Saturday Night Music: Gracias a La Vida

By Violeta Parra:



And by Mercedes Sosa:



It's fun to compare different artists' takes.

Monopoly. The Game. A Re-Posting

(From last March)

Yesterday (i.e. March 19th) was the eightieth anniversary of the game called Monopoly.  There's an interesting subtext to the history of the game.  Or a sub-game, if you wish:

Legend has it that Charles Darrow, an unemployed salesman, invented the game in his kitchen in 1930. But the roots of Monopoly actually date back a few more decades, to a game called the Landlord's Game created by Elizabeth Magie in 1903.

The Landlord's Game was meant to be educational, illustrating economist Henry George's belief -- inspired by the Gilded Age -- that property ownership by individuals is inherently unfair. Magie's game was an underground success, leading to a number of offshoots, including the one that Darrow tweaked. Parker Brothers bought her patent for $500 in 1935, closing the loop.

The New York Times recently published an article about Elizabeth Magie and her Landlord's Game as the possible basic source for Monopoly.  I recommend reading the whole piece, because it's a fairly representative case study of the "disappearing women"  phenomenon:

Magie’s game featured a path that allowed players to circle the board, in contrast to the linear-path design used by many games at the time. In one corner were the Poor House and the Public Park, and across the board was the Jail. Another corner contained an image of the globe and a homage to Henry George: “Labor Upon Mother Earth Produces Wages.” Also included on the board were three words that have endured for more than a century after Lizzie scrawled them there: “Go to Jail.”
...

It was a version of this game that Charles Darrow was taught by a friend, played and eventually sold to Parker Brothers. The version of that game had the core of Magie’s game, but also modifications added by the Quakers to make the game easier to play. In addition to properties named after Atlantic City streets, fixed prices were added to the board. In its efforts to seize total control of Monopoly and other related games, the company struck a deal with Magie to purchase her Landlord’s Game patent and two more of her game ideas not long after it made its deal with Darrow.

Magie never really benefited financially from her game, whereas Darrow became very rich indeed.  The reasons why history ended up that way can be many, but Magie's gender certainly would not have helped.

There's something about the way we (as humans) write history which downplays or erases the contributions of individuals which don't fit the subconscious patterns we have in our minds,* and women working in science or literature have frequently found their work  ignored or reinterpreted for that reason.  Sometimes the erasure is conscious, but often it is not.

What fascinates me is that often the unconscious or conscious rewriting seems to take place a short time after** the events, not immediately, as if it's the slightly more distant observers who have erased, say, any women from stories of inventions or scientific discoveries or assigned them to the more "natural" helper roles.   That could be because the effect of the unconscious patterns becomes more powerful when the actual individuals are no longer known.

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*The case of Rosalind Franklin is a well-known example of this.

For an example outside gender, consider the case of Sir Edmond Hillary and Tenzing Norgay as an example.  The early recognition went mostly to Hillary, perhaps because Norgay was seen as someone just doing his job whereas Hillary was the white adventurer.

**Time is a relative concept here, and I refer to such things as the evaluation of literary merit of various writers a generation after their work, rather than hundred years later.

From my Classics Archives: The Islamic State and Women.

(This mini-series of classics covers a few of my recent long posts, the ones that required a lot of hard work.  Each of them is of value about the individual phenomenon it covers, but I hope that each of them is also of value in a more general sense.

This series of posts (still missing the fourth post, sorry*) is about the views of ISIS/IS/Islamic State on women's proper position, about its views concerning sexual slavery as proper and legal and about the reasons why Western women have joined it.

The series is an example of how extreme subjugation of women might look like.  In that sense it's not easily generalizable to other movements wanting that extreme subjugation, mostly because they don't have the power.  But many of the principles of ISIS are basic social conservatism principles taken to the absurd end point (patriarchal marriage where the man is the leader, the control of women, the attribution of all sexual attraction or abuse to the sin of being female in the wrong place or at the wrong time or dressed wrong, the insistence of keeping women inside the house etc.)

The posts are here, in order:


Introduction

The Rules for Sunni Women

Sexual Slavery of the Yazidi Girls And Women

Western Women Joining ISIS 

Note that people are fighting back, in general against the Islamic State and in particular for the enslaved Yazidis.  Here is a heart-warming story about the latter.
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* I have no other excuse for that except I don't want yet another couple of weeks of nightmares right now. 

Three Short And Scrumptious Economic Posts: On Income Inequality and Lack of Information. A Re-Posting.

 (Originally posted here.  Everything in it still applies, income inequality is still growing and so on, and it's still worth your while to read the post if you haven't.)


1.  This is a neat bar graph about how the big economic cake is sliced and divided between various groups in the American economy.  It shows what has happened to the extra cake (income increases) in various economic expansions.  The latest expansion is passing most of that extra cake to the top ten percent of earners:

That's about how income inequality grows, right?   But what do people believe about income inequality in this country?

2.  A recent survey asking questions about what people believe CEOs here earn tells us this:

...Americans told researchers they thought CEO pay at major corporations was approximately 30 times more than their own. Actually, CEO pay averages 354 times what a worker earns at the same company.
Americans also said they thought the pay gap between CEOs and workers should be approximately 7 to 1. To achieve that ratio, workers would have to make $1.8 million each year, a separate study concluded.

Boggles your mind, doesn't it?  These results support earlier ones which suggest that Americans think general income inequality is a lot less than it actually is and would prefer even lower levels of inequality.  The Scandinavian ones.

To return to those CEOs, in other countries the multipliers are smaller.  From 2013 but still much bigger than the idea that CEOs would earn roughly thirty times as much as the average worker in the same company:

The ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay in neighboring Canada is 204, in Germany it's 147, in the U.K. it's 84, and in Japan it's just 67.

The Huffington Post piece notes that perhaps income inequality doesn't energize US voters because of this lack of information about its true size.  That may well be the case.  But it's also true that many not-rich in this country see themselves as just temporarily hampered potential billionaires whose interests lie with the top one percent and that class-based segregation in most everything further helps to disguise the magnitude of the differences.

3.  Speaking of lack of information:  The practice of maintaining secrecy about earnings in general is one reason why it's difficult for someone who suspects they are being paid less for discriminatory reasons to verify or falsify that.  If you don't know what others doing the same job are earning, how do you know if your pay is fair?

To take an example from gender differences in earnings, a Washington Post primer notes this:

 The one employer with relatively fair pay between men and women, Maatz said, is the federal government. Why? Because salary scales are published and widely known — so women, who historically have not negotiated for higher salaries, or are punished when they do — have more information about where to start.

That kind of transparency, among other provisions, is exactly what the Paycheck Fairness Act calls for.

Motherhood Tuesday 3: How To Discuss Gender Roles in Survey Results

That clumsy headline is an attempt to describe what I went through while studying a Pew survey on changes in the numbers of stay-at-home mothers.

But it can also be taken as the basis for a wider meditation about the way our ideas about motherhood and apple pie tend to crowd out the analysis of actual data in studies and surveys about how it is that women do parenting, and how easy it is to forget that mothers, too, are full human beings, who might stay at home to care for young children but who might also stay at home because they cannot get a good job or who might have gone back to school or who might be too sick to look for work and so on.

Although these old posts of mine about another Pew survey (in 2005!) are not about parenting, they describe somewhat similar problems of focus and magnification in survey results.

Research Monday 3. On Women And Men in the Labor Markets

These two studies about men and women in the labor markets are worth reading, despite their focus on the upper classes.

For a fairly good door into the magical world of economic research into work and gender, check out this post with its references.

The material it covers is still very important, especially given the crude treatment of the pertinent research by many MRAs who argue that men earn more because they work more and because they work harder, and more dangerously*.

That the discrepancies exist after controlling for working hours etc, albeit  reduced, is important to notice.

And that new right-wing chestnut, about young women presumably now out-earning young men, doesn't hold water (if chestnuts can be said to hold water).  That's because the study found it only to be "true" for unmarried and childless young women and men and only in large urban centers. 

Men earned more than women in the married category.  Even the results for urban singles were most likely caused by the fact that young women in urban areas are, on average, more educated than young men in urban areas.  To look for gender differences in earnings we must compare otherwise as identical people as possible (only differing in perceived gender).  That means comparing equally educated men and women, not comparing people with different average education levels.

Limiting the comparisons to people at the very beginning of their careers (a common trick in conservative writing about gender and earnings)  is also problematic if we are to analyze overall gender differences in earnings.

That's because most earnings differences, whether discriminatory or not, take time to appear.  Firms must have time to promote or fire people at different rates, workers must have time to get children and then perhaps drop out of the labor market for some years and so on.  The only possible discriminatory earnings differences that could exist at the initial point of hiring are those caused by discriminatory hiring practices (e.g. picking men for the better-paid jobs), not usually by direct gender  discrimination for people in the same occupational category.
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*See this post for an explanation of gross and net earnings differences between men and women.  The MRAs only talk about the gross differences.

The reference to dangerous jobs is something I have discussed earlier, but the gist of the counterargument is that the number of men in those dangerous jobs is too small and the jobs are not paid well enough to account for the overall average gender gap in earnings.  It's not the fishermen who make loads of money, it's the stock brokers.

More Saturday Night Music

Camille Saint-Saëns - Danse Macabre :






I often think of that as the music of war.

Uber. On "New" Alternatives To Traditional Worker-Employer Arrangements. A Re-Posting

(From last November.  More material has since cropped up about Uber, both good and bad.  See what Dean Baker plans to study when it comes to Uber, and this article about another firm in the so-called sharing economy.)

Go here to read the original post.

From My Classics Archives: The Rotherham Report on Child Sexual Abuse

(This mini-series of classics covers a few of my recent long posts, the ones that required a lot of hard work.  Each of them is of value about the individual phenomenon it covers, but I hope that each of them is also of value in a more general sense.  This post is about criminal gangs which exploit young girls, about the response of local government to that exploitation and about the role cultures play in all this)

Read the original post.

Why Statistics Is Sexy. Or The Need to Distinguish Between Large and Small Numbers. A Re-Posting

(Originally posted here.)

I've always liked statistics as a science  but never thought it hawt and sexy.  Now I wish we could make statistics more sexy (bare more skin?) in order to save more of us from falling into those hidden wolf traps of the net.  They don't have sharpened sticks, those traps (holes in the ground, covered by branches), but they do hurt our understanding in somewhat similar ways.

An example of the wolf trap:  Someone writes on, say, racism or sexism in recent events and then gets attacked by trolls.  Suppose that in one scenario there are five very active trolls hammering at the poor writer, in an alternative scenario there are five thousand such trolls.

The two scenarios are not the same, they don't tell us the same story about the likely number of people "out there" believing whatever those trolls believe.  That's why it's very wrong to argue that the presence of five Twitter trolls in one's mentions means that the troll-opinion is extremely common in the real world.  Yet in the last week I've seen several people take that view of events:  The mere existence of any nasty trolls (and nasty they are) means that those trolls have sizable backing in the world of opinions, ideas and values.

So that is about proportions or percentages.  There will always be people with extreme nasty values, there will always be some who troll.  To unearth a troll comment and then to write about it as if it represents a sizable number of people in the real world is lazy and just wrong.  Even utopia would have a few trolls, hankering for life in hell.

It matters whether 0.1 percent or 60% of Americans believe that broccoli should be banned.  Those who don't get that difference are going to create "the-sky-is-falling" stories, and they are not ultimately helpful.

Add to all that the problem of self-selection, which means that those who comment on any particular incendiary topic are much more likely to be the ones who hold the extreme opposite view of the one any particular writer has used in a piece (broccoli haters, whether 0.1% or 60%, will be much more likely to be in the comments section of your Broccoli Is King article than anyone else).

That's why the comments sections, especially if not moderated, are dominated by angry voices and often opinions better suited to critters who just crawled out of the primeval slime*.  You know, the way any article about gender inequality that focuses on women gets comments from angry meninists.

People who agree with the writer tend not to waste time scribbling that down under the article, and people who aren't that bothered either way tend not to spend time in the comments, either.  The Twitter discussions work on somewhat similar principles, though the fact that people have followers makes them less hostile to the imagined writer here.  But those who hated what you wrote are the ones with real energy to look up your handle and then enter the "discussion."

These two problems I've described above are a) ignoring the actual prevalence of various beliefs  and b) ignoring self-selection on the net.  That double-ignorance can have bad consequences:  We may be misled into believing that a molehill is a mountain, we may initiate much larger angry fights with an imaginary enemy (windmills?) and we may misunderstand the scope of the problem altogether.

A similar problem is born when someone writes an article starting with the planned plot.  Suppose that the plot is how much people hate broccoli.  The intrepid journalist will then go out and interview people.  What if the vast majority of those interviewed aren't bothered about broccoli at all?  That statement will not have a prominent place in the planned story.  Instead, even if it takes a very long time, the journalist will find a few people who reallyreally hate that green tree-pretender among the vegetables, and it is the opinions of those few people that we all will then read.

The next stage (and believe me I've seen this stage recently, though not about broccoli hating) is for people to talk about the vast camp of broccoli haters and mention the opinions of the interviewed few as representative of what that vast camp thinks.

This doesn't mean that anecdotes cannot reflect majority views or the views of an important numerical minority.  But strictly speaking an anecdote, if true, tells us only that one particular person held a particular opinion.  It doesn't tell us how common that opinion is.  For that we need the collection and analysis of statistical data about the whole relevant population (all vegetable eaters in the case of broccoli).

So all this was what has stopped me from writing on various interesting topics yesterday.  Aren't you glad I shared?
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*With all due apologies to critters from the primeval slime who are probably charming and empathic ones.

Moltherhood Tuesday 2: On Potential Motherhood And Research Biases in the Field

This late 2013 post talks about a study which, among other things, tells us the reasons why almost all parenting studies are really about women, not about men, and what problems this creates:  Little attention is paid to the influence of fathers, and in some cases the stubborn focus on mothers has delayed research in areas such as Down syndrome and autism.

More recent research shows that the age of the fathers matters about as much in both Down syndrome and autism fields as the age of the mothers, and in some cases more.

But for decades research focused only on mothers.  When I asked one researcher in the field for the reasons he answered:  "Surely the period of pregnancy matters more than the production of sperm." That this  assumption then turned into "let's not study sperm" was something he didn't get.

The more recent emphasis as women always being potentially pregnant is of great concern from a human rights point of view.  The above linked post talks about those issues, too.

Note that I'm not at all opposed to informing people about the potential impact of their choices on their future fertility.  I'm, however, very opposed to the assumption that it's necessary to tell women to view themselves as just temporarily empty aquaria for future fetuses and to maintain that aquarium carefully,  because this gives scope for dramatically unequal lived experiences for men and women, increases the likelihood of further controls on the behavior of women and might even become one of the issues that forced-birthers promote. 

It's also useful to keep in mind that the studies arguing for behavioral changes in today's men and women (presumed to be potentially procreating) are actually done on mice and rats, not on humans.

The only thing I would change in that post now is to note that all men are finally included among the potential parents.  That's because the new rodent studies find effects being passed from granddad rats to grandson rats and daughters.  So now men, too, get to be told that they should eat their spinach, not for their own sake, but for the sake of future generations, whether imaginary or not. And they won't be released from that even by a menopause!

But women are not yet released from the view that they are all pretty much just potential mothers, as this recent post demonstrates.

Research Monday 2: Back to Girl And Boy Brains

You might begin by reading a 2013 post I wrote about an extremely influential study and its reception.  Those argued that we have finally figured out why girls have pink brains and boys have blue brains, and that post is my response to the tidal wave of similar popularizations in all sorts of places.

More about why they were a tidal wave can be learned in this post (which also has useful stuff about Simon Baron-Cohen's work).  And this post talks about one of the many pertinent studies which never get reported at all.  They don't qualify for the tidal wave, because they are not about sex or gender and don't necessarily support innate views of gender.

Finally, Anne Fausto-Sterling writes about the question whether girls innately like pink and boys blue (we know the answer to that, of course, given that the colors were assigned to the genders quite recently).  But more importantly, she notes:

My research shows that, even at a young age, “nature” and “nurture” already interact.3 The first three years of a child’s life mark a period of extraordinary brain development and synapse growth. Like a sponge, the child absorbs everything around it, etching a record of its sensory experiences in its developing neurons. Social and cultural cues children experience during this period can influence their physiological development, establishing bodily patterns that set the stage for later phases of development.
One of my studies focuses on the belief that boy infants are more physically active than girl infants.4 While the babies in the study show no sex-related differences in their own spontaneous activity, we discovered through detailed observation that the mothers interact with the boys in a more physically active way. They move boy infants, help them sit up, and touch them more often than they do girls.
The impact of the mothers’ behavior may go much deeper than just setting cultural expectations – it could actually have biological consequences. While more testing is needed to understand these biological effects, it is possible that the sensory, motor, and neuromuscular systems of boys develop differently than those of girls, at least partly in response to different patterns of maternal handling.
If biological development is influenced by a child’s environment in this way, “nature” and “nurture” are no longer distinct. They are a developmental unit, two sides of the same coin. Rather than talking about nature versus nurture, we should ask: How is nature being affected by certain kinds of nurturing events?(c) And instead of viewing gender as something inherent and fixed, we should understand it as a developmental process involving the ongoing interaction of genes, hormones, social cues, cultural norms, and other factors.5
Moving beyond the nature versus nurture dichotomy allows us to have a more nuanced, accurate understanding of gender.

Saturday Night Music: Clara Schumann

Clara Schumann (1819-1896) - Nocturne in F major Op.6 No.2 from 'Soirées Musicales' :



Clara Schumann was married to the composer Robert Schumann. She had eight children and:

often took charge of finances and general household affairs. Part of her responsibility included making money, which she did by giving concerts, although she continued to play throughout her life not only for the income, but because she was a concert artist by training and by nature. She was the main breadwinner for her family, and the sole one after Robert was hospitalized and then died, through giving concerts and teaching, and she did most of the work of organizing her own concert tours. She hired a housekeeper and a cook to keep house while she was away on her long tours. She refused to accept charity when a group of musicians offered to put on a benefit concert for her. In addition to raising her own large family, when one of her children became incapacitated, she took on responsibility for raising her grandchildren.

Robert Schumann, on Clara's composing:

Clara has composed a series of small pieces, which show a musical and tender ingenuity such as she has never attained before. But to have children, and a husband who is always living in the realm of imagination, does not go together with composing. She cannot work at it regularly, and I am often disturbed to think how many profound ideas are lost because she cannot work them out.

The list of her compositions can be found here.

More Vacation Impressions: On Grrl Painters, Multiculturalism and the Sky

I parked next to a painters' van.  Two house painters in their white overalls got out of it, both young women with long braids.  Not a common sight in the US.  More cultural differences.

The local political topics include a debate about Finnish  multiculturalism and/or its absence.  The latter seems to be* equated with racism.   I haven't studied the various concepts of multiculturalism(s) enough to understand that exact equivalence,  but I'd love to learn how different concepts of multiculturalism solve the contradiction between, say, the goals of gender equality or LGBT rights with the simultaneous acceptance of those cultural-religious values which are built on gender inequality and the desire to criminalize lesbian and gay lifestyles.**

Or am I defining "culture" incorrectly here?  What IS it in the context of multiculturalism anyway?  What happens when "side-by-side" cultures clash in a multicultural society?  Who are the representatives of a minority culture in wider public debates?  The old powerful guys? And is it they who decide what their cultures mean?  Sometimes it looks like that to me
On the other hand, if cultures are defined by excluding those bits I detest (lower status of women etc.), then I'm all for multiculturalism.  Let all flowers bloom!

How's that for a bit of fuzzy thinking and blogging?  The sad thing is  that most every blogging topic requires an enormous amount of silent and boring  research work, and I'm on vacation, so you only get my naive initial thoughts on that topic.  But it's crucial that we discuss and understand the way feminism relates to multiculturalism, and that debate must include the way those concepts are seen from the inside of various cultures, not just from some academic angle.

 The sky.  I can't get enough of the sky.  Why does it look bigger here?  Is it because of the latitude?  Clean air?  Also, I saw a cloud in the shape of a slithering snake today.  To welcome me.

Almost forgot!  Croissants are about 40 cents each, presumably because they are shipped frozen-and-unbaked from the European South in large batches.  They are  then baked here.  The economies to scale must be why the prices are so low.

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*  How to define sexism and racism?  The definitions are tricky and often cover many different phenomena, but usually sexism is based on the perceived female gender of its object combined with overall unwarranted negative views about women as a class, and usually racism is based on the perceived race of its object and on negative unwarranted views about individuals of that perceived race as a class.  Note that it doesn't matter if race is not a real biological concept for these purposes.

Having negative views about a culture doesn't seem to me to be the same as racism.  What it is requires a long post on its own.  I should point out here that all cultures have something to criticize and something to praise.  A baseless criticism of a culture, would, however, have some of the flavor of sexism and racism, but it needs its own name.

** Is the US a multicultural society?  For example, do the Christian fundamentalist form a culture which we should respect, along with many others?  Given the cultural values of women's subjugation and opposition to LGBT rights in that culture, what would it mean for me, say, to respect it?

The Ur-Slut and Pay-For-Your-Own Fornication. How Conservatives Respond to Worries About the Hobby Lobby Decision. A Re-Posting

This post is roughly a year old by now, but it still reads well to me as my opinions about the ur-slut question:  the way conservatives view sex as a ballgame where men are supposed to always try for sex while women are expected to defend the "net."  If men get the ball in the goal, then the women are sluts.

But wait, there's more:  The post also describes the ideological background of the Hobby Lobby decision and in general provides a bridge of understanding:  Liberals need to know what conservatives mean by sex (unmarried, wild, carried out by women all on their own), who is not supposed to have it (repeat previous message in parentheses)  and who presumably benefits from unfair government subsidies (repeat previous message in parentheses).

Go here to read the post.

From My Classics Archives: The Day of Retribution. On Elliot Rodger, the Butcher of Santa Barbara

(This mini-series of classics covers a few of my recent long posts, the ones that required a lot of hard work.  Each of them is of value about the individual phenomenon it covers, but I hope that each of them is also of value in a more general sense. 

As an example, I wrote about the murders Elliot Rodger committed as an example of how misogyny intertwines with potential mental illness and how various Internet sites might support those misogynistic attitudes, thus making future massacres more likely.  Thus, the post teaches us something about how misogyny is seeded, watered and tended and what its flowers might look like.  But the basic principles can be applied to white supremacist sites, ISIS sites and so on.)

Read the original post.

Why Price Competition Doesn't Work in Most Health Care Markets. A Re-Posting.

(This is from last December, but everything in it still applies.  Indeed, those conservatives who worship the free-market-gods should know that economists widely acknowledge health care to be the one market where most everything that can go wrong with unregulated markets will go wrong.  That's because of the very nature of the services which are traded.) 

The New York Times has published a good article on the wildly varying prices for diagnostic procedures and the apparent stickiness of those prices at the upper tail of the distribution.  The quickest possible look tells us that the prices are not set based on some kind of marginal cost thinking, as simple market models assume.  For example:

With pricing uncoupled from the actual cost of business, large disparities have evolved. The five hospitals within a 15-mile radius of Mr. Charlap’s home here charge an average of about $5,200 for an echocardiogram, according to an analysis of Medicare’s database. The seven teaching hospitals in Boston, affiliated with Harvard, Tufts and Boston University, charge an average of about $1,300 for the same test. There are even wide variations within cities: In Philadelphia, prices range from $700 to $12,000.

You don't need to know anything more than that to know that the markets are not truly competitive, that consumers are uninformed about the prices (except after the fact when it's too late to shop around) and that the supply side has price-setting power.

In other words, competition doesn't lower prices*.  Rather the reverse, in fact:

Greetings from Yurp

I forgot to put up the usual gone-to-the-beach post, to let you know  that  I'm on vacation.  This time I'm going to write a few posts every week, tho I also prepared a lot of posts for you in July*, just in case I actually go to the beach!

Anyway, here are my first Finnish impressions**:

The sky is very very blue, the clouds are fat three-dimensional sheep, and what's a heatwave here requires a woolen sweater.

Lots of dads out alone with their kids***, running errands, doing the grocery shopping or just having fun.  The difference is significant compared to my usual US location (where dads-with-kids is a weekend phenomenon), and it's probably a cultural difference.

More women delivering heavy parcels to shops, more women driving buses and trucks.  Another cultural difference.

More people, including old people, on bikes everywhere.

Salty liquorice.  I've missed it, though you might not.

________

* This is so that you won't desert me!  I am very insecure.  Also, most of the stuff is pretty good.
** The kind which might be of interest to my sweet and erudite readers.  I haven't had time to learn much about the local politics yet.
*** Unless they are those Swedish male nannies.

Motherhood Tuesday 1. How To Make Being A Mother More Difficult And Other Pertinent Issues

The posts on the next four Tuesdays will be about research and media debates about motherhood.  Not about parenthood, mind you, but motherhood, though there is overlap between the way the two terms are viewed.  It's pretty rare, even today, to have a lot of research on fatherhood.  But some exists, and I talk about the problems about that in a few weeks' time.

Today's topic, expressed in this 2013 post, has to do with aspects of motherhood which are not quite as visible but very much present.  For example, in that post I write:

Something every bit as bizarre applies to fertility.  It struck me forcibly some days ago, and I had to stew the idea for a bit to decide if I'm oversensitive or not.  I decided I am not.
Here's the thought:  If you wanted to make having children as difficult and costly as possible, both in monetary and psychological ways, how would you go about doing it?  I think the answer is that you would follow many of the current policies in the US:  Minimize parental leave, refuse to make allowances for fertility in how the labor markets treat workers (no subsidized daycare, no real flexitime etc.) assume that all childcare will be done by the woman who gave birth to the child, fight to remove subsidized education as a viable alternative and support instead home-schooling, largely done by mothers.
Or think of the literature on child development.  Ninety-nine percent of articles about parenting are about the mothers, and the vast majority of those look at what mothers are doing wrong (not enough breast-feeding, not enough bonding, too much bonding,  too much fatty food cooked for the children, the cooking always assumed to be the mother's responsibility, bad mother-child relationships as the cause of childhood depression etc etc.)  And the later popular-psychology pieces are still very often about bad mothers and how they messed up their children.  Think of the "Mommy Dearest" branch of memoirs.  Think also of the Control Of The Bad Mother movement!  This begins before the child is even born.
Then add the legal rules about what constitutes child neglect (leaving a child under twelve alone in a parked car for a few minutes, say), the persistent media-supported fears about pedophilia, the requirement that middle-class parents (mothers) chauffeur their children from one event to another, how listening to Mozart during pregnancy or watching Little Einstein after it with the baby are necessary parts of child-rearing and if you don't follow them, you are a Bad Mother.  Or a Bad Parent.  At the same time, the wider public spaces are ultimately not child-friendly at all, what with complaints from other plane passengers or other restaurant diners etc.
The restrictions on parental life keep growing, and the guilt (aimed at mothers, in particular)  comes from all directions, including from other mothers in the Mommy Wars.  But to an alien from outer space, whatever gender that creature might be, all this surely looks like an intentional policy to cut back on fertility rates!

The obvious flaw in that last sentence is that the US does NOT want to reduce fertility rates!  The Republicans want more white children, for one thing, and the forced-birthers don't want women to have so much power over whether they will become mothers or not.

At the same time, the actual US policies are largely anti-children and certainly not supportive of parents.

Research Monday 1: On Retractions, Failures To Replicate and Other Bad Stuff

You get a flavor of the problems salivating and short-sighted popularization of "sexy" studies can create from this post.

I strongly recommend reading it, about a retraction of a study which argued that women are more likely to orgasm while having sex with wealthy men, because the failure it describes is a severe one, and that failure is the reluctance of journalists to tell us which studies turned out to be rubbish, especially after those same journalists avidly publicized them.  This means that it is the flawed results which readers of those journalists will believe in.

An example of a possible failure for a study to replicate is discussed in this post.  It's worth noting that NYT's John Tierney popularized the first study in his column, but as far as I can tell he never discussed the second study.  As an aside, John Tierney never found a study about the perfidy of women that wasn't worth publishing!  I have the material for that post but haven't had the time to write it up yet.

Finally, this post is all about the great interest in women's eggs and ovulation, with some pertinent links to what can go wrong in research if only people with the same bias (like the same religion) carry it out.

I keep harping on these problems not because I wouldn't love research.  I adore it!  And that's why I want it to do better.  It's my form of tough love.