The Pew Survey On Stay-At-Home Mothers: Problems of Definition and Data For Comparisons

I wrote this post some weeks ago.  It's delayed, because I contacted the Pew researchers for further information.  I never got it, so here is the post, just in time for the US Mothers' Day.

Introduction

The recent Pew survey on the percentage of mothers (with children under eighteen) who are now stay-at-home mothers begins:

After Decades of Decline, a Rise in Stay-at-Home Mothers

The rest of the long report is mostly about the details behind that sentence.   Except, my friends, the details turn out fuzzy for some very boring reasons.  Here's the first boring reason:

What that beginning really should have said is this:

After Decades of Decline, a Rise in Women Not Having Paid Work Who Also Have Children Under Eighteen. 

That looks like I replaced a clear sentence with researchy gobbledegook, though that's not so.  To see why, note that the mothers in this survey can be single mothers, the mothers in this study can be married to a partner who also has no paid work (which could make that partner into yet another stay-at-home-parent),  and the mothers in this survey can have all sorts of reasons for why they don't have a job in the labor market.  Some of those reasons are that they can be enrolled in school, too sick to work or unable to find paid employment.

They can also state that they are at home because they are taking care of their minor children, and the majority of the mothers without paid employment surveyed by Pew do give that answer.  But all those other answers could have been given by women (or men) who don't have children under eighteen at home, too.  Thus, it's the presence of children at home that is being used to distinguish between different groups of adults here.

For many valid purposes this doesn't matter.  But it matters greatly if we are going to analyze these findings against the background of the cultural debates about proper gender roles and about the question whether mothers of young children should stay at home or not. 

My Last Post on Monica Lewinsky

Partly because I didn't follow the events when they happened, but partly because others have written the more interesting stuff.

But there's a lesson to be learned from the "Monica Lewinsky scandal," beginning with the fact that it was called that and not the "Bill Clinton scandal."  Such "love or sex triangles" do not have equal sides, in terms of negative consequences, and neither did this one.

If I had to make an uninformed judgment I'd say that Lewinsky's life and career have truly suffered from what happened, but Bill Clinton's life and career have not.  His approval numbers went up with the impeachment attempts, his career didn't suffer and he even kept his marriage intact.  If anything, his hounddog reputation has enhanced him in some minds.  How much Hillary Clinton might suffer depends, to some small extent, on this latest go-around.

The point is that women do tend to bear the burden of such sex "scandals."   But is it because of our sexual scripts about women's responsibilities for both keeping their husbands sexually sated and for keeping the gate closed in extramarital relationships?  Is it because of that ancient slut-archetype, applied to women who cannot prove that they were forced to have sex?  Or is it, perhaps, that the blame is passed down the hierarchy and because women, on average, stand on lower rungs of that hierarchy they are most likely to be stuck with it?

I also find the way agency seems to have been treated in this case fascinating.  Many of the questions that are raised in the above links to other writings are about Lewinsky's agency.  But the agency of Bill Clinton appears to be treated as something akin to a switch in his hind-brain overwhelming everything else.  Yet he was the person with the most power of all types in this case. 

Why is all this the talk of the week again?  Because of Lewinsky's book, of course, and the timing of that book is most likely based on there still being a likelihood that Hillary Clinton might run for the president of the United States.  I don't grudge Lewinsky the money her book might make, by the way, but much of the political discussion about these events has to do with how to stop Hillary Clinton, not with the questions we appear to be debating. article in the Vanity Fair.  My apologies for the initial mistake.  I have no idea why I thought she had written a book!  Perhaps it's time to stop blogging...

Women And Their Eggs. How Ovulation Makes You Act And Other Tales From Evolutionary Psychology.

A new meta-study looks at the vast field of evolutionary psychology studies into menstrual cycle and women's impregnation preferences*.  That term is mine, to cover the field where women are argued to prefer pictures of rough male faces when they ovulate and pictures of smooth and babyish male faces when they don't, and so on.  These preferences are seen as indications of the type of man the woman would prefer to be impregnated by, trading different unconscious objectives:  The rough face provides the best genes but the baby-face is more likely to hang around and help in childcare etc, so women are more likely to pick the rough face to be the baby daddy but let the baby face wear the horns.  And so on.

The menstrual cycle studies even argue that women vote for manly men when they are in the ovulatory part of the cycle.  Or that women wear red or pink when ovulating.

Anyway, the meta study abstract tells us something interesting:

In evolutionary psychology predictions, women’s mate preferences shift between fertile and nonfertile times of the month to reflect ancestral fitness benefits. Our meta-analytic test involving 58 independent reports (13 unpublished, 45 published) was largely nonsupportive. Specifically, fertile women did not especially desire sex in short-term relationships with men purported to be of high genetic quality (i.e., high testosterone, masculinity, dominance, symmetry). The few significant preference shifts appeared to be research artifacts. The effects declined over time in published work, were limited to studies that used broader, less precise definitions of the fertile phase, and were found only in published research.

Bolds are mine.  As PZ Myers notes in his write-up of the study, the work that was not published may have been lower in quality.  But it may also have remained in the file drawers because it found a negative.  Research journals still favor new-and-shocking findings over no-effect findings.

Whether this meta-study gets it right or not, future studies, better done, could find such ovulation effects.  Though I personally doubt that.  Or rather, I doubt that any such effects would be large enough to matter when studied within the complicated context of human cultures.

The reference to "less precise definitions of the fertile phase" in that study abstract is also significant.  For example, if the fertile stage is defined widely enough, then those who want to see when women wear red or pink might be actually (and by accident) measuring women's desire not to wear red or pink when they are menstruating or close to that phase in their cycles.  The reasons for such avoidance (not saying it exists) are rather different from evolutionary explanations.

But what about the guys and ovulation?  Evolutionary psychology has something to say about that, too.  Remember the 2010 study which found that men could smell female ovulation by sniffing at women's sweaty t-shirts?   It was widely popularized, especially by John Tierney of the New York Times:

It may seem hard to believe that men could distinguish a woman who’s at peak fertility simply by sitting next to her for a few minutes. Scientists long assumed that ovulation in humans was concealed from both sexes.
But recent studies have found large changes in cues and behavior when a woman is at this stage of peak fertility. Lap dancers get much higher tips (unless they’re taking birth-control pills that suppress ovulation, in which case their tips remain lower). The pitch of a woman’s voice rises. Men rate her body odor as more attractive and respond with higher levels of testosterone.

It's that body odor stuff which comes from the 2010 study.  But a 2012 study didn't find any such testosterone effect.  That study wasn't an exact replication of the earlier one.  For example, it didn't prime the men by telling that they were going to smell the t-shirts worn by women and it didn't use shirts at all.  On the whole, it looks to me like a more carefully done study.  From the abstract:

Here, we collected axillary sweat samples from women on days near ovulation. In a crossover design, men who were not explicitly aware of the specific stimuli smelled the sweat samples in one session and water samples in a second session. There were no differences in testosterone responses across the experimental conditions.

 Now make a guess.  Did John Tierney write about that 2012 study or not? 

Sigh.  One reason I criticize the coverage of these kinds of studies is the easy pass they get from science pundits such as John Tierney (who has his own views on us wimminfolk).  Another reason is something I've spotted when I read through the articles.  Far too often the literature reviews in evolutionary psychology omit the critical studies, the studies which found nothing, the studies which were unclear.  That makes the edifice look formidably strong but writing the review that way is not ethical, in my humble opinion.  I hope to see this practice change in the future.

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 *Thanks to Latverian Diplomat in the comments for the first three links.

While Reading About The Stagnant Race Gap in Reading and Mathematics Scores

At MSNBC website, the right-hand column listed most recent comments attached to this topic.  The one I saw at the time of my reading was:

Liberals Scumbags get a job17 minutes ago
In reply to: Frank from Victoria #3
Thats becaus most liberals are like all commies...corporatist elitests that want a 2 class technocratic system ...,.
Where these people are the proletariat.
Platos Republic.

It diverted me from the article for a second or so and turned me into that favorite channel of wondering why comments are so stupid and why they exist at all.  But it also made me see an example of the failures of the US school system.

Returning to the actual topic:  The disparities in the achievement numbers by race and ethnicity are linked to lower incomes, less access to resources, racism and the way residential segregation follows both income and ethnic/racial lines. 

The best resource-based solution to this is to stop funding schools from just local taxes.  When the average incomes of areas differ the quality of the schools will, too, because some areas have a lot less money to spend per student.  I'd also like to see more resources steered into poorer areas and higher teacher pay in them.  Positive discrimination, to counteract the negative effects of poverty in early childhood.

Of course trying to affect the lower incomes and income inequality in general would work even better but that really is too radical a proposal in this country.  The next best thing is to focus on the schools, because everyone agrees that the children themselves are not to blame for their bad lottery results in life.



   

Back To The Nineties: Monica Lewinsky And "You Women's Rights Ladies."

It may shock some political pundits in the US, but eighteen years is a long time, when measured by human experience.  I  recall reading about the sex scandal involving Bill Clinton, then the president of the country, and Monica Lewinsky, then a White House intern.  I even remember thinking that Lewinsky was treated most unfairly and that the whole scandal was framed in archetypal terms as a triangle drama between the Frigid And Controlling Wife, the Impossible-To-Change-Hounddog and The Other Woman, A Slut.  Which leaves the hounddog free to sniff around and lift his leg wherever he wishes.

Now Lewinsky has written a book about her experiences during that time, and naturally all the pundits discuss the events again.  Joe Scarborough, a conservative pundit on US television, blew a gasket in this context.  To quote him:

The "Morning Joe" panelists were discussing a column by the New York Post's Andrea Peyser, titled "Self-pitying Lewinsky should go away," when Scarborough became incensed.
"This is not about Bill Clinton. This is about the women who were eviscerating Monica Lewinsky, who for 18 years was quiet and, by the way, lived a life of shame and her entire existence reduced to a punchline," Scarborough said. "And she stays quiet, shows a lot of dignity, a lot more dignity than people who preyed upon her and tried to turn her into a slut or a nut. A 22-year-old daughter, really? And now they're coming out kicking her in the face?"
"Please, you all are sick. You 'women's rights' ladies, you were sick in the '90s," he continued. "You all went around, you defended the wrong person time and time again. Whether it was Juanita Broaddrick, whether it was Monica Lewinsky, you defended [Clinton]. And you're doing it 18 years later. You're pathetic."

The writer of that column, by the way, is a conservative, anti-woman columnist.  She once compared the female Danish prime minister to a tart or a piece of Danish pastry.

What is interesting about Scarborough's reaction is the use of group guilt.  Every feminist is sick, because of Scarborough's opinions about how Lewinsky was treated.  It doesn't matter if I was doing anything feministy in the 1990s; the same accusations apply to me.  I'm sick.  Indeed, it doesn't matter if some feminist was then still in diapers/nappies, that person is every bit as sick as all the other "ladies" for "women's rights."  Men for women's rights would perhaps be a concept so sick that it doesn't even occur to Scarborough.

The use of group guilt is a topic which deserves a much more fine-tuned treatment than I'm giving it here.  This example differs from many others in important ways, but it brings home the point that large groups are seen by humans as having a life, as having a history and as being responsible for that history.  But large groups consist of mortal individuals and the actual identity of those in the groups change over time.  And it is the individuals now in that group we rant at.

That's how we get into the kind of situation where Echidne is responsible for what made Scarborough angry.  If she took all this seriously, of course, and ignored the political hay that was being made both then and now.

A Pretend-Review Of New Evolutionary Psychology Research

This is a pretend-review, and mostly about the write-up of the study,  because I couldn't read the study without paying for it, so all I have to go is the abstract and the one write-up I found.  Let's begin with the write-up:

Big eyes and full lips may turn male heads in Japan, but in Nepal, men aren't as interested in pretty, girly faces.
Those are the findings of a new study of men's preferences for female faces in 28 nations. The results reveal that guys are drawn to feminine looks – large eyes, pillow lips and a soft jaw — to a greater extent in countries that are the healthiest.
The reason for this difference isn't clear, but scientists suspect that evolution may drive these attractions, at least subconsciously. Men in harsh conditions may have a better chance of fathering children who survive if they mate with a woman who can hold on to resources, said study researcher Urszula Marcinkowska, a doctoral candidate at the University of Turku in Finland.

There ya go!  Except that big eyes and full lips are not defined exactly the same for different racial and ethnic groups, right?  The study is one of those look-at-photographs-and-decide-whom-you-want-to-mate-with ones, and the photographs are manipulated to get versions which the researchers (but perhaps not the subjects of the study?) deem to be more or less feminine or masculine.  I fervently hope that the photographs showed women of the racial or ethnic group the men belonged to, by the way, and that they didn't define "feminine" features on the basis of white faces only.  I'm going to assume that they did all that correctly.

So what were the findings?  We are told that men in Japan, Australia and the United States preferred "feminine" faces whereas the men in Nepal, Nigeria and Colombia didn't, or at least not to the same extent.  If "feminine" means big eyes and full lips, then that's what Japanese men like the best, right?

Right?

What are we going to do with these findings?  Here's where my pretend-review turns into nothing but questions, because we are told a) that women with more feminine faces are more fertile and b) that women with less feminine faces are more dominant in the society and have more access to resources:

Feminine looks are an evolutionary signal of fecundity, said Dan Kruger, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Michigan. In healthy environments, men may subconsciously look for women who can bear lots of children.
In unhealthy environments, however, it might be more important that your potential mate survive to have any children at all. Social dominance — marked by relatively masculine features — might signal that a woman can do just that.
"It seems like there's a trade-off going on, where in the harsher environments, men are putting less preference on femininity," Kruger, who was not involved in the research, told Live Science.

Is there an actual study somewhere in the archives of evolutionary psychology which conclusively demonstrates that women with more feminine faces indeed are more fecund?  Likewise, is there a similarly well-done study in those archives which proves to us that women with more masculine features indeed are socially dominant?

I have no idea.  But Dan Kruger does seem to suggest that all this is the case.

The problem I have with these deep-dives from data to some fundamental explanation is not just the possibility that the data we need to prove relationships between social dominance and masculinity in women or between feminine features and greater female fecundity might not exist, but also that had the findings been reversed (so that more feminine faces would have been preferred in the poorer countries) the obvious explanation would have been that having lots of children is important when most of them are going to die young!  Along the lines the leading researcher speculated:

Earlier cross-cultural research found that "macho" men with stereotypically masculine faces are most preferred in less-developed nations. A strong jaw, squinty eyes and a dominant brow might signal that a guy has strong genes to pass to his child, researchers suggested in March 2013 in the journal Biology Letters. [5 Things Your Grin Reveals About You]
Marcinkowska and her colleagues were interested in turning the tables and examining male preferences for female faces. It was possible, she said, that harsh conditions might promote a preference for sexual dimorphism: Women would want masculine dudes, and men would want girly-girls.

Bolds are mine.

Who knows what studies of this kind mean?  Perhaps the researchers are correct, though I'd truly like to see some sort of controls for the cultural impact of Western ideals of female beauty.  Those ideals are by now fairly widely spread, though they may not be as common in Nepal, Nigeria or Colombia as they are in Japan, Australia or the United States.  That alternative cultural theory is worth keeping in mind when evaluating studies of this type. 




 


  

Good News/Bad News On US Pregnancies

The bad news first, because the good news at the end leaves you feeling better: 

A World Health Organization report on maternal mortality rates notes global improvement in those rates.  The annual number of women who died due to childbirth or pregnancy fell from 523,000 in 1990 to 289,000 in 2013.

That's great, though we can do better.  What's not so great is the trend in the United States:

A Friday Small Thought on Twitter and Writing

My ability to write and Twitter are mortal enemies.  Just realized that.  If I spend time reading tweets I somehow cannot write.  This may be because the format of Twitter is 180 degrees from the way I think  or it may be because tweets, when arriving at my place from all over the universe, cover everything and ultimately cover nothing very deeply, yet they make me leap and dance and jump and pirouette all over the intellectual space until my energy has all been poured out. 

That thought might be of no interest for anyone who isn't trying to write on one single topic and at greater length than 140 characters, and it's not intended to be a criticism of Twitter or a denial of its benefits.  Just that everything has a price, so from now on I will write before reading tweets.

Rand Paul's Abortion Views

I get letters from all sorts of people, including a recent one from Rand Paul (probably from his minions).  It asks for money, in support of the egg-Murkans-human-rights initiative* (justifying it like this (quote from the email)):

Dear Ms.,

For over 40 years, nine unelected men and women on the Supreme Court have played God with innocent human life.

They have invented laws that condemned to painful deaths without trial more than 56 million babies for the crime of being "inconvenient."

There ya go!  It's all about convenience, nothing else, and the painful  baby deaths can be assumed to take place, even if science disagrees about whether zygotes, say, can feel pain.

Just to make sure that I understood that "inconvenience" argument correctly, I checked what Rand Paul himself thinks about when abortions should be banned:

Paul is opposed to abortion, even in cases of rape or incest.

Which sorta clashes with the idea that abortions are all about "inconvenience."

Then to the politics behind this:  Paul has angered forced-birthers by seemingly showing some ambivalence about abortion.  Hence the firm correction towards the right edge.

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*This initiative means that a fertilized egg has all the legal rights not-pregnant already-born people have,  but pregnant people have far fewer rights, given that they are also the aquaria for the fertilized eggs.

Where's The Next Alexander Fleming*? Or Why Corporations Don't Have Incentives to Create New Antibiotics.

The recent predictions that we are entering a post-antibiotics age, an age where a small scratch can, once again, mean death, must be added to those archives where the environmental end of the world, all those wars based on religion and greed for power etc. also live and procreate.  The "eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we shall die" archives.

One part of me has that very reaction.  The wiser (or more optimistic) part notes that apocalyptic news and fears are not exactly uncommon in human history and that the proper reaction to such news is to invest resources in combating whatever the direst threats are.

So what are the resources we need to combat the threat that antibiotics will no longer work because of their overuse in "meat production" and in the treatment of human illnesses? 

Research into new antibiotics and into antibiotic resistance.  Here's the problem with the corporate model of such research: 

There have been no new classes of antibiotics for 25 years, he said.
Pharmaceutical companies cannot cover the costs of research and development because new antibiotics have to be used sparingly, for fear of resistance developing – and when that begins, they have a short lifespan. "New antibiotics coming on to the market are not really new," he said. "They are variations of those we already have." That means that bacteria are likely to develop resistance to them that much sooner.

Translated to everyday language:  Governments should put a lot of money into this research**.  The benefits are wide-spread but cannot be captured by profit-making units. 

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*Alexander Fleming is credited with the formal introduction of penicillin into our medical cupboards.

**Another reason for governments to address this market of pharmaceuticals is that the use of antibiotics has strong external effects which the market hasn't internalized: My consumption of antibiotics has a direct effect on whatever condition I'm treated for but it also has an indirect effect:  to increase the likelihood that the same antibiotics won't work on some future condition you might develop.  Yet that side-effect does not enter my calculations or the calculations of animal farmers, which means that the use of antibiotics has been higher than would have been socially optimal.

This is similar to the anti-vaccination decisions where parents, say, refuse to vaccinate a child because any side-effects from the vaccination will fall on the child but the protection the vaccine gives to the rest of the society doesn't enter the family's calculations.

Today's Research Topic: Wide Hips and Promiscuity

I've got a backlog of studies I should write about, but in some cases the popularizers didn't dare to touch them (women have an evolutionary adaptation to get sexually abused)  and in a couple of other cases I haven't figured out what's going on with the methods yet (70-page articles take time).

But a recent evolutionary biology/psychology study about how narrow-hipped women are less likely to engage in one-night stands than their wider-hipped sisters is kind of fun to talk about, because all the popularizations are about that finding.  The researchers argue that this is because narrow hips are a health hazard in giving birth and so women with narrow hips would have some hard-wired evolutionary chip turned on to avoid situations where they might end up pregnant without a committed male partner.  Presumably the idea is that if the woman dies then the baby is more likely to survive if its father is around.

Or so it all sounds, superficially.  But if you read the research paper itself, things get a bit murkier, and that is clear (if murky things can be clear) from the very title of the paper:

Evidence to Suggest that Women’s Sexual Behavior is Influenced by Hip Width Rather than Waist-to-Hip Ratio.

So the researchers, Victoria J. Simpson, Gayle Brewer and Colin A. Hendrie, actually wrote about something a bit more complicated.  They wanted to see if the mythical albatross theory still hanging around the necks of evolutionary psychologists, about the presumed universal male preference for a certain waist-to-hips ratio, predicted which women would have more one-night stands.  Here the hypothesis is that the closer a woman's waist-to-hip ratio is to the ideal, the more potential bees would be swarming her flowers, so to speak.

Alas, they found no correlation with the waist-to-hip ratio and the proportion of a woman's sexual history which consisted of one-night stands.  Hence the focus on the hip width and its correlation with that number. Here the approach does a kind of a u-turn.  From the paper:

In this context, where opportunities for sexual encounters exist, it is women who decide, in all but the most extreme of circumstances, whether mating takes place or not (Clark & Hatfield, 1989). Signals of fertility and attractiveness, such as WHR, serve to influence the number/quality of men available to them (e.g., Hendrie, Mannion, & Godfrey, 2009). However, variations in hip width per se have a direct impact on women’s risks of suffering serious birth related traumas and these have the potential to lead to permanent gynecological damage or even death. Therefore, it was predicted that there may be some relationship between women’s hip width per se and their sexual behavior.

It's a bit muddled, I think, and gives short shrift to the mutual negotiations of sexual interactions.

Why aren't the men making choices here?  After all, they either swarm around the ideal waist-to-hip goddess or they don't, and that swarming is a choice, right?  If no bees are humming around a woman, her choice is meaningless.  Then there's the fact that the research this paper discusses didn't find any correlation between the waist-to-hip ratio and the number of one-night stands as a proportion of the woman's total sexual history.

More generally, I find the idea of "sexual history" slightly odd when the study subjects had an average age of first intercourse of sixteen years and when the age distribution in the study was from 18 to 26 years.  What would happen if studies like this were done on women in their eighties, say?

The study also omitted women who had never had intercourse.  That omission is most likely because the original idea was to study the waist-to-hip theory of attractiveness, and virgins don't provide information on that.  But once we move to the hip width theory, virgins would have been an important sub-group to include, because, following the logic of the researchers, they should contain the women with the narrowest hips.

The study measured hip width (based on bones) and it measured hip and waist circumference.  But other than those measurements, variable collection looks really minimal to me.  We know the women's ages, but we don't know anything else about them.  Yet the environment matters for casual sexual encounters, and not controlling for that may affect the findings. 

For instance, students living on campus have more access to one-night stands than women living in the countryside, cultural and religious norms may differ in studying something like casual sex and they should have been somehow controlled for.  And so on.  --  This is a common problem with evolutionary studies which simply ignore social and demographic data, because it's not in their model and they are not really familiar with the alternative models because they belong to different disciplines.

None of this means that the finding might not be a real one, but it suggests that better studies are needed to study it.  Such studies should look at the actual width of the birth canal, not the distance between the extreme ends of the hipbones, and they should collect all the relevant social-and-demographic data.

More on the Kidnapped Nigerian Schoolgirls

It's difficult to find out what is happening (my earlier post is here).  The rumors are that the kidnapped teenagers have either been sold as wives outside Nigeria or that they have been forced to marry some of the Boko Haram extremists.  Relatives have tried to find the girls, without success so far, but it's not clear what, if anything, the Nigerian government is doing.

The crime of the girls was to be at school.  Boko Haram is opposed to all Western-style education, but not apparently to the kidnapping and rape of young girls.

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Added later:  Two stories relevant for understanding what the Nigerian government is doing and should be doing.

Speed-Blogging 4/29/14: On Rights For Guns, Religious Education and How One Gets To Be Judged As Outnumbered

1.  This is the sort of thing liable to happen when guns must have rights to be carried everywhere.

2.  A Republican candidate for South Carolina's lieutenant governor wants to end public education and replace it with religious schools.  He hasn't figured out yet how madrasas would be built into that system, because in his mind it's about Christian schools only.  I always find it fascinating how much brethren-under-the-skin the extreme religious people of the right-wing type are.  They want their religion to provide all the information anyone could acquire and they are always, always into caging up wimmenfolk.  Yet they hate each other, too.

3.  Fox News has a brand-new show called "Outnumbered!"  It's based on the idea of four women and one man talking gender wars.   I got a good laugh out of that, because of course a show having four men and one woman as hosts would not be seen as anyone being outnumbered. 

A Biased Snapshot of Campus Rape: Rod Dreher Opines

Lawyers, Gun and Money discusses  Rod Dreher's conservative ideas about why Swarthmore College has been accused of covering up sexual assaults.  Because Dreher is a conservative, what's wrong at Swarthmore College are bad liberal values.  Obviously.

That Dartmouth College, the alma mater of so many famous conservative pundits, has been in the news recently for apparently having a big problem with college rapes  and for not doing enough about them is not mentioned in Dreher's article, because he is taking biased snapshots.

Indeed, Dartmouth, and many other colleges of various political stripes (even, or perhaps especially,  religious colleges), have been accused of very similar things as Swarthmore:

Dartmouth is currently under federal investigation for potential violations of Title IX, the federal gender equity law that requires universities to ensure a safe learning environment for students. A group of Dartmouth students and alumni have also filed a Clery Act complaint alleging that administrators have failed to accurately report incidences of sexual violence and hazing on campus.

Thus, Mr. Dreher picks a case and addresses it, assuming that the specific aspects of Swarthmore College explain what might be happening there, when in reality the problem is independent of the political or religious stance of a college.

Funny Stuff For Saturday: How To Review A Book You Haven't Yet Read, Philosophical Advice About Life And Being A Multi-Lingual

1.  I love Megan McArdle's beginning sentence in her book review of Thomas Piketty's book about wealth inequality*:

I apologize in advance, because I am going to talk about a book that I have not yet read.

It's very charmingly meta-meta criticism, and makes me feel much less guilty about the few times I've discussed a study based on nothing but its abstract and summaries by others.

2.  You know those little deeply philosophical sentences which are intended to make you feel clearer and better about your life?  Many of them are helpful, but sometimes my nastier side enjoys them for wrong reasons.  For example, I recently read this one:

Don't let other people bring you down. Be your own advocate.

Then there's the one of "having to face your worst fears by just doing whatever you fear the most."  Depending on what you fear the most this could result in some very final recommendations.  I think tugging the blanket over your head and squeezing your eyes shut is a healthier reaction to a lot of fears.  Check under the bed for monsters first, of course.

3.  Us multi-linguals may have multiple personalities! This sounds a bit like a cousin of the weak form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.  But I keep thinking of all the shadow-Echidnes which might slip out when the moon is round and the night dark or how very practical it is to take out my wallet and slip another personality card into the slot in my head.


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*A spoof take of McArdle's review can be found here.

From The Instant Expertise Archives: Will Infantine (R) On Why Women Earn Less

This is such a fun example of the Instant Expertise when it comes to the extremely complicated and much-researched question why there is a gender gap in earnings.  Will Infantine dropped one of those Instant Pills into his beer mug last night and -- presto! --  he knows the reasons for women's lower earnings:

Women are not as motivated by money as men are, men work more hours and in more dangerous jobs.  Or in his own expert words:

"Men, by and large, make more because of some of the things they do," state Rep. Will Infantine (R) said during a speech on a paycheck fairness bill. "Their jobs are, by and large, riskier. They don’t mind working nights and weekends. They don’t mind working overtime or outdoors."
Infantine's colleagues' protested almost immediately, to which he responded that he pulled all of his information from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics.
"This is not me," he said before continuing to explain why women make less.
"Men work on average more than six hours a week longer than women do," he said, adding that even among business owners, women earn less. "Women make half of what men do because of flexibility of work, men are more motivated by money than women are."

What's the problem with all that Instant Expertise, you might ask.  Only that those things cannot explain all of the average difference in earnings by gender, only that there is a difference even once one controls for hours worked, only that the dangerous jobs are far too few to somehow explain much about the gender gap in all earnings by all full-time workers, only that even in the so-called flexible jobs which women are supposed to prefer men make, on average, more.

Or put in a different way:  You can't buy Instant Muscles or Instant Slimness or Instant Expertise.  You have to actually delve deeper and you cannot stop with those explanations that most please your inner Manhood or Womanhood.

Let me recommend a few of my posts on these matters, available as links here.

Minor Goddess Thoughts: Post 2. On Sex Work and Gender

Melissa Gira Grant has written a book about prostitution (Playing the Whore), and Katha Pollitt writes about the book in her fairly recent column.  I have not read Grant's book yet, but I'm aware of the furious nature of most debates when it comes to sex work.  (This piece gives a flavor of Grant's arguments.  Pollitt's review offers some of the opposing arguments.)

This fury may be because data is hard to get on some aspects of prostitution, such as the demand side (the "johns") and also because data about trafficking and exploitation is, almost by definition, also difficult to obtain or interpret.  That leaves the debate wide open to individual views.  Those, in turn, depend on the individuals and their places in the hierarchies of the sex work marketplace.  Questions of "choice" and "agency" and such abound, but it's hard to get solid numerical data on the characteristics of mostly illegal markets.

So the debate is all over the place.  On one extreme endpoint,  sex workers are seen as women (mostly women) who were abused as children and never had a chance, who were possibly trafficked as sex-slaves or trapped as teenagers in the streets,  who are addicted to illegal drugs, who are exploited by pimps and who are essentially powerless to stop any of it.

The other extreme endpoint argues that there's nothing more exploitative about sex work than about, say, washing the bottoms of the elderly in a nursing home, that sex work is no different from any other poorly paid and exploitative occupation, such as flipping burgers, washing floors or serving customers at a Hooters bar.  According to this view, choosing sex work is a rational choice, especially for those whose other options are all linked to basic survival, and choosing sex work in the higher-paid part of the market is also a rational choice, because of the pay and the freedom the work offers.

Minor Goddess Thoughts. Post 1: The Confidence Gap Between Men And Women

I'm trying to create a series of small-to-medium thoughts, as a way to spring-clean some of the junk that hangs around in my brain.  This one is about all the recent conversations on how men have more self-confidence and how women need to get more of it and not be so focused on perfection.

The recent conversations are because a new book is out on the topic.  A flavor can be obtained from this Atlantic Monthly article by the authors. It puts together a lot of studies which show that men have more confidence in their abilities, even unwarranted confidence, and then speculates about the possible reasons for this confidence gap, all the way from testosterone to early childhood upbringing.

Because this post is only a minor goddess thought, I haven't gone through the studies or thought about why evolution would benefit from a confidence gap of that sort (though I did have time to wonder if the studies all use American data, and if so, whether the confidence gap might be cultural).

Instead, I wish to draw attention to this weird argument chain:

Do men doubt themselves sometimes? Of course. But not with such exacting and repetitive zeal, and they don’t let their doubts stop them as often as women do. If anything, men tilt toward overconfidence—and we were surprised to learn that they come by that state quite naturally. They aren’t consciously trying to fool anyone. Ernesto Reuben, a professor at Columbia Business School, has come up with a term for this phenomenon: honest overconfidence. In a study he published in 2011, men consistently rated their performance on a set of math problems to be about 30 percent better than it was.

We were curious to find out whether male managers were aware of a confidence gap between male and female employees. And indeed, when we raised the notion with a number of male executives who supervised women, they expressed enormous frustration. They said they believed that a lack of confidence was fundamentally holding back women at their companies, but they had shied away from saying anything, because they were terrified of sounding sexist. One male senior partner at a law firm told us the story of a young female associate who was excellent in every respect, except that she didn’t speak up in client meetings. His takeaway was that she wasn’t confident enough to handle the client’s account. But he didn’t know how to raise the issue without causing offense. He eventually concluded that confidence should be a formal part of the performance-review process, because it is such an important aspect of doing business.


The fact is, overconfidence can get you far in life. Cameron Anderson, a psychologist who works in the business school at the University of California at Berkeley, has made a career of studying overconfidence. In 2009, he conducted some novel tests to compare the relative value of confidence and competence. He gave a group of 242 students a list of historical names and events, and asked them to tick off the ones they knew.

Among the names were some well-disguised fakes: a Queen Shaddock made an appearance, as did a Galileo Lovano, and an event dubbed Murphy’s Last Ride. The experiment was a way of measuring excessive confidence, Anderson reasoned. The fact that some students checked the fakes instead of simply leaving them blank suggested that they believed they knew more than they actually did. At the end of the semester, Anderson asked the students to rate one another in a survey designed to assess each individual’s prominence within the group. The students who had picked the most fakes had achieved the highest status.

Here's the way I understand that long quote (sorry about the length):  Men can be too confident but because they are too confident honestly, it's all good.  Indeed, overconfidence gives social rewards!

Well, perhaps in studies which employ very young undergraduates as their subjects.  But I think most people learn about this thing called overconfidence when they get to know more and more people, and most people then calibrate down their expectations when they come across a very boastful person.

I may be mistaken about how general such corrections are, but I certainly carry them out frequently.  In short, overconfidence (false though honestly felt confidence) should not benefit people in the long-run if the reward systems are based on any kind of rationality, because overconfidence doesn't signal anything real.

This doesn't mean that lack of confidence wouldn't be undesirable, especially in those who actually have a lot to be confident about.  Neither does it mean that there wouldn't be a gender difference in the amount of confidence men and women express, on average, and in the US, at least.  Still, I find it fascinating how the natural lens in these kinds of articles is to assume that the problem is solely in how women are, so that the solution is change the way women are.  Perhaps judging workers and students on objective criteria might be better?

Then there are my personal experiences (you can add yours in the comments):  During my life I have been questioned about any expertise I have often enough that I have spotted the pattern in that questioning.  It's as if I need to prove myself over and over again.  Certificates and degrees are not sufficient. 

If such questioning is more common about women than about men, then some of the confidence gap may be created by the very fact that women meet more doubt.  At least such questioning may make some women very careful about what they say or double-check everything before saying it.

Add to that the traditional gender role ideas about women.  In many cultures those strongly discourage women from blowing their own trumpets, and if a woman does pick up a trumpet, the outcome might not be the same as a confident male trumpeter receives.  Because she has violated role expectations she are more likely to  get not only accolades but also a reputation as an uppity bitch.

The best remedy for the problem of too little deserved confidence is to see what else gets touted in your field, which types of people and what type of work get promoted and what ultimately successful people do when they first fail.  And no, you certainly don't need to be perfect.  Even minor goddesses aren't.

Cardinal Dolan on the Availability of Birth Control

This is from the know-nothing-but-priestsplain-files, and that's what makes it both funny and very sad.  Cardinal Dolan was defending the Hobby Lobby side of the birth control debate and stated this:

When asked whether allowing for-profit corporations like Hobby Lobby to claim religious liberty could set a “dangerous precedent” for the rest of the country, Dolan deferred, claiming it’s not a problem because birth control is already widely accessible.
“Is the ability to buy contraceptives, that are now widely available — my Lord, all you have to do is walk into a 7-11 or any shop on any street in America and have access to them — is that right to access those and have them paid for, is that such a towering good that it would suffocate the rights of conscience?” Dolan said in an exchange uploaded by Raw Story. “I don’t think so. I hope the Supreme Court agrees.”

Why it's hilarious is pretty obvious.  Either cardinal Dolan thinks of condoms when he talks about "birth control", or he thinks that the pill indeed is available in 7-11 stores. Then there's that bit about mentioning the divinity's name in vain.

More seriously, though this is not the clearest example of the trend of know-nothing-is-OK-when-we're-about-controlling-women's-fertility it's part of that same trend.  For example, post-menopausal women don't need gyno services, according to some, women have a little switch that turns off when they are "legitimately" raped so that no child is conceived and so on.

I don't know about you but I think it's a good idea to know the area in which one wants to legislate behavior before spouting about it.

The Kidnapped Nigerian Schoolgirls

Perhaps as many as 234 schoolgirls in Nigeria were recently kidnapped by Boko Haram:

The kidnappings are believed to have been carried out by Nigeria's extremist rebels, known as Boko Haram. Boko Haram — which means "Western education is sinful" — is violently campaigning to establish an Islamic Shariah state in Nigeria, whose 170 million people are about half Muslim and half Christian.
Boko Haram has been abducting some girls and young women in attacks on schools, villages and towns but last week's mass kidnapping is unprecedented. The extremists use the young women as porters, cooks and sex slaves, according to Nigerian officials.

Some of girls managed to escape, but most are still missing.  Let us hope all them will be found soon and in good health.

Boko Haram bases its terrorism on religion.  This article argues that it has shifted its policies to the question of gender during the last year or so.   But in any case, the goal of establishing Shariah law is linked with the goal of limiting girls' and women's choices.

Boko Haram has killed its male prisoners in the past but spared its female prisoners:

Part of the reason the military is loath to respond mightily may be because the girls who are kidnapped are raped, forced into servitude -- but rarely killed.

In February, 29 college students in the northern Yobe province were killed after an attack authorities blamed on Boko Haram. All of them were males. The women were spared.

In other instances, kidnapped girls were later rescued while working on farms. Many were pregnant or had babies -- the result of rape.

These choices may reflect Boko Haram's ideas of chivalry (though not kidnapping women and girls in the first place would seem more in tune with the idea of war being men's business), but they may also reflect the way gendered violence is used in warlike circumstances.  One leaves the women alive but impregnated by the enemy.  That way the women are viewed as "spoiled" and their children as belonging to the enemy.