An EP Study On The Scarcity Of Men And Women's Career Choices. Part I

EP stands for a particular type of evolutionary psychology, the kind which offers an almost cartoonish interpretation of human psychology, one based on a few simple models and whatever can be extrapolated from them, one which has essentially no reliance on historical or archeological evidence and one which doesn't have much use for any competing theories at all.

If that sounds harsh it is meant to be, because studies under that sub-title of evolutionary psychology anger me greatly. Here is a recent example which I wish to take apart for your entertainment and education:

Many factors can influence a woman’s choice of career. Cultural, or family, traditions. Her specific skill set. Her interests and passions.
And whether she senses an abundant supply of available men.
That’s the conclusion of newly published research, which finds the mating market, not just the job market, impacts the way women pick their professions. The finding, which is rooted in evolutionary biology, has fascinating implications given the rapid rise of women both on college campuses and in the workplace.
“Does the ratio of men to women in the local population influence women’s career aspirations? Real-world archival data and a series of laboratory experiments suggest that the answer is yes,” writes a research team led by Kristina Durante of the University of Texas at San Antonio. “A scarcity of men leads women to seek out more lucrative careers.”
The paper, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, begins with a little-known historical fact: “A substantial portion of women in Northern Europe achieved economic parity with men during the late 12th century.” This “relatively short-lived” phenomenon (it had largely faded away 100 years later) occurred during a period when there was “a scarcity of marriageable men,” the researchers write.

You may already guess that this is about those sad and deluded educated women who will never able to marry or have children. And that, indeed, is the final message of the paper. But before we go there, and to the paper itself, let's look at the above description a little more closely. There are two points I wish to make about it:

First, the paper begins with that same anecdote about an era of equality, based on the shortage of eligible men for marriage, which once existed but was relatively short-lived (quote from the paper):

Recall a time in history when women began to assert their economic independence. After years of holding the near-exclusive role of homemaker, many women ambitiously entered the male-dominated workforce, successfully climbing up the economic ladder. If this description sounds like an account of the latter half of the 20th century in Western culture, it’s not. Instead, this account describes a period in Medieval Europe. A substantial portion of women in Northern Europe achieved economic parity with men during the late 12th century (Guttentag & Secord, 1983). Although the Middle Ages are rarely associated with women’s independence, many women in this time and place “became independent entrepreneurs and formed labor unions that were almost exclusively female” (Guttentag & Secord, 1983, p. 66).

Historians do not attribute this medieval shift in women’s economic aspirations to changes in government policy, education, or any kind of social movement that directly favored women. In fact, the change was relatively short lived; a century later, the number of female entrepreneurs and guild leaders diminished. Demogra- phers note that rather than reflecting a change from above or a grassroots movement from below, this time period was characterized by a specific shift in the European population: a decrease in the ratio of men to women, which produced a scarcity of marriageable men (Guttentag & Secord, 1983).

Is this anecdote intended to make us draw similar conclusions about the current era of increased gender-equality as based on an imbalance of men and women in the population? That it will also be short-lived, leading us back to a status quo of something varying between today's Afghanistan and the 1950s US? The researchers, including Kristina M. Durante and Stephanie M. Cantú, are silent on that question but the answer does seem to be in the affirmative. Perhaps Kristina and Stephanie see themselves as dinosaurs in the making?

I like the way the five authors (Kristina M. Durante, Vladas Griskevicius, Jeffry A. Simpson, Stephanie M. Cantú, and Joshua M. Tybur) note that the late 12th century experiment in gender equality was "short-lived" without telling us anything about how it ended. It's as if all the women just packed up their bags, relinquished their high-paying jobs and went back to their kitchens all voluntarily.

But an alternative interpretation of the end of women's guild memberships and professional success exists. There's plentiful evidence that women often left those jobs (at least during some parts of the Middle Ages) not voluntarily but because they were forced out.

From A History of Women. Silences in the Middle Ages:

Women dominated certain crafts, particularly those related to cloth and clothing production; they carded and spun wool, prepared flax, and worked as tailors, furriers, bag- and belt-makers, and gold spinners and embroiderers. Women in the last-named trade occasionally formed their own all-female guilds, as in Paris and Cologne. (p.300)
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One of the oldest guilds to grant men and women equal rights is that of the furriers of Basel, from the year of 1226. Once accepted as members, women were permitted to work, buy and sell under the same conditions as men. (p.300)
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In many other crafts women could be admitted to guilds and open their own workshops; many were wives or widows of male craftsmen; but single women appear as well. Normally they were required to serve the usual apprenticeship of several years. As guild members they then worked under the same conditions as their male colleagues, with the same rights but also the same restrictions and communal obligations, such as night-watch and military duty. In the last case a woman with her own workshop was required to supply a journeyman or pay a fee in lieu of service. (p.301)

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In addition many women worked outside the guild system in unregulated professions, such as the gold-spinners of Nürnberg, who do not appear in official records until 1526 and had previously worked without any system of regulation. In Strasbourg the large number of female wool-weavers operating outside the organized weavers' guild were the subject of repeated protests to the city council by the (male) guild members. The male weavers demanded that women either stop competing or buy into the guild and pay dues. something many of them could not afford to do. A later regulation kept women's workshops small and uncompetitive by forbidding them to hire apprentices. These strategies were successful in driving women out of the city or into other trades. (p.302)
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"No female may lawfully practice a trade, even if she should understand it as well as a man." This sentence from Adrian Beier's 1688 book on craft laws appears to show that medieval developments ultimately led to the complete exclusion of women from crafts and trades.

Much does indeed point to a growing hostility toward women and the suppression of independent female-led workshops near the end of the Middle Ages, particularly in guild ordinances. The trend can be observed in conflicts that began at different levels as early as the start of the fifteenth century: between journeymen and female apprentices, between trained artisans and untrained women day laborers and maids, and between master craftsmen in guilds and women competitors outside them. By the end of the sixteenth century men dominated the previously all-female guild of silk-workers in Cologne.

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This observation has led many historians to conclude that the late Middle Ages saw the beginning of a process of "women's exclusion from professional life" that led more or less directly to female dependency and the confinement to the domestic sphere typical of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This interpretation overlooks a number of factors, however, such as the fact that for women merchants engaged in both local and long-distance trade the decisive phase of exclusion occurred not in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries but -- if it took place at all -- in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. For example, the ordinance for fish merchants in Nürnberg, passed in 1300, permitted a woman to run a stand only temporarily, in her husband's absence. (pp. 303-304).

I quote from this source so extensively for three reasons:

First, it adds tentative flesh to the skeleton of the Durante et al. medieval anecdote which has been stripped of that for their purposes.

Second, it serves as a reminder of the existence of alternative disciplines which could have been applied to a particular question instead of the sole use of evolutionary psychology.

Third, when we get to the paper itself (in my second post) it reminds us of the fact that the way women worked in the past cannot be simply deduced from some evolutionary psychology model which concludes that they did mostly childcare and housekeeping. In reality most women have worked not only in caring for children and the elderly or in cooking, cleaning and laundry services for their own families but also in the kinds of jobs which we now regard as belonging to the labor market: The manufacture of clothing, the growing of food, the brewing of beer for sale and so on. And when they did not it may have been because they were sometimes not allowed to.

My second point in this introductory post has to do with one teeny-weeny word in the above quote:

The finding, which is rooted in evolutionary biology, has fascinating implications given the rapid rise of women both on college campuses and in the workplace.

Can you guess the word? It's "biology." Evolutionary psychology is not evolutionary biology. I checked the qualifications of all five authors in the study. Four of them have doctorates in psychology and one expects to have that psychology doctorate by 2014. None of them seems to be an evolutionary biologist.

This doesn't mean that the study might not be based on evolutionary biology in the sense of the animal studies the authors refer to in their paper. But their own analysis is pure EP. Despite that, the paper itself always refers to evolutionary biology. I'm not sure what to make of that though I have a few theories.

Teen Pregnancy Rates Drop in the US

All across the country:

The number of teen births in the U.S. dropped again in 2010, according to a government report, with nearly every state seeing a decrease. Nationally, the rate fell 9 percent to about 34 per 1,000 girls ages 15 through 19, and the drop was seen among all racial and ethnic groups. Mississippi continues to have the highest teen birth rate, with 55 births per 1,000 girls. New Hampshire has the lowest rate at just under 16 births per 1,000 girls.
This is the lowest national rate for teen births since the Centers for Disease Control began tracking it in 1940, and CDC officials attributed the decline to pregnancy prevention efforts. Other reports show that teenagers are having less sex and using contraception more often. Studies have backed this up. Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle found that teenagers who received some type of comprehensive sex education were 60 percent less likely to get pregnant or get someone else pregnant. And in 2007, a federal report showed that abstinence-only programs had “no impacts on rates of sexual abstinence.”

It's difficult to tease out the main reason for the drop. In addition to less sex and more contraception, recession may have played a role in the decline or may have been the reason why more teens would abstain from sex or be more careful with prevention of pregnancies.

That's about the recent decline in teen pregnancy rates. But those rates still show large differences by US states, as described above, and also large differences between ethnic and/or racial groups:

The teen birth rate dropped across all racial and ethnic groups but still varies widely by race; Hispanics have the highest teenage birth rates at 55.7 births per 1,000 teens in the age group, followed by black teens at 51.5 per 1,000. Asian teens have the lowest teenage birth rate with 10.9 per 1,000

.
The US overall rate, of 34 births per 1,000 girls aged 15-19 is quite a bit higher than the corresponding rates in Germany (9.8), France (10.2), Sweden (5.9) or the Netherlands (5.3), and is higher than the rate in the Russian Federation (30.2)

The international statistics (Table 10 here) suggest a rough inverse correlation between the income of a country and the rate of teenage pregnancies in general, and that seems to be supported by the US data, too. Mississippi is the second poorest state in terms of per capita GDP, for example.

Earlier Puberty?

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post have had pieces on the hypothesis that puberty now begins earlier than it used to. The NYT article, from March, is on girls, the more recent WaPo article on boys. Neither is able to give much data. I get the impression that research in this field is at its infancy, and that one aspect which limits it is lack of good data on puberty and its timing in the past.

The article on girls' earlier puberty states that the age of menarche (the onset of menstruation) does not seem to have changed much, if at all, but that secondary sexual characteristics (breast development and body hair) may now appear earlier.

What this means seems to be debated. One researcher argues that these developments might not have anything to do with puberty:

Adding to the anxiety is the fact that we know so little about how early puberty works. A few researchers, including Robert Lustig, of Benioff Children’s Hospital, are beginning to wonder if many of those girls with early breast growth are in puberty at all. Lustig is a man prone to big, inflammatory ideas. (He believes that sugar is a poison, as he has argued in this magazine.) To make the case that some girls with early breast growth may not be in puberty, he starts with basic science. True puberty starts in the brain, he explains, with the production of gonadotropin-releasing hormone, or GnRH. “There is no puberty without GnRH,” Lustig told me. GnRH is like the ball that rolls down the ramp that knocks over the book that flips the stereo switch. Specifically, GnRH trips the pituitary, which signals the ovaries. The ovaries then produce estrogen, and the estrogen causes the breasts to grow. But as Lustig points out, the estrogen that is causing that growth in young girls may have a different origin. It may come from the girls’ fat tissue (postmenopausal women produce estrogen in their fat tissue) or from an environmental source. “And if that estrogen didn’t start with GnRH, it’s not puberty, end of story,” Lustig says. “Breast development doesn’t automatically mean early puberty. It might, but it doesn’t have to.” Don’t even get him started on the relationship between pubic-hair growth and puberty. “Any paper linking pubic hair with early puberty is garbage. Gar-bage. Pubic hair just means androgens, or male hormones. The first sign of puberty in girls is estrogen. Androgen is not even on the menu.”

Several theories exist on the possible causes of earlier puberty in girls, assuming that it indeed is earlier, and more research is clearly needed.

The NYT article is titled "Puberty Before Age 10: A New ‘Normal’?." That misleads in two ways: the article is only on girls, not on boys, and given that the average age of menarche has (perhaps*) fallen only from 12.8 to 12.5 years since the 1970s the more correct title would have replaced the word "puberty" with "the beginning of female puberty." Yeah, that's clunky and yeah, I know that the authors of articles mostly don't have a say with the titles the newspapers pick.

The WaPo piece, on boys, is even more anecdotal in its approach (though I'm not blaming the authors of either piece for the current state of knowledge in the field). An example:

For 800 years, the St. Thomas Boys Choir has been filling churches with pure, young voices. Now it’s confronting a confounding phenomenon: Every year, those voices are cracking with teenage angst just a little earlier than before.
Other boys choirs have been noticing it, too, as an unrelenting march of puberty sweeps voices into rebellion. Over recent decades, the already-short careers of their sopranos have started to end between six months and a year earlier, challenging them at times such as Easter, for which choral music such as J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion was written with difficult lines for boys free of hormonal woes.
At the venerable St. Thomas Boys Choir, where Bach once drilled pupils in their scales, leaders have redoubled recruitment efforts and taken in boys at a younger age to make sure the choir has a full stock of voices ranging from the deepest bass to the most clarion-pure soprano. Children whose voices are deepening wait out the change by working the ticket booth.
The cause of the shift remains unclear.

The topic of earlier puberty clearly calls for a large study, given both the possible health and social consequences. The latter are described in the article on girls though mostly as they apply to girls who develop earlier than average. The consequences might be different if the whole age range of puberty shifts downwards for all children.
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*I added this qualifier for two reasons: First, I'm not sure how good historical data is on the onset of puberty, given that routine physician or school nurse records of that would probably be pretty incomplete and not representative in the past. We have more data today.

Second, if different ethnic or racial groups experience menarche at somewhat different average ages, then the change could be caused by a different mix of individuals in the population rather than by a drop in the overall average age at menarche.

On Autistic Children and Obese Mothers

A study in the Pediatrics journal has found a statistically significant correlation between mother's obesity and autism-related disorders in the child:

Krakowiak and her colleagues looked at 1004 children who were between two and five years old, born in California and already participating in a study underway at UC Davis.
Of those kids, 517 had an autism spectrum disorder and 172 had developmental delays. For Krakowiak's study, the children's diagnoses were confirmed by a reevaluation at the UC Davis MIND Institute.
Autism is attributed to atypical brain development and characterized by a group of symptoms that include problems with socialization, communication and behavior.
Milder versions of autism, such as Asperger's syndrome and related conditions, form a "spectrum" of autism-related disorders. In addition, impairments in any one of the autism-related cognitive skill areas are considered developmental delays.
Among the kids in the study with an autism spectrum disorder, 48 were born to mothers with Type 2 or gestational diabetes, 111 to mothers who were obese and 148 to moms with any sort of metabolic condition, like high blood pressure.
For children with a developmental delay, 20 were born to mothers with Type 2 or gestational diabetes, 41 to mothers who were obese and 60 to moms with any sort of metabolic condition.
Overall, the connection between diabetes in a mother and her child being diagnosed with autism was not significant, but the researchers did find links between a mother being obese or having any other metabolic condition and her child having autism.
Developmental delays were associated with both obesity and diabetes, along with having any other metabolic condition.
"There is definitely an association present and it adds to the reasons for finding ways to lower obesity rates or diabetes rates and make greater efforts to change lifestyle factors," said Krakowiak.

And what are the policy implications? Krakowiak and her colleagues:

Meanwhile, Krakowiak and her colleagues note that nearly 60 percent of U.S. women of childbearing age (20-39 years) are overweight, one-third are obese and 16 percent have so-called metabolic syndrome -- a constellation of symptoms, including high blood pressure and insulin resistance, that raise heart disease risk.
Although no one can say the nation's rising obesity rate is to blame for the prevalence of autism, Krakowiak said the parallel increases did catch her attention.

The study itself is available for reading. The initial study design matches the mother-child pairs with control mother-child pairs where the children have typical development, without any autism or developmental delays. Here are the frequencies of the mothers' Body Mass Index in the autistic-children group and the typical-development-children group:
Percent underweight (BMI less than 18.5)
Autistic group 3.7%
Control group 3.2%

Percent normal weight (BMI between 18.5 and 24.9, inclusive)
Autistic group 52.0%
Control group 54.6%

Percent overweight (BMI between 25.0 and 29.9, inclusive)
Autistic group 22.8%
Control group 27.9%

Percent obese (BMI 30.00 or more)
Autistic group 21.5%
Control group 14.3%

Those frequencies are worth a closer look. The percent of obese mothers is clearly higher in the autistic group. But the percent of overweight-but-not-obese mothers is actually higher in the control group.

I'm nitpicking here, sure. But given how studies like these are interpreted, it's worth being careful with the numbers and also worth noting that the majority of mothers in the autistic group (55.7%) were not overweight or obese. In short, autism would not be cured if every single woman belonged to those weight categories.

As the researchers point out, it's difficult to know what this correlation means, and further research is necessary.

Speaking of further necessary research, I'm always astonished by the way fathers are eradicated in these kinds of studies. This study, for instance, uses good controls on all sorts of demographic and sociological variables which might intervene with the identification of autism in a child, say, including data on the mother's education level. But there is no control data on the fathers. None whatsoever.

That rules out some theories about altruism at the starting line (anything having to do with the sperm). If we rarely look at data on fathers we won't find much, either. I sometimes imagine future people reading the studies of this era and finding them a bit shocking in the hidden assumption that only mothers matter when it comes to children's health and development.

My Sincere Apologies

To any readers and especially people of color who were hurt by Suzie's post on Trayvon Martin. Suzie didn't intend the post to read the way it did to me and several others, and after we discussed what to do about it she decided to withdraw the post as the clearest statement.

Once again, my sincere apologies.

On Spanish Brothels

The New York Times writes about prostitution in Spain. The story is upsetting, on many levels, though it's always important to remember how hard it is to get good data on the extent of trafficking.

This is the part to which I reacted most strongly:

While the rest of Spain’s economy may be struggling, experts say that prostitution — almost all of it involving the ruthless trafficking of foreign women — is booming, exploding into public view in small towns and big cities. The police recently rescued a 19-year-old Romanian woman from traffickers who had tattooed on her wrist a bar code and the amount she still owed them: more than $2,500.
In the past, most customers were middle-aged men. But the boom here, experts say, is powered in large part by the desires of young men — many of them traveling in packs for the weekend — taking advantage of Europe’s cheap and nearly seamless travel.
“The young used to go to discos,” said Francina Vila i Valls, Barcelona’s councilor for women and civil rights. “But now they go to brothels. It’s just another form of entertainment to them.”

And this:

On a recent evening, one young man from Paris stood in the parking lot of Club Paradise, bragging about his sexual exploits while his friends looked on. The women, he said, did not talk about whether they were being forced to have sex.
“Maybe,” he said. “But I think they are having a good time.”
If any of them actually are, they would seem to be the exceptions. Thirty years ago, virtually all the prostitutes in Spain were Spanish. Now, almost none are. Advocates and police officials say that most of the women are controlled by illegal networks — they are modern-day slaves.

The reason for my reaction is that these are the parts where the article talks about the demand side of the market. In prostitution the clientele is overwhelmingly male and the workers overwhelmingly female. Indeed, the market could not exist if men, everywhere, simply decided not to frequent prostitutes.

It's very difficult to think of other markets where almost all the sellers are one gender and almost all the buyers the other gender. This gendered nature of the market cannot be ignored in feminist analyses, even though it sometimes is.

To put it as plainly as possible, women don't have the power to stop sexual trafficking because women are not the customers in the prostitution markets. Any attempt to rectify the problems in prostitution can be destroyed if enough customers don't really care whether the women who service them are forced to do so or not.

This is why those quoted parts worried me so much. Take the latter quote first:

The young man boasts about his sexual exploits! Given that they have been with women paid (and perhaps forced) to participate, I'm not quite sure where the bragging rights enter. Any person with enough money (and no scruples) could have done what he did.

Then the first quote: Brothels are just entertainment for these young men.

Would it matter at all if they were told that some of the women entertaining them were forced to do so? Or is that an irrelevancy, something that would only occur to a person who saw prostitutes first as human beings?

Or in a somewhat different form: Are women still divided into the ones who get at least a temporary passport as human beings (mothers, sisters, wives, girlfriends, work or school friends) and then the rest who are more in the nature of a juicy steak or a mug of beer?

I guess one might make the counterargument that when I visit, say, a dentist, I'm not overly bothered about her or his humanity, that we all treat others as objects or as performers of certain roles in some parts of our lives. But this doesn't really wash, because dentistry is regulated, subject to laws and well remunerated. If anything, the dentist has more power than the patient.

This is not the case in prostitution, partly due to its illegal nature in many countries. But even where prostitution is legal sex workers are not respected and their rights are poorly guarded. Add to this the whole mythology about whores, the way that term is used as a general insult, and I end up in the same pretzels whenever I write about the topic, and those are created by the dual nature of the debates:

On the one hand the market for sex is argued to be just another market, a place where people buy and sell a service for which there is demand. From that point of view all we need is to make the markets legal and to regulate and oversee them properly. That will safeguard the rights of sex workers and make something like trafficking so unprofitable that it will cease.

On the other hand, the market for sex is not the same as the market for, say, bread. It doesn't have the same mythology or the same legal and moral history. It's a market where women sell (or rather, rent) something biologically female to men who wish to buy (or rent) only that part and not the rest of any possible relationship between men and women. And in some ways it's a caricature of a mutually satisfying sexual relationship where the necessity of pleasing the woman has been replaced with a monetary payment. But despite that replacement, the relationship is viewed as demeaning to the woman, not to the man in the sexual mythology of all countries. The term for men who frequent prostitutes is not a swearword in any culture I know of. But most of the terms for prostitutes are.

Those underpinnings cannot be ignored when we discuss the market for sex. Would they exist if women also frequented prostitutes in the same numbers as men do? I doubt that, and that's why the markets for sex are something feminists cannot really analyze only as a female dominated labor market. We must also question the underlying values, myths and moral judgements.

Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, Women Deserve Less Pay

The Nazgul governor, Republican Scott Walker:

...signed a bill repealing the state’s 2009 Equal Pay Enforcement Act, which allowed victims of workplace discrimination to seek damages in state courts.

So it goes. The repealed law applied to all sorts of people who might have been discriminated against but the reason for it really was those caterpillars women. The law was enacted because the gender gap was pretty large in the state of Wisconsin. The law seemed to have had an impact:

The Equal Pay law wasn’t just about women—it also offered protection from discrimination based on race, age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, and other factors. But it was enacted largely in response to a large gap between men and women’s compensation, one that was worse than average in Wisconsin—in 2009 the state ranked 36th in the country in terms of workplace gender parity.
Wisconsin’s law was similar to many others—indeed, almost every state in the country has anti-discrimination laws that augment federal legislation. “It’s often easier, faster, and cheaper to pursue a claim of discrimination in state court than in federal court,” says Linda Meric, national director of 9to5, an organization devoted to working-women’s issues. “The law is different in each state, but Wisconsin was certainly in the mainstream in having a law that provided remedies for employees who experienced discrimination on the job.”
To bring a suit under the law, a plaintiff first had to go through a state-level administrative process to prove discrimination. It was rigorous enough that in the two years the law was in effect, not a single equal-pay lawsuit was filed. Still, the law’s supporters believe it has been effective in spurring businesses to pay women more fairly. Thus by 2010, the state had climbed to 24th in the national gender-parity rankings, with women making 78 percent as much as men, compared to 77 percent nationally. “Since the law was put into place, employers actually took notice and were very conscious of the fact that they had to follow this law or they were at risk of a lawsuit,” Sinicki argues.

Do read the whole article for the counterarguments by those who like this repeal. They are so delicious, amounting to deciding on any potential discrimination case beforehand by simply stating that women don't care that much for money and that women choose to earn less when they have children and become responsible for them.

That the court procedure is intended to weed out cases where discrimination cannot be proved doesn't seem to matter at all!

What's also delicious is that this is one of the few fields of research where non-experts simply *know* the facts! Ann Coulter has looked into this! Ann Coulter, hmmm. That many, many qualified economists have published actual studies on the topic and that all the best studies do show an unexplained gender gap in earnings doesn't appear to matter. Because women simply never face labor market discrimination, never.

I'm not arguing here that the gender gap in wages wouldn't have many causes or that one of them would not be women's current child-care responsibilities. The overall effects of gender work through many different channels. But to imply that women's own choices are the only reason why women earn less, on average, well, that is biased. And anyone who quotes Ann Coulter as an economics expert and then discounts a study by the American Association of University Women as biased! At least the latter used actual economists in the analysis stages and presented the evidence for anyone to critique.

What is the overall impact of this repeal? It makes discrimination cheaper than it was in that Nazgul state of Wisconsin by removing one potential cost from those who wish to discriminate against some group of workers. And every discriminator can just echo the idea that women don't care that much for money and that women make different choices, all the time kicking some woman's butt out of the door.

It's hard not to see all this as a part of a war against women, or at least against independent women with some rights over their lives. Republican politicians are weird people.

A Weird Music Post

I like this particular piece (a song about a poor boy courting a rich girl) for silly reasons which don't have much to do with the music itself. The band (now extinct) mixes the music with the heritage and myths of a particular area of Finland, Ostrobothnia. Hence the guy in the traditional outfit doing break-dancing and the diamond-patterned tops of the band members. He is poker-faced because Ostrobothnians are supposed to be laconic and quiet (even for Finns) but with a fierce temper when angered. Note the knife which is part of the traditional outfit.

The lead singer is hawt. And in the song he offers "only his gentle/loving heart and his right hand" while extending his left hand. Just in case you might miss that, an arrow keeps pointing at the extended hand!

You might enjoy the trilling of the r-sound in the song if your language doesn't happen to have that.

On The Caterpillar Comment

By the Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, this one:

And, here’s the transcript:
HUNT: Let me ask you this. The Democrats of course say you are waging, the GOP is waging a war on women. I know you don’t agree with that, but looking at the polls, you have a gender gap problem. Recent polls show a huge, huge margin for Democrats among women voters. How big a problem is it? How do you close it?
PRIEBUS: Well, for one thing, if the Democrats said we had a war on caterpillars, and mainstream media outlet talked about the fact that Republicans have a war on caterpillars, then we have problems with caterpillars. The fact of the matter is it’s a fiction and this started a war against the Vatican that this president pursued. He still hasn’t answered Archbishop Dolan’s issues with Obama world and Obamacare, so I think that’s the first issue.

I agree that Priebus didn't compare women to caterpillars. But picking that example in this context shows that Priebus is a bit out of practice when it comes to suddenly having to talk about or to women.

What's more interesting in that transcript is Priebus' counter-charge that all this was started by Obama's war against the Vatican! I don't think Obama has sent troops to that foreign locale, even if the Vatican itself pretty much wages a war against women.

It's circles within circles, and people like Priebus have a tone-deaf ear when it comes to the issues. Because those issues are not his and neither are they given much of a hearing inside the Republican Party. That's why Mitt Romney, for example, asks his wife when he wonders what women (all billions of them in this world) might think.

A Shallow Thought For The Day: What Is The Alternative?

Humans have great difficulty with that "what-about-the-alternative" aspect of problem solving. It's pretty visible in the old "vote-the-bums-out" response in politics where the voters punish a regime by voting in the opposite regime, even if that regime is known to be worse. It's also visible in some criticisms of Obama's health care law where the question what would happen if it was demolished isn't getting the attention it deserves. After all, there was a reason for the changes in the first place.

In a more tragic sense, something akin to this (though not the same) happens with uprisings and revolutions where the toppling of a dictator leaves a power vacuum which is then quickly filled by something even worse or at least less democratic unless careful plans are in place beforehand. Such careful plans are rare under the kinds of circumstances in which revolutions happen.

Pope Benedict and Women Priests

Pope Benedict recommends radical obedience for his priests. That would be obedience to Benedict, naturally. From his recent homily:

In his homily, Benedict made clear that reforms cannot go against Church doctrine. He singled out “a group of priests from a European country” who had recently “issued a summons to disobedience.”
They had done this to the point of disregarding church teaching and encouraging “women’s ordination, for which Blessed Pope John Paul II stated irrevocably that the Church has received no authority from the Lord,” Benedict said.
In 1994, John Paul issued an apostolic letter saying that that the Church “has no authority whatsoever” to ordain women, citing among its reasons that the apostles of Jesus Christ were all men.

Such fun and games, and so many ways of playing those. For example, how do we know that there were no women among the apostles? Much information was lost during the power struggles of the early Christian church, and much also depends on how one defines "an apostle."

But in any case, the basis for ordaining priests appears to be a metaphor, having to do with the apostles of Jesus Christ. Why can this metaphor be stretched in some directions and not in others? Now men of all ethnic groups and races can become priests and their numbers vastly exceed the presumed number of the original apostles. Yet women's priesthood is "irrevocably" out.

A Touch of Feudalism

Did you know that Xavier University will discontinue its contraceptive coverage:

Xavier University, one of the oldest Roman Catholic colleges in the United States, will cut off birth-control coverage for its employees in July, a move that has divided faculty members and students on the Cincinnati campus.
The abrupt cancellation of insurance benefits at the Jesuit university in Ohio comes amid a furious dispute between the Obama administration and the nation's Catholic bishops over contraception.
The administration has mandated that nearly all health insurance plans provide free birth control by this summer, with limited accommodations for religious institutions that oppose contraception on moral grounds. Top Catholic bishops have blasted that mandate as an attack on religious freedom.
President Barack Obama's allies, in turn, have accused the church of obstructing an important benefit for women.
The controversy prompted Xavier President Michael Graham, a Jesuit priest, to review the health insurance plan offered to the university's 935 employees. Graham announced this week in a letter to the faculty that the plan will cease to cover contraception on July 1.

I hope that Xavier University is also no longer covering vasectomies, a permanent form of birth control and I hope that all prescriptions for Viagra will be scrutinized for the marital status of the patient. Premarital or extramarital sex is against the teachings of the Catholic Church and the oppressed Fathers Of The Church should not be made to subsidize sins.

Never mind that the Catholic Church has in the past ranked the wearing of a condom as a greater evil than the transmitting of AIDS to one's spouse in Africa. Never mind that the Catholic Church regards women priests as a grievous sin, too. Never mind that I believe the Church is overstepping any reasonable definition of religious freedom by demanding that this includes the determination of the kind of health care coverage non-Catholic workers in Catholic universities, schools or hospitals can have. All those anger me greatly, but right now I'm angrier about the feudal touches I see in the society.

If the Catholic Church had its way in this matter, all employers would ultimately be able to use moral or ethical arguments to cut off bits of their health insurance policies and to save money. All employees could then have the extent of their health insurance coverage determined by the morals or ethics of their bosses.

This smells of a feudal system. In medieval feudalism the welfare of the peasants was partly determined by the desires of the feudal overlords (or in some cases feudal overladies). If the lords were benevolent the peasants lives were easier. If the lords chose not to be benevolent, well, that was their right.

We are inching in that direction. The more powers corporations in general have, the fewer powers individual citizens will have. The historical link between employment and health insurance is just that, a historical link, one method of disseminating group health insurance. It should not give the employers a right to determine on the ethics or morals of their workers' health care choices.

The ASME Individual Byline Finalists And Gender

Ann Friedman has counted gender among the 2012 individual-byline finalists for National Magazine Awards:

ASME announced the National Magazine Award finalists today. Women hold their own or dominate in servicey categories (public interest, personal service) and fiction. They are not represented at all in the categories of reporting, feature writing, profile writing, essays and criticism, columns and commentary. (I only counted individual-byline categories, not editorial packages or section awards.)

Assuming the gender attributions are correct, the total gives us 12 women and 37 men as finalists in the various categories. Do those numbers reflect the general frequencies of men and women working in the fields that the various subcategories reflect? I haven't tried to research that question.

The answer matters because if a category has few women working in it then the list of finalists would also have few or no women, whatever their individual talents might be. In reverse, is the Public Interest category one in which few men write?

What is the impact of the topic on being selected as a finalist? I noticed that war reporting dominates in the Reporting category. The current wars are harder for women to cover (as are wars in general), for pretty obvious reasons. If the topic affects one's chances of being picked as a finalist then a focus on war would handicap women.

Speaking about the topics of the articles, have a look at the titles in the Feature Writing Section:

FEATURE WRITING -- 0 women, 5 men
Esquire for “Heavenly Father!” October -- Luke Dittrich
GQ for “The Man Who Sailed His House,” October -- Michael Paterniti
The New York Times Magazine for “You Blow My Mind. Hey, Mickey!” June 12 -- John Jeremiah Sullivan
The New Yorker for “A Murder Foretold,” April 4 -- David Grann
Rolling Stone for “Arms and the Dudes,” March 31 -- Guy Lawson

That list of titles reads funny in the present context.

Competitions of this type are always worth scrutinizing. The results might not tell us much (or anything) about gender and writing, say, but the questions such scrutiny elicit are usually interesting ones.

The Deep Question of The Day: Can You Use The Other Side's Talking Points?

So much of political debate is about emotions, metaphors and whose-side-are-you-on-hmh?, not about facts at all. Right now I'm having a moment of silence because of all that.

Then onwards and upwards. Ruth Marcus slapped Obama's fingers for pretty much using a conservative talking point:

There was something rather unsettling in President Obama’s preemptive strike on the Supreme Court at Monday’s news conference.
“I’d just remind conservative commentators that for years what we’ve heard is the biggest problem on the bench is judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint — that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law,” Obama said. “Well, here’s a good example. And I’m pretty confident that this court will recognize that, and not take that step.”

Then she continues by writing about the presumed ideal role of the Supreme Court.

My first reading of that paragraph was all in terms of the political tactics: The president seemed to be saying that the conservatives are always complaining about activist judges. But now they want the judges to be activists, and the framing is changed accordingly.

Within the context of political gaming what Obama said wasn't that "unsettling." What's more unsettling is the way the conservative framing of "activist judges" has been allowed to circulate through the last decades without much of the kind of analysis Marcus gives it here. Or in simpler terms: The American political theater expects temper tantrums and bully pulpits and viciousness from the right, not from the left. We are lulled into accepting that, to a point where a reversal makes us wake up and notice it.

It's not enough to present just the political baseball game or just the pretty ideals about the place of the Supreme Court, of course. The reality is murkier. Sure, the justices on the court are unelected for a good reason, but they are appointed through openly political processes and for openly political reasons, and any open slots on the Court become a part of election fights.

Given that background, I don't think president Obama's comments were that unsettling.

Did the Contraception Wars Help Obama?

This from USAToday is worth thinking about:

In the fifth Swing States survey taken since last fall, Obama leads Republican front-runner Mitt Romney 51%-42% among registered voters just a month after the president had trailed him by two percentage points.
The biggest change came among women under 50. In mid-February, just under half of those voters supported Obama. Now more than six in 10 do while Romney's support among them has dropped by 14 points, to 30%. The president leads him 2-1 in this group.

Romney's main advantage is among men 50 and older, swamping Obama 56%-38%.
Republicans' traditional strength among men "won't be good enough if we're losing women by nine points or 10 points," says Sara Taylor Fagen, a Republican strategist and former political adviser to President George W. Bush. "The focus on contraception has not been a good one for us … and Republicans have unfairly taken on water on this issue."

It's difficult to think of anything else that has been going on except for the contraception debacle, so the reason for the changing opinions among women under fifty most likely are caused by the things that Republican politicians have recently said about this issue and other so-called women's issues.

Will this trend continue until the elections? Who knows, given the short memory of American voters and the amount of static and screeching and bullying in the political conversations. I do sniff a bit when I think that we live in a world where Obama can pretty much sit on his hands and get more support from women, just because the Republicans are so bad on the issues.

And they are bad. It's not that they have "unfairly taken water on this issue" as the interviewed Republican strategist argues. When the whole Catholic church refusal to offer birth control to the workers of Catholic-owned corporations turned up, all famous Republicans were out there complaining about this, without bothering to give the smallest pat on the head to us ladies! Women are invisible to Republican politicians, except as the residents of the one single area where Republicans believe in greater government involvement in the lives of the citizens, more regulation and less freedom: The Fertility Sphere.

In Praise of Poetry

This piece by Katha Pollitt on Adrienne Rich is quite lovely. From it:

The death of Adrienne Rich marks not only the end of a long and transcendent literary career—thirty books of poetry and prose, prizes beyond counting—but the end of a kind of poetry that mattered in the world beyond poetry. It is hard to believe, given the plethora of articles with titles like “Is Poetry Dead?,” that there was a moment not so long ago when poetry and poets played a central role in our cultural and political life. Robert Frost and T. S. Eliot were iconic figures, even to people who never cracked a book, and so, in her old age, was Marianne Moore; what Robert Lowell wrote about the war in Vietnam or black civil rights or his marriage or his madness was news. It was proper, and gratifying, that the New York Times began its obituary of Adrienne Rich on the front page, but it made me wonder if an American poet would ever be honored that way again.
In 1951, W. H. Auden, who selected the twenty-one-year-old Adrienne Cecile Rich’s first book, “A Change of World,” for the Yale Younger Poets series, wrote that her poems were “neatly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them.” (This way of writing about women’s work was hardly limited to Auden. Floating around my parents’ house was an early book by Doris Lessing whose jacket copy informed the prospective reader that the author was an “attractive young woman.”) Talk about not seeing history massing its forces round the corner. In 1963, the year Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique,” Rich published her first great book, “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” with its indelible title sequence:

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
The beak that grips her, she becomes. And Nature,
that sprung-lidded, still commodious
steamer-trunk of tempora and mores
gets stuffed with it all:        the mildewed orange-flowers,
the female pills, the terrible breasts
of Boadicea beneath flat foxes’ heads and orchids.

Katha writes about poetry as politics. Perhaps that role of poetry is dying, though I think song lyrics at their best continue that political role.

I love poetry, including poetry which might be called political. It can give those inchoate feelings an identity before they have been named, and it can speak across eons and across worlds in ways which prose struggles with.

Friday Music

On The Requirement For Individuals To Buy Health Insurance

The question that the recent challenge to President Obama's health care law hinges on at the Supreme Court of the United States.

That particular requirement has created difficulties on both sides of the political aisle though for slightly different reasons. Yet it is a fairly central aspect of the new health care law. If it goes, what will happen to the availability of affordable coverage for people with pre-existing conditions?

To see why that could be a problem, think of the worst incentives the combination of no individual mandate and affordable coverage for people with pre-existing conditions might create:

It could make sense for someone not to buy insurance (or only buy insurance for catastrophic events at low cost) until that person is diagnosed with, say, diabetes or some other chronic condition if getting a policy at a reasonable price is feasible at that point. If enough people use that strategy, the average costs of insurance will rise, simply because a larger percentage of the insured will consist of high users of care. These higher costs will then make insurance even less attractive for those who are not yet ill.

Or put in another way, the particular combination of no individual mandate and no punishment for entering with a pre-existing condition would give low-risk individuals (the young and healthy, say) incentives to stay out of the system until they need it. But that would raise the average costs for all in the insurance pool.

The usual market solutions for this problem in other insurance markets are premia based on experience rating: If you have a poor driving history, you pay more for car insurance, for example. But that solution would bring those refusals of coverage for people with pre-existing conditions (except at a much higher premium) right back.

The question, then, is how much of the health care law could stand without the individual mandate, should the Supreme Court vote against it.

As I've written before, the health care funding system of this country is a patchwork, and some of the patches exist almost due to historical accidents. That would be the case with insurance ties to one's place of employment, for example. But a more troublesome patch, in my opinion, is the use of the insurance model to pay for health care. Most health care consumption fails to satisfy the rules for insurable events.

Here's a related thought: A single-payer system does, in fact, have something very much like the individual mandate in it. This is because single-payer systems are usually funded from taxes or tax-like fees, and taxation is obligatory. I'm pretty sure that allowing opting out from that mechanism would damage those systems, too.

Meanwhile, in Arizona, More Abortion Restrictions Planned

Mother Jones summarizes yet another forced birth proposal, this time from the state of Arizona. The proposal has several interesting parts. I have no idea how likely it is to pass but it's worth studying because it tells us about the intentions of the forced birthers.

From that angle this is worth noting:

The bill doesn't stop there. Under this law, if a doctor performs an abortion after that 18-weeks, he or she can be charged with a crime, have his or her license revoked or suspended, and can be held liable for civil penalties if the father of the fetus decides to pursue legal action.

Emphasis mine.

How would Arizona determine the "father of an aborted fetus"? Never mind. What struck me about all this is that once a fertilized egg is defined as a child all parental laws would apply from the moment of conception, right? I mean in the kind of world the forced birthers want to exist.

Thus, in that world, the minute a woman is pregnant the man who impregnated her would have extra rights over her body because of her pregnancy. She is now the aquarium for his future child, after all. That the aquarium is also a person is where the complications enter.

Adrienne Rich, RIP

Adrienne Rich has died at the age of 82. The New York Times has an obituary and Ms Magazine has a poem in her memory by Marge Piercy.

Today's Action Alert

This seems like a useful appeal:

This month the UN Commission on the Status of Women failed to adopt agreed conclusions at its 56th session on the basis of safeguarding "traditional values" at the expense of human rights and fundamental freedoms of women.

Together with our partner feminist and women's rights organisations, we say NO to any re-opening of negotiations on the already established international agreements on women’s human rights and call on all governments to demonstrate their commitments to promote, protect and fulfill human rights and fundamental freedoms of women.

We have outlined our concerns in the statement below, which will be submitted to UN Member States, CSW and other relevant UN human rights and development entities.

Thank you for your support.

In solidarity,

Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD)
Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID)
International Women's Heath Coalition (IWHC)
International Women's Rights Action Watch Asia Pacific (IWRAW ASIA PACIFIC)
Women Living under Muslim Laws/ Violence is not our Culture Campaign

To read the concerns, click on the link.

Trayvon Martin (by Suzie)

I've deleted my post on the Trayvon Martin case because I do not wish to hurt Echidne or her blog. If I write again, I will take into consideration the insights I've gained. For those who would like to follow the Martin case, I recommend the Orlando Sentinel, which was the first to report it and has done a thorough job of following it.

While The Rich Get Richer, The Poor Get The Blame

That's the common story in the news, though the two parts are mostly split into separate categories so that we would not notice the connections. Thus, we get stories like this one, about who it is who is doing well in this economy, and then we get stories which tell us about planned budget cuts in the federal and state governments, about belt tightening and about the need to cut corporate taxes. Or the reminders about the importance to have "skin in the game," a term which in this context refers to all those "freeloaders" who coast on the coattails of the One Percent.

It's a bipolar world. Or at least a world where the Powers That Be seem to have forgotten the overall goals the economy should have: To offer the largest possible number of people a decent chance in life.

That includes work which pays enough for survival and some time off from that work. It should include basic education and health care which are affordable and a civil society which treats people with some respect. All the markets and corporations matter only as means towards that goal, not as goals themselves.

Things Few People Know About You

Do you remember those tag games in the early dawn of blogging? A common one was to write down something about oneself few people knew, something interesting enough to be read by others.

After all these intervening years I finally came upon one suitable fact about me:

I never learned to crawl as a baby. I scooted around in a sitting position (a modified lotus position), pretty fast, I've been told, and then started walking.

So what interesting facts few people know about you?

And yes, this is a fluff post, to be inserted as air between the usual condensed and indigestible posts I deliver.

How About Them Teachers? Ripping Us All Off, From Primary School To Universities!

An opinion column in the Washington Post argues that professors don't work enough:

Through the first half of the 20th century, faculties in academic institutions were generally underpaid relative to other comparably educated members of the workforce. Teaching was viewed as a “calling” in the tradition of tweed jackets, pipe tobacco and avuncular campus life. Trade-offs for modest salaries were found in the relaxed atmospheres of academic communities, often retreats from the pressures of the real world, and reflected in such benefits as tenure, light teaching loads, long vacations and sabbaticals.
With the 1970s advent of collective bargaining in higher education, this began to change. The result has been more equitable circumstances for college faculty, who deserve salaries comparable to those of other educated professionals. Happily, senior faculty at most state universities and colleges now earn $80,000 to $150,000, roughly in line with the average incomes of others with advanced degrees.
Not changed, however, are the accommodations designed to compensate for low pay in earlier times. Though faculty salaries now mirror those of most upper-middle-class Americans working 40 hours for 50 weeks, they continue to pay for teaching time of nine to 15 hours per week for 30 weeks, making possible a month-long winter break, a week off in the spring and a summer vacation from mid-May until September.
Such a schedule may be appropriate in research universities where standards for faculty employment are exceptionally high — and are based on the premise that critically important work, along with research-driven teaching, can best be performed outside the classroom. The faculties of research universities are at the center of America’s progress in intellectual, technological and scientific pursuits, and there should be no quarrel with their financial rewards or schedules. In fact, they often work hours well beyond those of average non-academic professionals.

What's the writers' real point? This:

I take no issue with faculty at teaching-oriented institutions focusing on instructional skills rather than research and receiving a fair, upper-middle-class wage. Like good teachers everywhere, they are dedicated professionals with high levels of education and deserve salaries commensurate with their hard-earned credentials. But we all should object when they receive these salaries for working less than half the time of their non-academic peers.
The cost for such sinecures is particularly galling when it is passed on to the rest of the middle class and to taxpayers in states that are struggling to support higher education. Since faculty salaries make up the largest single cost in virtually all college and university budgets (39 percent at Montgomery College), think what it would mean if the public got full value for these dollars.

This is part of the war against any public sector worker and any teachers. The newest trend in the conservative "don't look at the man behind the curtain" tactics. As income inequality increases and one percent of the top one percent gets almost all of the recent gains ordinary people are asked to turn their inchoate feelings of unfairness and their bitterness against someone else.

In this case that "someone else" is the second rung of the academia, the rung on which, by the way, the vast majority of female faculty members may be found. It is those people who work too few hours and have too long vacations. Well, according to this opinion writer (who runs a competing type of educational institution).

So does such faculty work too little for too much money? That is, after all, the argument in this opinion column. Professors should be made to teach much more and have less time off, without any change in their overall pay. Oh, with the exception of the superstars, naturally!

Let's have a thought experiment on all this! Let's consider someone who has the talents and desire to become either a professor in, say, chemistry or biology or to go to medical school. The training in either field takes about the same number of extra years and will leave the person with roughly the same debt.

But the two jobs now offer different packages of hours of work and other conditions. The medical option offers potentially very high pay with high hours of work, the professorial option offers much, much lower pay but with more freedom as to when to work and perhaps how many hours to work altogether.

Now remove the freedom of hours from the professorial option, leave everything else the same and what do you get! Presto! Many fewer entrants into university teaching.

My point is a simple one: Those who believe in the power of markets never seem to believe in that power in the labor markets. If a job is made much less desirable as a package, fewer people will choose to train for that job.

One aspect of teaching receiving much criticism from mostly the conservatives has to do with vacation time. If most Americans, for some weird reason, are not allowed to have time off, how come do teachers get it? This is unfair.

But note the whole package (hours and pay): Even a cursory look at the academic degrees which teaching requires suggests that they are fairly poorly paid, in comparison to the alternatives. Indeed, the pay in those fields matches pay in fields which do not require as much education.

And those vacation times are partly what makes people accept lower pay packages. This is especially true for women who are the main caregivers for their children. Teaching is one of the few fields which allows the kind of work/life balance which only women are supposed to worry about. If that aspect of the jobs is removed what do you think will happen? The pay really is pretty crummy.

That brings me to the real problem in the opinion column: If we wish to determine whether professors are overpaid for their work load, we need to compare like with like and we need to define work properly. Class time is not a good measure for actual work hours unless we decide that actors only work when on stage, performing in front of a live audience.

And it's not correct to compare professors with people who don't have to have doctorate degrees to enter the field. That degree takes time and money and the pay must be enough to compensate for it.

This post is not really about whether people get the right amount of pay for the right amount of compensation, though I do think that people working 80 hours a week are mostly being just placeholders at the end of such weeks and that we should stop thinking that such hours are admirable and not a sign of some pathology or exploitation.

Nope. It's to point out that people react to incentives. If you change the incentives by demanding many more hours of very high-level teaching, you are going to get lower-quality teaching and you are going to get fewer entrants to teaching in general. Academics is not the only game in town for even those with newly minted doctoral degrees, and it has many rivals when we look at the question whether a person enters graduate studies or not.

What happens in the next round if this opinion writer has his way about increasing the teaching loads without any increase in pay?

After some years, colleges and universities cannot find sufficient numbers of qualified applicants for teaching jobs. Either they must raise the salary offer or....? Reduce the teaching load.

Now it could be that the labor markets for academic jobs are malfunctioning or the feudal system might advance to a point where this response would not be forthcoming. But I doubt that. I think people enter the academic occupations fully aware of the fact that the pay is not what they could earn elsewhere. It is the other aspects of the package that attract them. If you change those aspects you change the desirability of the jobs.

Which means that the tax payers might not get away with squeezing more and more teaching from a captive labor force without paying more for it.
---
Recommended extra reading: Robert Farley's take.

Meanwhile, in China. Female Astronauts Must Not Smell!

I thought this was a joke at first:

China has selected two female astronauts among seven candidates for its next manned space mission that will launch between June and August.
Three Chinese astronauts, also known as taikonauts, will be chosen from the candidates to fly aboard the Shenzhou-9 spacecraft that will manually dock with Tiangong-1, an orbiting module of the country's planned space station, and conduct scientific experiments, said Li Wei, deputy designer for spacecraft systems with the China Aerospace and Technology Corporation.
The two female astronauts, whose identity will be released before the launch, were selected from 15 women who must be married and have given birth naturally, Space International magazine under the China Academy of Space Technology said yesterday. They also must have no scars nor body odor.

It's naturally possible that the same selection rules apply to male astronauts, about body odors and such. But the whole piece reeks to me of that women-as-the-Others treatment:

Xu Xianrong, a professor with the General Hospital of the PLA Air Force, said the female astronauts must be married and have given birth naturally because that ensures their body and mental condition are mature enough.

Hilarious...
---
Link thanks to Moonbootica

Hahah! Women Are The Richer Sex

It's even on the cover of the Time Magazine.

You get to be the richer sex by earning less, on average, than the other sex earns, you know. A well-known factoid.

Or as Bryce puts it in the Nation:

This is the heart of her thesis: “Almost 40 percent of U.S. working wives now outearn their husbands, a percentage that has risen steeply in this country and many others.” She adds that “[w]ives are breadwinners or co-earners in about two-thirds of American marriages” and that “[a]lmost 7 percent of wives—nearly 4 million women, up from 1.7 percent in 1967—[are] sole breadwinners.” These are impressive statistics to be sure, but as some have pointed out, the math doesn’t add up to a claim that women are already the richer sex. After all, to flip her numbers around, 60 percent of men are still outearning their wives, a third of married women are still contributing less to their families than their husbands and 93 percent of wives are not sole breadwinners. But Mundy predicts that the time when the balance will tilt toward women is “just around the corner.” “We are entering an era where women, not men, will become the top earners in households,” she says. “We are entering the era in which roles will flip.”

There are several reasons why any flip of the gender roles is not just around the corner, and Bryce discusses several of them in the quoted article:

Women are still concentrated in low-pay occupations and industries, many of the growing female-dominated occupations of the future offer very low pay and women are severely underrepresented among the very highest earners.

Add to that the unchanged division of labor at home (CHILDREN) and the fact that even women with college degrees are over-represented in those fields with relatively low pay and under-represented in the well-paying STEM fields, and the fact that most earnings differences between men and women develop over time and are not visible among young workers, and you become much more skeptical about the idea that women could be the higher-earning sex any time soon. In any country of the world, actually.

These stories are very popular. I hear that Hannah Rosin's book The End of Men will be out in September, and most likely will present the same arguments. Thus, my earlier comments on her work might be relevant here, too. As are my comments on that often-cited study on young women out-earning men in a few places and only when very educated, single and childless.

I'm not arguing with the fact that women are doing better than in the past here. I'm criticizing the odd aspect of these kinds of stories which can leap from women earning roughly 80% of what men earn (when comparing full-time workers only) to predictions about the sky falling, men ending and the world turning into a matriarchy. Or predictions about a complete flip in the gender roles! Whatever these people are drinking I'd like some of it, please.

Yes, indeed, women have bridged the education gender gap in this country and turned it into a reverse gender gap, by a small amount. But all the other bits of the mechanisms which cause average differences in the earnings of men and women are still in place. It is extremely unlikely that the sky will fall or the golden era of matriarchy will dawn.

Never mind all that. Stories like these are click magnets!

They are also very much based on what provoked this representation of women's suffrage:

I am going to read Mundy's book, of course I am. But by the time I have done it we are all talking about something completely different. That's how it goes.

Helen of Troy. Friday's Fun Post.

The Trojan war, caused by the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Troy!

She was, we are told in the myths, the wife of Menelaus, the king of Sparta, but spirited away (either willingly or not) by Paris of Troy, after Aphrodite, the goddess of love, promised him the most beautiful woman in the world as a reward for picking her among all goddesses as the most beautiful. All the Greeks then attacked Troy to get Helen back. Hence the Trojan wars, the trap with the wooden horse and everything else.

Myths are such fun. I've just read two books on the Helen of Troy. She may have been a fertility goddess, she may not have existed at all but she certainly had an impact on Western literature and art. The face that launched a thousand ships!

I've had a theory about Helen's role as the initiator (whether passive or active) of the Trojan wars (whether real or mythical). I consulted the two books on her but found no real mention of my theory, though I'm quite sure that someone else has proposed it before me. Most things have been.

Still, it's a fun theory and goes like this: The Greeks went after Paris and Helen not because she was the most beautiful woman in Greece but because the rule over Sparta belonged to the man who was Helen's husband. By abducting Helen Paris also abducted the kingdom of Sparta. If he could present himself as the husband of Helen he would also have the rule of Sparta.

This is a much more likely theory than the one about Helen's beauty. It is also supported by other parts of the myth, including the myth about Helen's birth.

She is supposed to have been the daughter of Zeus, the boss of the Greek gods, and Leda, the wife of Tyndareus, the king of Sparta. Zeus, in the shape of a swan, either seduced or raped Leda who then laid one or more eggs. Out of the egg(s) hatched Helen, and according to some stories also Clytemnestra and the twins Castor and Pollux.

None of these mythical children are the children of the king of Sparta. But they are the children of the queen of Sparta, Leda. And note that some myths suggest that Helen had full brothers, too.

So why did Menelaus, Helen's husband, become the king of Sparta? Why not Castor or Pollux? Why did the crown of Sparta go to an outsider, the husband of one of its princesses?

The most likely explanation is that the Spartans used the female line to determine inheritance of the crown. A man had to marry the correct princess to become the king of Sparta. That Tyndareus is not Helen's biological father in the myth does not matter if the right to rule was based on Leda being the queen of Sparta. It would then be the husband of her (oldest?) daughter who would be the next ruler.

That the myths assign Zeus as Helen's real father complicates matters, of course. But even if a divine father is preferable to a human one, surely Castor or Pollux would have qualified before Menelaus?

Many aspects of the myth support the idea that the inheritance of city-kingdoms in Greece was once linked to the female line. Even the early abduction of Helen by Theseus fits into the same pattern, and so does the whole idea that a large number of suitors would turn up to compete for Helen's hand:

When it was time for Helen to marry, many kings and princes from around the world came to seek her hand, bringing rich gifts with them, or sent emissaries to do so on their behalf. During the contest, Castor and Pollux had a prominent role in dealing with the suitors, although the final decision was in the hands of Tyndareus.[27] Menelaus, her future husband, did not attend but sent his brother, Agamemnon, to represent him.

This looks comprehensible if the kingdom of Sparta went with Helen. But once that link faded from general consciousness something like Helen's beauty had to take its place, to explain both the large number of suitors and the Trojan war.

Old European fairy tales may reflect a similar early inheritance custom. Just think how very common it is in those tales for the hero to get the princess and half the kingdom. If she was an only child, why not the whole kingdom? Perhaps the hero and the princess were once expected to rule together?

How Feminism Is Covered in The Media. Echidne Thoughts.

Brought to me courtesy of this article last weekend about why there is no new Gloria Steinem in the movement.

Try to get past the fact that the article appeared in a section called "Fashion and Style." Feminism is about fashion and style, you see.

I've written about that placement many times before. Today's topic is slightly different: Feminism is almost always covered by focusing on the people in the movement, their personalities, their names, what they said or say. Who leads the movement? Who should lead the movement? What about those fights between older feminists and younger feminists? What about racism inside the movement, from the first wave to the last?

Then there's the attribution of something a famous feminist has said to the whole movement of feminism. A synecdoche, if you like. Those who hate feminism dig up extreme comments for that purpose, of course. But even more generally the movement is condensed to a few sentences by one woman, picked somewhat arbitrarily.

And essentially all of it, in the United States, is strictly about the domestic feminist movement.

These kinds of stories are also written about other civil rights movements, sure. But I don't think they are equally common. The overall flavor is different. Feminism is covered the way celebrity magazines would cover it or the People magazine, with much stronger focus on personalities and on the problems inside the movement.

There's nothing wrong with discussing the problems inside the movement. That is all good and necessary. Even talking about the individual leaders or followers inside the various waves is good. What I find weird, however, is the relative division between stories which discuss what the movement aims for, what it achieves or does not, and then the insider stories.

What if the labor movement was only discussed in the latter terms? Articles would be about the internal power struggles within the movement, the prejudices (sexism, racism etc.) of its leaders, their personal charisma, the factions inside the movement and so on. Or apply similar thought experiments to anti-racism movements or immigrants rights movements.

These are my thoughts on this topic so far. The term "feminism" gets confused with the term "feminists" and that confusion influences the relative number of stories written on the former and the latter. We get more stories about real and imaginary "feminists" than about "feminism or feminisms," and we get many more stories about the American feminist movement in recent history than about feminist movements in other countries or feminist ideals and goals.

This is Lovely. Activism Works in Idaho!

Remember the Idaho Republican Senator Chuck Winder who compared pregnant women to cows and chickens and used his veterinary knowledge to inform people about abortions for rape victims*? He got lots of publicity for his views!

And what happened next? Winder revealed even more about himself:

Despite ultrasound theater and overwhelming senate support, a mandatory ultrasound bill that would have forced women seeking abortion to pay out-of-pocket for an additional and unnecessary medical expense, while also trying to trick them into visiting crisis pregnancy centers, may not even make it to the House floor for a vote.
The bill became a political hand-grenade after bill sponsor Sen. Chuck Winder admitted that his sole reason for introducing it was to stop women from having abortions by whatever means necessary. Criticism of Winder began to escalate as he used his closing remarks during the senate vote to claim women with "rape issues" might lie to get abortions.
Facing national outrage, Winder then explained that he was merely trying to advocate for a "rape test" to ensure a woman who claimed she was rape was sure she was raped, and wasn't "accidentally terminating" a pregnancy resulting from consensual sex instead.

Do read the whole linked post. It's very giggleworthy.

It also shows that activism works. When lots of women get very angry and demonstrate their anger, politicians decide not to push a particular bill through. At least right now.
----
*I confused him there with the Georgia legislator Terry England. My apologies to both these gentlemen. It was Mr. England who ranted about cows and chickens. Mr. Winder just ranted about pretend-rapes in abortions.

Thanks to Kierra in the comments for setting me right.

The Trayvon Martin Case

I have not written about the case because I have nothing special to add to it but I have of course followed it.

The whole thing is a racist monstrosity, beginning from the parents not been told that their son lies in a morgue despite his cell phone having numbers marked "mom" and "dad." If the police did not have his cell phone, where did it go? The shooter was not arrested or tested for drugs and alcohol though Martin was, and the initial police investigation appears to have been completely biased and one-sided.

In addition to racism the other strands that made this possible are pretty obvious, too. Laws which allow vigilantes like George Zimmerman to cruise neighborhoods legally armed to the teeth and laws which offer him a possible defense (the Stand Your Ground law), however unlikely, for shooting an unarmed teenager.

A Brookings Study on Government-Funded Contraception

This is quite interesting, given all the conservative misplaced furor about private health insurance coverage for contraceptives. The kind which is not paid by the tax payers.

A simulation suggests that access to family planning within the Medicaid program (which covers health care expenses of certain groups of low-income individuals) could save taxpayers quite a bit of money. The study concludes:

The research reviewed in this brief shows that evidence-based pregnancy prevention interventions are public policy trifectas: they generate taxpayer savings, they improve the lives of children and families, and they reduce the incidence of abortion. These cost saving policies are particularly well suited to the current fiscal climate, in which state lawmakers are struggling to balance their budgets and the federal government is grappling with a yawning debt that is projected to increase in the years to come.

Simulations are no better than their basic assumptions, of course. But common sense also suggests that avoiding unplanned pregnancies is a win-win for all concerned. If it also results in net governmental savings, what's not to like?

Ah. There's that thing about paying for someone else's sex life. Limbaugh told us all about that in a context which isn't even about taxpayer funding.

This Is Priceless!

Mitt Romney:

“I keep hearing the president say that he’s responsible for keeping America from going into a Great Depression,” Romney told a crowd at a town hall meeting in Maryland Wednesday. “No, no no. That was President George W. Bush and Hank Paulson that stepped in and kept that from happening.”

The Rape Of Amina Al Filali

She was a sixteen-year-old Moroccan girl who was raped at knife point and then made to marry her rapist:

Amina Al Filali, 16, drank rat poison last week in Larache, near the city of Tangiers after being severely beaten during a forced marriage to her rapist.
The girl's rapist had sought to escape prison by invoking an article of the penal code that he claimed would exonerate him if the rape victim was his wife.
Activist Abadila Maaelaynine wrote on the social network site Twitter:  "Amina, 16, was triply violated, by her rapist, by tradition, and by Article 475 of the Moroccan law."
An online petition has been started and protests are planned for Saturday against a law branded by campaigners as an "embarrassment".

It is good that the law might be changed. It is sad that Amina had to die for that to happen.

Laws of this type have existed in the past in many societies. Their point has been to fix the disorder a rape causes for all concerned except the woman/girl who was raped: The man doesn't have to be punished, the family of the victim hasn't lost its honor by having a deflowered unmarried daughter whom nobody else might now want to marry.

The extreme outcome of such laws is to sentence a victim to be permanently available to a sadistic torturer. Sadly, this was the case here.

Fun in Pro-Choice Politics

The Facebook pages of forced-birther politicians still get questions asking for advice on menstrual problems and such, what with those guys' great desire to provide women with useful reproductive information. Texas governor Rick Perry is the most recent oracle women approach with their questions.

And this is a really fun idea: Knit a uterus and send it to a politician who wants to control uteri but doesn't happen to own one himself! Not sure what to send to those forced birth politicians who already have a uterus.

But expanding on that idea: You can also crochet, and patterns are provided. But why not embroider or quilt? Realistic-looking embryos could be embroidered on the surface of the womb or if it is made like a pocket the embryo could be the happy find an inquiring finger locates there! You could do a menstruating uterus, too, by using fabric paints and such.

And what about a gigantic sleeping pouch, in the shape of the uterus? The whole Congress-critter could fit inside it and finally we would have peace.

Meanwhile, in Idaho. Or What Forced Birthers Really Think About Women.

Idaho state senator Chuck Winder (R-Boise) is a busy forced-birth bee! First he proposed a bill, passed in the Idaho Senate, which requires that women seeking abortion must have two medically unnecessary ultra-sounds, not just one! And the first one will have to be at a crisis pregnancy center.

Then this:

In his closing debate in favor of SB 1387, Sen. Chuck Winder, R-Boise, said, “This bill does not require a trans-vaginal exam. … It leaves that up to the patient and the physician to make that determination.” He said, “Rape and incest was used as a reason to oppose this. I would hope that when a woman goes in to a physician with a rape issue, that physician will indeed ask her about perhaps her marriage, was this pregnancy caused by normal relations in a marriage or was it truly caused by a rape. I assume that's part of the counseling that goes on.”

Mmm. I guess Sen. Winder is another expert in women's health issues, given that he has such deep and meaningful ideas about what happens after a woman is raped.

How About That Health Insurance?

Paul Krugman links to a study which shows a big drop on the number of people who have health insurance from their employers. Most of that is due to the loss of jobs in a recession, but the drop also shows the vulnerability of a system which is based on employment. As Krugman notes:

What this says is that the system that has provided workable insurance coverage to many (but not enough) Americans is coming apart at the seams. And this in turn means that if health reform goes down, we’re going to be looking at a wave of misery spreading across the land.

The employment-based aspect of health insurance has never been as generous to those who have jobs with lower pay. But if firms can pick and choose the way they can now, we are all going to be at the mercy of the employers' moral and other values when it comes to health insurance.

The market-based alternatives to job-linked group plans are more expensive because they are not group plans and because the sellers of those have been able to exclude people or charge higher premia based on existing health problems. Combine that with the need for such policies being greater for the lower earners (both because firms are less likely to offer health insurance in such jobs and because small firms, also less likely to afford health insurance, have more low-pay employees), and you get a situation where the feasible alternative for many working families is not to buy insurance at all, assuming that they don't qualify for Medicaid.

Housekeeping Post

About this blog, not about the Snakepit Inc. It has a few problems.

You may have already noticed that the only thing I like to do is think and write. To decide what to do about all this makes me grit my fangs and pretend that the problems aren't there.

But they are:

First, Blogger is doing weird stuff which make the comments on this blog (and other blogs which use blogspot) not appear for those of you who read it from outside the US. The fix, kindly provided by Shakesville, and passed on by a Guest here, can be found in this post.

Second, several of you have had comments problems even without that extra complication. After some discussions, I have found that Echo (for which I pay about fifteen dollars each month) is not supported anymore! So we appear to be on our own with any problems that will crop up. And there will be more of them as time passes, naturally.

Third, there is the old problem with links to my archives. When Blogger changed the system of archiving and forced me to change the archives to weekly ones all the old links elsewhere to this blog are only approximately right because they are to the monthly archives. It's possible to find the correct link because it is somewhere near that overall link to the month. But I have found no way to fix that link problem.

The possible solutions to the more recent problems:
1. To migrate the blog out. I don't want to do it for the reason Melissa mentions in the post above.
2. To stay with blogspot, even given the hassle, and to get a new commenting system. The problem here is how to retain the old comments for the readers. I can archive them myself but I want them to be available more generally.
3. Duh. To continue procrastination the way I usually do.

My apologies for the hassles.

A Conservative Man Advises Women About Men

If you have ever cruised the misogyny sites you get a pretty good idea how woman-hating men want women to be: They must kowtow to The Man, they must never put on weight, they must not talk much at all, they must stay at home and clean house and cook (but if they do they are still sucking off the man like a leech).

They must have their vaginas (and mouths) always available for the men who own them but other men must not have access to the said vaginas. And even then they are still horrible bitches and fat slags who only want the Alpha Males when the Omega Males who want to be treated as alpha males demand equal vaginal rights. But most of all women are seen as horrible on those sites. Nothing women could do will ever alter that.

Given this background, I was somewhat surprised to see a bowdlerized version of all this on a conservative site as an advice column on how women should behave if they want to date a man or get married to one.

The column is much gentler than the hate sites, almost humorous, but it is based on the same extreme gender caricatures. Women are emotional wrecks who bubble and bubble and bubble, men are silent and simple lords of the universe who just want to get laid and obeyed. Men do not have emotions! But women: Remember not to try to manipulate those nonexistent emotions of men! And so on and so on.

It's that Mars/Venus bullshit with some slight updating. Here's one snippet:

Men are not as comfortable with their emotions as women. Typically, we don’t use our emotions as often or as fully as women, we don’t get in as many emotional situations, and we feel extremely uncomfortable with the idea of crying or getting choked up.
So, ramped-up drama can take a much harder toll on men than women. For example, men have it drilled into them from the time they’re young that they’re supposed to protect women. So, if a man says something that makes a woman cry, it may be no big deal for her. Depending on their mental state, there are a lot of women who can break into tears if a waiter brings them the wrong kind of salad dressing. But to a man, a woman crying over something he did means that he FAILED as a man to protect her and worse yet, he did the opposite and inflicted pain on someone he cares about.

This means that women are not allowed to cry. It reflects badly on a man, you see, and then he won't want to protect the woman or provide for her!

I had to read the whole column several times, what with being a feminazi and all, until I realized that this is not an advice column on romance, not even a humorous one.

This is a job application column where women can look for the job of a wingnut wife. In Wingnuttia men protect women and provide for them, in exchange for something which this column leaves undefined. But once I realized that this is about a job the column started making sense. How to dress for the job interview, how to deal with the boss. That there is no advice for the boss goes without saying. He is not applying for the job.

Some of the comments are lots of fun, too, as you might expect. There's general agreement that feminists have caused all the sexual and marital problems of wingnuts, and that men are at least as oppressed as women, most likely more so. That, too, sounds a lot like those misogynistic sites.

Then there are the people commenting-as-female who agree that men are by far the better gender and that they themselves have never felt comfortable with those odd creatures called women. These comments always leave me dizzy because other people won't give the honorary-man-women an out when it comes to this kind of mud-slinging on a whole gender. However hard they try to earn that. Because the advice is to all women, my dears.

It's sadly true that columns like this one are not unheard of on the other side of the political aisle, though they tend not to be quite as misogynistic. It is equally sad and true that we don't get many (if any) columns where a woman tells men how they should act to find a woman to date or marry.

Is there then no advice for lonely heterosexual men? Sure. You can find several sites on the net which tell men how they can cheat women into going to bed with them without getting at all emotionally entangled while doing that.

That's a little odd. All the advice we are offered tends to have a whiff of woman-hating in it!

The gender caricatures in these kinds of pieces are offensive, and not only to women. It's shocking how much misandry is hidden inside the basic story (men are simple and strong but fall apart if a woman cries) and how acceptable it appears to be as long as the gender dominance hierarchies are not threatened.

It's not that I mind silly humorous-intended pieces of the sexes though everything those say will fail to apply to the large majority of individual relationships and in that sense turn out to be sexist. What I mind is the opportunity they give for those little stabs of loathing, aimed at half the humanity, really, and the idea that the humor somehow makes them OK.