcast. I'm Rick Graber, President and CEO of the Bradley Foundation. On the podcast, we'll explore issues that affect our freedoms with a focus on free enterprise, free speech, and educational freedom. So let's get started. Freedom has created greater opportunity and prosperity than any other form of governance in the world. Despite this, there's an increasing belief by some that free markets and limited government

leave too many behind and reflect a lack of compassion on the part of their proponents. Our guests today offer solutions to improve the lives of all Americans by increasing the number of women who are willing to identify as citizens who value liberty and fight for it. As a leading women's advocate and Mama Five, she has courageously called out policies that may be well intended, but in reality, prevent advancement and opportunity for women. Carrie Lucas is the president of Independent Women's Forum, vice president of Independent Women's Voice, and a member of Independent Women's Network. She's the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex, and Feminism, Checking Progressive Privilege,

and Liberty is No War on Women. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, USA Today, and many, many other outlets. Carrie, it is great to have you. Welcome. Well, thank you so much for having me on. I'm excited to be here. Absolutely. Carrie, let's start here. You've spent your whole career in the policy arena. What drew you to the mission of Independent Women's Forum, known to many as IWF? Yeah. You know, I was lucky that I cut my teeth in the policy world at the Cato Institute and was very libertarian. And then I worked on the Hill was how few women there were who were part of the certainly libertarian movement, but really the larger conservative movement at that time. This is the mid 90s. It was much more skewed than I think it is today.

And that's when I learned about IWF and knew the mission of IWF. I thought this is, you know, a perfectly dovetails with my interest of trying to enlist more women to see the benefits of limited government and greater freedom. Why do you think many women are just a little reluctant to embrace the idea that free markets, limited government, personal responsibility are compatible with concepts of fairness and compassion, and to use a buzzword in today's world, inclusivity. Yeah. You know, it's interesting because, you know, as I know you know, Rick, I do believe that there's great differences between men and women and how we're hardwired.

And I do think that women in our role as caregivers, both as people who are giving birth and taking care of babies, but also our role in taking care of sick people and the elderly has made women just intuitively or intrinsically more risk averse. Women tend to worry much more about downsides than be excited about the upsides. I feel like a lot of men hear policies and say, oh yeah, that can really, I can see myself getting much more wealthy where women are thinking, saying like, I just wanna make sure that the people I worry about are okay.

And I do think that often that's the left focuses more on that helping ward against the downsides where the right focuses a little more on the upsides, and we need to connect the dots that, in fact, less government, greater liberty, kind of a rising tide is really what is best in my mind. And I think the evidence bears it out in terms of helping those who are most vulnerable. But it doesn't always come across. It's not as easy to instantly see that. Interesting. Since the rise of the feminist movement, the left has really pushed a narrative that their policies are more supportive of women. And frankly, they've had a lot of success

in doing that. I know that you believe that those policies actually hold women back. We'll get into some specifics later on, some specific topic areas. But just broadly speaking, how does the ideology of the left really make it harder for women to thrive? Yeah, you know, I do think that there's one of the worst things is this is encouraging women to see themselves as victims and believing that the system is stacked against them. And I think this, you know, just as the most beyond like kind of the policy, the different policy prescriptions, just that kind of that attitude or that approach, I think is, is really bad for women and particularly for young women. Because I do think that we live, you know, our society is, you know, women have so much opportunity today and have the capacity to build really interesting, thriving lives. But choices have to be made and you have to recognize the

trade-offs that come with these. And I think that so often the left is about trying to disguise those choices or make women think that the only reason why they can't have everything they want is because of this terrible patriarchy, rather than just the human condition where you have to learn how to prioritize and make these trade-offs, that that alone can really hurt women in terms of making good choices that are going to lead to happiness for them in the long term and lead to, you know, a better a better outcomes for them and their families. How do you juggle a family of five kids? I mean, you've made these choices and are thriving. Seems to have worked for you. Yeah. You know, and you know, but it always you know, it hasn't always been easy.

I'm sure I've been very, you know,, when you asked in the beginning a little bit about Independent Women's Forum, and that's what, you know, when I did, I was making the decision to leave the Hill and wanted to work at IWF. One thing I was thinking, I was recently married and knew I was going to want to start a family and have children. And I thought to myself, you know, Independent Women's Forum is probably going to be a pretty good place to work. And and that's you know, I am really proud of what IWF offers to women like myself. But, you know, we now have more than 30 employees and we do.

I feel like everybody works hard, but we are a virtual office, which means that we have the ultimate flexibility and get to balance work and family life. And the good news is, is that, you know that I feel very lucky to have Independent Women's Forum, but there are more and more options out there. Back in the 90s when I was first starting out, there was much more black and white between are you going to be a working woman or a stay-at-home mom? And now there's all these shades of gray.

I think it's really important we protect those shades of gray. And it's a shame that some of the policies that the current administration is pushing are really seeking to make those choices much more stark when really this is the blessing of a real free market is women having options that used to be unthinkable. In terms of appealing to women, what do you think the right has gotten right on one hand and what the conservatives need to do a just a better job at on the other hand yeah you know i think that um i think that one of the the struggles and one of the things that

the left has done well and i think conservatives are getting better at, but we should continue to focus on, is kind of making things real, telling stories about actual people and how things impact their lives. And it's interesting because often I think that one of the knocks on conservatives, or you'll hear this misconception in the media, is that the left is the party of science and that conservatives like to ignore this. Where, in fact, I feel like often conservatives always are wanting, we want to show the data and say like, you know, look, we can see this works because of these numbers. And yeah, and I think it's really important to look at those numbers and see what works and what doesn't and figure that out.

But people don't tend to really be moved by numbers. What you really need to be able to do is tell those stories and show how conservative solutions are impacting real people. We saw that during the pandemic, didn't we? Yeah. I mean, your very point about, I mean, facts at some point just didn't matter. Yeah. And it's unfortunate. I do think that that's a real problem today when we look at the moment we're in where people don't want to look back and look at those data points that we really should look at before we make these decisions.

But the narrative, it's hard to insert those facts into a narrative. So we need to be really conscientious about helping craft a positive narrative. Let's jump into some policy issues that you've taken on at IWF. A big issue for all working families is parental leave. Conservatives have long been criticized for not presenting solutions which directly address the pressures that families with working mothers face. Some on the right have explored new ways to support expectant moms, including through a new federal paid family leave entitlement. How would such an entitlement affect them and society at large? Yeah, you know, this is one of those, a great example of some of what we're talking about,

about the narrative and storytelling. Because, I mean, gosh, I think everyone, and it's important for us as conservatives to acknowledge that, of course, there are problems that we wish we could solve. When you hear a story of a woman who's had to have a C-section and then doesn't have enough, isn't able to take time off from work and has to go back to work after two weeks. I know both you and I are going to think, oh my goodness, how can we help this woman? Of course, we don't want that to be the option. But then we need to think about how to help that woman, but then also make sure that we understand the target aid at people who need it and think about how to help that woman, but not disrupt the situation for the vast majority of

people for whom the situation is much better. And I do think that in paid leave, we have a situation where there's 150, like it's 157 million working Americans. And there are certainly some folks who lack paid leave. And there's many people who lack sufficient paid leave, or they wish they had more time off. But the solution to this is not rewriting the employment contract of all 157 million Americans and creating a new federal paid leave entitlement. And it's important, you know, I think that in a paid leave entitlement, it's really easy to see who benefits and you say, oh, yeah, this is great. You know, people get a, you know, government's going to hand them a check for the six weeks after birth or after when they need this time off.

And, yep, there certainly are people who will benefit from that, from having that stream of income. But what people don't think about is the fact that in all these proposals for a new federal entitlement, there is a tax that is imposed on every single paycheck for your entire working life. Every single American will be paying a paycheck, whether or not you need time off, whether you're going to exercise that time off. And it ends up hurting people who are poorer more. The rich guy, it doesn't really matter if he has a little bit taken out of his paycheck. But for people who are the most vulnerable, that woman who wasn't able to afford the time off she needed after, she's the one who's really going to be struggling with this loss of income. And in fact, we have

really good examples of how this works. And you can see in their state programs that function much like the proposed federal program. And we can see that the people who end up getting more money out of it are wealthier people who end up getting these benefits. And see that the people who end up getting more money out of it are wealthier people who end up getting these benefits. And it's the poor who end up bearing the brunt of the tax payments. So it's a mistake to think that this is going to, that such a massive, you know, widespread, one size fits all program is going to really solve the problem. We all agree there that exists, that woman that we all, lower-income woman who has really bad choices. Instead, we should be focused on how can we help her, not how can we remake everybody's employment contract.

And these proposals are coming from the right. Some of them are. It's really, you know, I'm frustrated about that because I do think that one of the things is that there's is there are like better ways to do this. You know, one option that Independent Women's Forum, one of our fellows, a woman named Kristen Shapiro, who works for us, came up with what I thought was a really brilliant idea. And that's what we already have these big entitlement programs that that function like Social Security that have this stream of income that comes later in life when you reach retirement age. She came up with the idea of allowing people who needed it to basically take part of their Social Security early so that that woman who's been you know, she's working, she needs time off, that she doesn't have any paid leave, that she could

have a couple of her Social Security benefit and then she could pay it back. So it's budget neutral. It wouldn't create a new entitlement. It just is making existing programs more flexible. So I think we should be thinking about programs like that that do help. We can find ways to help people who really need it. But again, without warping the employment contracts of everyone. And honestly, one of the

things, again, both I'm a mom of five, but I also run an organization where people have a lot of babies. I have women on maternity leave all the time. And IWF offers some paid time off, but I also have a conversation with each woman. It makes a big difference whether it's your first baby or if it's your fourth baby and what they want, because people want different things. Some want you know, you don't have a you don't need to have a black and white. You get six weeks off. We can't call you during those six weeks. And, you know, and then you got to come back full steam where we have this great conversation of, you know, well, how about we try? You can come back for a couple of days. We'll give you a partial, you know, you can take this day off. And it's just this,

it's a conversation and it makes sense for them and it makes sense for us. And, you know, all that stops if the federal government comes in and says, no, we're going to do it this way. We all have to do it this way. That means true flexibility is thrown out the window. Makes great sense. Related issue, child care, real challenge for families. I'm not so old. I remember juggling daycare and who is going to pick up which child at which day affordability is indeed an issue, a problem, but you pointed out that many parents are actually satisfied with their existing arrangements. Why is that important? And what are some of the creative solutions that families devise to solve the problem without the government involved? Yeah, you know, this is, you're right, this is another example of there's, of course, you know, you is, you're right, this is another example of, of there's, of course, you know, you hear about some of the problems people have in, in finding daycare, especially

in some of the cities, or in rural communities. And we think, you know, goodness, we really should focus on ways to help those, those folks. But we also need to be a little bit humble. I mean, I feel like the federal government coming in and taking over something like our child care system is really dangerous. It's dangerous on a lot of levels. I just especially when you mentioned COVID earlier, it kind of amazes me that we're having this conversation right now about the federal government coming in and taking over oversight of all of our nation's child care systems when we just had during the COVID lockdowns such a vivid demonstration of how much our K through 12 government run public schools have failed parents. I was in Virginia and I had five kids in public schools in Virginia. And I saw everybody I knew who had children in private schools,

those private schools were opening up and were trying to find ways to really serve those parents because they considered them customers, where as a public school person, my teachers' unions and my public schools were trying to stay closed for as long as possible. And you can see this in the numbers, the childcare centers, because they are mostly privately run, lots of them are religious. They were much quicker to open than the K through 12 schools. And that's obviously because, you know, schools didn't have to. The child care system did have to to be able to stay in business. So I think we should really humble about government involvement overall. But then also, I think because there are so many parents out there and so many families

that want and value and are making sacrifices to provide care through the family members. And this isn't just having a stay-at-home mom or a stay-at-home dad, but this is also involving grandparents. And I do think that the more we subsidize families and say, okay, you know, you're going to get, we're going to give you this big benefit, but it's conditional on you putting your child in the hands of somebody, a paid childcare provider. That's really, that's telling grandma at home, like, you're really not needed. You know, like it was nice that you wanted to do this, but that's really not important. We can do like somebody, a professional can take this over. I think it's a terrible message. It also is regressive.

The people who tend to have loved ones caring for their extended family tend to be lower income folks. When you subsidize paid formal child care centers, you're actually tending to subsidize people with higher incomes. So I think we should be finding ways to help parents and especially parents with young kids where there's some real struggles and financial sacrifices. But that doesn't mean we should double down on funding a child care bureaucracy. And the facts are these government programs over time just have not worked.

This is not what the founders intended government to do. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, it's interesting that in all the talk about child care and the federal government increasing help, especially kids from poor families and get them ready for school and have these great outcomes and everybody was going to be better off. And that's because there's simply no evidence that Head Start has worked at all. It's expensive per hour, much more expensive than your average child care. It's exactly what you would expect when it comes to a government service. It's just not performing. Right. Let's switch gears a little bit and talk about equal pay between men and women.

Women who work full-time year-round are paid an average of 83.7% of what men are paid. What is that telling us? Is it an indication that we need policy interventions from on high to narrow the pay gap? Or are there just cultural factors at play that contribute to the discrepancy between what men and women make on average? What's going on there? because I think this is one of those big misconceptions and statistics that misleads people, especially young women, and warps the way they approach the world. You know, Rick, as you know, with all these statistics, they often obscure more than they reveal. And when we talk about the important definition there is like working, this is full-time working women and full-time working men. It doesn't tell you what that means by full-time workers. And what the numbers show is that the average male full-time worker works almost an hour more a day than a full-time working

female. So it doesn't, it shouldn't surprise anybody that I believe it's that fact alone, the difference in just time, time spent working, that explains something close to half of the wage gap is attributable just to the number, different number of hours. But then we also know that men and women tend to work in very different jobs. And sometimes I think people assume that that means that, oh, well, men are all sitting in these boardrooms and having cigars and they have the cushy white collar jobs. But in fact, a lot of these men are working in jobs that are hard, that are in many ways like have undesirable aspects. They're working in prisons. They're working in sewers. They're driving trucks overnight.

They're in the hot baking sun on our roofs and in our streets, making sure that kind of our systems are all going. And so obviously taking on these physical risks, most of the overwhelming majority of physical injuries and deaths that occur at work are suffered by men. And it's because they're taking on these dangerous jobs. And yes, these dangerous jobs are paid a little bit more, but obviously women are compensated in other ways. We have more flexible hours. We work in environments that are more pleasant and we focus on more meaningful work. One other, just before we leave this topic, I don't mean to go on too long, but I think this is one where it really bothers me that the conversation around evaluating men and women,

where they say, back in my days in college, we would have called this at a women's studies class, you would have called this a very male way of evaluating things where we're just looking at the dollars as if we should judge women's careers and their value in terms of how much money they're earning, where, you know what, if women are often opting for jobs that don't require them to work at night so they can be home with their kids, they're going to be closer to home so that they're working in schools and in places where they're caring for people. These jobs pay a little less, but they're more, they report it being more personally rewarding. Do we think that women are making a mistake in that? I don't think so. I think there's a lot of women who at the end of the day, you know, if you're making a choice to prioritize things

other than making money, you know, I think that that's probably not a big mistake. So I do think it's important to correct the record on that. It's not just discrimination or, you know, women getting the short end of the stick. Great. Another big topic of the day, diversity, equity, inclusion, DEI. What's your take on DEI as it pertains to women in the workforce? Does it have the intended effect of enabling women to rise and succeed in the long term?

Or are these policies or initiatives actually harmful to women? Yeah, you know, I really I think these are worrisome. I think it all again, it perpetuates this idea that women are somehow victims in the workplace when in fact, women are as likely as men to be managers. You know, women are as likely as men to be managers, you know, women are actually shaping our workplace cultures. Um, so the idea that we need to have kind of a, um, you know, set asides is a really antiquated, um, and I think demeaning way to approach women in the workplace. So, um, we need to get past all this and start judging people as individuals and women, you know, women are highly educated, much more highly educated, kind of sadly that men are falling behind in terms of education. So you stop kind of focusing on these boxes to put people in and encouraging individuals

to rise on their own merits. Totally agree. I mean, we've stopped looking at ourselves as Americans, part of the greatest country on earth. And instead, it tribalizes the country. It divides the country. It's very unhealthy. And I would say to the credit of many on the right, people on the right have started to make this case and started to make it pretty effectively. There's been progress in the last year or two. I completely agree. And, you know, I think one of the things it's actually it's really interesting.

I think we were talking before about what the right's doing right and wrong in terms of messaging. I think for a long time, conservatives or people, anybody on the right were really afraid of being called bigoted or sexist or homophobic or hateful. And it made us, I think, very nervous about addressing any of these issues because that's such an important thing. We obviously don't want to be seen or accused of this type of attitude. Now we're starting to speak up and say, no, we don't have to apologize or walk on eggshells. And we can say that it's completely demeaning and divisive to try to make it so I have to look at somebody with a different race or gender or sexuality and feel like somehow that's a feather in their cap. I mean, it's just, it's a terrible mentality to impose on us. And it works in the opposite

direction of true acceptance and inclusivity to create this weird reward system where we're all divided up by our identities. It's really, it's quite destructive. And I agree that we're calling it out. I think we're winning people over. People instinctively know that it's bad. It's wrong. Yeah. Let's discuss efforts to redefine what a woman is, something we hear a lot about these days and the impact that it's having on our society. And there's been a lot of attention, lots of attention devoted to how gender identity is affecting women's sports. What message does it send to girls when biological boys are permitted to compete against them? Yeah, it's really depressing. It's interesting because I think it's one of those,

think about all of the things that happened during COVID, and we were concerned about the messages of the isolation of the next generation or of young people, of teenagers and young Americans, where I think that this is one, especially young women who tend to, teenage girls tend to be particularly vulnerable. And then you have kind of this thrown at them. And to IWF, we've been working with a lot of female athletes. And one of the things that I think people should recognize is just how sad so many female athletes and coaches are when they hear about how demoralized young girls are when they realize that they're in a competition that's essentially rigged. They can't win.

Yeah. Why should they bother? I mean, and it's again, when we talk about the basic idea of science and that the idea that we're pretending somehow that a man doesn't have an advantage over a woman in terms of strength and speed and and pure athleticism um is insane it's it's insane and it's insulting um yeah it's and it's and at the end of the day it ends up being um sexist and um misogynistic because if we can't acknowledge that that means that women are going to be more vulnerable and in play in terms of women's safety. And it's going to be, and we're going to lose, you know, this means that like, we're basically going to kill female athletics if we don't start standing up. And for the obvious that women, the reason why we've always had sex segregated sports are so that women have a chance. That's the only reason why there's sex segregation. It's because otherwise women will lose and we will just destroy the

tremendous progress we've made in terms of encouraging young girls to play and love and thrive playing sports. I think you've been working with Riley Gaines, former college swimmer, who's been a courageous spokesperson on this. Yep. Do a little prognosticating for us. How does this play out? I'm very optimistic. because I do think this is one where it's so obvious like that anybody, and this is one where you know, the emperor can only have no clothes for so long. How many times are we going to have a woman,

a trans woman who is going to take in award a medal, you know, an athletic scholarship from a female. There's only so many times until a lot of the Americans, you know, I talked to the parents, parents who would consider themselves left of center, but they're watching their daughters play soccer. They're on, you know, sidelines of lacrosse. And they realize like, wait, this is crazy. That guy's going to compete on the girls team and potentially injure my daughter and take a scholar a position on this team, threaten my daughter's scholarship. I think there's a lot

of people waking up to this, recognizing just that it's both overreach and that it's really sacrificing women's interests on the altar of identity politics. So I think we're going to win on sports. And I'm hopeful that this whole identity politics, this is going to be the first chink in the armor of real identity politics. And the pendulum, I'm hopeful, will swing back towards a little more normalcy. Do you think it's galvanized women to speak out more? I mean, certainly it has for Riley Gaines, but there are others. Oh, sure. Absolutely. Paula Scanlon is also another woman who was one of the teammates of Leah Thomas. And she's a sexual assault survivor who has testified before the Senate on

the experience as a sexual assault survivor with a fully intact biological male who she's forced to undress in front of and have him expose himself to her. It was something like, you know, 12 times a week where she had to change in front of this guy. People are so afraid of implying, you know, anything untowards about trans identifying individuals. But I think for a long time, we've recognized that, you know, with the whole Me Too movement, that this is that there's our bad men out there who are trying to gain access to women's bodies. This enormous loophole that we've said that if you want to just any anybody who wants to say they're, you know, hooray, I'm a woman now, and this is happening in prisons, this is happening in the locker rooms of YMCAs, where all you have to do a man can look, you know, as much as a male as you could show up

and just say, I want to go into that locker room. And suddenly, you know, there's young girls who are being put in positions that are obviously inappropriate. Where are we as a society that we're allowing this to happen? Let's end on an upbeat point. You're a mom of five. You're immersed in culture issues. You think about this every day. What's your hope for the next generation? And is it a positive hope for the next generation? Yeah. You know, I do think that there's a lot of reasons for optimism. I do think that some of the excesses of what's going on right now might be creating a potential to swing back towards common sense. I do think that the post-COVID, you know, these kids who are growing up after COVID,

there might be a moment when they kind of the stars are starting to fall off of seeking Instagram fame. I hope that we're starting to look back at trying to find causes that are bigger than ourselves. I think some of the utter focus of the last real decade of saying, well, it's all about you and being your best self and making sure that you're true to your identity. Okay, obviously, there's fine, you should be aware of your own mental health, but you should also think about your loved ones, your country, your faith, that things that are bigger causes.

And I think there's might be a moment where we might return to something, some more common sense, some more real face-to-face relationships. That's my hope anyway, is that we can create a culture that encourages those things. Because we all know that's where true happiness lies.

Indeed. Gary Lucas, thanks so much for your time today. Thanks for your great work and the great work of Independent Women's Forum. Thanks for listening to this episode of Voices of Freedom. Join us next month on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts for our next conversation on issues impacting our freedom and America's foundational principles.

And make sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. I'm Rick Graber, and this is a Bradley Foundation podcast.