Friday Cat Post

Norway has a different kind of a reality show:

Now the channel behind Norway's marathon "Slow TV" broadcasts – billed as an antidote to the frantic data overload of the internet and twitter – has excelled itself with Piip Show, a strangely addictive "reality-TV show with wild birds".

Guess who is watching this show?

Here's the answer:

Weekend Reading on Reproductive Justice, Stand-Your-Ground And Inheritance as Women's Issues

What you might want to read over the weekend:

A good summary of what can happen with the fetal human rights movement.  This is the story of Rennie Gibbs, but the article covers several aspects of the treatment of women as incubators:

Rennie Gibbs’s daughter, Samiya, was a month premature when she simultaneously entered the world and left it, never taking a breath. To experts who later examined the medical record, the stillborn infant’s most likely cause of death was also the most obvious: the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck.
But within days of Samiya’s delivery in November 2006, Steven Hayne, Mississippi’s de facto medical examiner at the time, came to a different conclusion. Autopsy tests had turned up traces of a cocaine byproduct in Samiya’s blood, and Hayne declared her death a homicide, caused by “cocaine toxicity.”


In early 2007, a Lowndes County grand jury indicted Gibbs, a 16-year-old black teen, for “depraved heart murder” — defined under Mississippi law as an act “eminently dangerous to others…regardless of human life.” By smoking crack during her pregnancy, the indictment said, Gibbs had “unlawfully, willfully, and feloniously” caused the death of her baby. The maximum sentence: life in prison.
Seven years and much legal wrangling later, Gibbs could finally go on trial this spring — part of a wave of “fetal harm” cases across the country in recent years that pit the rights of the mother against what lawmakers, health care workers, prosecutors, judges, jurors, and others view as the rights of the unborn child.
A judge is said to be likely to decide this week if the case should move forward or be dismissed. Assuming it continues, whether Gibbs becomes the first woman ever convicted by a Mississippi jury for the loss of her pregnancy could turn on a fundamental question that has received surprisingly little scrutiny so far by the courts: Is there scientific proof that cocaine can cause lasting damage to a child exposed in the womb, or are the conclusions reached by Hayne and prosecutors based on faulty analysis and junk science?

The "Stand Your Ground" laws and women's immunity from prosecution is covered in this article about the case of Marissa Alexander.  This piece covers the prosecutors' arguments concerning the applicability of the "Stand Your Ground" law to this case.  Whatever one's conclusions about that specific law might be,  the Alexander case looks like an outrage when compared to other recent Florida cases which have employed the "Stand Your Ground" defense.

Inheritance laws, both religious and traditional laws, still handicap women in several African countries and in Muslim countries which apply the shariah law to inheritance.  An example of the latter from Morocco is covered in this article, which also notes the usual problem with religion-based discriminatory rules:  The women themselves do not wish to go against their holy books.  A reinterpretation can be difficult, however much it is needed.

This article from last January talks about the impact of traditional inheritance rules on widows in Tanzania.

Both types of unequal inheritance laws, have included certain protections for women, such as the implicit understanding that men have been culturally regarded as responsible for the monetary support of their mothers, daughters, sister-in-laws etc., via various arrangements.  But those protections have never amounted to the same thing as legal ownership of the assets and the right to determine how they are being used.  They have many more loopholes than legal ownership rights offer.

Likewise, one can argue that such laws were more ethical and practical in the traditional patriarchal system (though they always had those loopholes).  But the case for those arguments is even weaker today, and change is urgently needed. 

Market Ideas in Education. When Things Go Wrong.

Can you have something for nothing?

In economic resource terms, pretty much never.  Yet people keep on trying.  For example, conservatives want teachers to teach just because of their devotion to children, conservatives want schools not to need budgets, and conservatives expect that cutting teachers' pension benefits will have no negative consequences to the ease with which we can find good teachers.

What's fascinating about that example is the contrast with, say, financial markets, where nobody expects people to work just because they like their jobs so much and where good pay is obviously utterly and completely deserved because the markets say so.  That  teaching is an occupation with quite a few women in it while finance is regarded as testosterone-fueled may matter for those conservative ideas.

When is a little knowledge very dangerous?

A good example is taking Economics101 (a basic micro course), learning about the model of competitive markets (which applies to very few real-world markets), and then deciding that all sorts of things (not covered in Econ101) which do not lend themselves to market provision should be turned over to the cruel and reckless claws of anarchy-markets.  Because of the appealingly simple models in that course!  I come across people on the net all the time who think they know economics because of one course they have taken.  That little knowledge is dangerous, especially when it is viewed as the entirety of all economic theory applying to markets.

Consider the popular conservative idea that schools should be turned over to the "free markets" everywhere.  Those who support that should ask themselves why basic education has so very seldom been offered by profit-making firms, why, instead, it has almost always been constructed on a not-for-profit basis.  There are economic reasons for these institutional characteristics, and though technological change may increase the ability of for-profit solutions to work in education, the essential characteristics of the product which education offers have not changed, and those characteristics make for-profit solutions rather bad ones.

What are those essential characteristics?

The Job Of A Wife, According to Dennis Prager

This is worth looking at, despite the original source being from 2008, because Prager, a conservative talk-show host,  is co-hosting a fund-raiser for Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

What Prager stated in 2008:

Prager has penned a number of op-eds for conservative publications like TownHall.com and National Review that outline his views on feminism, which he’s said has produced an “awful legacy” for women, and sexual relations in marriage, which he’s argued is one of a wife’s “mutual obligation[s]” to her husband.

Writing on TownHall.com in December of 2008, Prager compares a man’s obligation to go to work, regardless of his “mood,” to a woman’s obligation to have sex with her husband.

“Why would a loving, wise woman allow mood to determine whether or not she will give her husband one of the most important expressions of love she can show him? What else in life, of such significance, do we allow to be governed by mood?” he writes.

“What if your husband woke up one day and announced that he was not in the mood to go to work?”

So in Prager's view marriage is a heterosexual labor contract where the female spouse provides sex, childcare, meals, laundry services, house-cleaning etc. and the male spouse pays for those services.   Once you understand that definition of marriage, Prager's views become crystal-clear:  He believes that the workers are failing in their duties if they don't provide sex on demand, given that they are being paid for it. 

Those views also reflect, I believe, one of the major problems among many/some conservatives:  This is their definition of marriage, and it drives several of the socially conservative policies they support, their obliviousness for the need of labor rights for women, their opposition to daycare or pregnancy leaves and so on. 

That view has at least two major problems.  First, the majority of wives in the US work in the labor market, earning money, and Prager's patriarchal marriage doesn't acknowledge that aspect at all.  He just waves a magic wand, and suddenly paid work is all male.  If we decided to keep the interpretation of marriage as a labor contract, the fact that the wives also have earned incomes would mean that they, too, are then buying services from their husbands, right?  But in Prager's world the husbands owe their wives nothing but financial payments.

Second, Prager assumes that sexual services are included in the job description of wives.  That definition means that marital sex is paid sex work.  An interesting interpretation from a conservative anti-feminist.

Lawrence Summers On Envy. Or Why We Should Not Tax The Rich More.

Our Larry has cropped up again with interesting comments, this time about income and wealth inequality in the US:

“Reducing inequality is good, but it’s 50 times better to do it by lifting those up who are low than by tearing those down who are high,” said Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary whose bid to become Fed chair got derailed by the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party. “The politics of envy are the wrong politics in America. The better politics are the politics of inclusion where everyone shares in economic growth.”

OK.  Let's see what this would amount to:  Don't tear down those who are high would mean not taxing the wealthier more than they are being taxed now. Everyone shearing in economic growth would mean that the poor, the middle class and the rich would all get wealthier as the economy grows.

This is so beautiful.  It also dispenses with the accusation that concern with income and wealth inequality is based on nothing but that deadly sin of envy.

But imagine, for a moment, a society in which 99% of people are just barely surviving and where 1% of people own almost everything, living in guarded enclaves where the faucets and toilet seats are gold-plated.  There's nothing about such a society that would preclude the winning 1% from using the envy argument.  In that sense it is an empty argument, one which cannot be disproved and one which doesn't even have to be false, in the sense that of course the suffering poor would be envious of those who have their bellies full of food.

What Summers' statement hides is that there are other arguments we can make about income and wealth inequality being bad for all of us, even ultimately for the very rich.  How about the possible collapse of extreme unequal societies?  How about the unpleasantness of living in a society where the haves must hire private guards to protect themselves against the have-nots?  How about the damage inequality causes for the proper functioning of democracy?

To wipe all that under the "envy-mat" could come back to haunt us later, Larry.

Then there's the problem that economic growth benefiting everyone would still have to benefit the poor and the middle-income people more than it benefits the rich if growth is to be the major policy to be used in reducing income and wealth inequality.  But once we redefine the cake-division as applying not to the existing cake but to the growth in that cake, the envy argument can slip back in.  Who are the critics to argue that the wealthier don't deserve larger chunks of any cake growth?

I get that the linked article is about money in the US politics, that the Democratic Party doesn't want to frighten away its rich donors and so on. But think about the need for such articles in the first place.  They are necessary because the political system is already geared towards the desires of the wealthier among us.

Short Posts On Weird Stuff About Gender

1.  One conservative, Bryan Fischer,  thinks that the proper goal of women is to strive to be women:

"We don't need women trying to be like men," he added. "We need more women whose ambition in life is to be a woman"

That's based on the idea that men and women are non-intersecting sets in all their characteristics, but it's also an interesting plan for allowable female ambitions.

2.  The manufactured thigh gap that looks like a missing Lego piece.  This is funny on one level and nothing but horrible on a deeper level.  For an antidote, have a look at this story.

3.   Did you know that there will be a new reality show called "My Five Husbands?"  Well, I lied there.  The new reality show will be called "My Five Wives" and it joins other recent shows which portray polygyny (one man with several wives) in the US ("Big Love" and "Sister Wives").  The husband of those five wives states that he is a feminist and all the five wives also regard themselves as feminists.

To address those claims would take a proper post.  Though polyamory could be gender-egalitarian, the situation of that family doesn't quite look like equal sexual freedom for all participants.  Brad has five partners but his wives, Paulie, Robyn, Rosemary, Nonie, and Rhonda, each have only one partner, and the five share Brad between them.  There's a small adding-up problem* in that, for those who argue that the arrangements provides sexual equality. 

Now, a polygamic situation like that could have many theoretical interpretations.  For instance, the man could be viewed as having a harem or the women could be viewed as having a toyboy they share as they deem appropriate.  In other words, how egalitarian such an arrangement is depends on how power is divided inside it.  The traditional forms of polygamy give the man the lion's share of the power.  Whether egalitarian polygyny or polyandry is possible in real life and not just in theory seems an open question to me.  But the traditional type of polygyny certainly isn't gender-egalitarian.

I'm not as fascinated by this attempt at a feminist angle of the most recent polygyny series as I am by the question why there are enough American viewers for essentially gender-retrogressive stories about marriage and gender.  And when are we going to see that "My Five Husbands" series?
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*The fundamentalist Mormon polygamy has another adding-up problem which these kinds of series probably don't address, and that is what happens in a community where some men have many wives so that other men cannot have any wives.  The Lost Boys is what happens.  More generally,  polygyny cannot be a stable societal arrangement without some way to get rid of all the surplus men, even if the women in the society have no say about whom they will be married to.

Quvenzhané Wallis as Orphan Annie, Ben Kingsley as Gandhi. Looking at the differences.

The Oscar-nominated ten-year-old actor,  Quvenzhané Wallis, is playing Orphan Annie in a new adaptation of the original musical (Annie).  Several sites have gathered together tweet comments expressing racism or anger about the actor not being white and read-headed as in the original musical and book it was based on.

It's hard to know how common those kinds of comments are, without going back to gather all tweets about this news, but some people obviously feel that the character Annie should never be played by an actor who doesn't exactly match the original specifications and some of those people are racists*.

To compare this to related decisions, consider the classical film Gandhi.  Because it came out before we had the blessings of Twitter it's not easy to find out if people were at all outraged that a British-Indian white actor**, Ben Kingsley,  was to play Gandhi.  After all, Gandhi's essential characteristic for the purposes of that film was that he was an Indian leader of the people.

Then there is Waiting for Godot.  Evidence suggests that the playwright, Samuel Beckett, was opposed to having female actors play the roles in his play:

Beckett was not open to most interpretative approaches to his work. He famously objected when, in the 1980s, several women's acting companies began to stage the play. "Women don't have prostates", said Beckett,^[79] a reference to the fact that Vladimir frequently has to leave the stage to urinate.
In 1988, Beckett took a Dutch theatre company, De Haarlemse Toneelschuur to court over this issue. "Beckett [...] lost his case. But the issue of gender seemed to him to be so vital a distinction for a playwright to make that he reacted angrily, instituting a ban on all productions of his plays in The Netherlands."^[80] This ban was short-lived, however: in 1991 (two years after Beckett's death), "Judge Huguette Le Foyer de Costil ruled that the production would not cause excessive damage to Beckett's legacy", and the play was duly performed by the all-female cast of the Brut de Beton Theater Company at the prestigious Avignon Festival.^[81]
The Italian Pontedera Theatre Foundation won a similar claim in 2006 when it cast two actresses in the roles of Vladimir and Estragon, albeit in the characters' traditional roles as men.^[82] At the 1995 Acco Festival, director Nola Chilton staged a production with Daniella Michaeli in the role of Lucky,^[83] and a 2001 production at Indiana University staged the play with women playing Pozzo and the Boy.^{[citation needed]}

Setting aside the difference between the creator of a work of art opposing recasting and the possible audience for the work of art opposing it, these three cases do share a similar smell.  Or should share it, because I doubt that the casting of Kingsley as Gandhi caused much protest outside India (though I may be mistaken about that).

The essential question in such casting decisions is probably whether they change the central messages of the work of art.  I don't see how that would be the case for the musical Annie or even for Waiting for Godot (as some menopausal women have to pee pretty often, say) because neither piece explicitly demands a certain race or gender to keep its central message the same.  On the other hand, something like A Raisin in the Sun would be hard to recast with white actors at this time and in the United States, because it would stop making sense.

Not allowing more flexible casting of roles hurts actors belonging to racial minorities, because there are fewer works explicitly written for them.  If we are never allowed to rethink casting, minority actors will have more trouble staying employed. 
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*Hunger Games' casting decisions caused similar complaints about the race of some characters, even when the book had specified them.
**Sorry, got that wrong.  Kingsley was born Krishna Pandit Bhanji.  But he is British. Thanks to pixelfish for the correction.  For a better example of this phenomenon, the 2013 remake of the Lone Ranger might do:

Despite the producers citing the presence of an adviser from the Comanche Nation, some debated the advisability of casting of Depp as a Native American and whether the film would present a positive and accurate representation of the Comanche.^[97] Depp has stated he believes he has Native American ancestry, possibly from a great-grandmother. He has said that he considered the role a personal attempt "to try to right the wrongs of the past", in reference to portrayals of Native American culture in the media.^[98][99]

The Centennary of Tove Jansson's Birth

If you don't know any small children to whom you could read the Moomintroll books you should hire a few, just as cover so that you can read them yourself. Tove Jansson, the author responsible for those books, was born a hundred years ago this year:

This year Finland is celebrating the centenary of the birth of Tove Jansson, creator of the Moomins, and one of the most successful children's writers ever. Her life included war and lesbian relationships - both reflected by the Moomins in surprising ways.
There is Moomintroll, Moominmamma and Moominpappa - little white trolls who live in Moominvalley, with other fantastical creatures such as the Hattifatteners, Mymbles and Whompers.
Tove Jansson's Moomin books have sold in their millions, and been translated into 44 languages.
Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials, has described her as a genius. Other devotees include Michael Morpurgo, writer of War Horse and dozens of other children's books, and Frank Cottrell Boyce, who scripted the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony.
"I was completely blown away and enchanted," says Boyce, who read Finn Family Moomintroll as a 10-year-old, after discovering the book in a Liverpool library.
"I didn't realise it was set in a real place. I thought she'd made Finland up. Finland was like Narnia, with these incredible characters that were so strange but instantly recognisable because you had met lots of them - noisy Hemulens or neurotic, skinny Fillijonks."

The books are aimed at children.  Don't let that stop you from reading at least the Tales from Moominvalley, a 1962 short-story collection.  

It is one of the books I might take with me to a deserted island, because of the vast psychological riches the stories contain.  It's hard to pick a favorite among them, but if I had to do so I'd pick "The Fillyjonk Who Believed In Disasters,*"for reasons I discuss in this post.
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*The story is so good that a summary doesn't give it any kind of justice.  I know because I tried.

A Crime Post: On Gun Rights And Rape Kits

Which covers the love of guns, its consequences and the way rape kits are analyzed in the US.  Or, rather, not analyzed.

First, on guns.  The state of Georgia has a new proposed bill about "gun rights":

In addition to overturning current state laws and dramatically rolling back concealed-carry restrictions, HB 875 would loosen other gun regulations in the state. The law would:
    •    Remove the fingerprinting requirement for gun license renewals
    •    Prohibit the state from keeping a gun license database
    •    Tighten the state's preemption statute, which restricts local governments from passing gun laws that conflict with state laws
    •    Repeal the state licensing requirement for firearms dealers (requiring only a federal firearms license)
    •    Expand gun owner rights in a declared state of emergency by prohibiting government authorities from seizing, registering, or otherwise limiting the carrying of guns in any way permitted by law before the emergency was declared
    •    Limit the governor's emergency powers by repealing the ability to regulate the sale of firearms during a declared state of emergency
    •    Lower the age to obtain a concealed-carry license from 21 to 18 for active-duty military and honorably discharged veterans who've completed basic training
    •    Prohibit detaining someone for the sole purpose of checking whether they have a gun license
The sweeping bill would also expand the state's Stand your Ground law into an "absolute" defense for the use of deadly force in self-protection. "Defense of self or others," the bills reads "shall be an absolute defense to any violation under this part." In its current wording, the bill would even allow individuals who possess a gun illegally—convicted felons, for example—to still claim a Stand Your Ground defense.

Don't you think the list sounds like civil rights demands for weapons?  Not even for the people owning them, but for the guns themselves?  Less regulation of guns!  Guns should be allowed everywhere and there should be no trace of the guns in any statistical source!

To put all that in perspective, for about ten days I have made a note of any story which tells us how a child has killed or hurt someone with a gun or gotten killed or hurt by a gun.  This is not an actual search for those stories, by the way.  I just made a note when I saw one.  Here is the recent crop.  David Waldman at Daily Kos writes frequently about various types of "gun fails."

Studying Gender Stereotypes in Science. Or We All Know That Women Can't Do Math

Are there fewer women in STEM-fields just because women don't choose them as often as men?  Or could it be that there are demand-side reasons for the relative scarcity of women?  Those "demand side" reasons mean that the people responsible for hiring and promoting workers might have (perhaps subconscious) prejudices about women which affect the likelihood that a woman is picked for a job or an educational slot which requires mathematical skills.

A new study, How stereotypes impair women’s careers in science, by Ernesto Reuben, Paola Sapienza and Luigi Zingales tries to answer the latter question, about the possible impact of our prejudices concerning mathematics and gender.   Bryce Covert summarizes the study findings:

Researchers from Columbia Business School, the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University conducted an experiment that had both men and women complete an arithmetic task that both genders, on average, perform equally well as potential job candidates. Then test subjects had to decide who to hire. “Our results reveal a strong bias among subjects to hire male candidates,” the researchers note, which was true of both men and women. When the prospective employers were only shown a candidate’s physical appearance, making their gender clear, they were twice as likely to hire a man than a woman. This was because women were expected to perform worse on the math problems, even though it was a task they were equally like to do well.
Women were still less likely to be hired even after the candidates told prospective employers how they did on the task “because men tend to boast about their performance, whereas women generally underreport it,” the authors write. Employers don’t take this into account, particularly if they went into the experiment with a strong bias against women in math.
Things improved when those doing the hiring were given full information about how the candidates did on the task, but even then discrimination wasn’t totally eliminated.

Stuff To Read, 3/12/14

I always say that writing can be as fast as your ability to type.  It's the research that props up the writing which takes time.  That's another way to say that I've been doing a lot of research and very little writing today.

So what could you read, instead of me?  Let's see.

This piece talks about a new study which suggests that money buys access to politicians, but that even the smell of money isn't quite enough to guarantee face-to-face access.  More on the power of money in American politics can be found in this editorial.

What the Hobby Lobby case reveals about the US religious right's attitudes toward contraception.  A spoiler:  They think contraception destroys marriage and makes men disrespect women.

The US is ranked 98th in the global ranking of national legislatures when it comes to the number of women in them.  Sure, some other countries achieve a higher ranking through quotas, but many don't need quotas to get there.  This country is behind Kenya and Indonesia and just ahead of United Arab Emirates.  Part of the reason for America's less-than-stellar performance is the two-party system which makes atypical candidates less likely than multi-party systems.

On crowdworkers.  A new kind of labor market and mostly unregulated.

And one more example of the Republican wingtip-in-the-mouth syndrome when it comes to so-called women's issues:

New Hampshire state Rep. Kyle Tasker (R) posted a joke about domestic violence to Facebook on Monday while defending a fellow lawmaker's comments about abusive relationships, according to William Tucker's New Hampshire politics blog, Miscellany: Blue.
Tasker posted a graphic joke about domestic violence that read, "50,000 battered women and I still eat mine plain!"
Tasker has since deleted the joke from Facebook...

Put Me On A Pedestal

So that you can look up my skirt more easily?

Mike Huckabee, the former Republican Governor of Arkansas, tells how he has run against female candidates in political races:

“I’ve twice run against women opponents, and it’s a very different kind of approach,” he tells me. Different how? “For those of us who have some chivalry left, there’s a level of respect. ... You treat some things as a special treasure; you treat other things as common.” A male opponent is “common,” a woman requires “a sense of pedestal.”

“I’ll put it this way,” Huckabee says. “I treat my wife very differently than I treat my chums and my pals. I wouldn’t worry about calling them on Valentine’s Day, opening the door for them, or making sure they were OK.”

That's just wonderfully informative.  And funny, given that he seems to equate female political rivals with his wife and male political rivals with his pals (presumably all men).  Or at least he has trouble trying to explain how those female politicians might differ from male politicians, except in some extremely deep and gendered ways  which require chivalry from him, probably Valentine's Day cards, opening doors and making sure that they are OK.  I'd think it would be fairly easy to beat Huckabee if that's how he plans to run any future races against women.

Chivalry, by the way, is an interesting concept.  Many conservatives seem to assume that in the olden days the world was full of chivalrous men, opening doors, even when a woman didn't want to go anywhere, rising when women entered the room and so on, but now chivalry is almost dead and that's because of feminazis.  Indeed, some not-so-nice sites suggest that the price of chivalry is submission, and that the alternative to chivalry (of the imagined type that once ruled everywhere) is not being treated with respect and politeness as a human being but being treated with extra nastiness for overstepping the boundaries of traditional gender roles.

That's not what Huckabee is saying.  His ideas come from his own traditional gender norms, perhaps reflected in his earlier support for wifely submission in marriage.

I can't help feeling a bit sorry for our Mike.  He's trying too hard to make the Republican war on women come out right, but he just doesn't get it, because in his worldview women really cannot take the kinds of roles those uppity women are taking.  Sadly, there are no ready-made answers to the proper way of campaigning against someone who is both supposed to stand on a pedestal and then get that pedestal toppled. 

Today's Science Snack. On Hormones And Women's Voting

Remember that study in 2012:  "The Fluctuating Female Vote:  Politics, Religion and the Ovulatory Cycle" by Kristina  M. Durante,  Ashley R. Arsena and Vladas Griskevicius?   It argued that women's voting is affected by their menstrual cycles, and linked the argument to the usual evolutionary psychology stuff about reproductive drives and how they might influence women differently at different stages of the ovulatory cycle.

The next stage of the game:  A new study*, Harris, C., & Mickes, L. (2014). "Women Can Keep the Vote: No Evidence That Hormonal Changes During the Menstrual Cycle Impact Political and Religious Beliefs Psychological Science" argues that a replication of the Durante et al. study failed to find the same effects.

Neuroskeptic, at a Discovery magazine blog, writes about some of the methodological concerns with that particular field of psychological studies which might exist in both the original studies and in the replications, especially something called "researcher degrees of freedom," from here:

[I]t is unacceptably easy to publish “statistically significant” evidence consistent with any hypothesis.
The culprit is a construct we refer to as researcher degrees of freedom. In the course of collecting and analyzing data, researchers have many decisions to make: Should more data be collected? Should some observations be excluded? Which conditions should be combined and which ones compared? Which control variables should be considered? Should specific measures be combined or transformed or both?
It is rare, and sometimes impractical, for researchers to make all these decisions beforehand. Rather, it is common (and accepted practice) for researchers to explore various analytic alternatives, to search for a combination that yields “statistical significance,” and to then report only what “worked.” The problem, of course, is that the likelihood of at least one (of many) analyses producing a falsely positive finding at the 5% level is necessarily greater than 5%.

I'm not sure if that's a polite way to hint at the possibility that researchers can go on fishing trips with the data until they find significant results in at least one tiny part of the analyses, and that it is those significant results which then will be published.

Setting all that aside, replication still matters, even "replication"** suffering from possible "researcher degrees of freedom" problems.  That's because replications which fail to produce the original results tell us something about the fragility of the results,  so to speak, and about the ease with which opposite results can be manufactured.

Finally, it's worth noting that the women-and-their-hormones (and men-and-their-hormones) field also needs to be studied by people outside the evolutionary psychology camp, because any overt biases of the researchers will be different.  Evolutionary psychologists seek to verify their reproductive theories, those outside that field have different basic theories and thus different blinders.
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*I have not read this replication study or the response to it, though I did read the original Durante et al. study.
**In quotation marks, because replication should not deviate from the steps the original study took.  But if we don't know what those steps where...






 

Wrestling Bears Bare-Chested

That's Vladimir Putin in the imagination of many American conservatives.  These recent comments reveal a yearning not only for a Strong Daddy Leader in the US (traditional among conservatives) but for something closer to Godzilla as the leader:  Someone who can demolish cities without a thought:

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin:

Well, yes, especially under the commander-in-chief that we have today because Obama's -- the perception of him and his potency across the world is one of such weakness. And you know, look, people are looking at Putin as one who wrestles bears and drills for oil. They look at our president as one who wears mom jeans and equivocates and bloviates.

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee:

"I know the only time that Vladimir Putin shivers is when he takes his shirt off in a cold Russian winter," 

And the pundit Rush Limbaugh:

Well, did you hear that the White House put out a photo of Obama talking on the phone with Vlad, and Obama's sleeves were rolled up?  That was done to make it look like Obama was really working hard—I mean, really taking it seriously. His sleeves were rolled up while on the phone with Putin! Putin probably had his shirt off practicing Tai-Chi while he was talking to Obama.

Limbaugh was unintentionally hilarious in that quote when he picked tai chi (probably not one of Putin's actual martial arts) as his example.

It is a difficult internal martial art which uses very slow and apparently gentle movements in the training stages.  Its basic martial strategy consists of deflecting the attack and of using the attacker's own power against him or her; the very reverse of how Putin has acted in Ukraine or elsewhere.

That unintentional hilarity is worth pointing out, because it shows the lack of thinking in the conservative admiration of lack of thinking.  The best bear wrestlers are other bears, after all.

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Cross-posted at Eschaton

SAT And The Dropped Essay Requirement. Gender Implications.

The Washington Post tells us that the essay requirement, which was only fairly recently added, will now be made optional:

The SAT college admission test will no longer require a timed essay, will dwell less on fancy vocabulary and will return to the familiar 1600-point scoring scale in a major overhaul intended to open doors to higher education for students who are now shut out.

...

Out, too, will be a much-reviled rule that deducts a quarter-point for each wrong answer to multiple-choice questions, deterring random guesses.

Whatever the actual reasons for these changes -- and they may be good ones, who knows -- there's an outcome which is not good for female students taking the test.  Have a look at the tables showing the 2013 scores on the written test, on the critical reading test and on the mathematics test.  You might check both the 99th percentiles, the top scorers, and then scroll down to the means and standard deviations on the tests.*

By making the essay an optional one, the College Board is keeping the tests where the male mean is somewhat higher than the female mean compulsory, while making the test where the female mean is somewhat higher than the male mean optional.  A similar impact could be created by not deducting anything for guessing if men are more likely to use that strategy than women**.

Removing the essay requirement also means that those who use the upper tail theory about tests to explain why there are fewer women than men in positions of power don't have to try to explain away the writing test results, because they will no longer be there to be cited in that debate.

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*Note, also, that more women than men take the test, and this matters for all the means in those tables I link to.  From an older article (before the essay requirement was added) about this effect:

Gender Differences. The number of women taking the SAT has exceeded the number of men for more than two decades. In the class of 1996, there were 75,529 more women than men taking the SAT. These "additional" women were less likely to have taken rigorous academic course work than other students who took the SAT. In 1996, average SAT verbal scores were 503 for women and 507 for men. This four-point difference is what one might reasonably expect given that there are so many more women taking the test. In fact, research has shown that the differences in the self-selected population taking the test explains the difference in average verbal scores between men and women. If equal numbers of men and women took the SAT, the average verbal score for women would actually be somewhat higher than the average verbal score for men.

**My apologies for getting that one wrong.  Removing the penalty for guessing may benefit women if the results of that study generalize.

Short Posts, 3/6/14. From Serious to Silly

Dani McClain in the Nation reminds us not to forget about the black girls and women or the young Latinas while focusing on improving the opportunities of black and Latino boys and young men.  Monique Morris has more on the invisibility of girls of color.  Neither McClain nor Morris want to start oppression Olympics or deny the urgent needs of black and Latino boys and young men, but point out that the comparable female needs also should be addressed.

The Bitcoin markets are in trouble.  I've only recently read about the whole phenomenon, and find it a very interesting learning experience, especially to Libertarians who believe markets don't need any sort of outside framing to flourish.  Yet every market is like a poker game where someone needs to enforce the rules of the game and make sure that the deck is not marked.  That "someone" doesn't need to be the government but mostly ends up that way, because of the powers the referee needs to have.

This is a fun video where a young woman shows us how languages sound to those who don't actually speak them.  What she actually says is gibberish:

Trigger Warnings in College Courses

A debate on the advisability of having trigger warnings in college courses began with this New Republic article.

When reading an article on some new phenomenon, fashion or fad, it's important to ask the kind of question people these days tend not to ask about lots of things:  How common are these types of trigger warnings in colleges?*

They are probably quite rare, and mostly crop up by students asking for them (and perhaps not getting them), not by most colleges requiring them.  The rarity matters if we are going to spend energy and effort on thinking about the issues.  Indeed, one of my pet frustrations, these days, is people thinking that one nasty tweet, say, obviously and unavoidably means that the tweet is a representative of a giant movement.   It may be but most likely we are always going to have a few nasty tweets, even after the world is made into a paradise.

Given that warning, the debate is worth following for some of the issues it brings up.  Jill Filipovich writes about the feminism-linked part of trigger warnings by noting that they were at first used fairly narrowly on some feminists sites, and mostly in the context of sexual violence:

In the early days of feminist blogging, trigger warnings were generally about sexual assault, and posted with the understanding that lots of women are sexual assault survivors, lots of women read feminist blogs, and graphic descriptions of rape might lead to panic attacks or other reactions that will really ruin someone's day. Easy enough to give readers a little heads up – a trigger warning – so that they can decide to avoid that material if they know that discussion of rape triggers debilitating reactions.

She then gives examples of the proliferation of trigger warnings to a much wider class of topics, and explains the difficulty of using trigger warnings if they are intended to protect those suffering from PTSD:

It is true that everything on the above list might trigger a PTSD response in someone. The trouble with PTSD, though, is that its triggers are often unpredictable and individually specific – a certain smell, a particular song, being touched in that one way. It's impossible to account for all of them, because triggers are by their nature not particularly rational or universally foreseeable. Some are more common than others, though, which is why it seems reasonable enough for explicitly feminist spaces to include trigger warnings for things like assault and eating disorders.
College, though, is different. It is not a feminist blog. It is not a social justice Tumblr.

Tressie McMillan Cottom addresses trigger warnings in the context of college culture:

But, I’m not sure that’s at all the kind of deliberation universities are doing with their trigger warning policies. Call me cynical, but the “student-customer” movement is the soft power arm of the neo-liberal corporatization of higher education. No one should ever be uncomfortable because students do not pay to feel things like confusion or anger. That sounds very rational until we consider how the student-customer model doesn’t silence power so much as it stifles any discourse about how power acts on people.

Melissa McEwan notes that something akin to trigger warnings already exists in the wider society:

Film rating systems, which include warnings about certain types of content, including sexual and violent content, have existed for years. Although they are not typically broadcast at the beginning of a screening, with the exception of cable broadcasts where that has been standard practice for some time, viewers can easily access in trailers, reviews, and listings on sites like IMDb notes about the content of a film before viewing it. Newspapers, too, frequently offer notes about content at the top of in-depth investigative pieces about systemic abuse or violent crime, especially when there are graphic descriptions within the story. These sorts of habits already exist in some measure, which makes the alarmism about trigger warnings misplaced, at best.

This topic is difficult, even if we stick to the university context the New Republic article creates, because of the clashes of underlying values: fairness, inclusion, sensitivity to those who suffer from PTSD on the one side and the academic goals of debate, learning and challenging existing beliefs on the other side.  Then there are these questions:  What spaces should be (or can be) safe spaces (and for whom), how appending trigger warnings might affect the way students approach a topic, how not appending them might also affect the way the topic ends up being treated, and, how colleges would decide which phenomena deserve warnings and which do not, and finally, the whole question of the relationship between feminism and trigger warnings:

Then, simply, there is the fact that the universe does not treat its members as if they come hand-delivered in a box clearly marked "fragile". The world can be a desperately ugly place, especially for women. That feminist blogs try to carve out a little section of the world that is a teeny bit safer for their readers is a credit to many of those spaces. Colleges, though, are not intellectual or emotional safe zones. Nor should they be.
Trauma survivors need tools to manage their triggers and cope with every day life. Universities absolutely should prioritize their needs – by making sure that mental health care is adequately funded, widely available and destigmatized.
But they do students no favors by pretending that every piece of potentially upsetting, triggering or even emotionally devastating content comes with a warning sign.

But the fact is that the medical industry is not very good at treating PTSD.  If it were, we wouldn't need to have this discussion, because all sufferers would have been quickly cured.
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*From the article:

On college campuses across the country, a growing number of students are demanding trigger warnings on class content. Many instructors are obliging with alerts in handouts and before presentations, even emailing notes of caution ahead of class. At Scripps College, lecturers give warnings before presenting a core curriculum class, the “Histories of the Present: Violence," although some have questioned the value of such alerts when students are still required to attend class. Oberlin College has published an official document on triggers, advising faculty members to "be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression," to remove triggering material when it doesn't "directly" contribute to learning goals and "strongly consider" developing a policy to make "triggering material" optional. Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, it states, is a novel that may "trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide and more." Warnings have been proposed even for books long considered suitable material for high-schoolers: Last month, a Rutgers University sophomore suggested that an alert for F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby say, "TW: suicide, domestic abuse and graphic violence."
What began as a way of moderating Internet forums for the vulnerable and mentally ill now threatens to define public discussion both online and off. The trigger warning signals not only the growing precautionary approach to words and ideas in the university, but a wider cultural hypersensitivity to harm and a paranoia about giving offense. And yet, for all the debate about the warnings on campuses and on the Internet, few are grappling with the ramifications for society as a whole.

Bolds are mine.

Given the vast size of the college industry, these examples don't tell us how common trigger warnings in colleges are.  If the list given here is the total of all such warnings, any problems are pretty much nonexistent. 


 


 

Looking Up Your Skirt

In Massachusetts, a court ruled that it's legal for someone to take pictures up women's skirts on public transportation.  And yes, the man who was doing that, one Michael Robertson, is clearly an asshat (now take a picture of that).

But the reason why Robertson won his case has to do with the way the existing Massachusetts law is written: 

The court ruled that the law as written only applies to people in private when they are nude or partially nude. The court did say that riders should have protections from peeping toms on the MBTA, but the law as written needs to be updated.
"We conclude that (the law), as written, as the defendant suggests, is concerned with proscribing Peeping Tom voyeurism of people who are completely or partially undressed and, in particular, such voyeurism enhanced by electronic devices. (The law) does not apply to photographing (or videotaping or electronically surveilling) persons who are fully clothed and, in particular, does not reach the type of upskirting that the defendant is charged with attempting to accomplish on the MBTA," read the decision.
"At the core of the Commonwealth's argument to the contrary is the proposition that a woman, and in particular a woman riding on a public trolley, has a reasonable expectation of privacy in not having a stranger secretly take photographs up her skirt. The proposition is eminently reasonable, but (the law) in its current form does not address it," read the decision.
 

Well, that's all I planned to write until I read some of the comments (mea culpa, though most of them were weird trollery and many of them were sensible).  The very first one:

If women want to dress scantily, I sure as hell will see whatever I can. I don't need a shot of testosterone.

And then there was this:

That's not a Green Line train in the photo above and the ladies on my Red Line trains to/from work are never that pretty :-(

Anyway, with the recent popularity of wearing black tights with no skirt, and the amount of camel toe being displayed all over the trains and in general as a result, it's not like you need to be doing the upskirt thing...so yeah, there's that....because Lycra. Now, if we could just get them to move on past the whole Uggs thing...blech...

Those do a neat reversal, blaming the imagined victims for showing too much flesh, right?* But there's also that whiff of 'cover-yerselves-wimmen' which I was a bit shocked to find on a liberal site.  And then another whiff of the idea that women's bodies indeed are public comestibles, that they can be judged in the manner of Olympic gymnastics or figure skating, that no woman out there can declare herself to be outside the competition (except perhaps by wearing a burqa).

That general ranking wouldn't bother me if we did the same to all bodies, partly, because I think that doing it to both men and women would reduce the amount of such judging I see.  Imagine, say, me going on here about plumber's cracks and big bellies and moobs and mullets.
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*The question of "appropriate" clothing is a tricky one and I'm not addressing it here.  It partly depends on societal norms, but because those have traditionally been sexist the norms themselves need rigorous interrogating under bright lights before any simple conclusions can be drawn. 

Alcohol And Sexual Aggression. Or Was That Harassment Caused By the Booze?

Several sites have written about a study titled ""Blurred Lines?"  Sexual Aggression and Barroom Culture."  The study is available at the linked site in its entirety, which is good news for all the geeks who read this.

This study gets so much attention because of that ongoing debate about alcohol and its role in sexual abuse and rape.  That debate covers arguments such as Taranto's statement that inebriated sex is like two cars colliding but only one of the drivers (the male one) gets taken to court for the collision.  It also covers advice to young women not to drink because drinking makes them obvious and natural prey for the obvious and natural predators out there, and it covers the arguments that the role of alcohol in such events shouldn't be the excuse for what happened.

That's why the current study is of interest.

What does it have to tell us about alcohol and sexual aggression?  Here's what the NPR says about the study findings:

Young women are often the targets of aggression when they're out in bars, but the problem isn't that guys are too drunk to know better.
Instead, men are preying on women who have had too much to drink.
When researchers at the University of Toronto and the University of Washington observed young people's behavior in bars, they found that the man's aggressiveness didn't match his level of intoxication. There was no relationship.
Instead, men targeted women who were intoxicated.
The researchers hired and trained 140 young adults to go into bars in the Toronto area and note every incident of aggression they saw. They found that 25 percent of all incidents involved sexual aggression. And 90 percent of the victims of sexual aggression were women being harassed by men.
Almost all of the aggression was physical, with about two-thirds of the aggressors physically touching women without consent. About 17 percent threatened contact. And 9 percent verbally harassed their targets.

Men may perceive intoxicated women either as more amenable to advances or as easier targets who are less able to rebuff them because they don't have their wits about them, the researchers say.

Well, sort of, if we allow for the usual magnification and simplification of research summaries in the popular media.

It's indeed true that the study found no relationship between the aggressor's level of drunkenness and how invasive and persistent the harassment was, whereas the drunkenness of the "target" of harassment was found to be correlated with how invasive the aggression was, and that gives some support to the view of inebriated women as more vulnerable and therefore as more obvious prey for the predators among us.

But note that the observers in the study rated inebriation of the participants in these events on a scale from 0 (sober) to 9 (falling-down drunk).  Here is what the study tells us about the average inebriation level among the initiators (the aggressors) and the targets:

On average, initiators were rated 4.98 (SD = 2.10, range = 0 to 9.00) on the intoxication scale and targets rated 2.26 (SD = 2.30, range = 0 to 9.00).

In plain language, the aggressors were more likely to be drunk than the targets of the aggression, so it's not quite true that  "men are preying on women who have had too much to drink" as the NPR summary states, or at least it's not true that overwhelmingly sober men are preying on overwhelmingly  drunk women.

The nature of this study cannot tell us how the "initiators" in the bars the observers frequented might differ from those who did not initiate any kind of harassment, and neither does it tells us how possible "non-targets" for harassment might have differed from the "targets."  But that's the information we would also need, to state conclusively what the role of alcohol in the occurrence of harassment might be.

This post is not really criticizing the study as such, merely suggesting the kinds of things further studies might look at.

 

Speed Blogging, 3/4/14: On Female Scientists, Entrepreneurs and Women in Saudi Arabia

This is an interesting piece about female scientists of the past.  You can learn more about Lise Meitner, Émilie du Châtelet, Barbara McClintock and others.



A new study argues that female entrepreneurs pay themselves a lower salary than male entrepreneurs, and that the difference happens to match the gross gender gap in salaries.

What that means isn't very clear to me.  The study subjects were all graduates of a particular program in entrepreneurship, and it looks like that salary data was acquired very early after graduation from the program, because:

The good news, at least for the women schooled by Goldman, is that when they were asked six months after graduating, they had narrowed the salary gap, to 8 percent from 20 percent. Both male and female graduates gave themselves raises, but the women, Ms. Greene said, gave themselves bigger raises.

I can make all sorts of guesses to explain that first round difference in salary assignment.  As one expert in the quoted article stated:

Ariane Hegewisch, a study director at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, noted that there was “quite a pronounced gender segregation” in the types of businesses men and women operate. The Babson finding “could be a reflection of the fact that women are more likely to start businesses in sectors with lower average revenue than men,” she said in an email.

More generally, if people pay themselves at least partly based on their past actual salaries, then, on average, women might choose a lower salary because they are accustomed to that. 

Or, as the article also suggests, men and women could differ in risk aversion, men being more risk-loving. But why not theorize about other possible gender differences?  For instance, perhaps the women in that study were more focused on faster growth of the firm, plowing more money back into it, say?  Then there's the difficulty of determining what the "right" salary for entrepreneurs might be, given how the firm is doing, what other sources of funding it has and so on.   And the question what the right amount of risk aversion might be, for each type of enterprise.



Saudi activists have petitioned

 ...the country's consultative council to back a demand to curb the "absolute authority" of male guardians over women in the kingdom, a signatory has said.
Activist Aziza Yousef told AFP news agency on Sunday that "rights activists have petitioned the Shura (consultative) Council on the occasion of the International Women's Day [on March 8] demanding an end to the absolute authority of men over women".
They demanded "measures to protect [women's] rights," in their petition to the Shura Council, she said.
Saudi Arabia imposes a strict interpretation of Islamic law, forbidding women to work or travel without the authorisation of their male guardians.
It is also the only country in the world that bans women from driving, and a woman cannot obtain an identification card without the consent of her guardian.
Laws in the kingdom enforcing such restrictions on women "are not based on religious" teachings, said Yousef.
The petition, signed by 10 female activists, also calls for allowing women to drive.

I'm not holding my breath for instant changes.  But I raise my helmet for those ten activists.  They are brave women.