A British survey of 5000 teenage girls has found that most support traditional gender roles in which the husband is the provider.

The most interesting result was that nearly all the girls (97%) disagreed with the statement that ‘It doesn’t matter who is the main earner, as long as we are happy’. There is a whole generation of girls, it seems, who very definitely want their future husbands to be the main earners.

Britain’s politicians, though, do not want them to achieve this wish. Both major parties are determined to engineer society so that men do not earn more than women (even though men generally earn more by fair means, such as accepting positions which are well-paid and stable, but less creative and glamorous, or by working in dangerous or remote workplaces, or by accepting promotions involving more onerous responsibilities or longer working hours).

The hapless Conservative Party has announced that it will try to narrow the earnings gap between men and women by “combating traditional views of a mother’s role”. They are doing this as “part of an attempt to rid the Tories of their image as an old-fashioned party.”

So at a time when 97% of teenage girls want (eventually) to find a husband who earns more than them, the Tories think they are being up to date in their electoral appeal by seeking to provide these girls with men who earn the same or less.

The Conservative Party is showing once again how misleading their name is – they might be right-wing but they are not conservative.

However, though they are out of step with an overwhelming majority of young women, they do have support in high places: the Labour Party. The Chancellor, Gordon Brown, has received a report from the Women at Work Commission, chaired by Baroness Prosser, which recommends no less than 40 measures to engineer equal earnings. The Chancellor will spend millions of pounds to implement these recommendations.

Why are both major parties so determined that men not earn more than women, even if the point of these earnings is to support a family?

The answer in brief is that both parties are liberal in their politics. They both accept the idea that what matters is what we choose for ourselves. We do not, and cannot, choose our gender. Therefore, gender ought not to matter. It is an affront to a liberal, a “disgrace” as Baroness Prosser put it, that gender might be seen to matter by influencing patterns of work.

There are other reasons, too, why male earnings are targeted by the political class. Liberals believe that we are human in virtue of our freedom to exercise our will. This means that liberals often look at things in terms of power relations: who is dominant in their will over others. How can you tell who is dominant? The liberal answer is usually: money, status & political power.

What follows from this is contradictory: on the one hand, it becomes illegitimate to belong to a group which is identified as possessing money, status or political power: this is to be privileged at the expense of some oppressed group. (Which creates a scramble to prove that the group you belong to is a victim group rather than a privileged group. It also creates the odd situation where any established majority loses its moral status, until it is sufficiently reduced in its position.)

Men, of course, have been tagged as an oppressor group, with an assumption that the money men earn creates an unequal power relation and thereby oppresses women. It is this political framework which explains why a liberal like Baroness Prosser can think it “unjust” for a man to work hard to provide for his family – she assumes his extra earnings come at the expense of women (when they are actually destined for a woman and her children).

The larger contradiction in this view is that as much as “oppressor groups” are vilified for having money or status, the assumption remains that it is these things which secure our dignity as humans. So for a liberal woman, the competition for money and a high status job is what the game is all about, and gender politics is one path to achieve a good outcome.