Revolutionary Women: Get Your Brooms And Sweep! The Kitchen Floor, That Is.

Have you followed the Oregon protests by a group of anti-government activists?  The group, lead by Ammon Bundy, registers as right-wing and, at least to me, as pretty fundamentalist.  But revolution they want.

Today's rebellions have a right-wing and fundamentalist religious flavor.  They are also very, very, male-dominated.  The role of women in the Oregon group is described in one article:

SLIDESHOW: Much of the attention surrounding the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge has focused on the self-styled militiamen. But there are women occupiers, too. In the shadow of the the cowboy hats at the press briefings and the patrolmen styled with camouflage and rifles, women cook pots of chili, do laundry, and lead Bible study.

And

Many of the initial crew of women began drifting away by the end of week three, leaving Bass, Cooper and another woman who goes by “Mama Bear” to cook for a crowd of male militants that seems to increase daily. Where there were at first fewer than 20 militants at the refuge, there now seems to be closer to 50. Cooper and Bass look increasingly fatigued.
For her part, Bass feels like the occupation could end if law enforcement and government officials negotiate successfully. She doesn’t want to soften on the occupiers’ demands about federal lands or their view on clemency for the Hammonds. Still, she wishes she could convince the men leaders to get together and talk, calmly.
“But I’m a nobody,” she said. She said she will stay at the refuge as a cook, “for as long as it takes. We women, we are helpers,” said Bass. “That’s how we are created, and that’s what we do here.”

Both bolds are mine.

Compare the views Bass expresses to the views of the Western women who have joined ISIS/Daesh in Syria*.  Indeed, compare the overall views about women's proper places in the two extremist conservative revolutionary movements.  Those proper places for women are kitchens. 

Strictly speaking women, as women,  get nothing good from joining those movements, and in the case of Daesh they get all their freedoms removed.

Yet that is an acceptable bargain for many.  We have fundamentalist religious interpretations and years of educational brain-washing to thank for that.
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 * I'm asking you to compare the opinions of the female participants in these revolutionary movements, not the movements itself.  Daesh legally approves the use of  violence, rape, slavery and sadism, and I'm not trying to draw parallels between that and the fumbling efforts of the Oregon protesters.  Daesh also legally wants to eradicate all rights for women.  But the conservative view of what women are for (kitchen, bedroom, under male supervision) is shared by all conservative religious movements, all over this poor globe.

Is This Ageism?

I belong to several Internet groups on various issues.  Some of them allow job announcements and announcements about scholarships and prizes.  Many of those specify that the applicant must be young.

Now compare that common practice today to the 1960s custom of listing available jobs separately for men and women.

The differences are obvious, of course. 

There really aren't scholarships or jobs which require people to be older.  There are some which require educational qualifications or experience that would exclude, say, an eighteen-year-old, just because those qualifications take so long to acquire.  But in principle a qualified teenager could apply for those jobs.

That's not the case for a forty-year-old starting again (after, say, divorce and years of having been a stay-at-home parent) who would like to apply for one of those Jugend Arbeit posts.

Another difference is that the sex segregated job announcements of the 1960s reserved the best jobs for men and put a fence around those. 

The current age-segregated announcements offer one group of people (the young) jobs which we all assume the older applicants wouldn't want, because we tend to think that they are already far along a successful career path, earning much higher salaries than those the young are now offered.

But in reality many middle aged people have crashed careers, none or work in dead-end jobs.  Some have gone back to college and would now be qualified for jobs which define the desired applicant as someone at most three years from college graduation.  But they are not qualified for jobs which require one to be under twenty-five, say.

So is this practice ageist?  Interestingly, I haven't noticed progressive or feminists think so! 

I  think that we simply don't see anything odd in the fact that some jobs and awards are offered only to people in certain age categories, because the age categories that are selected appear obviously the ones where people still need help and support to get launched.  Still, requiring age as a qualification in this context rules out all applicants who are not young enough, but need a relaunch or the first launch of their careers or education.
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Picture from my archives.

Lightning Posts, 1/25/16: On the Politeness of an Armed Society, Zika Virus and Women, and Kansas Senate Dress Codes for Women

1.  From the "armed society is a polite society" files:  A good Samaritan was shot dead by an inebriated driver.  That horrible story points out some troubling aspects of the politeness that an armed society could create, such as simply avoiding all other people, just in case.  Including your own mother.

2.  The rapid spread of the Zika virus which can cause the child of a woman who was infected while pregnant to be born with microcephaly has led the government of El Salvador to recommend that Salvadorian women just not get pregnant until 2018.

Abortion is illegal in El Salvador, even in the case where the mother's life is at stake, and the linked NYT article argues that most pregnancies there are unplanned.  The Catholic Church is very strong and not especially fond of contraception.  But never mind!  At least the government cannot now be blamed when a wave of microcephalic babies are born.

The point, of course, is that it's the women to whom they are born who bear the brunt of both the blame and the burden of care and the suffering.  Gender politics link to other politics.

3.  We are still in Kansas, Dorothy (a silly reference to the Wizard of Oz):

A dress code imposed by a Kansas Senate committee chairman that prohibits women testifying on bills from wearing low-cut necklines and miniskirts is drawing bipartisan ridicule from female legislators.

Sen. Mitch Holmes' 11-point code of conduct does not include any restrictions on men, who he said needed no instruction on how to look professional, The Topeka Capital-Journal reported.

This is where I start salivating!  The whole wonderful topic of how to police women's dress, whether women should be covered or revealed, whether women who do the former are chaste and modest, while the women who do the latter are sluts and whores!  I so want to write a book about it but life is short. 

Historically, the dress of women has always been a burning political issue, and it still is a burning political and religious issue in Islam and among US fundamentalist Christians, and, it seems, among some Kansas Senators.

Historically, how women dress has always been used as an indicator of their sexual modesty and sexual availability or lack of it.  And historically, too (check the Bible), it has always been very important that women do not "cross-dress,"  because that makes the messages their clothes send much harder to interpret, beginning with the importance of being able to assign someone to a gender wherever men and women are treated differently.

But the last hundred years in the industrialized West have changed that policing.  The changes are still fluid and some final kind of assessment is impossible.  What I see are several different patterns emerging, including the pattern where men and women dress more alike and the pattern where women are allowed to dress more comfortably than in the past.

But I also see a very different pattern:  One, in which women are in some sense expected to dress in the very ways the conservative codes ban, to be viewed as desirable and admired, to be viewed as fashionable and "in."  All choices about our dress take place within cultures, and no choice is ultimately completely "free."  As I see it, the cultural signals about proper dress for women in the West are now many, often contradictory, and difficult to tease apart in their final impact*.


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*Take the bit in the above quote about men knowing how to look professional.  That's partly, because men have a rigid uniform for political work, women do not, and that leaves the question of professional dress for women wide open.

From one angle the expected male uniform in places of power is discrimination against men.  Why can't men dress as they wish in the Kansas Senate hearings?

But what if dressing as you "wish" (see the above discussion about what might drive our ideas) means that people will then use your clothes to judge your sluttiness or the desirability of your body?  What if some people would like you to bare a bit more leg before they are willing to listen to you (Fox News)?  What if people will respond to your choice of more relaxed clothing like this:

"It's one of those things that's hard to define," Holmes said. "Put it out there and let people know we're really looking for you to be addressing the issue rather than trying to distract or bring eyes to yourself." 

That quote from the article about dress codes for women crystallizes the problem for me:  Holmes uses the traditional angle in which women's dress is seen as having sexual implications, whether it is meant to do that or not.  But the topic is more complicated than that, and that's why I wrote that it would take a book.

   

When Feminist Ideals Clash With Other Political Ideals. The Cologne Events and the US Democratic Primaries.

What do people do when their political ideals clash?  What happens when one set of those ideals is about gender equality?

I've been researching the gender-political reactions to the Cologne mass sexual assaults by putting on my hazmat suit and then diving into the right-wing sites in Europe and the US, such as Breitbart.com.  After decontamination I returned to do the same with as many "mainstream" sources, left-wing sites and feminist sites and writers as I can find.  Then I detoxed. 

You may or may not get the fruits of all that research delivered to you on a pretty blogging plate, with a sprig of intellectual parsley to decorate it.  Much depends on how suicidal I am, because the world I've spent days in, to do that research, is a Bizarre World where the anti-feminists are suddenly the feminists and the feminists, well, they are suddenly in-general-concerned-but-there's-nothing-new-here people.*   Or silent. 

I have noticed that pattern before in cases where misogynistic acts are carried out by members of groups which in the West might be hated, reviled or oppressed on some other dimension than gender.

Ideals then clash and one ranks above the other:  To caricature,  right-wing anti-feminists can swallow a certain amount of pretend-feminism in order to be able to carry out anti-Muslim bigotry.  Feminists, on the other hand, can set aside concerns for women's rights** if those appear to clash with refugee rights or with anti-racism work, multi-culturalism or the work to fight against general bigotry towards Muslims.

Mmm.  I really should write about something more relaxing, such as how to endure multiple root canals without anesthesia.

I see something slightly similar happening with the Clinton-Sanders fights in the Democratic primary battles.  Commentators who believe in both women's equal representation in politics and progressive income redistribution or more economic equality must choose their candidate.  And that choice involves a clash of ideals.  The one that is ranked higher, at least in the short term,  will then have to be defended.  Some of the chosen defenses get very ugly.

When this happened in 2008, in the juxtaposition of race and gender,  I was unprepared and pushed into a state of mental and emotional dizziness which was both interesting and frightening.  This time I am prepared, but it's still disheartening to see the mud slung and the main reason why I have  not written on those primaries.

But the similarity of these two examples on the clash of ideals is instructive. The Cologne debates can be mined for people's deepest views on women, gender and the tasks of feminism.   They also helped me, at least, to understand why fast global progress on women's rights is as likely as a coffee cup giving birth to a puppy.

To draw lessons from the US presidential primary debates is more difficult, because Hillary Clinton is almost the only very powerful woman in the country.  A sample size of one doesn't let us draw conclusions about how other female candidates would be treated, because Clinton-the-person matters more than the fact that she is a woman and that this country has never had a female president, despite currently having more women than men in it.

So many see Hillary Clinton as divisive, hawkish, part of a family dynasty,  a low-cal alternative to the Republicans who desire to build a banana republic.

Clinton's alternative has strawberries, too!  Many truly detest her politics and her policies, and do not wish to support them, even if she is a woman and there has never been a female president in this country, despite its population currently tilting female.

At the same time, it's possible to see deep and unconscious forms of sexism working in some of the writings about her***.  She is an egomaniac, and ambitious politician, not someone we can connect with.

What are the other people wanting to run the most powerful country of the world?  Unambitious and retiring kind people who spend their days in soup kitchens or baking cookies for little children?  But they are men, so we don't require that they "connect" with the voters in quite the same way, and we don't really expect them to be sweet and gentle and unambitious****.  Gender expectations differ.

Then the usual warnings:  This post is not about whether Sanders is better or worse than Clinton and it is not about what the "true" feminist choice should be.  It is about the underbelly of our ideals, about the ring in which they come to box it out, and what happens in that particular situation and why.  We should be aware of those fights.  It doesn't matter which combatant wins our endorsement for that awareness to be valuable.
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* To clarify, sites which have permanent sections for feminism-bashing suddenly worry about European women's right to go out unmolested.  But that worry is only when the perpetrators of sexual assaults are Muslim or Africans, and more careful reading of the sites tells us that the worry is interpreted mythologically, as "Germany/Sweden/Finland/Austria getting raped" or as "virginal innocence being destroyed," or as "our women being molested."

The average comments thread to one of these pieces also accuses feminists for all types of things, including being the real culprits in allowing and supporting the flood of refugees and migrants to Europe and focusing only on the bashing of white Christian men.

On the other hand, many (if not most) feminist sites limited their coverage to pointing out that odd sudden right-wing concern about the sexual harassment of women but only when the culprits were mostly Muslim.

What should have been a small part of feminist takes on the Cologne mass sexual harassment became almost the whole story about Cologne, though reinforced by evidence that sexual harassment was already widespread in whatever the European country under discussion, so it wasn't something the refugees and migrants brought with them.

Which is completely correct.  But the harassment in Cologne, Helsinki, Hamburg and other cities was a novel type for Europe. It consisted of many men working together to surround one or few women and then sharing the tasks of keeping the victim contained, keeping potential helpers out and the actual groping, stripping and finger-penetration of the women.  This form of harassment may not have been unknown in Europe, but I certainly had only heard about it in the context of the Arab Spring demonstrations in Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt.

As I mentioned in the post, all this really requires a thorough article, based on the myriad links I've collected and translated.  Would you like to do it for me?  I promise to organize the funeral of your reputation in return.

The bad taste in my mouth from reading so much on the Cologne reactions has to do with the actual women who were the victims.  They seem to have slipped through the political cracks in this debate, becoming tools for one political set of ideals or another.

**  Though this should be qualified.  I learned, in my travels that I may not have understood how feminism might be defined.  One Finnish feminist states in an interview:

Kirjoitit kylttiin ”Tasa-arvo on kaikkien asia”. Miksi?
Kolmannen aallon feminismissä ei enää ajatella, että feminismin ensisijainen tavoite olisi parantaa pelkästään naisten asemaa. On hirveän paljon sukupuolittuneita ilmiöitä, jotka vaikuttavat miehiin, naisiin ja niihin, jotka eivät sovi kumpaankaan kategoriaan. Puhun kriittisesti esimerkiksi armeijasta ja miehiin kohdistuvasta väkivallasta. Tasa-arvo ei voi olla vain yhden ryhmän tehtävä.

My rough translation:

Q:  You wrote on your sign:  "Equality is everybody's business."  Why?
A:  Third wave feminists no longer think that the primary goal of feminism would be to only improve women's status.  There are awfully many "genderized" phenomena which affect men, women and those who fit neither category.  For instance, I speak critically about the military and about violence aimed at men.  Equality cannot be the task of only one group.

 That's slightly confusing, because she seems to both argue that other groups should work for some of the issues which negatively affect, say, men, but at the same time suggests that they are among the tasks of feminism.  But I append that quote because it is one example of the many ways in which the definition of feminism has widened.  When that widening includes anti-racism and pro-refugee work the clash of ideals may enter the picture.

***  Google "Hillary Clinton age," then "Bernie Sanders age," and note the difference.  Or note that articles of this type cannot be written about male candidates, because the US has never had a female president with a spouse who could be held responsible for how he reacted when she turned out to have had an affair with her subordinate.  Or who could be held responsible for the policies his wife carried out.

****  The very small number of women in American politics really makes it difficult to completely distinguish between gender expectations and reactions to Hillary Clinton's actual personality.  We need more women in politics, not only for the usual good reasons from the left, but also so that we get lots more clearly sexist writings in American politics!  I'm sick.

John Tierney And His Woman Trouble Through The Ages

INTRODUCTION


John Tierney is a right-wing libertarian science writer at the New York Times.  Wikipedia describes him as follows:

In 2005 and 2006, he was a columnist on the Times Op-Ed page, before which he wrote a column about New York, "The Big City", that ran in the New York Times Magazine and the Metro section from 1994 to 2002.
Tierney identifies himself as a libertarian and has become increasingly identified with libertarianism. His columns have been critical of rent stabilization, the war on drugs, Amtrak and compulsory recycling. His 1996 article "Recycling Is Garbage" broke the New York Times Magazine's hate mail record.^[2]
Joseph J. Romm has written that Tierney is one of the "influential but misinformed" skeptics who have helped prevent the U.S. from taking action on climate change. In his 2007 book, Hell and High Water, Romm cites, and claims to refute, what he calls Tierney's "misinformation".^[3]

Say hello to Mr. Tierney:

I read him a lot during his Op-Ed page years, less after those.  To me he presented a different angle from that reflected in the above quote:  He seemed to be a man who had never found an anti-uppity-woman study that didn't desperately need wider dissemination.

But it's always possible that I just happened to notice those columns by our John which worked against my beliefs, right?  It could have been that Tierney's writing over his career was much more balanced and impartial.

It could have been, but it wasn't.  Rather, Tierney used the space he was given to work against anything that just might allow women to be uppity.  The way he linked "science" to this was by lavish use of one sub-branch of evolutionary psychology, the kind I call EP or Evolutionary Psychology, the kind which is in favor in cocktail party debates about gender, the kind which ignores all cultural influences on human beings and which often results in JustSo stories about human evolution (1).

Over time, the percentage of Tierney's columns which were on the topic of what's-wrong-with-uppity women or on the topic of gender-equality-is-scientifically-proven-to-be-impossible is far too high to happen by accident, and neither is it  a random drawing from the gender studies which were published in any particular year (2).  No.  Johnnie just wanted to share with all the New York Times readers his views on women and so he picked those studies which support the same views.

Why would this matter?  After all, everybody knows that Tierney writes opinions, not facts.  He's like his brother-in-ideas, David Brooks, or like his sister-in-the-hatred-of-uppity-women, Maureen Dowd.  Just what the New York Times thinks us women might find fascinating on those kinds of opinions, right?

I wrote this post to answer those questions (which I asked myself, in a deep-and-heated political debate!):

First, it is salutary and enlightening to see what Tierney has written about us womenfolk over the last decade or so, in one place, in short lists, with the basic contents highlighted. History brought to life!  Facts gleaned from the dreck and pure noise of actual time passing, dinners, work, other articles and politics intervening!  Just pure Tierney, bright as transparent glass!  And it is great to see whom Tierney uses as experts on the "woman question."  People like Christina Hoff Sommers and Roy Baumeister.

Second, it shows you how the culture around us will affect us, will affect the information we hold, the ideas we agree with and our general beliefs about what others believe. Sometimes those cultural effects are orchestrated, and hearing the orchestra and who is conducting it (Tierney! New York Times paying for the performances!)  is an interesting and fun phenomenon. 

Third, putting together the work of one influential science writer in one influential place tells us something about the way various voices are given microphones at newspapers, something about the way "the balancing" of Democrats and Republicans and libertarians etc. in the stables of writers works out in practice, and what it's possible consequences might be.

I decided to write this post now for no particular current-events related reasons, but because I want to clean up my never-posted archives, to tidy up everything, to tie up all the loose ends, and while doing that I found research I had started into Tierney's career (3).  It seemed too good to waste, even though the research is not complete and doesn't pretend to reflect on the whole career of John Tierney (4).   So I'm tossing it out by first tossing it here.

Before we move to Tierney's work itself, I want to stress this:   

There's nothing wrong with Tierney covering certain opinions and studies which support those particular opinions.  What's wrong, in the context of opinion writing in science,  is ignoring other studies which don't support those opinions, over-using certain experts and not using others at all, and, in general, giving the impression that the studies one covers are somehow the consensus of all researchers in a particular field.     



TIERNEY BY THE YEAR OF PUBLICATION

On Neanderthals and Political Debates

That headline is quite likely to make you expect something different from this post than what it actually contains!  And that's part of its lesson.  Let's start:

I spotted this headline a few days ago and stashed it away as a potential source for delicious thinking:

You might have a peanut allergy because your ancestors had sex with Neanderthals

What's weird about that headline is pretty obvious:  The Neanderthal in that headline would also be your ancestor if the described sex was productive, and if it wasn't productive that ancient nookie cannot explain your peanut allergy.

So I began this post with what looks like hair-splitting.  But it isn't, really.  It can be a valuable lesson about how we introduce new information (the idea of a Neanderthal ancestry of some humans is a novel thesis) and how we interpret information in general.

People tend to have a certain prior structures (or strategies) of thinking and those can affect what we read from certain information.  In this example the prior structure is the assumption that the Neanderthals didn't pass their genes on to any currently existing human populations, that they were out-competed by the Cro-Magnons*, that they were a genetic dead end.  Besides, they were ugly, and "we" beat them!

Thus, a useful starting point is to assume that most readers of that headline see the Neanderthals as outsiders, not really in the ancestry chain, and to inject them into the conversation from that starting position, as if our "ancestors" had a bit of illegitimate exotic sex on the side.**

The political implications of this are enormous, my erudite readers, enormous!

Just spend some time reading how the right-wingers wrote about the Cologne mass sexual harassment and then how the left-wingers and feminists wrote or didn't write about it.  Granted, those particular knots have many more threads intertwined, but one important thread consists of the thought structures people have earlier built about and around the issues.

And by those I don't mean solely the basic value structures, but also personal experiences, the selective sieves we use to filter reality, the values of the groups we belong to and how those groups can give us both pleasurable praise or make us suffer from shunning, and, of course.  All those affect the information we see and how we go about interpreting it, and any new information will be interpreted within those thought structures we already have and the older information we have accepted into them.

None of that is new thinking, of course.  I'm sure that experts have proper names (or detestable acronyms) for the phenomena I grasp with here.  Still, it can be worthwhile to enter an old room through a new door, right?  
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* We are not supposed to use that term anymore.  But, honestly, the proposed alternative EEMH for European early modern humans is nowhere near as memorable.  Besides, I detest acronyms almost as much as I detest raisins.

**  Assuming, of course, that EEMHs and Neanderthals did interbreed in Europe or Asia.















 

The Old Canard Returns: Women's Lower Earnings Are All Because of Choice

Dana Loesch, a conservative television host on The Blaze tells us that women earn less ONLY because they "choose" to earn less, that there is no gender wage gap attributable to anything else, and that everybody knows this to be the truth.

I love her audacity and deplore her stupidity, the latter, because economists who actually study the question don't agree with her conclusions.  The world is complicated and the economics of the gender gap in earnings are even more so.

Does it ever annoy you that it's much easier to make soundbites which are not true than to present what is known, so far?  It annoys me, because I'd like to shoot a short soundbite back at our Dana.  Instead, links to relevant material must suffice:

This post provides links to several others for those who really want to get their teeth on the topic.   This post, as well as this one, have more on the idea of "choice" in this context.

Finally, this post talks about a study which the conservatives have widely used to draw the conclusion Loesch makes.  More on the topic here.

I get very angry at the usual conservative political lies about the earnings gap between men and women and also get somewhat angry at the lefty political interpretations of the gross earnings gap* as being completely due to discrimination against women.  The truth is somewhere in the middle.  But no way can we state that it's only feminine choices** which cause the average earnings of women to be lower than the average earnings of men.

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*  The gross gap hasn't been adjusted for anything.  It's the net gap, calculated after data is adjusted for non-discriminatory factors such as working hours (if the earnings data is not per hour), education and experience, that economists actually analyze when trying to measure the impact of discrimination on earnings.

In other words, not all of the observed average difference is attributable to differential treatment of women and men in the labor market.

**  As I write in one of the linked pieces, the meaning of "choice" matters here, too.  If the society expects women to be in charge of most child-rearing, shopping, cooking, cleaning and laundry then the options between which individuals choose are already affected by their gender.

Things get even more complicated when we acknowledge that the US labor markets are still largely based on the assumption that someone else than the worker takes care of those chores.

Conservatives toss the term "choice" into the conversation as if everybody was choosing from exactly the same menu for their lives.  But that's not the case, on average, and even less so for poorer workers whom the labor market treats with greater harshness and fewer perks.

Note, also, that there is trivial choice, such as choosing between drinks at dinner, and non-trivial choice.  The latter is the proper interpretation for the production of the next generation.  But most conservatives treat this topic as if having children is just an expensive hobby of no greater societal significance.  Odd, given how "family focused" many of their organizations are.

Teamwork in Economics Research: Who Gets Credit?

The ivory towers of academia are not a place to lounge on your laurels.  Rather, professors compete ferociously for the diminishing numbers of jobs with actual benefits and job security, i.e., tenured jobs.  And in that competition being female may work against you, at least according to a new study* which looks at how much credit researchers get for writing articles.

Publications are important, because of the publish-or-perish principle of tenure acquisition.  Heather Sarson's doctoral thesis looks at the impact of gender on how much credit someone in the economics field gets for her or his publications.  What she argues her study shows is this:  Women get less credit for co-authored articles than men, but roughly equal credit for articles they have written alone:

While women in the field publish as much as men, they are twice as likely to perish. And this higher rate for women being denied tenure persists even after accounting for differences in tenure rates across universities, the different subfields of economics that women work in, the quality of their publications and other influences that may have changed over time. 

But Ms. Sarsons discovered one group of female economists who enjoyed the same career success as men: those who work alone. Specifically, she says that “women who solo author everything have roughly the same chance of receiving tenure as a man.” So any gender differences must be because of the differential treatment of men and women who work collaboratively.

...

The career benefit from publishing a solo paper is about the same for women as it is for men. But unlike women, men also get just as much credit for collaborative research, and there is no statistical difference in the career prospects of authors of individually written papers and those of papers written as part of a research team.

Unfortunately for women, research done with a co-author counts far less. When women write with co-authors, the benefit to their career prospects is much less than half that accorded to men. This really matters, because most economic research is done with co-authors.

What's going on there?  To learn more, Sarsons looked at the possible impact of who you are writing those articles with, and found that what really hurt women was co-authoring only with men.  In those cases the women got essentially no credit  for the article.  Men, on the other hand, received approximately the same credit for co-authored articles independently of the gender of their co-authors.

Justin Wolfers, the author of the NYT piece on the study, suggests that whenever there is ambiguity about how to divide the credit for an article those who are to decide on that division tend to fall back on their (probably subconscious) biases.  He also notes that Sarsons carried out a parallel study in sociology and failed to find any gender effect.  That might be because in sociology the first author listed is the main author of the article, whereas in economics the authors are listed alphabetically.  The former practice gives some help in deciding how much credit to give to someone (more to the first author), the latter leaves that more open.

Finally, this quote from the NYT piece is interesting:

Many female economists have shared with me their experiences of research being taken less seriously simply because it was written by a woman. The great economic historian Deirdre McCloskey, a distinguished professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has a unique perspective on all of this, having spent the first half of her career as the male economist Donald McCloskey. Today, she reports that it is quite common for her colleagues not to acknowledge a point she has made until it is reinforced by another male economist. That rarely happened when she was Donald.

I was trying to think of alternative theories which would explain Sarsons' findings, such as asking whether the gender of one's co-authors gives a different signal about male and female authors.  Something along the lines that, on average, women in economics are at earlier stages in their careers than men, so perhaps women are more likely than men to co-author with more senior researchers, and senior researcher tend to get more credit.  But Sarsons tests that (p. 24) and finds it not to be the case.

Her findings have wider importance, if similar considerations affect how employers divide the credit for teamwork more generally.  Indeed, the findings may be stronger in areas where there is no choice whether to work in a team or go solo.

   

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*  This seems to be the working paper on the topic.   Sarsons writes:

While women who solo-author everything have roughly the same
chance of receiving tenure as a man, women who coauthor most of their work have a significantly lower probability of receiving tenure. The penalty is not explained by coauthor selection and is robust to controlling for productivity differences, tenure institution, year of tenure, and field of study.

 

To Clarify The Previous Post

This one.   My goal with that post was to criticize mayor Reker's advice to women.  I would criticize that sort of advice whether the suspected culprits are native-born Germans or immigrants or aliens from outer space.  That aspect doesn't matter for the criticisms, and it shouldn't make any difference in how the German law is applied, either.

How Not To Get Sexually Molested: Lessons From Henriette Reker, the Mayor of Cologne

After the events of Cologne, Hamburg, Stuttgart (and Düsseldorf) I wrote about yesterday,  the mayor of Cologne organized a crisis meeting.  Good things came out of it:

The crisis management team said prevention measures should include a code of conduct for young women and girls, and Mayor Reker said the existing code of conduct will be updated online.
The suggested code of conduct includes maintaining an arm’s length distance from strangers, to stick within your own group, to ask bystanders for help or to intervene as a witness, or to inform the police if you are the victim of such an assault.
In anticipation of large carnivals in the city centre in February, Mayor Reker promised an increased police presence. She warned young women about potential dangers of drunken events.

Mayor Reker also said a “better explanation” to asylum seekers was needed about the meaning of the annual carnivals.
“We need to prevent confusion about what constitutes happy behaviour and what is utterly separate from openness, especially in sexual behaviour," she said.

Bolds are mine.

I cannot stop laughing.  I imagine German women now walking about with their arms horizontally extended, making sure that any stranger stays out of the reach of their finger tips.  Especially fascinating to try to do this in a rush-hour subway car!  Well, in any crowded place, such as large cities tend to be.

Besides, a harasser is unlikely to honor your arm's length of private space*.  That's the definition of a harasser.

The Guardian reports that:

Journalists at the press conference said the mayor had reacted with surprise to the initial question and her struggle for an answer demonstrated the extent to which it had caught her off guard.

That is also laughable.  Women were the victims in Cologne,  and the mayor had not thought about them long enough to baste together something less inane about the "proposed code of conduct!"

Even the idea that women are to have a code of conduct makes me giggle.  Maybe this is just because of the English translation, but the association in my mind is to schoolgirls who are allowed out only under strictly defined conditions.

And of course all this veers very close to victim blaming, because the advice is such weak tea (almost pointless)** and so thoughtlessly prevented, and because Reker's advice to anyone who might consider molesting women seems to be the even more inane idea that those men don't know it's wrong!  They know it's wrong, they just want to do it.

The social media reaction to this "advice" was ridicule, and I agree that mayor Reker deserved that in this particular case.

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See this clarification to the post.


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*Unless you measure that arm's length with a sword or a machete.  But then you get into trouble with the police.

** That's because harassers don't care about your private space and because harassers working in teams can easily separate you from your friends.  Bystanders may not be present or may not intervene, and reporting the harassment to the police doesn't prevent it.   And of course you might be out alone, gasp, in which case your friends are imaginary. 

Meanwhile, in Cologne, Germany

(Posts beginning with "meanwhile" are about negative events which affect women somewhere in the world).

Note:  This post has been corrected.  Originally it stated that the number of those doing the assaulting equaled one thousand men.  That's because of the way many newspapers reported this, including here and the quote I used in this post.  The New York Times also reports several hundred attackers.   More clarity on the actual numbers will have to wait for the police investigations.

On New Year's Eve pairs or small groups of young men of Arabic or North African appearance assaulted women at Cologne's main railway station.  Similar groups attacked women in Hamburg and in Stuttgart:

Police in Germany are investigating an alarming series of sexual assaults on women trying to celebrate the New Year by large groups of single men “of Arab or North African appearance”.
Authorities in the city of Cologne are to hold a crisis meeting on Tuesday after police described a group of some 1,000 men who took over the area around the main station on New Year’s Eve.
Women were robbed, groped, and had their underwear torn from their bodies, while couples had fireworks thrown at them.
Police have received 90 criminal complaints, around a quarter of them for sexual assault, including one case of rape.
Police in Hamburg say there was a series of similar incidents in the city’s Reeperbahn red-light area. Witnesses described groups of five to 15 men of who “hunted” women in the streets.

...

“Some girls were chased like cattle,” a 17-year-old woman told Bild newspaper. “I’m stunned that such a thing is possible in Hamburg. It makes you scared to celebrate in the neighbourhood.

Why did it take until yesterday, January fourth,  for news about this violence to appear in newspapers?  The most likely reason is that German authorities (police) and/or media feared provoking anti-refugee sentiment,  given that most refugees in Germany are of "Arab or North African appearance."

But to make that choice of censoring automatically implies a second simultaneous choice:  What happened to those women in Cologne and Hamburg and Stuttgart is not worth reporting; some other cause is more important than the well-being of women. *

And ultimately that policy of censoring is self-defeating.  It breeds distrust of the official news media, it provides more support for the anti-immigrant parties, and it is quite likely to create the impression that any such crimes swept under the carpet are bigger and more common than they actually are**.

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*This is a real dilemma for those who support both women's rights and refugee rights, and I'm not belittling the importance of not provoking anti-refugee sentiment in Germany or elsewhere.  The vast majority of immigrants, migrants or refugees to Europe do not commit crimes, including crimes against women.

But it is naive to assume that Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans, say,  would have exactly the  same views about how women should behave and how women behaving in certain ways can be treated as the average German does.

Germany may be a patriarchal country, but Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan are vastly more so, and not planning for this difference in the education of refugees and migrants spells trouble.  As I've written before, people move with their values in their suitcases or backpacks, and an explicit unpacking of those patriarchal gender ideas is necessary.  Even when it is not sufficient, at least people are told what is against the law.

** For instance, the German police has stated that the most recent wave of refugees seems to have lower rates of crime than Germans on average.

(Now, should one trust that report?  See how the policy of censoring is a very very bad one.)

Start-Of-The-Year Post: On Shampoo Labels, Research Problems And On Alphas and Betas

Like a trial run, if you wish, to see if the gears are too rusty by now.

1.  I bought a new bottle of shampoo, not because the labels offer me chances for stupid posts (like this one)  but because I ran out of shampoo.

But the labels are fun.  The new bottle says "used by professionals," by which it probably doesn't mean engineers or lab analysts or flea trainers but hairdressers and barbers.  It fails to tell us if those professionals use this particular shampoo on their own heads or only on the heads of their customers, or if they wash floors with it.

The bottle then continues:  With Volume Control Complex.

Poor bottle.  I can't afford to send it with its complex to a shrink, but my hair doesn't have a lot of volume it needs to control.  Just enough to fill the various war helmets my Echidne role requires.  So we, the shampoo and I, should get on just fine, if I am gentle and understanding*.

2.  I should erase the above but I won't because this is my blog and you, sweet readers, don't pay me enough for the weird (though still ladylike) side of me to stay quiet.  Though my warm thanks to those of you who gave me year-end presents!

3.  This article is worth reading if you are interested in the difficulties of doing psychological research or if you are interested in having a critical-but-open-mind** about social science research.

The article is about oxytocin, but similar problems exist in many of the fields I follow:  the tendency to only publish positive findings while all the others are left in the file drawers, the actual meaning of statistical significance in many studies,  and the problems in getting studies reproduced, including some very famous ones.

Those are relevant worries for anyone who analyzes what research is popularized and why.  It's not sexy or click-breeding to write about earlier famous studies which turned out to be nothing at all, compared to some new hot-out-of-the-oven study which finally and conclusively explains how we are (using evolutionary psychology arguments, probably)!  Except that of course those earlier studies explained the very same thing.  Or thought they did.

4.  Finally, just a repeat reminder (from 2013) that alpha wolves do not exist in the wild.  Wolf packs are extended families, and the so-called alpha couple are just the parents of most of the wolves in the pack.

The repeat reminders are needed, because the alpha wolf idea has bred a whole Internet subculture around the thesis that some men are alphas (and keep large harems of beautiful women) while other men are betas (and never get to reproduce).  There are even how-to-books which purport to teach those poor beta guys how to pretend to be alpha and so to "fool" women into their beds.

The supposed basic theory*** derives from early studies of wolves under captivity (and therefore not in their natural habitat).  But the practice looks a lot more like hunting where women are viewed as prey animals.

 

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*  Is shampoo necessary?  What would happen if I washed my tresses with soap?  Or with beer?  And why do I feel I'm lying when calling my hair "tresses?"

**  Imagine an open maw with sharp teeth.

*** Even if wolves in the wild behaved in the manner the early research supposed we shouldn't just draw equivalencies to humans because the species are pretty different.  But I've noticed that human borrowing from research into other animals is very selective, mostly to support traditional ideas humans already believe about homo sapiens.  An example can be found here, which was a response to this post.  

Bits And Pieces, 12/29/15: On Weird Republican Ideas, "the American Dream" and Taxing the Rich (Too Taxing?)

This post is like sweeping the floor of all those baby ideas which got dropped in the process of writing. 

Well, not really.  Those posts come later.  It's more recent links I have collected but never wrote about, what with the great anomie of the last days of yet another year.  (Correct that word, please.  What I'm looking for is similar and means that state of not caring and almost rejoicing in the annihilation of the past.  But in an odd way anomie would work, too.)

First, this goofy bit about Republican presidential politics:

After five Republican debates, most Americans know about Donald Trump’s provocative beliefs, like his desires to end birthright citizenship, stop Muslim immigration and kill families of suspected terrorists. Much less attention has been paid to Carly Fiorina’s conclusion that the minimum wage is unconstitutional, Mike Huckabee’s pledge to defy Supreme Court rulings he deems incompatible with God’s law, Rick Santorum’s claim that Islam is not protected by the First Amendment or Chris Christie’s threat to shoot down Russian planes and launch cyberattacks on Chinese leaders.
Those provocative beliefs, believe it or not, were also expressed during the five Republican debates. They were just overshadowed by the furor over Trump. It might be natural for an opposition party to sound bombastic during primary season, especially when its front-runner is blessed with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of bombast, but the debate transcripts read like a Democratic opposition researcher’s dream.

I'd be rubbing my hands together with great joy, thinking of the satire that all this makes possible if one of those people grabs the steering wheel of this country if

a) I had hands* and

b) I was on some other planet where the fact that the most powerful person on earth might be an utter weirdo would just make the reality show more interesting to watch.

Second,  another hilarious story for you:  It's about the American dream.  The money-related conservative American dream, the dream that we are all gonna be extremely rich one day.  Except that other people won't be extremely rich at all.  Only us.  And that's because we work very very hard, never accept handouts (Obamacare!) and deserve to become extremely rich.

Well, that's my interpretation of that goofy dream.  The real American dream, as a concept, was more about one's children having a better chance at life than what was possible in some starving nation.  An immigrant's dream, if you wish.

In any case, here's the money quote:

A new study from Harvard University shows that close to half of those ages 18 through 29 believe the "America Dream" is dead. While education played a role in the opinions of those polled, race or ethnicity didn't matter much. 

Let's set the record straight: the American dream is more alive than it's ever been, and it's not going to die anytime soon. In fact, it's so strong that I believe more self-made millionaires will emerge in the next 10 years than ever before. 
...
Take a look at your talents and natural abilities and ask: how can I help others? Money is created through ideas that solve problems, and since ideas are infinite, the amount of money you can earn is infinite.

 Beyond that, there are huge opportunities for selling and brokering used goods like clothes, toys, computers and sporting goods. The wealthy are the largest buyers of personal services. It's a perfect time to start a lawn care service, maid service, handyman business, pool cleaning company, grocery shopping service, etc. The opportunities are endless.

Bolds are mine. 

This opinion piece sketches out the future banana republic economics, how to survive by catering to the top one percent who is raking in all the income and wealth gains, by becoming part of their personal staff!  Or you can trade in used clothes, just as the Victorian markets in Britain did, because many people could only afford used clothes!

That this came out right before Christmas is very very Dickensian (think of the spirit of Christmas past).  But no, even if ideas are infinite the amount of money you can earn is not infinite.

Third, on taxing the very rich:

...Two decades ago, when Bill Clinton was elected president, the 400 highest-earning taxpayers in America paid nearly 27 percent of their income in federal taxes, according to I.R.S. data. By 2012, when President Obama was re-elected, that figure had fallen to less than 17 percent, which is just slightly more than the typical family making $100,000 annually, when payroll taxes are included for both groups.

Think about what or who needs to be taxed more to make up that shortfall from 27% to 17%.  Note that the actual amounts of money the government lost there are huge.

I have two thoughts on that whole article. 

The first has to do with money buying government policies which allow for the "income defense industries" (described in the article) to thrive.  That's a problem which the Supreme Court of the United States has recently contributed to, a problem which is getting worse, until we really do have a "one-dollar-one-vote" democracy.

The second thought has to do with the odd thoughts of someone who has so much money that he** could line all his clothes, houses, cars and yachts with it, to the thickness of several feet, and who still spends money on making sure that the government gets as little of it as possible.

Are economists wrong?  Doesn't the marginal value of an extra dollar drop, after all, when you have billions of them?  When is enough enough?

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*  The goddess doesn't have hands.  The avatar does.  Also, the avatar doesn't get paid, ahem.

** Or she.

Where Everybody Poops. Except Donald Trump.

No day can be completely wasted when it begins with a Google search for the definition of "schlonged," right?  Imagine that in some other context than in the presidential debates of the still-most powerful nation on earth (cue:  tiny whips).

Then imagine it in its actual context:  The deep utterances of Donald Trump, a man who wants to be the most powerful person on this planet:

Republican frontrunner Donald Trump used a campaign stop in Michigan on Monday to make astonishingly sexist attacks against Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton.
At one point, Trump told the Grand Rapids crowd that Clinton got “schlonged” by President Obama during their 2008 Democratic primary race.
“Even her race to Obama. She was going to beat Obama. I don’t know who’d be worse. I don’t know. How does it get worse? She was favored to win and she got schlonged. She lost. She lost,” Trump said.
“Schlong” is a well-known reference to a man’s genitals. There are no alternative definitions for the word, according to Merriam-Webster.
Trump also used his speech to attack Clinton for using the bathroom.
Discussing her brief disappearance during Saturday’s Democratic debate while she was using the lavatory, Trump told the crowd, “Where did Hillary go? They had to start the debate without her. Phase two. Why? I know where she went. It’s disgusting. I don’t want to talk about it. It’s too disgusting. Don’t say it, it’s disgusting. We want to be very, very straight up.”

But wait!  It gets even more hilarious.  Andrea Tantaros, one of the many identical-looking* beautiful women in the stable of conservative Fox News, asked this deep, deep question about how Hillary Clinton should respond to Trump or how she might respond to Trump:

HARRIS FAULKNER (HOST): Donald Trump, talking about -- and I don't know if you guys watched it. Saturday night, the debate, there was a little bathroom break with Hillary Clinton. Watch.
[...]
ANDREA TANTAROS (HOST): He shouldn't have said it. He -- I think that he doesn't need to say those type of things, because he knows that historically Hillary likes to play the victim, and he knows that now her campaign's talking about this. But this campaign season's different. People don't care about political correctness. They don't. And, frankly, I think what he's doing may be smart because it baits Hillary to come out and look like a wimp. A whiny, weak female. And her campaign has to make up its mind. Is she a strong leader who can handle criticism about going to the potty or not? Or is she a victim? Can she handle ISIS or can't she? And you know what, Trump knows that and he's baiting her and it's masterful. I have to say. She's going to lose this one.
[...]
TANTAROS: She looks very, very weak and victim-like. And in this environment, that is a losing strategy.

Emphasis is mine, and I cannot stop laughing.  Can she handle criticism about going to the potty or not?  When, as they say, "everybody poops"?

Can our Donald handle that criticism?  And why on earth would he wish to criticize someone for doing what all human beings (living ones) have to do?  I'd be very worried about someone being a pod-person or an alien in disguise if they never had to go to the lavatory!  Or about the resulting constipation and how that might make someone press the nuclear button.

But of course this is  about Hillary Clinton's genitals (she has no schlong!).  Trump is an open sexist, often on the level of a nasty teenager, and he is disgusted by the idea of a woman urinating or defecating.  Disgusted!  I wonder if he has support staff for those functions himself?  Now I feel disgusted.**

Ah, the whiny weak female who has to go potty.  How low have the conservatives fallen, with their rebel boy, Donald?  How inane can American political debate turn?  Well, here's your answer, my sweet friends.

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*  Because the women are selected based on the same criteria (looks and long legs) and then made up to look the same.  Or so I suspect.  Fox News where all the women are beautiful and all the men look like they came out of a crumpled paper bag.  Now that's how you do sexism!

**  There are arguments that disgusting things provoke strong reactions in more conservative test subjects in studies.  I haven't read in that field so I cannot tell if that is true, but in any case the disgust doesn't appear to stretch to dead bodies, what with the war supporters among the conservatives.

Where Echidne Confesses Her Laziness About The US Presidential Debates. And on "Full Vagina Ahead."

This post has to do with all the presidential debates.  I haven't followed them this year.  In past elections I used to write long posts about the debates, with lots of research, but I got the impression that they weren't that popular.

So laziness set in, and also the fear of getting elections burnout before the actual races (rat races?) even begin.  I need to treasure the small political flame which still sputters in my brain, and part of that is not to keep thinking that I've seen this Déjà vu all over again...

Because stuff does repeat.

I promise to do better next year.  Still, I can't resist commenting on that "full vagina right away" statement, in the context of the last Republican debate.  It came from Ed Deace, a religious conservative radio host from Iowa, and referred to Carly Fiorina, the only female Republican candidate for the presidency.  As in "she went full vagina right away,"  by mentioning aspects of her life which linked to her being a woman.  Which seems to be a no-no for Deace.

But imagine, for a minute, that the connotations of all this wouldn't be so bad!*  I think (says Echidne, worriedly peeking over the edge of her desk) that the term could have had grrrl power!  Like having a jet engine or a giant vacuum cleaner.

For instance, imagine Echidne going "full vagina" at Deace, vacuuming up any head hair he has and wheeling him around like a tornado, just to make him appreciate his own invention, then spitting him out!  Quite safely, of course.

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* Some of the bad aspects are obvious, as they link to the war against women.  Others you can think of for yourself.  It's not necessarily bad to have a full vagina, of course (even the reverse!), but that, my friends, is not the business of Ed Deace.

What Motivates The Harassment and Violence Against Muslim Women in the US?

Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley writes in the Time Magazine about the violence and harassment of Muslim women in the aftermath of the San Bernardino terrorist attack. The headline (not usually picked by the author) argues that violence against Muslim women is racist and misogynist.

I feel like a worm for picking this particular article* as the example for my thesis (to be covered below), because Tinsley's message is mostly about the need for women to stand together and to defend those who are exposed to various hate crimes. She addresses women of color, in particular, and refers to the recent case of Larycia Hawkins, a Christian Wheaton College professor, who was suspended by the college for wearing the Muslim veil (in solidarity) during the Christian Advent period. And it can indeed be true that some anti-Muslim bigotry interacts with racism and misogyny.

At the same time, I disagree with the headline, because violence against Muslim women would probably exist even if** there was no racist or misogynist aspect in it. That's because it is largely fueled by anti-Muslim bigotry and general (and media-stoked) fear of Muslims.

These hate-attacks would be equally aimed at men if it was as easy to spot men of Muslim faith. But traditional Muslim women are much easier to spot, because their dress differs more from the general dress in the United States. The men have a certain privilege (heh) here, and can more easily become invisible to the haters.

This, in turn, links to the way the three ancient Abrahamic religions have coded female and male behavior, how literal interpretations of their holy texts place the burden of controlling sexuality on women, their dress and their general behavior, and how forgetting about those underlying injustices can color today's debates about religious freedom or religious rights, especially for women.
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*  The reason I do it at all is that it helps to be precise in naming what might be behind certain types of hatred. 
** It's naturally impossible to know what's in the mind of someone harassing or attacking Muslim women. But I doubt that their first motive would be anything but religion-based.

 

Read This Today

If you can, for it is about rape. 

The story is long, nuanced and extremely well reported and written.  It is about a serial rapist, about a young woman who confessed to having falsely reported her rape, and about the victims of that serial rapist.

I believe it is an important story to read, and so is this one, if for no other reason than to offer some complicating balance for the way Martha MacCallum advertised a Fox News program (Fox News Reporting: The Truth About Sex & College) in this video (from 3.24 onward) by focusing on how false rape reports can destroy innocent lives.

Of course false reports can do that.  But so can rapes.  Luckily the former are pretty rare:

The fear of false rape accusations has a long history in the legal system. In the 1600s, England’s chief justice, Matthew Hale, warned that rape “is an accusation easily to be made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused.” Judges in the U.S. read the so-called Hale warning to juries until the 1980s. But most recent research suggests that false reporting is relatively rare. FBI figures show that police annually declare around 5 percent of rape cases unfounded, or baseless. Social scientists examining police records in detail and using methodologically rigorous standards cite similar, single-digit rates.

I wish we could say the same about the latter.

Speed Posting, 12/15/15: Recent Good News About Women

Some recent good news about women, some of wider significance than others, but all with some good stuff in them:

-  Saudi women were, for the first time ever, allowed to vote and run for office in local elections, and some women  got elected.  This is important, even if only symbolically.

-  Daniel Holzclaw, the man who used his standing as a police officer in Oklahoma to prey on black women he deemed unlikely to report him,  was found guilty of serial rape.  The good news is that the women he hurt got justice, despite the prior fears that they would not.

-  This story about a young female baseball pitcher in Mexico is good news to me not because she is fantastic (which she is) but because of the support she is getting from the guys (in a macho society, as the story puts it).  The basic idea, after all, is that everyone should be able to develop the talents they have, and that opportunity requires the support of others.

- US Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced in early December that all combat positions in the US military will be opened to women who qualify, based on all existing physical and other tests.  Military women welcome this decision because it stops them from being discriminated against in promotions which depend on combat experiences, because women already end up being in combat situations abroad, whether they are formally allowed to do so or not,  and because of the same reason Carter mentioned:  that assignments should be based on ability, not on gender.

As you might expect, there's lots of resistance.  You can read some letters the NYT received here, both for and against the decision.  Some of the latter are about unit cohesion which means that girls have cooties and that guys can't stop their peckers from making all the choices and so on.  -- This whole topic deserves a much longer post, including the question whether this is good news for those who'd rather have also men removed from all combat positions.  There are several such posta in my archives if I only could find them.





 

Jesse Watters on Guys Driving in New York

A fun exercise for you would be to watch the video at this Media Matters post.

It's meant to be a jokey one about New York's traffic problems.  This Fox guy, Jesse Watters, goes around New York interviewing drivers and workers out on the streets.  Then he quips to one driver that the traffic problems are obviously created by women being allowed to drive.

And that's how Media Matters labels the story.  But the real story is in the video, my friends.  Because I'm pretty sure that Watters didn't talk to a single female driver!  New York has nothing but guys driving.

Maybe that was part of the comedy, eh?  A deeply intellectual approach to New York's traffic problems?  One which on purpose only samples male drivers so that Watters could make that joke about women driving (and sorta shake hands with Saudi Arabia which doesn't have any traffic problems because women are not allowed to drive).

Nah.  I don't think so.

Today's Small Thought. On Class Privilege as an Example of Problems in the Privilege Concept.

The current concept of privilege in progressive/feminist circles is one with which I have a love-hate relationship.  The concept I mean is used in "male privilege", "white privilege", "thin privilege" and so on.  It's even used (as a counterattack) in "female privilege" and "black privilege" as I have written before.

And that those counterattacks can be performed shows one problem with the concept:  It's always possible, by serious digging, to find something that is good (or can be made to look good)  in any social ranking, even the most oppressive one, especially if we simultaneously ignore all the horrible parts of that position.

But as I've written before, the concept of privilege is excellent for self-inspection, for thinking before one opens one's big mouth to say something uneducated and rude, for understanding how other people's lives differ, for avoiding mansplaining and whitesplaining and all the other types of uninformed preaching to people who, in fact, know more than one does.  Thinking about privilege and the lack of it can also strengthen empathy.

Still, I'm moving more towards disliking the concept, and that's because the advantages of the earlier concepts we had are getting lost.  By those earlier concepts I mean the familiar ones of race, gender etc. discrimination.