Adviser to Texas GOP's Greg Abbott: No 'evidence' that women are 'significant thinkers'

An adviser to Greg Abbott, the Republican candidate for Texas governor, said this week that he had found no "evidence" to prove that any woman had been a "significant original thinker in any of the world's great philosophical traditions."

In audio obtained by the Burnt Orange Report, American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray can be heard explaining to an audience at the University of Texas that his views on women had not changed since a 2005 paper, in which he asserted that one or "maybe" two women had played significant roles in the field of philosophy.

When a woman at the event on Tuesday asked Murray if he still believed what he wrote, Murray quipped, "Who do you have in mind?"

Murray argued that in "certain traditions" like literature, women had been at the "peak of accomplishment." But he said that he could only recall one important female philosopher, "and she was not a significant thinker in the estimation of historians of philosophy."

"So, yeah, I still stick with that," he insisted. "Until somebody gives me evidence to the contrary, I'll stick with that statement."

Murray, who Abbott cited in his education plan, argued that equal pay laws would actually hurt women by discouraging companies from hiring them, and that pay discrimination was a "myth" in the first place.

The AEI scholar declared that the gender wage gap cited by liberals "all but disappears" when "education, marital status and occupations are considered."

According to Murray, the statistics were flawed because "many women prefer to stay home with their children," or choose jobs "such as sociology, liberal arts or psychology, that pay less in the labor market."

Watch the video below from Lone Star Project.

Listen to the audio below from The Burnt Orange Report, broadcast April 9, 2014.