Dearth of Women in Hard Sciences? Women's Fault, Probably. Part II

This post is about the Ceci-Williams meta-study itself. To explain where I am going with this, note that the possible reasons why women, on average, might show different patterns of participation in the so-called hard sciences, can be summarized as follows:

1. Biological explanations

1a. Women cannot learn enough science to work as researchers in the field, on average.

1b. Women are not interested in hard sciences for biological reasons (such as biologically determined focus on people rather than on things)

1c. Women are biologically destined to be the sex which gives birth to children and then takes care of them (as well as of their father). This work conflicts with the long hours necessary in hard science research.

2. Societal explanations

2a. Girls and women are socialized away from hard sciences, probably because their primary future roles are seen as caretakers of children. This can take place inside homes, in schools and in popular culture (Math Is Hard). This, in turn, results in fewer women prepared to enter hard sciences as well as fewer women with expressed interest in hard sciences.

2b. Societal gender roles place the responsibility for childcare and household chores on women. These tasks are time-intensive. That women do them also benefits men in hard sciences who can thereby both dedicate themselves to their careers AND have children. Women in hard sciences may be offered "a choice" between having a family or a career.

3. Discriminatory Explanations

3a. Direct discrimination. This term refers to our usual understanding of the term "discrimination," such as hiring a man over a better qualified woman in a laboratory, making certain that women scientists don't get the best spaces, promoting men over equally qualified women and so on. Note that direct discrimination could happen because the person discriminating believes that women are biologically inferior as scientist, but it could also happen without that belief.

3b. Indirect discrimination. This is a seldom-used term. It refers to discrimination in earlier stages of some process. For instance, if schools discriminated against girls in the teaching of mathematics, the fact that later universities would not do so doesn't mean that discrimination had no role to play in the outcomes. Sometimes it is useful to keep in mind that the overall impact of discrimination on any one particular woman is a cumulative one. To disprove discrimination in the final stages does not mean that it never played a role. Likewise, treating sons and daughters with equal talents and interests differently is also gender discrimination, even if of the indirect kind by the time the daughter would like to be a scientist.

3c. Institutional discrimination. This term is interpreted somewhat differently by different people, but in general it means that the institutions themselves, perhaps in an unintended fashion, discriminate against some group, women in this case. As one popularization of the Ceci-Williams study pointed out, universities in general are set out to "discriminate" against any individual whose fertility declines rapidly after the age 35 because of the way tenure is granted. The tenure process was not invented to keep women out of academia. But its impact on women is far more negative than on men.

It's quite possible for several of these theories to apply at the same time. I like the list because it reminds us that "choice" may mean several different things, even though certain commentators equate it with "free choice" by women. But by the time a woman is ready to "choose", she has already been subjected to a society in which it is women who take care of children and she knows that hard sciences are where the Menz Are.

Armed with this, let's have a closer look at the Ceci-Williams meta-study. They argue that women are no longer directly discriminated against in journal reviewing (a process which one must pass to get published) or in the awarding of research grants, given that we compare men and women with "the same resources" and in those two sections their work is fairly good. They also argue that women are no longer directly discriminated against in hiring.

Their work in that section is less convincing. As the Slate review points out:

Here's what Ceci and Williams show: That women with the same resources as men are just as likely to get their papers, grants, and job applications accepted. While this might appear to mean that women scientists don't face discrimination, in fact, it's quite compatible with the strong experimental evidence that there is bias against women.
In order to understand why, we need to revisit some basic facts about the scientific method. The best scientific way to discover if one factor influences another is to do a controlled experiment. For example, you can give people two identical résumés to evaluate, one with a woman's name and one with a man's name. If people rank the one with man's name higher than the identical one with a woman's name, you know that they are discriminating on the basis of sex, and nothing else, since you've experimentally controlled all the other factors. These experiments, and others like them, have been done. They are described in the PNAS article and the results are clear. Even in fields that are traditionally considered friendly to women, such as psychology and sociology, a woman's name leads to a lower ranking. As Ceci and Williams say, it is extremely unlikely that this bias is limited to the specific fields that were studied in these experiments. If you want to answer the scientific question of whether there is unconscious bias and discrimination against women, these experimental studies are the gold standard.

This quote reminds us, by the way, that unless we happen to experts in this particular field we also have no way of knowing if the studies Ceci and Williams analyzed are an unbiased sample of all the studies in the field. They may well be but it's always good to remain aware of the possibility that a different set of researchers might have covered different studies and emphasized different results.

My major disagreement with the study is not about the hiring section, however, or even the absence of sections on promotions and the "firings" which are created by not getting tenure, but the way the concept of resources are treated in the study.

What do the authors mean by resources? This seems the closest to a definition I could find:

When type of institution, teaching load, funding, and research assistance were factored in, the productivity gap completely disappeared (which is not to say discrimination has not influenced these factors in the real world): “There is very little direct effect of sex on research productivity. . ..men generally have positions superior to those of women, although structural differences by gender have appreciably declined over time.Once sex differences in such positions and resources are taken into account, net differences between men and women in productivity are nil or negligible” (ref. 26, pp. 863–864).

What this quote says is that women are every bit as productive as men who are treated the way women in science are treated! Only most men are not treated that way, but once we control for the fact that women tend to teach larger classes in colleges with less research emphasis and tend to do research with less money and fewer assistants, they do every bit as well!

Oops! I shouldn't have used the word "treated" there, because clearly women chose to have larger classes, less prestigious colleges, less money and fewer assistants.

Humor aside, we don't actually KNOW how resources are allocated. Ceci and Williams take a tremendous leap here:

Given equivalent resources, men and women do equally well in publishing. A key issue, separable from sex discrimination in manuscript evaluation, is why women occupy positions providing fewer resources and what can be done about this situation. This situation is caused mainly by women’s choices, both freely made and constrained by biology and society, such as choices to defer careers to raise children, follow spouses’ career moves, care for elderly parents, limit job searches geographically, and enhance work-home balance. Some of these choices are freely made; others are constrained and could be changed (3).

When I read the above, I prepared for a long review of all the studies which demonstrate how women's choices are the cause of their fewer resources. Pages and pages of them, I thought. But to my surprise the authors move on to discuss grant applications. Thus, it's only that number (3) which is used to refer to the certain-sure evidence that lower resources are mainly caused by women's own choices. It refers to another Ceci&Williams article, called "Sex Differences in Math-Intensive Fields." I haven't had time to get hold of it yet (send money) but surely the above leap is too important, too fundamentally earth-shatteringly important, to stand on just one puny citation? Especially given that this is the take-home message of the whole article?

I am not arguing that women's child-rearing and household responsibilities wouldn't play an important role. Far from it. But note that these responsibilities play the same direct role in all academic disciplines. Their indirect role may be greater in the field of hard sciences, because of the strong gender connotations that field has in the popular imagination and because women in the field are rare enough to perhaps stand out negatively if they ask for longer maternity leaves or more time in the tenure clock. It might look like demanding preferential treatment when most of the guyz don't "need it".

Still, imagine a study which argues that secretaries and bosses are treated exactly the same once we standardize for their available resources! That would never fly but this one seems to. My point is that discrimination, if it exists, is not going to leave the resources available to women unaffected. No way. And yet the whole Ceci and Williams meta-study argues that resources are something completely different from discrimination and all about women's choices.

Dearth of Women in "Hard" Sciences? Women's Fault, Probably. Part I

Here is where reading the two posts below comes in handy! You can see How It Is Done in this society, meaning how we can talk out of two sides of the mouth at the same time when it comes to women: Women's lower participation in sciences is their own choice, either free or societally constrained, but nobody EVER tells them what they should choose! So pay attention, my sweeties, because Auntie Echidne has just shown you here, on this very blog, how it is done to make women "choose" family over careers of all times.

This post is about a new meta-study looking at the reasons why women are scarce in mathematics and hard sciences. By "meta" I mean that the new study doesn't actually carry out new research but goes over research already published. The conclusions of this study, by Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams, called "Understanding Current Causes of Women's Underrepresentation in Science" have spread like a wildfire in the popular media. Here is the study summary:

Explanations for women’s underrepresentation in math-intensive fields of science often focus on sex discrimination in grant and manuscript reviewing, interviewing, and hiring. Claims that women scientists suffer discrimination in these arenas rest on a set of studies undergirding policies and programs aimed at remediation. More
recent and robust empiricism, however, fails to support assertions of discrimination in these domains. To better understand women’s underrepresentation in math-intensive fields and its causes, we reprise claims of discrimination and their evidentiary bases. Based on a review of the past 20 y of data, we suggest that some of these claims are no longer valid and, if uncritically accepted as current causes of women’s lack of progress, can delay or prevent understanding
of contemporary determinants of women’s underrepresentation. We conclude that differential gendered outcomes in the real world result from differences in resources attributable to choices, whether free or constrained, and that such choices could be influenced and better informed through education if resources
were so directed. Thus, the ongoing focus on sex discrimination in reviewing, interviewing, and hiring represents costly, misplaced effort: Society is engaged in the present in solving problems of the past, rather than in addressing meaningful limitations deterring women’s participation in science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics careers today. Addressing today’s causes of underrepresentation requires focusing on education and policy changes that will make institutions responsive to differing biological realities of the sexes. Finally, we suggest potential avenues of intervention to increase gender fairness that accord with current, as opposed to historical, findings.

A translation: Ceci and Williams argue that women in sciences used to face direct discrimination in hiring, in getting grants and in getting their papers published in the past, but that this is no longer the case. When women and men with the same resources are compared, there is no consistent gender difference in either hiring, grants or the refereeing process. I will come back to the actual study in Part II but first, let's see what the media coverage of it has been:

This treatment has varied from really bad (by people who can't write):

As the 21st century unfolds, if even one woman does not get a job, there will be claims of discrimination.   And some will believe discrimination occurs institutionally despite the evidence, and insist any action by individuals is proof of sexism.   That's the nature of humans being humans.

But it's good to know the issue is still being addressed.   In a new study, "Understanding Current Causes of Women's Underrepresentation in Science" in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (freely available to read - http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/02/02/1014871108.abstract?sid=ec6ff688-b446-4fe1-bf54-bcb1d7765598), Cornell University social scientists, at least one who risks being immediately saddled with "white, male privilege" smears for daring to study the topic,  say institutional sexism is just not there any more.

to John Tierney (you know what he is going to say: it's women's bad biology):

Instead, the taboo against discussing sex differences was reinforced, so universities and the National Science Foundation went on spending tens of millions of dollars on research and programs based on the assumption that female scientists faced discrimination and various forms of unconscious bias. But that assumption has been repeatedly contradicted, most recently in a study published Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by two Cornell psychologists, Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams. After reviewing two decades of research, they report that a woman in academic science typically fares as well as, if not better than, a comparable man when it comes to being interviewed, hired, promoted, financed and published.
“Thus,” they conclude, “the ongoing focus on sex discrimination in reviewing, interviewing and hiring represents costly, misplaced effort. Society is engaged in the present in solving problems of the past.” Instead of presuming discrimination in science or expecting the sexes to show equal interest in every discipline, the Cornell researchers say, universities should make it easier for women in any field to combine scholarship with family responsibilities.

to quite interesting takes:

Ceci and Williams did not show, or claim to show, that there was no discrimination or unconscious bias against women scientists. Instead, they tried to untangle the complicated causal factors that influence success. They found that when you factor in women's circumstances—for example, what kinds of teaching loads they have, whether they are at research universities, whether they have young children, and so on—then the correlation between sex and success goes away. Overall, female scientists have fewer resources than male scientists, just as poor people have less access to health care. But if you compare male and female scientists with identical resources you find that the women are just as likely to be successful. Ceci and Williams put it this way in their discussion of the number of journal articles women published: "The primary factor affecting women's productivity was structural position. When type of institution, teaching load, funding, and research assistance were factored in, the productivity gap completely disappeared (which is not to say discrimination has not influenced these factors in the real world)."
Concluding from this that gender doesn't influence scientific success, however, would be like concluding that poverty doesn't influence health in the study I described before. It's much more likely that gender causes the unequal resources, which causes the different outcomes.

finally, to this one:

Two thoughts before you use the comments to discuss whether women choose different paths, or whether systems are designed to “choose for them.”
First, the authors of the study are the co-authors of “The Mathematics of Sex: How Biology and Society Conspire to Limit Talented Women and Girls.” They are also, not incidentally, married to each other and the parents of three daughters. And, also not incidentally, he has an endowed chair at Cornell, while she does not.

The crucial finding of the Ceci-Williams meta-study has to do with the "similar resources" argument. That's also where their analysis lets them down as I shall show in Part II. But for the time being it's enough to note that we skip from the fact that women in science, on average, have fewer resources than men in science to the assumption that this is the outcome of female choice without addressing the question how resources in fact are allocated and to what extent that allocation process depends on the female scientists vs. the institutions which employ them.

Mostly, however, I wanted to juxtapose this post with the two below, for the enlightenment of all those who argue that women are these cumbersome creatures who keep choosing the wrong things. It's always the wrong things, by the way.

Divorce: The Fault of Feminists and Uppity Women

Reading Phyllis Schlafly is a weird exercise. Here is this woman who has certainly made it in the public sphere, and made it by telling other women not to make it in the public sphere! Not too sure about what that might mean, but I think she would have suffocated to death in the kind of world she advocates to other women.

Yes, we are still covering the recent "it's women's fault" fashion. More is to come, by the way, but this particular post is about how feminism destroyed the family. Mmm.

Us feminists are incredibly powerful people, despite not having any money and despite probably being the most hated liberation group of all times! We can't get a voice in the mainstream media, we don't have armies, we have hairy armpits (except if we are naturally scaly snakes) and we are otherwise not f***able or appealing. Still, we destroy civilizations.

I kinda like that. Anyone who is moronic enough to pretend to goddesshood must like that. But Schlafly doesn't like feminists at all. She and Suzanne Venker have co-authored a book entitled The Flipside of Feminism: What Conservative Women Know - And Men Can't Say:

"If there's one thing feminists love, it's divorce - they consider it liberating." That's just one of the claims Phyllis Schlafly and her co-author Suzanne Venker make in their new book, The Flipside of Feminism: What Conservative Women Know - And Men Can't Say, to be released this March. Schlafly--political activist, bestselling author, syndicated columnist, radio personality--is often called the grande dame of the conservative movement (she is perhaps best known for her successful campaign to stop passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and founding of the national volunteer organization known as the Eagle Forum). Venker, a.k.a. "No Bull Mom," is author of 7 Myths of Working Mothers and a regular contributor to NewsReal.
In a series of e-mails and telephone conversations over the last few weeks from their offices in St. Louis, Missouri, they weighed in on marriage, divorce and feminism in our society:
Why do you claim feminists love divorce?

Phyllis: Their own writings reveal that feminists sought liberation from home, husband, family, childbirth, children, and the role of fulltime homemaker. They wanted to be independent of men and liberated from the duties of marriage and motherhood. So, their first legislative goal was the adoption of easy-to-get divorce. They were behind California's adoption of unilateral divorce, which then spread across the country.

So why do so many marriages fail, not just those of feminists?
Suzanne: Living in a culture in which people break vows easily makes it difficult to keep one's own vows. The modern generation was groomed for an independent life. Marriage and motherhood are not something to which young women have been taught to aspire. Instead the women in their lives tell them to focus solely on their career. The result is women don't think of marriage and motherhood as fulfilling in and of itself. It's silly to think there's something wrong with being in the kitchen--everybody has to eat! Sandra Bullock's claim marriage is the end of who you are is indicative of the modern generation's defeatist attitude toward marriage.

To sum: Divorce is the fault of feminists because not getting divorced requires a woman to be a full-time homemaker, and besides, feminists LOVE divorce. It gives them multiple orgasms and such.

Wouldn't it be interesting to do an actual study of the marriages of feminists? To see if they actually have higher or lower divorce rates than the marriages of anti-feminists? But then we would have some actual data and that is a lot less interesting than attacking feminists.

I can't take these women quite seriously though I know that they mean business and that many people do take them seriously. But honestly, to argue that feminists love divorce for its own sake! Not to define what one means by the "duties of marriage and motherhood!" And so on. I get that Schlafly and Venker hate women, pure souls. But the rest of it is not very interesting.

But do pay attention to this post and the one below because the next post in this "it's the fault of women" will show you how the tables are turned.

Do You Know What Is Women's Fault: Pre-Adult Men

This has been one of those periods when we are told how many things are the fault of uppity women. These periods come and go, quite regularly (though not every 28 days), and they mostly follow any advances in women's independence, and the usual plot is to show how that advance for women in fact makes them unhappy!

Thus, education has always made women unhappy, from the era when the womb would start wandering about because of the excess pressure on the feeble brain, to the era when no upstanding man would marry an educated woman (librarians!) to the current era when getting educated will let your eggs wither away (what with the apparent impossibility of using both ends of your body at the same time).

Greater sexual equality also makes women unhappy. The more women hook up in their twenties the unhappier they will get, I read. Women are simply not made that way and if women don't cross their legs men won't bother marrying them. Why buy the cow if you can get the milk free?

These stories NEVER ask if women should care for the pig when sausages are plentiful in the marketplace. This is because they are conservative anti-feminist views of how the world should be structured. In those views women don't matter except as providers of more soldiers and more workers, and women should do that job with the minimum hassle and cost to anyone else. Paradoxically, while women don't matter much at all, they are also extremely important: It is their job to uphold the civilization by domesticating men, by somehow gate-keeping sex outside the marriage and by providing the negative mirror in which masculinity is ultimately reflected: Men become men ONLY if women act like women: tending to children at home while being provided for and protected by men.

This is the argument of Kay Hymowitz in her new book Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys. Hers is the extreme definition of masculinity as subtractive: Men can only be men if women remain girls, ultimately. Or so I think, based on the piece Hymowitz has written based on her book.

It focuses on the idea of pre-adulthood, a period when a person is no longer an adolescent but for various reasons unable or unwilling to become fully adult. And what does adulthood mean for Hymowitz? Here's a hint

Sociologists use the term "life script" to describe a particular society's ordering of life's large events and stages. Though such scripts vary across cultures, the archetypal plot is deeply rooted in our biological nature. The invention of adolescence did not change the large Roman numerals of the American script. Adults continued to be those who took over the primary tasks of the economy and culture. For women, the central task usually involved the day-to-day rearing of the next generation; for men, it involved protecting and providing for their wives and children. If you followed the script, you became an adult, a temporary custodian of the social order until your own old age and demise.

...

What explains this puerile shallowness? I see it as an expression of our cultural uncertainty about the social role of men. It's been an almost universal rule of civilization that girls became women simply by reaching physical maturity, but boys had to pass a test. They needed to demonstrate courage, physical prowess or mastery of the necessary skills. The goal was to prove their competence as protectors and providers. Today, however, with women moving ahead in our advanced economy, husbands and fathers are now optional, and the qualities of character men once needed to play their roles—fortitude, stoicism, courage, fidelity—are obsolete, even a little embarrassing.
Today's pre-adult male is like an actor in a drama in which he only knows what he shouldn't say. He has to compete in a fierce job market, but he can't act too bossy or self-confident. He should be sensitive but not paternalistic, smart but not cocky. To deepen his predicament, because he is single, his advisers and confidants are generally undomesticated guys just like him.
Single men have never been civilization's most responsible actors; they continue to be more troubled and less successful than men who deliberately choose to become husbands and fathers. So we can be disgusted if some of them continue to live in rooms decorated with "Star Wars" posters and crushed beer cans and to treat women like disposable estrogen toys, but we shouldn't be surprised.
Relatively affluent, free of family responsibilities, and entertained by an array of media devoted to his every pleasure, the single young man can live in pig heaven—and often does. Women put up with him for a while, but then in fear and disgust either give up on any idea of a husband and kids or just go to a sperm bank and get the DNA without the troublesome man. But these rational choices on the part of women only serve to legitimize men's attachment to the sand box. Why should they grow up? No one needs them anyway. There's nothing they have to do.

Bolds are mine.

There you have it! No-one needs men, and that is women's fault. Women haven't stuck to their proper biological role as nurturers of the next generation so that men can provide for them and protect them. Protect from what? Could it possibly be...from men? Hmm. Note also that women have always worked on the farms, all day long. The nurturing of the next generation has been but one of their many tasks.

Hymowitz replaces real history with her ideological summaries. Doing that makes writing real easy but gets you into all sorts of other problems. For instance, if women who do well in labor markets are to blame for the pre-adulthood of men, isn't Kay Hymowitz herself one of the guilty ones?

There's something utterly sexist about all of this, and in a bizarre way it is men who get the roughest deal. They are portrayed as pretty much imbeciles who must be forced to let go of their toys, forced into marriage and the role of a provider, forced into acting like adults in the conservative worldview.

What is the solution Hymowitz offers for this new "man-crisis"? The article gives us no hints, though I bet it has something to do with women not getting so educated or so pushy or doing so well at school. Because men's problems are women's fault, caused by women stepping out of line.

Hymowitz's piece is really quite silly. The age at first marriage in the United States has varied widely over time (and what once was registered as marriage may today consist of cohabitation), and her anecdotal evidence is all about men and women with college degrees and parents who are affluent enough to let them continue living at home after college, say.

This doesn't mean that the whole topic would be as silly, however. There are valid reasons (other than uppity women's perfidy) for the reasons why young adults cannot leave home and set up their own households very easily, but those are largely about economics, about outsourcing, about the recession and about the fact that we may now live in an era when the next generation is not automatically better off than the previous one.

While thinking about Hymowitz's piece my brain ran on the usual squirrel wheel about how women-bashing women get published so very easily, about what it is that might make a woman hate her own sex so very much and how she reconciles her beliefs about the proper biological place for women (the kitchen) with her own life and so on. But mostly I was thinking about the way the conservatives hate gender equality so much that they cannot see the other solutions to the problems they bemoan.

All their writing aims at women changing their behavior. Whatever bad-boy behavior they ascribe to men is also the women's fault. Men cannot change, cannot be asked to change and should not change. Only women are expected to do the changing and always in the direction of what might benefit the conservative society on the whole. That many men are eminently marriageable, not because of their earning power or their ability to fight saber-toothed tigers with their own tiny teeth, but because they are going to be good husbands and good hands-on fathers and great mates altogether is simply not something a conservative writer ever considers.

That's why I think the contempt of women they demonstrate is matched by their more hidden contempt for men.

Miscarriage: A Possible Crime Scene in Georgia?

A Georgian whackadoodle politician, one Bobby Franklin, is proposing a new law about the murder of prenatal Americans. I raise my helmet for Mr. Franklin, because he is very logical in his defense of the zygote Americans against murder.

Part of his proposal covers the obvious need to find out if any zygote Americans are at risk. Because they make their living inside structures sometimes called women, it is necessary to police those structures:

2) 'Prenatal murder' means the intentional removal of a fetus from a woman with an
115 intention other than to produce a live birth or to remove a dead fetus; provided, however,
116 that if a physician makes a medically justified effort to save the lives of both the mother
117 and the fetus and the fetus does not survive, such action shall not be prenatal murder.

....

Said title is further amended by revising subsection (a) of Code Section 31-10-18, relating
198 to registration of spontaneous fetal deaths, as follows:
199 "(a) A report of spontaneous fetal death for each spontaneous fetal death which occurs in
200 this state shall be filed with the local registrar of the county in which the delivery occurred
201 within 72 hours after such delivery in accordance with this Code section unless the place
202 of fetal death is unknown, in which case a fetal death certificate shall be filed in the county
203 in which the dead fetus was found within 72 hours after such occurrence. All induced
204 terminations of pregnancy shall be reported in the manner prescribed in Code Section
205 31-10-19. Preparation and filing of reports of spontaneous fetal death shall be as follows:
206 (1) When a dead fetus is delivered in an institution, the person in charge of the institution
207 or that person's designated representative shall prepare and file the report;
208 (2) When a dead fetus is delivered outside an institution, the physician in attendance at
209 or immediately after delivery shall prepare and file the report;
210 (3) When a spontaneous fetal death required to be reported by this Code section occurs
211 without medical attendance at or immediately after the delivery or when inquiry is
212 required by Article 2 of Chapter 16 of Title 45, the 'Georgia Death Investigation Act,' the
213 proper investigating official shall investigate the cause of fetal death and shall prepare
214 and file the report within 30 days; and
215 (4) When a spontaneous fetal death occurs in a moving conveyance and the fetus is first
216 removed from the conveyance in this state or when a dead fetus is found in this state and
217 the place of fetal death is unknown, the fetal death shall be reported in this state. The
218 place where the fetus was first removed from the conveyance or the dead fetus was found
219 shall be considered the place of fetal death."

Amanda Marcotte noticed that it's hard to think of a better term for all this than Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, an imaginary world where all women had their fertility policed.

This proposal will not become law in Georgia. I'm fairly convinced of that. But may I draw your attention to the fact that when I once wrote about the logical consequences to women of proposals to turn abortion into murder, I did describe this very thing. And then I got called for being ridiculously extreme. Mmm.

It goes without saying that having every miscarriage policed in this way would make the lives of women who already are undergoing hell more hellish. Our Bobby doesn't care about that at all.

My New Hat

A snake in a cloche hat!

This post is to prove you that I'm indeed one of those feeble-minded critters with no testicles to support them. Also, the hat is THE HAT! The best hat ever. And I have it.

The Womancession

This recession has been called a mancession because the jobs lost tended to be first in traditionally male industries and because therefore more men than women lost jobs in the first round. I kept reading Men's Rights Activists ranting about this.

Now it seems that we have a mancovery, meaning a recovery of the jobs men lost:

The Great Recession has been called the "mancession" because men absorbed 7 of 10 job losses during the downturn.
Male-dominated industries such as manufacturing, transportation and wholesale trade shed millions of jobs. Even in fields where men weren't a majority of workers, they still got hit harder, said Heather Boushey, senior economist at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research group.
So as these and other industries slowly rebound, Boushey said it's hardly a surprise that men have landed more than 95 percent of new jobs in the recovery, or "mancovery" as it's playing out.
"If I get hit harder than you do, it does make sense that my recovery should be more dramatic. That's just logical," Boushey said. "The way this recession played out, there was this gendered impact across a wide variety of industries, and I think that's what you're seeing coming back."

That quote is about the only good one in the whole article. In general I love McClatchky, but this piece is a numbers coleslaw. Take this, for example:

It was job gains by men that fueled January's steep decline in the national unemployment rate from 9.4 percent to 9 percent.
In fact, men have gained 438,000 jobs since the Great Recession officially ended in June 2009, while women have lost 366,000 over the same period, according to Labor Department figures.
And the 984,000 new jobs created from January 2010 to January 2011? Only 47,000 went to women.
That's less than 1 of every 20 new job openings.
These numbers would barely draw a second look in the aftermath of past recessions, when women made up a much smaller share of the labor force. But women now account for nearly half of all U.S. workers, so the great disparity is all the more startling.

Are these net figures? In other words, did women since June 2009 gain some jobs and lose some jobs so that the result is a net loss of 366,000 jobs? And did men since June 2009 gain some jobs and lose some jobs so that the result is a net gain of 438,000 jobs? Or are we comparing the gains by men to the losses by women while ignoring the losses by men and the gains by women? And do women now have a higher unemployment rate than men have?

I cannot tell from the article. I may go and study the question. But the article should have made this clearer, because the consequences under one interpretation are humongously important, while under the other interpretation not so much. This problem could have been easily solved by reporting the overall unemployment rates for men and women in June 2009 and now.

Never mind. Maybe I'm the only one who finds all that confusing. But the end of the article is the usual stuff about why it's women's own fault if they become unemployed:

Stacy Ethun, the president and CEO of MRINetwork, an international executive search firm, said she's noticed two things that work against job-seeking women: a lack of aggressiveness and limited use of professional networking options.
"Those are the two areas where women are lagging, and it's impacting their eligibility for employment," Ethun said. "Having the courage and conviction to get out there, call on people that you don't know personally, brag on yourself and compete for a job, those are all things, I think, that men in general are naturally stronger at than women."

Compare this and the way the "mancession" was treated: Men became unemployed through no fault of their own. They were just in the wrong industries. But women! They are unemployed because they are not that good at looking for jobs.

Now, the article does point out that the reason for the "womancession" is the industries which are now suffering from layoffs by local and state governments. So why add that woman-blaming piece at the end? Note that if women are not as good at bragging and so on, that would have an impact not only during recessions but all the time. Adding that bit sounds like woman-bashing to me, an attempt to blame women for their own unemployment in a way which was not done with the "mancession." After all, one could have argued that the men who were unemployed then caused that situation by picking the wrong industries to work in and by refusing to get more educated and so on.

I'm writing about this because otherwise it might be invisible, once again.

Magical Thinking in American Elections

It must be magical thinking. The rule is that under poor economic times the voters "throw the bums out" as the old saying goes. But in a two-party system this means that the old bums are voted in. What if they caused or at least contributed to the poor economic times, as is the case in the most recent election debacle?

They don't get punished at all! But that "throwing of the bums out" IS all about punishment. Or if not punishment, then it must be magical thinking.

I've decided on the magical thinking bit. Granted, Obama has squandered opportunity after opportunity, to be friends with the right-wingers. But he still isn't a right-winger. So how could so many voters think that right-wingers would better run an economy to get jobs? Given that they never have bothered about jobs before, and that they immediately started with attacks on abortions and on the teachers' unions?

In any case, the conservative platform is openly about giving more tax cuts to the rich and cutting back on all kinds of public spending, whether it's for the environment or for the payment of civil servants or for new bridges or roads. The idea is that those tax cuts to the rich will make them suddenly excited about creating more jobs and that somehow the fact that fewer people can now afford to buy anything doesn't matter. But those second-level effects are NOT what conservatives desire. That, my friends, is simply for the rich to have much more money and the rest to have so little that pool boys and nannies and personal guards go cheaply.

So why would the average not-so-rich person wish to vote for that? But they have, all over the country.

Magical thinking or sheer stupidity. Or utter hatred of everyone else. Take your pick. I have decided on magical thinking, because there was a time when I played solitaire and decided that if I beat myself in a certain game I'd get an A+ in an exam.

Meanwhile, in Frederick County, Maryland, Mothers Should Not Work For Money

The Board of County Commissioners in Frederick County, Maryland, has voted to cut the Head Start program by fifty percent. The Head Start program is:

...is a program of the United States Department of Health and Human Services that provides comprehensive education, health, nutrition, and parent involvement services to low-income children and their families.

Two County Commissioners explain why this cut is perfectly fine:

County Commissioner Paul Smith said, ‘As many of you know, I had a lot of kids and my wife stayed home at a significant sacrifice in those early years, because she knew she had to be with those kids. I know everybody isn't able to survive doing that, but clearly if we can strengthen marriage, we can decrease the number of children we have to reach.'
Commissioner Kirby Delauter added, according to the newspaper, 'My wife is college educated and could go out and get a very good job. She gave that up for 18 years, so she could stay home with our kids and we gave up a lot to do that. I agree with commissioner smith. The marriage thing is very important.’

When the predictable reactions came in (including a vigil by women of Frederick County), Commissioner Smith clarified his stance:

"I think the ideal situation is for parents to take care of their own children," Smith told The Baltimore Sun. "The mother is the one to be the best situated to take care of small children. I believe that."

Note that neither Commissioner Smith nor Commissioner Delauter has taken care of his own kids.

But despite that, the two gentlemen hold firm opinions about the proper role of women as well as about who it is who should ultimately bear the financial burdens for child-rearing: Women. Because it is the women who stay at home for several years this way who are left with lower retirement income. It is also these same women who are especially vulnerable in the case of a divorce. I'm willing to bet quite a lot that neither Mr. Smith nor Mr. Delauter finds any of that problematic.

Then how about that classism? Do you know how poor a family must be to qualify for Head Start in Frederick County, Maryland? How many poor families can afford for one parent to stay at home? And what about the goals of the Head Start program? It's not really intended as just a daycare program, you know.

Were these two men born this asinine or did they have to work at it? Not that I really care.
----
Thanks for the tip go to vjs in the comments.

On The Straw-Feminist in Scientific Critiques

Cordelia Fine (whose book, Delusions of Gender , I discussed extensively in January) has written a nice post responding to some of the criticisms her book has caused. The gist of Fine's piece is this:

In the interminable sex differences debate it always seems to be those who are critical of scientific claims of essential differences who are accused of allowing political desires to blinker them to the facts of the case. A century ago a medical professional commented in the New York Times that “the dear women are ‘obsessed’ with their fitness for all things masculine which blinds them to a sane view of their biological limitations.” Today’s admonishments, sometimes only a little less condescending, suggest a way of thinking about the relationship between politics and science that is inspired by stereotypes: the agenda-driven feminist who requires everyone to ignore what does not fit her ideology; and the detached spokesperson of science.
And so, in the aftermath of the Summers controversy Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker suggested that the “taboo” of innate sex differences drove a “refusal to glance at the scientific literature”. In a more recent commentary, entitled “Daring to discuss women in science”, New York Times columnist John Tierney quipped that the evidence presented in his article put him at “risk of being shipped off” to a gender equity workshop (a hellish fate, indeed), and asked whether it would be “safe” in such a workshop “for someone to mention the new evidence supporting Dr. Summers’s controversial hypothesis about differences in the sexes’ aptitude for math and science”.
A similar theme emerged when The Sexual Paradox author Susan Pinker was asked to comment on my book, which argues that we don’t yet know whether, on average, males and females are born differently predisposed to understanding the world versus understanding people. Pinker responded that the results of scientific investigations of sex differences “describe what is, not what we might choose if we were designing a perfect world. These are compelling studies that add to our understanding of human development. Why would we ignore them?” And while a review of my book by The Essential Difference author and Cambridge psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen generously acknowledged its scholarship, the instantly recognizable stereotype was nonetheless lurking in all its unalluring glory: I was “strident”; in pursuit of a “barely veiled agenda”; and guilty of the “mistaken blurring of science with politics.”
Again and again, the target is a familiar one and should be recognized for what it is: a straw-feminist.

Fine does a fine and gentle take on all these arguments which essentially (hah!) boil down to the assumption that to have a null hypothesis of "no biological gender difference" is biased but to have as null hypothesis "a biological gender difference exists and most likely is to the advantage of men" is not biased but doing cold-blooded and unbiased science.

For that is what I see happening in the literature of those who criticize Fine for bringing politics into science. As I have written before, the very field of "gender differences" is already loaded with the assumption that one looks for differences. Naturally one will be awfully sad when one finds them as one would much prefer a world where they don't exist but facts are facts.

Once the "facts" are criticized (as was done in all the three books I discussed in my January series), that, too, somehow turns into politicking. Miraculous.

Simon Baron-Cohen is one of the people who criticized Cordelia Fine for mixing politics with science. Baron-Cohen's own theory (in Essential Difference) argues that people have either a female brain (strong on empathizing, low on systematizing ability which really means analytical ability), a male brain (strong on systematizing, low on empathizing) or a balanced brain (equal in both skills). That only about 40% of women in his tests appear to possess a female brain has not stopped this particular pattern of naming.

The roots of Baron-Cohen's theory can be found in autism. He believes that autistic individuals have extreme male brains, high on systematizing and very low on the ability to empathize. At the end of the book Essential Difference, he speculates what might happen if we ever found an extreme female brain, one high on empathizing but very low on systematizing ability. I quote:

When we find someone with the extreme female brain, my guess is that we also find that society has made it easy for them to find a niche and a value, without that person having to feel they must in some way hide their systemblindness.

I hope that at least one benefit of this book is that society might become more accepting of essential sex differences in the mind, and make it easier for someone with the extreme male brain to find their niche and for us to acknowledge their value. They should not feel the need to hide their mindblindness (as many currently do).

Remember that this is pure speculation. Nobody has met a person with "an extreme female brain," but Baron-Cohen believes that we would treat that person much better than we treat people with autism. This is not science but an opinion.

Baron-Cohen continues:

A central tenet of this book is that the male and female brains differ from each other, but that overall one is no better or worse than the other. Hopefully, in reading this book, men will also experience a resurgence of pride at the things they can do well, things like being able to work out confidently how to program a new appliance in the home, being able quickly to discover how to use a new piece of software, or how to fix something with whatever available tools and materials are around. All these need good systematizing skills.

Hmm. It sounds like Baron-Cohen thinks men can't currently feel pride in their technical skills. In fact, that whole bit sounds like gender politics. But Baron-Cohen can still criticize Fine for the same.

By the way, the test Baron-Cohen uses to MEASURE systematizing abilities has the following questions, all of them biased or tilted towards not systematizing per se (after all, there are all sorts of systems), but towards tasks which gender role division assigns to men or towards traditionally male interests (collecting coins or stamps, following football scores, anything to do with machines):

5. If I were buying a car, I would want to obtain specific information about its engine capacity.
7. If there was a problem with the electrical wiring in my home, I'd be able to fix it myself.
11. I rarely read articles or Web pages about new technology.
13. I am fascinated by how machines work.
18. I find it difficult to understand instruction manuals for putting appliances together.
25. If I had a collection (e.g. CDs, coins, stamps), it would be highly organized.
26. When I look at a piece of furniture, I do not notice the details of how it was constructed.
29. When I read the newspaper, I am drawn to tables of information, such as football scores or stock market indices.
37. When I look at a building, I am curious about the precise way it was constructed.

So.

What about Stephen Pinker? Is he as unbiased as he insists? His book The Blank Slate has a whole chapter on gender. That chapter sets out to prove that though feminism is of course a wonderful thing (wonderful!), women have both innately different abilities and innately different interests than men and THIS is the reason why so few women can be found in the hard sciences.

The economics references in that chapter omit 90% of the actually relevant studies in economics but borrow liberally from polemic pieces by members of the Independent Women's Forum, a right-wing gal's hit squad against feminists. But that's not my main problem with the book and its treatment of gender. It's the omission of differences in violence and crime rates from the gender chapter. Violence is treated elsewhere, as a general human problem.

It's a very subtle thing, sure, but a book which puts all the gender differences which appear to benefit men into one chapter about gender and then discusses those gender differences which appear to benefit women elsewhere is not exactly neutrally scientific. In my humble view.

I hope you read Fine's much more careful take and then come back to re-read mine.

Bela Bartok

Spring

Angelica Leánykar Városmajori High School (Budapest, Hungary)
Conductor: Zsuzsanna GRÁF

Did You Know This About Scott Walker, The Nazgûl Governor of Wisconsin?

The reference to Nazgûl is to the Lord of the Rings:

"Scott Walker" refers to the tea-party governor of Wisconsin, the one who is trying to remove many collective bargaining rights from state workers in Wisconsin.

Nazgul Walker is not just a tea-partier. He is also pretty extreme in his anti-abortion views, as in "nobody could be more extreme." From last fall's election campaign:

In a gubernatorial campaign largely centered on jobs and the job performance of the candidates, Democrat Tom Barrett has injected abortion into the debate, using a stark TV ad to take aim at his opponent, Republican Scott Walker.

A couple identified as Lana and Mike appear on the screen. Mike says their teenage daughter was brutally raped. "You can’t imagine what she went through," he says. "That’s why politicians like Scott Walker make me so mad."

The screen goes black. Then as Mike continues, the words he says also appear on the screen:

"Scott Walker wants to make abortion illegal, even in cases of rape, incest, or to protect the life of the mother."

...

We asked Jill Bader, Walker’s campaign spokeswoman, about Barrett’s ad and she said it accurately states Walker’s position.

Bolds are mine.

Friday Good News And a Bit on Walker of Wisconsin

Those would be this one (as well as the protests in Wisconsin):

The Obama administration rescinded most of a federal regulation Friday designed to protect health workers who refuse to provide care they find objectionable on personal or religious grounds.



The Health and Human Services Department eliminated nearly the entire rule put into effect by the administration of President George W. Bush during his final days in office that was widely interpreted as allowing such workers to opt out of a broad range of medical services, such as providing the emergency contraceptive Plan B, treating gay men and lesbians and prescribing birth control to single women.
Calling the Bush-era rule "unclear and potentially overbroad in scope," the new, much narrower version essentially leaves in place only long-standing federal protections for workers who object to performing abortions or sterilizations. It also retains the Bush rule's formal process for workers to file complaints.

On the Wisconsin protests: I just listened to governor Walker's speech from this morning. It made me angry, because he applies so many political stunts during just one speech, including "the only way fix the budget is on THESE expenses" and "let's bust the unions while we have a good crisis" and "let's call everyone BUT the protesters tax-payers" and "let's compare apples with rotten oranges (in terms of how much worse things are in some private firms) to turn the apples, too, into rotten oranges."

But then the people in Wisconsin voted him in. I'm not giving them a pass on that.

SIGN THIS PETITION

In support of continued federal funding of Planned Parenthood.

The Vendetta Against Planned Parenthood

The House has voted to block federal aid to Planned Parenthood. The Senate is unlikely to agree, but the battle lines are drawn. Remember how the elections were all about unemployment? Well, the Republicans have forgotten all about that. They are into forced birthism, full throttle.

Something new happened in the house. Two women stood up and talked back:

The battle over cutting Title X funding, which provides $317 million dollars to family planning service providers including Planned Parenthood got personal yesterday when California Representative Jackie Speier (D) took an incredibly courageous tact in the House of Representatives debate.
In a serious turn for the you-go-girl, Speier stepped to the mic and apologized for deviating from her planned remarks, because the remarks of “the gentleman from New Jersey” who preceded her at the podium, Rep Christopher Smith (R) had “put her stomach in knots.”
And then she laid the smack down. Speier told the House of her own abortion in no uncertain terms, relating how a complicated (but wanted) pregnancy led her to make the heartbreaking decision for the procedure. “I lost a baby. But for you to stand on this floor and to suggest, as you have, that somehow this is a procedure that is either welcomed or done cavalierly or done without any thought is preposterous.”

...

Another Power Woman in last night’s heated debate was Rep. Gwen Moore of Wisconsin. When Rep. Paul Brown of Georgia argued that because most clinics are in ethnic neighborhoods “more black babies are killed” by Planned Parenthood, she countered, “I know all about black babies. I’ve had three of them. I had the first one at the ripe old age of 18.” Moore also said that Republican policy has long had “utter contempt for poor women and poor children.”

You can watch Speier's speech:

SIGN THIS PETITION

It is about women's shelters in Afghanistan. Some background:

The government of Afghanistan has recently introduced a bill that wrests control of women's shelters in Afghanistan from the local Afghan women's NGOs that have founded and run them, and transfers that control to the Ministry of Women's Affairs (MoWA). This bill could become the law of the land ANY DAY NOW.

If this bill becomes law:

Women and girls seeking shelter will be required to plead their case before an eight-member Government panel, including conservative members of the Supreme Court and Ministry of Justice. This panel will determine whether a woman needs to be in a shelter or should be sent to jail or returned to her home (and her abuser).

Women will have to undergo "forensic" exams (virginity tests) to determine whether they have had sex and therefore committed adultery. The tests are medically invalid.
Once admitted to a shelter, women will be forbidden to leave. Their shelter will become their prison.

There is no discussion in the bill of women's human rights, of the horrific abuse that most women in shelters have suffered and fled.  The bill discusses shelter food but not how women's rights will be protected and justice achieved.
 
And perhaps worst of all, if any family member comes to claim her, even her abuser, she will be handed over to that person, in most cases to be subjected to the harshest retribution for shaming the family.
The bill is the culmination of a long, intense campaign by enemies of women's rights in the Afghan government to close women's shelters on the basis of false, unsupported claims:  shelters are unIslamic, corrupt, and agents of immoral activity.

GO HERE TO SIGN.

Some Comments on Wisconsin

I'm sure you are following the events in Wisconsin where the state budget is balanced on the backs of certain types of state employees and by using a very long-reaching weapon: The Republican governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, wanted to take away most collective bargaining rights of state employees. Without such rights each tiny worker unit faces a humongous state structure in a fair-and-balanced way:

But even as workers were helping topple the regime in Cairo, one state government in particular was moving to topple workers' organizations here in the United States. Last Friday, Scott Walker, Wisconsin's new Republican governor, proposed taking away most collective bargaining rights of public employees. Under his legislation, which has moved so swiftly through the newly Republican state legislature that it might come to a vote Thursday, the unions representing teachers, sanitation workers, doctors and nurses at public hospitals, and a host of other public employees, would lose the right to bargain over health coverage, pensions and other benefits. (To make his proposal more politically palatable, the governor exempted from his hit list the unions representing firefighters and police.) The only thing all other public-sector workers could bargain over would be their base wages, and given the fiscal restraints plaguing the states, that's hardly anything to bargain over at all.

You know what happened next.

I wish to point out something else, hidden deep below all the other concerns, and that is the fact that the police and the fire fighters would be exempt from the governor's proposals but teachers would not be. What is the major demographic difference between those two groups?

Gender. Police and fire fighters are mostly male whereas the teachers are mostly female.

I'm sure that Walker didn't aim at some sexist way of dividing the burden of budget deficits here, just pointing out that if the unions representing the police and fire fighters were in general exempted from budget control proposals, the overall effect would be to increase the gender gap in male and female earnings in Wisconsin.

New Jersey governor Chris Christie went after the fire fighters in 2007 so Wisconsin might not be a general Republican template. But it's worth pointing out that state level layoffs and pay and pension cuts will have a big effect on female workers.

Eating the Seed Corn. Who Needs Education?

Several state governments want to eat the seed corn so that there's nothing to plant next year by cutting severely back on education. This is short-sighted, obviously, but goes along with the general contempt of education in this country and especially on the right side of the political aisle.

Texas makes a great example. Even Barbara Bush is concerned:

This month, The Houston Chronicle published an opinion piece by the former first lady titled “We Can’t Afford to Cut Education,” in which Mrs. Bush pointed out that students in Texas currently rank 47th in the nation in literacy, 49th in verbal SAT scores and 46th in math scores.
“In light of these statistics, can we afford to cut the number of teachers, increase class sizes, eliminate scholarships for underprivileged students and close several community colleges?” she asked.
You’d think there’d be an obvious answer. But the Texas State Legislature is looking to cut about $4.8 billion over the next two years from the schools. Budgets are tight everywhere, but Perry, the state’s governor, and his supporters made things much worse by reducing school property taxes by a third in 2006 under the theory that a higher cigarette tax and a new business franchise tax would make up the difference. Which they didn’t.
“In Austin, I’ve got half-a-dozen or more schools on a list to be closed — one of which I presented a federal blue-ribbon award to for excellence,” said Representative Lloyd Doggett. “And several hundred school personnel on the list for possible terminations.”

Similar cutbacks are happening elsewhere but Texas is especially bad because it educates a very high percentage of America's children.

Why do so many Americans despise education? Your guess is as good as mine. But perhaps it has something to do with governors like Rick Perry and what is in their best interest?

“Abstinence works,” said Governor Perry during a televised interview with Evan Smith of The Texas Tribune.
“But we have the third highest teen pregnancy rate among all states in the country,” Smith responded.
“It works,” insisted Perry.
“Can you give me a statistic suggesting it works?” asked Smith.
“I’m just going to tell you from my own personal life. Abstinence works,” said Perry, doggedly.

Now You Can Experience the 1960s!

Mad Men and such, indeed! Or rather, you can find out what it feels like to be one of the "female firsts" in some new area:

An Iowa high school wrestler who was one of the favorites to win his weight class defaulted on his first-round state tournament match rather than face one of the first girls to ever qualify for the event.

Joel Northrup, a home-schooled sophomore who was 35-4 wrestling for Linn-Mar High this season, said in a statement that he doesn't feel it would be right for him to wrestle Cedar Falls freshman Cassy Herkelman. Herkelman, who was 20-13 entering the tournament, and fellow 112-pounder Ottumwa sophomore Megan Black, who was 25-13, made history by being the first girls to qualify for the state tournament. Black was pinned quickly in her opening round match.
"I have a tremendous amount of respect for Cassy and Megan and their accomplishments. However, wrestling is a combat sport and it can get violent at times," wrote Northrup. "As a matter of conscience and my faith I do not believe that it is appropriate for a boy to engage a girl in this manner. It is unfortunate that I have been placed in a situation not seen in most other high school sports in Iowa."

I can even see Joel's point of view. He's not used to the idea and it would have all sorts of overtones that are...uncomfortable for him. Though Cassy seems to be fine with those.

I'd like to know what Joel's faith is, because I have read the same explanation from men who in the past refused to work with women in the military. They didn't believe it was the right place for women (kitchen would be that or the bedroom), and their god told them so.

Still, this is like the beginnings of women's entry into new jobs and hobbies in the 1960s and 1970s. Home-schooling might bring more of these experiences to us, because some of the home-schooled are educated in the values of strict gender hierarchies. Not that I know what the case is in Joel's family, of course.

I used to fight men all the time in karate. It didn't seem to bother them much to fight a girl but then we were of course playing within the rules and not getting unnecessarily violent. Good control and all that.

After The Egyptian Revolution: Where Are The Women?

I wrote an earlier post about the way revolutions tend to leave women behind after a while, and I am concerned that this is happening in Egypt. Women did participate in the protests, often at a high level of risk. But now:

The lack of women on a committee charged with amending Egypt's constitution for elections post-Mubarak casts doubt over whether the country can develop into a true democracy, a group of activists said on Wednesday.
The group of over 60 non-governmental organisation and activists said the committee, which is presided over by a respected retired judge known for his independence, had begun work on Wednesday by "marginalising female legal experts."

...

The committee includes one senior Muslim Brotherhood legal expert in an unprecedented move to include the Islamist opposition group, but the panel did not give details on how it selected its members.
"Signatures to this statement have received with great concern the list of committee members as there is no participation from female experts, which is unacceptable marginalisation of half of society," the statement said.
"We also question the standards used to select the members of the committee," the group said, although adding they supported the military's efforts in moving to a democracy.
The role of women in Egyptian politics has been limited, with few occupying ministerial and parliamentary seats. Their role in the judiciary has been the subject of wide debate in recent years.
Last year, a top court ruled that women should be allowed to serve on the State Council, a court that tries cases involving the government and which had resisted including female judges.
Mubarak appointed Tahany el-Gibali, Egypt's first woman judge, to the Constitutional Court in 2003. Conservative judges campaigned to stop what they regarded as an exception from becoming a trend.

So the Muslim Brotherhood is included, even if as a token member, but women are not.

I don't expect miracles. A country which debates whether women can serve as judges has a long way to go. But still.

The Nanny State! Run for Yer Lives!

Michele Bachmann, an arch-conservative member of the House, is really unhappy about the IRS ruling which allows people to deduct the cost of breast pumps etcetera from their taxes:

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), the national Tea Party star who is eyeing a possible run for President, really is opposing every initiative from the White House. In her latest comments, Bachmann slammed First Lady Michelle Obama's move as part of her physical fitness campaigns, plus decisions by the Obama administration proper, to promote breastfeeding.
The government has taken recent steps to promote breastfeeding, including a ruling last week by the Internal Revenue Service to declare breast pumps and other nursing supplies as medical tax deductions.
But this is one tax break that's not welcomed by Bachmann, as she said during an appearance Tuesday on the Laura Ingraham radio show.
"I've given birth to five babies, and I've breastfed every single one of these babies," Bachmann said. "To think that government has to go out and buy my breast pump for my babies, I mean, you wanna talk about the nanny state -- I think you just got the new definition of the nanny state."

Mmm. Except how does this differ from, say, the deductibility (is this a word?) of the interest in one's mortgage payments?

TRIGGER WARNING: The Lara Logan Case on the Net

For what this is about:

On Friday February 11, the day Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak stepped down, CBS correspondent Lara Logan was covering the jubilation in Tahrir Square for a "60 Minutes" story when she and her team and their security were surrounded by a dangerous element amidst the celebration. It was a mob of more than 200 people whipped into frenzy. In the crush of the mob, she was separated from her crew. She was surrounded and suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating before being saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers. She reconnected with the CBS team, returned to her hotel and returned to the United States on the first flight the next morning. She is currently in the hospital recovering.">

I wish her full recovery from the assault. I hope that she approved the publishing of these details by CBS.

Now for the topic of this post, disgusting as it is: The comments wherever the sexual assault is discussed, especially on non-moderated comment threads. The majority of those comments are the vilest of the vile. Here is an example for those who wish to wade in the filth themselves. I advocate a Hazmat suit and excellent mental health as prudent precautions.

The loathsome comments are of two major types: The first type describes Muslims or Arabs as animals and so on. The second type, the one I'm going to analyze here, consists of victim blaming. It is Logan's fault if she gets assaulted, in short.

There is a third type, too, which is about the desire of the commentator to join in with the gang rape of various too uppity women in the public eye or a wish that some other female celebrity had been assaulted instead.

And what about the victim blaming? Let me count the ways:

1. This experience teaches women that there are jobs women just cannot do. They get raped if they try and should stay at home, reporting on high school football games. I include that example because I came across it three times in the first 200 comments linked to above. Thus, women can be reporters but only about something which doesn't let you advance very far in your career or truly compete with men. And the reason is not the women themselves but what can be done to them by some men. Thus, it is the victim who should pack her bags and go home, while the assaulters don't get told to do that.

2. This experience teaches women that gender equality is impossible and that they should accept it and not to try to horn into the military services, for instance. Sorta like vive la difference but from a misogynistic point of view. Something like a sexual assault is Just The Way Things Are, and we should all be reminded of the value of traditional gender roles. Except, of course, in the case of Muslims who shouldn't have them.

3. Logan is good-looking and blonde. She should expect to be assaulted under those conditions.

4. She dresses seductively. She should expect to be assaulted under those conditions.

5. What happened to her was a proper revenge for all her years of spouting liberal dogma and her assumption that she can just flit about in a man's job.

Comment threads to posts about sexual assault will get a large number of comments from disgusting individuals, naturally, and I am not arguing here that what I describe would be based on a random sample of all readers of the piece. But even given the biased sample, the number and quality of the comments makes me want to give up my membership in the human species. Though people with the opinions I have outlined already think women are not full members of the species.

It is not just the comments threads which are full of woman-hating and inhumanity. Check out this post to get another eyeful of victim blaming.

Today's Hilarious Sexist Post

Courtesy of Huffington Post. Who else does misogyny better on the left side of the political aisle? Their clicks come from the boob pictures and I'm not talking about man-boobs.

Anyhow, this funny and wonderful post I'm writing about tells women why they are not married yet if they want to be. To a man, naturally. The reasons are in the women. They are bitches, sluts, selfish, shallow and liars. All they need to do is to fix those things and then they, too, can get their very own "messy, farting, macaroni-and-cheese eating man!"

The whole post reads exactly like the book Laura Schlessinger wrote about the care and upkeep of a husband. Her advice was to bend over backwards, to feed him, to f**k him and to serve him nonstop. Because men are like wild animals and women are their keepers.

The writer has even swallowed that right-wing oxytocin hoax! The idea that casual sex doesn't suit women because it wears out our ability to commit later on. How that goes with the thesis of the post (women want to get married) I leave to those who like such puzzles.

I get that this post is intended as a light-hearted one, and of course it is true that there are women who are too demanding when looking for a partner. Nevertheless, you cannot gender-flip the post, however hard you try. Men are never the market for posts like this, despite the fact that I know several who look for the queen of perfection to marry.

It's for us wimminz to change from being bitches and sluts to something more like servants. Men, on the other hand:

The deal is: most men just want to marry someone who is nice to them. I am the mother of a 13-year-old boy, which is like living with the single-cell protozoa version of a husband. Here's what my son wants out of life: macaroni and cheese, a video game, and Kim Kardashian. Have you ever seen Kim Kardashian angry? I didn't think so. You've seen Kim Kardashian smile, wiggle, and make a sex tape. Female anger terrifies men. I know it seems unfair that you have to work around a man's fear and insecurity in order to get married -- but actually, it's perfect, since working around a man's fear and insecurity is big part of what you'll be doing as a wife.

...

The good news is that I believe every woman who wants to can find a great partner. You're just going to need to get rid of the idea that marriage will make you happy. It won't. Once the initial high wears off, you'll just be you, except with twice as much laundry.
Because ultimately, marriage is not about getting something -- it's about giving it. Strangely, men understand this more than we do. Probably because for them marriage involves sacrificing their most treasured possession -- a free-agent penis -- and for us, it's the culmination of a princess fantasy so universal, it built Disneyland.

Once again, echoes of the right-wing writing there. Which conservative woman was it who wrote that women must give up full-time work and take on 100% of the household chores and child-rearing because men have sacrificed, too! They have sacrificed that free-agent penis!

Except that women are also supposed to sacrifice the wandering vagina when they get married, so the trades are never equal. The writer of this hilarious advice column views marriage as a deal where the woman gets all the work to keep the marriage and the household going, while the man gets to tie his penis in a knot except for the home-sex.

Mmm. It's 2011, my sweet readers.

Meanwhile, in South Dakota

The concept of justifiable homicide gets a proposed expansion:

A law under consideration in South Dakota would expand the definition of "justifiable homicide" to include killings that are intended to prevent harm to a fetus—a move that could make it legal to kill doctors who perform abortions. The Republican-backed legislation, House Bill 1171, has passed out of committee on a nine-to-three party-line vote, and is expected to face a floor vote in the state's GOP-dominated House of Representatives soon.
"The bill in South Dakota is an invitation to murder abortion providers."

The bill, sponsored by state Rep. Phil Jensen, a committed foe of abortion rights, alters the state's legal definition of justifiable homicide by adding language stating that a homicide is permissible if committed by a person "while resisting an attempt to harm" that person's unborn child or the unborn child of that person's spouse, partner, parent, or child. If the bill passes, it could in theory allow a woman's father, mother, son, daughter, or husband to kill anyone who tried to provide that woman an abortion—even if she wanted one. 

Mr. Jensen argues that this is a totally stupid interpretation of what he wants to achieve with this bill. Because abortions are still legal, the above couldn't possibly have anything to do with abortions!

But if it doesn't have anything to do with abortions, what is its point? Remember that a fetus is inside a woman (the aquarium), so any illegal attempt to harm the fetus is already an attempt to harm the woman, and existing laws cover that. But perhaps Mr. Jensen thinks protecting mere aquaria is not sufficient?

Read the linked article. South Dakota is the place you want to move to if you love forced births. A woman considering abortion in South Dakota cannot find one single doctor in that state who performs them. Doctors must be flown in from other states. And:

Before performing an abortion, a South Dakota doctor must offer the woman the opportunity to view a sonogram. And under a law passed in 2005, doctors are required to read a script meant to discourage women from proceeding with the abortion: "The abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being." Until recently, doctors also had to tell a woman seeking an abortion that she had "an existing relationship with that unborn human being" that was protected under the Constitution and state law and that abortion poses a "known medical risk" and "increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide." In August 2009, a US District Court Judge threw out those portions of the script, finding them "untruthful and misleading." The state has appealed the decision.

Never mind that giving birth poses "a known medical risk" and greater psychological health risks, too, on the basis of a recent study. The point of all this lying is to serve a higher goal: forced births for all!

I would be lying myself if I didn't point out that stuff like this appears to be just fine-and-dandy in the opinion of most South Dakotans. Or at least a sufficient number of them have elected a very anti-abortion state legislature.

Pro-love, anti-hate (by Suzie)

"Join us on February 14, and the days surrounding, as we re-imagine Valentine’s Day as a holiday of love and acceptance for everyone." -- Unitarian Universalist Association, on the web page for its "Standing on the side of love" project. "Ask your public officials to denounce vitriolic rhetoric and to recommit to respect and inclusion."

From what I can tell from my own church and the UUA web site, "Standing on the side of love" revolves around rights for LGBT people and undocumented immigrants. My guess is that all these loving people would recoil in horror if someone came to church and announced they were against gays in the military and in favor of building a wall along the Mexican border.

A couple of years ago in my church, a man got up during joys and sorrows to decry illegal immigration. I leaped up to correct him. The difference was, I know I'm not all that loving.

As a UU committed to critical thinking, I want to point out the marketing aspect of being "pro-love" or "anti-hate." It's akin to conservative Christians calling themselves "pro-family," people opposed to abortion saying they are "pro-life," or one group of feminists calling themselves "pro-sex." These are nebulous terms applied to specific political positions, in an effort to grab the upper hand. I resist them, even though I do fall prey to them from time to time, such as using "pro-choice" as shorthand for my belief in abortion rights.

I'm especially wary of using "love" to fight oppression, as this UU site suggests. Over the millennia, men have said they loved women, or they loved particular women, but denied them rights or "disciplined" them. The same is true for other classes of people. Today, many Christian conservatives say they love the sinners, but hate the sin, including when "sin" amounts to "rights" for others. Women have been told to love their men, even if it means putting up with abuse. Women who want their rights often get labeled "man-haters." Men have stalked or killed women whom they "loved."

When I'm told I need to love others, I'd like to know a few more details. When people say they love me, pardon me if I ask what the conditions are.

Happy Valentine's Day!

A very old drawing by me.

Spending on Weapons: The Holy Cow of American Politics

To put the various Republican budget cut proposals into perspective, have a look at where the United States stand internationally on defense spending:

But we are tiny quiet mice on that topic, even though the Republicans really, really want to get rid of both retirement benefits and publicly funded health care for the elderly. Here's a sample of their opinions from the Washington Post:

Former senator Rick Santorum (R) released this statement in response to the president's budget:

"This budget also lacks a very critical component - it does not address entitlement reform. We cannot have an honest conversation about consequential spending cuts without reforming Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and repealing our country's most recently enacted entitlement: Obamacare.

Former Republican Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty released the following statement:

It's especially disappointing that the President is refusing to reform runaway entitlement programs. We need to be honest with the American people and reform these programs before they bankrupt our nation."

Freshman Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) released the following statement on the budget:

"While the President insists he will take the commendable step of vetoing earmarks, his silence on entitlement reform, the absence of meaningful spending cuts and his reliance on anti-competitive tax increases will cause more economic uncertainty, stifle job creation and keep America on a path towards a diminished future.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) joined conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham on Monday to discuss the president's 2012 budget request:

As I said yesterday, this isn't winning the future, it's spending the future," said Boehner.

"[T]his week House Republicans will move a bill on the floor of the House that will cut $100 billion in spending. And this is just the beginning," he continued, "Over the next several months you'll see us move ahead with other cuts in mandatory spending, and then you'll see our budget. And our budget will deal with the entitlement crisis that we're facing."

Boehner also took an opportunity to defend Republicans' proposed continuing resolution that would keep the government funded through the remaining seven months of fiscal year 2011, "We're going to do everything we can in this bill to make sure that there's no money for ObamaCare," said Boehner, "But this is a continuing resolution. This deals with what we call discretionary spending. And within the rules of debate for a bill like this, we're going to do everything we can to make sure there's no money."

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) released the following statement on the president's budget proposal:

President Obama has used tough rhetoric about the need to get our fiscal house in order, even assembling a bipartisan commission to address entitlement spending which accounts for more than half of our federal budget including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Unfortunately, the President again failed to put action behind his words by neglecting to even acknowledge these tough issues that everyone knows drive up our debt and must be reformed if they are to meet their obligations for younger Americans.

The conservative Club for Growth posted a short assessment of the president's budget Monday morning:

President Obama is releasing his FY12 budget today. The highlights include higher taxes, no entitlement reform, and a whopping 11% increase in education spending. And he wants to take 10 years (what's the rush?) to cut the deficit by $1.1 trillion.

The bolds are mine. Note that none of these conservatives seems to be at all concerned about the defense spending and its share in the federal budget.

From The "No Comment" Files

Via Feminist Peace Network.

A Tea Party Without Any Sandwiches for YOU. Or Cutting The Bloated Government

Bruce Bartlett has written an interesting article on the current fascination with cutting the federal budget. It's a bit like letting children play with sharp scissors: No actual thinking required, naturally, just lots of cutting and most likely some blood.

These are the kinds of things the "new" Republicans wish to cut:

About 8 million college students would see their Pell Grants fall by about 15 percent, with the maximum grants of $5,550 declining by by $845. “Our students count on that money, and we don’t have the resources to try to make that up,” one college financial aid officer told the New York Times in December, in response to talk such a cut might be coming.
Head Start funding would fall by more than $1 billion, forcing some combination of lower spending per child and fewer children in the program. The analysis I saw predicted more than 200,000 low-income children would lose slots in the program, although some of that may reflect the loss of funding from the expiring Recovery Act. Either way, it's a pretty big hit. Oh, and about 55,000 instructors and teachers could lose jobs as part of the cut.
In absolute terms, the cut to the USDA's food inspection program may seem a lot smaller--just $100 million. But that will almost certainly mean fewer inspectors, which is no small thing. As the non-partisan organization OMB Watch has noted, in recent years the number of inspectors has not kept up with the number of food producers--and "at no other regulatory agency does the size of the inspectorate need to be so closely aligned to the size of the industry it regulates." 
Title I grants, which help schools with particularly needy populations, would fall by $700 million, affecting 2,400 schools and one million children. Another 10,000 instructors and aides would likely lose their jobs, as well. This is a direct hit on low-income children and the communities in which they live. (In the forthcoming print edition of TNR, I profile a Flint, Michigan school that has won awards for its work with low-income students. A big reason why is its Title I teachers.)
Americorps? The House Republicans would wipe out its funding entirely. And the Corporation for Public Broadcasting? Same thing.

And the "pro-life" Republicans also want to hurt pregnant women and infants:

They also want to reduce spending on the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infant, and Children. That initiative, known as WIC, provides nutritional assistance to expectant mothers and newborns. As Paul Krugman notes, that cut will hurt today and tomorrow, since kids who grow up malnourished are more likely to have problems later in life.

Wow. Just wow. Note who suffers from those cuts. I'll give you one hint: They are not the voting base of the Republican Party. They are the poor, the teachers and, naturally, the women, though allowing more food-linked illnesses will kill off the odd Republican, too.

Most of these cuts are class warfare. They try to stop upward mobility. And they do look like children going haywire with sharp scissors, as I mentioned. There is no attempt to separate really good programs with those which are only moderately successful or outright ineffective. Off with your head, whoever you are! The WIC program, for example, is excellent in its outcomes and it should be an obvious thing for anti-abortion people to support. But noooo. Which suggests that those people really don't care about babies at all.

Back to Bartlett's article. He gives us a table based on Suzanne Mettler's study concerning the ignorance of Americans about whether they have been the beneficiaries of government social programs or not. The first column in the table lists various programs, the second column gives the percentage of actual beneficiaries of that program who think they haven't received anything from the government:

529 or Coverdell	64.3
Home mortgage interest deduction	60.0
Hope or Lifetime Learning Tax Credit	59.6
Student Loans	53.3
Child and Dependent Tax Credit	51.7
Earned income tax credit	47.1
Social Security - Retirement and Survivors	44.1
Pell Grants	43.1
Unemployment Insurance	43.0
Veterans Benefits (other than G.I. Bill)	41.7
G.I. Bill	40.3
Medicare	39.8
Head Start	37.2
Social Security Disability	28.7
SSI - Supplementary Security Income	28.2
Medicaid	27.8
Welfare/Public Assistance	27.4
Government Subsidized Housing	27.4
Food Stamps	25.4

Pretty mind-boggling, isn't it?

Women and Berlusconi in Italy

You really want to watch the video at BBC (via Moonbootica)about Italian women getting fed up with the sexism of the supposed leader of their country:

Italian women have been holding nationwide protests against embattled Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Event organiser Sara Ventrone spoke of the ''anger'' and ''frustration'' felt by women in Italy at the way they were represented.

A Sunday Cartoon

This cartoon about dogs and moving is very funny. It reminds me so much of my sainted Henrietta and Hank, though one should add the humongous brain of Henrietta into the story.