Oh, the bleating has started over at CNN....

Private companies, then, should make a choice: Do they want to invest and operate in states where half of the workforce cannot make their own choices about whether and when to have children -- choices that, from a pure business perspective, fundamentally alter a company's ability to retain talent and a cohesive, healthy staff? Or do they want to take steps to protect their employees -- and take their business to states where women are freer?

Or do firms let the marketplace of ideas work, and, where people like this author "win" in that firms leave, let the remaining ones have whatever competitive disadvantage -- or advantages, as the case may be, continue onward.

What, you say "advantages"?

Perhaps.

You see, its illegal to discriminate on the basis of sex in employment.  This is interpreted to mean that an employer may not take into account the materially higher cost, for example, of health insurance on a woman of childbearing age, nor may the employer take into account that a woman who is young and doesn't have kids might want them and thus will take time off to have them at a time of her choosing.

Both are real.  Prior to Obamacare when health "insurance" (in quotes because its not insurance, legally-speaking) companies set premiums entirely based on actuarial losses women were always more expensive to cover than men.  Whether its because women complain more (and thus go to the doctor where men don't) or whether its due to actual health being more-fragile if you're female I don't know -- but I can tell you, as someone who wrote that check as a CEO every month to those firms women were more expensive.

That a woman may choose to have a child of course, if she's of childbearing age is a very real risk and FMLA makes it a legal obligation for most firms to provide for it and hold that job open at the employer's expense never mind that if you don't promote a young woman on this basis you will get sued (and likely lose too) -- but, while in theory that law is sex-neutral in point of fact it is not, ever, simply because of biology.  Men can't gestate no matter how many Reeeeing idiots say otherwise and irrespective of your "pregnant man" emoji -- and every employer and indeed every sane person over the age of about three knows it.

Indeed given this is Mother's Day let's shove in the face of the crazies that not every mother gestates (you can adopt and be a mother, for example) but every single mother is in fact a biological woman no matter how many screws you have loose upstairs.

So let's let the 50 state laboratories play out, shall we?

I'm not at all sure how this resolves, honestly.  Without actually doing it there's no way to know.

Of course the Reeeeing side is absolutely sure that women are on balance superior to men, even though that assertion is sexist on its own and, in any rational society, would get you hammered exactly as would the opposite assertion particularly when there is in fact law that makes discrimination on the basis of sex illegal.

After all if discrimination is illegal and one must pay the same wage for the same work then the person who shows up more often and does more work should make more money irrespective of what happens to be between their legs or on their chest.  If you actually attempt to implement that in as an employer you will be sued and lose, however, and the politicians always lie about this every year on cue -- "wimmens are paid less than men!"

Oh really?  Where are the businesses that hire specifically and only on merit and productive output -- and are bending their competitors over the table and having a screwfest at their expense which would be trivial if this was true.  If you think I wouldn't have instantly exploited someone other shlub's stupidity in refusing to hire a superior workforce I assure you that you're wrong.

This was the reason, incidentally, that I have always found such "laws" to be either stupid or worse, intended to force mediocrity so virtue-signaling firms don't get hammered.  If "diversity" (on whatever basis) was strength and a net positive you'd be wild-eyed crazy not to maximize it because someone else in your market would and that would be the end of your company.  Only by forcing others to do as you do can you prevent that from happening.  Think about that for a minute because its rather obvious -- if you're capable of thinking, that is.

We may be about to get a real test of this theory.

What happens if those firms that believe in the "feelz" of abortion on demand being in fact nothing other than nakedly oppressing women all flee Texas?  What's left are competitors who don't believe in the "feelz."  There are fewer women employees in such firms on a percentage basis, simply because fewer present themselves to work as the rest have fled and a larger percentage of women in said state stay home and raise kids.  The women who present requesting employment have no interest in bearing or raising kids and are wildly-successful employees.  In addition the men who present themselves for employment are, on balance, more-likely to have all their "household stuff" (including kids) being taken care of by a wife who they love and who loves them -- and thus a higher percentage of their brainpower can be dedicated to their job.  No discrimination takes place; this is all from natural economic forces and personal choice to live in such a state -- or not.

What happens if, should that occur, the Texas firms are more-competitive in that their costs are LOWER, their employees are more productive and thus they hammer the feeelz-patrol companies over the head, drive them into the dirt and then assault their corporate corpses?

Do I expect this?  I don't know what the outcome will be since it hasn't been legal to do something like that for so long nobody alive has any real experience with doing it; the very point of 50 state laboratories is good ideas win and poor ones lose, which can only happen if there is a diversity of ideas and the free capacity of people to implement them whether the outcome be for good or bad.

That very experiment and allowing the market to determine who's right is what America was founded on, and it's a good thing -- not a bad one.  Indeed it is likely to answer the question as to whether so-called "diversity" initiatives are in fact worth anything or whether they are, as some have asserted, deliberately destructive because if they weren't everyone would have undertaken them on their own for purely economic reasons.

I say bring on the experiment and may the most-competitive ideas -- and States -- win.

Perhaps, just perhaps, what the Reeeeeeing left fears (maybe because they already are pretty-sure what the outcome will be) is that the acronym "DIE" will, well.... die.