Today seems like a great day for a “Day Without A Woman,” a strike organized to protest the supposed gender oppression of women in America. Women are encouraged to take the day off from work, refrain from shopping and wear red. With the same group of organizers who held the Women’s March earlier this year, the strike today is aimed at highlighting the same old collage of leftist complaints bound up in their favorite term, “inequality.” Women in America are victims of a sinister patriarchal society, which is robbing them of equal rights … or so we’re told. Absent any substantive evidence supporting this claim, the strike is aimed at convincing Americans of its reality.

But what is the reality? Are American women actually suffering under some insidiously oppressive patriarchy? Well, the facts would say otherwise. In 2014, the American Community Survey found that 37.5% of women ages 25 to 34 had a bachelor’s degree compared to only 29% of men in the same age range. And what of the supposed pay gap between men’s and women’s salaries? It evaporates when accounting for variables such as child bearing and rearing.

In fact, according to a Pew Research Center survey in 2013, 72% of women believe they have the same opportunities in the workplace as men, while 75% believe they are paid just as much as their male counterparts. It sounds like the women’s strike needs to convince just as many women of the supposed inequity in pay as it does men.

But the truth is, this strike has more to do with protesting Donald Trump and conservative values (sometimes two very different things) than in promoting women. Ironically, today’s protest will only prove to make the day harder for many women. Take, for example, any poor single moms living in Alexandria, Virginia. So many teachers took the day off that the district closed public schools for the day. Working single moms whose children now have no school will lose a day of pay as they stay at home watching their children. Unless they hire someone to do it for them. Brilliant.

Maybe the biggest irony of the protest is that it infers women are merely helpless victims who need men to save them from their oppressed status. There are no laws preventing women from having access to the same opportunities as men. Equal opportunity exists in this nation more than any other. But the goal of socialists and leftists is not equal opportunity but equal outcome, and anywhere they find disparity they see an excuse for greater government involvement and control. This is the real message being sent by this strike. It’s not about women, it’s about promoting leftist policies.