So the state of Iowa has finally added women to their constitution. Big deal. This is only a formality, isn’t it? Don’t women have equal rights under the law anyway?

No, they don’t, and the legislative act of adding “and women” to the Iowa State Constitution is just one more sorry substitute for what women really want and need and deserve: equal rights.

Women have the majority of the responsibility for raising children, a job which often takes them out of college and out of the workplace. Many of these women end up raising the children alone on incomes considerably smaller than their ex-husband’s.

According to U.S. Census, over 75 percent of all female householders with no spouse and with related children under 18 years of age struggle on less than $16,000 a year.

Even when a woman completes college, establishes a career and then has children, she is often haunted by suggestions that she is less than a good mother because she has a career. Single-career mothers get hit twice.

As a technical writer in the early ’80s, I was making $40K+, and every single performance evaluation said, “Doing great work but must develop a career attitude in order to advance.”

In other words, as a single parent, my daughter’s chicken pox and parent-teacher conferences interfered with what was really important: 24-hour job availability. Men in same field were often earning $10-15K more.

Married career women face this obstacle, too, usually as a result of the couple’s conscious decision to allow the man’s career to be primary and the woman’s secondary “at least until the kids are raised.”

While some liberated men choose various versions of the Mr. Mom scenario, I would bet that they are fewer than the number of men who “leave home” before the kids do.

Bottom line: As long as women earn only a percentage of every dollar that men earn, regardless of the reasons, then we don’t have equal opportunity.

It’s not that women are not completing college at as high a rate as men. As the Office of Institutional Research ISU Fact Book shows, ISU women have a consistently higher rate of retention and graduation than ISU men.

Maybe women are not seeking professional employment in the workplace, as some statistics suggest. Some people argue that women aren’t as ambitious as men, yet ISU women have consistently earned higher GPAs than men for all the years recorded in the Fact Book. (In 1996, the overall GPA for male undergrads was 2.72, and the overall for women was 2.87.)

Then there is the sexist argument that women aren’t majoring in the “difficult” subject areas. I admit that many women are still pursuing degrees in areas considered socially-acceptable for women.

But this can be blamed on everyone: the men who haze the women out of their “masculine” programs, the women who allow themselves to be intimidated by traditional male institutions and the parents who reinforce these values by telling their sons to be doctors or engineers while encouraging their daughters to be nurses or teachers so it will be easier to balance a family and a career.

Surprisingly, the statistics simply don’t support the argument that women are excelling exclusively in the traditional subject areas.

According the Fact Book, women were surpassing men in all areas except Veterinary Medicine, and the total still showed women averaging a higher GPA than men for each year of school.

If we have qualified women graduating in every academic area, why isn’t there more gender-balance in the workplace?

Even ISU, which is producing qualified female graduates in every department, cannot find equal numbers of women to hire.

The Fact Book shows that among ISU tenured faculty and staff, less than two out of 10 are women. Either the women are all choosing to stay home with the kids, or they are leaving Iowa for warmer, more liberal climates.

Women do have equal opportunity under the law, but not under the constraints of social norms which cannot be legislated.

These norms must be negotiated between men and women who share a vision of equality.

There will always be the die-hard sexists, the determined knights of male supremacy who argue that it is nature’s fault for making women the child-bearers.

But nature gave humans a set of incisors, too, but I don’t see many people refusing to use knives and forks in favor of tearing at their food like animals just because we were born with the necessary tools in our mouths.

I have a daughter, and I would like to think that someday she will marry someone who values her career interests as much as his own, someone who will be able to say to his boss that he is taking off work because the kids have the flu.

And when his boss says, “Why doesn’t your wife do that?” this highly-evolved man can answer that his marriage is an equal partnership, not an old-fashioned marriage which promotes his success at the expense of hers.

In my dreams, huh?

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Kata Alvidrez is a graduate student in English from Los Angeles.