On The One Percent Wives. Finally, My Response To Elizabeth Wurtzel.

Not that she probably even knows I'm alive and not that this is really a response to the arguments she makes though it IS about those arguments.

Wurtzel wrote a very angry Atlantic Monthly article in early June on how choice feminism has failed women and how the educated stay-at-home-wives are enabling the war on women.  She's not treading untouched ground;  Linda Hirshman  has written  about this extensively.

It took me this long to write my response because I had to go from the questions to the deep theory, doodled on pieces of paper all around the house, and then all the way back to a simple way of looking at this theory.  And here it is:

Let's take a comment or two from Wurtzel's article:

I have to admit that when I meet a woman who I know is a graduate of, say, Princeton -- one who has read The Second Sex and therefore ought to know better -- but is still a full-time wife, I feel betrayed. I'm not much of a moralist -- I have absolutely no right to be -- but in the interest of doing what's right both for me personally and for women generally, I have been strict with myself about earning my keep. For the longest time I would not date anyone who would now be called a one-percenter because money and power are such a potent combination, and if I am going to be bossed around, I don't want that to be the reason. When it's come up, I have chosen not to get married. Over and over again, I have opted for my integrity and independence over what was easy or obvious. And I am happy. I don't want everyone to live like me, but I do expect educated and able-bodied women to be holding their own in the world of work.


....

To be a stay-at-home mom is a privilege, and most of the housewives I have ever met -- none of whom do anything around the house -- live in New York City and Los Angeles, far from Peoria. Only in these major metropolises are there the kinds of jobs in finance and entertainment that allow for a family to live luxe on a single income. In any case, having forgotten everything but the lotus position, these women are the reason their husbands think all women are dumb, and I don't blame them. As it happens, fewer than 5 percent of the CEO's of Fortune 500 companies, 16 percent of corporate executives, and 17 percent of law partners are female. The men, the husbands of the 1 percent, are on trading floors or in office complexes with other men all day, and to the extent that they see anyone who isn't male it's pretty much just secretaries and assistants. And they go home to...whatever. What are they supposed to think? They pay gargantuan American Express bills and don't know why or what for. Then they give money to Mitt Romney.

Why does Wurtzel feel betrayed?  Could it be because she took one for the team by choosing a certain lifestyle and she sees other women reaping the benefits of feminism but then failing the "team" women?

I think so.  We need to look much deeper to understand her feelings of anger, and  ---  lo and behold!  ---  what do we find lurking in that deep dark well?

Sexism, believe it or not, and it's not Wurtzel who is guilty of it (though she is guilty of rudeness).  The sexism is the reason why Wurtzel feels betrayed and why stories about women dropping out of the labor force, whether made-up or real, give many feminists heartburn or even a cold fist of fear in the stomach.*

That sexism works like this:  Men are almost always judged as individuals.  Women, in many, many cases, are judged as spoonfuls of that amorphous mass of womanhood.  As an example, a woman applying for a job or a promotion is not judged solely on the basis of her education and experience and so on but also on the basis of her gender.  The last type of judgement can be unconscious but it certainly happens.

This means that her chances will crucially depend on the job evaluator's own views on how women, on average, react to various life changes, how ambitious women, as a class, are and how reliable workers women, as a class are.

The more educated women drop out of the labor force early, the harder getting ahead will be for other educated women.  Because the signal they carry by default, being a woman, is changing its contents towards something less advantageous in a job setting.

Am I making this at all clear?  Because women are not judged as individuals, what other women do matters to all women.  It affects our "reputation" and we will end up meeting that "reputation" one day.

This, I believe, is behind Wurtzel's feelings of betrayal.  As long as sexism of this type exists towards women (judging all women at least partly on the basis of stereotypes about "the average" woman), those individual choices by individual women will affect, at least marginally, the well-being of "women as a class."

To give you an extreme example, take medical schools.  Currently the intake to medical schools is roughly equally split between men and women but there was a time where those schools put maximum quotas on the numbers of female students they would accept.

This was justified on the basis of women's child-rearing duties and the expectation that married women would stay at home.  Thus, the medical education (an expensive one) they were given were regarded as wasted.  Medical schools guarded their backs by limiting the number of these risky women they would accept as students.

That's long ago, of course.  But ask yourself this question:  Suppose that suddenly something like half of all graduating female physicians decided to drop out.  Given that over 80% of the costs of a medical education are subsidized by the society (mostly by Medicare)  how long do you think it would be before there would be loud calls to limit the numbers of women who enter medical training?

Now consider the impact of that on young women wishing to become physicians.  They would essentially face a higher entry threshold than young men.  They would somehow have to try to prove that they were serious about a career in medicine.  But how do you prove something like that?  The most likely outcome would be gender-based discrimination in intake.

I spent so much time on the above explanation because Wurtzel's arguments are inflammatory (the stay-at-home wives of the One Percent  are "dumb") and it helps to understand what is valid about her anger.

What about the solution, then?  My preferred solution is for more men to take on the role as stay-at-home-parents and for more men to quit working if the partnership allows that.  Should this happen (yeah, I know pigs don't fly), the gender signal would stop harming women.  Gender would no longer predict much about any one worker's likelihood of quitting or of being more family-centered or less ambitious.

See how it is all a dance of different types of sexism, all based on the idea that women are interchangeable toasters or microwave ovens?

Wurtzel's second point  is about the failures of choice feminism.  I have written about those failures in the past, from several different angles, and I agree with Wurtzel about choice feminism being a weird commercialized and watered-down feminism.  Indeed, a fundamentalist woman once told me that she is a feminist because she has chosen to subjugate herself to her husband.

There's nothing left of feminism if we travel all the way down that route.  But of course choice feminism does offer a certain kind of minimal feminism:  At least women are not directly or legally forced into certain channels.  Though the cultural norms and pressures certainly influence those "choices."

The goal of feminism, to me, is not ultimately defined by "choice" but by equal opportunities to all individuals irrespective of their gender, given their talents etcetera and by equal valuation of traditionally male and female areas of activity.   Although we are closer to reaching the public sphere aspects of the first goal (though we are certainly not there yet),  we haven't  even started on  the second goal.  And no, praising motherhood in the abstract and having a special day for mothers is not equal valuation of those traditionally female tasks of child-care and family management.

I haven't read the many comments attached to Wurzel's article because I've lost my hazmat suit and don't want to get all irate and grumpy.  But understanding what lies behind her arguments could take us a step forwards.  It's really all about sexism, gender-based work roles and the application of that "generic woman" label to almost all women.

What angers me about this conversation is that most of the anger should be aimed at that Monster Of Sexism.  That's what makes us all dependent on other women's behavior.  That's what you see when some individual woman fails in an endeavor and this failure is then used to teach us something about all women.  We are like horses harnessed to pull the same carriage and any one horse pulling away will hurt all the other horses.
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This could provide a further reason for those feelings.

A Guest Post by Anna: A Feminist Literary Canon, Part Four: 1950-1966

Echidne's Note:  This series will continue in August.  For earlier posts in this series, go back to Part Three which links to the first two posts.

Valerie Saiving Goldstein (1921-1992) was a feminist theologian. She is best known for "The Human Situation: A Feminine View"  (1960), in which she criticized the Christian focus on pride as a sin, noting that many women struggle much more with feelings of self-doubt. She noted that much of Christian theology was written by men and based on male experience, and might not apply to women, and that women would have to write out their own theology. Her essay had a strong influence on other feminist theologians. Mary Daly for example, cited her in her own book The Church and the Second Sex, while Judith Plaskow, a Jewish theologian, both published a dissertation on Saiving's essay (entitled “Sex, Sin and Grace: Women’s Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich”) and reproduced the 1960 article in her own anthology Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion.

"The Human Situation: A Feminine View” can be read in its entirety here

Betty Friedan (February 4, 1921 - February 4, 2006) was a leading feminist activist. Her best-known written book is The Feminine Mystique (1963), which is widely credited with sparking the beginning of the second-wave feminist movement in the United States.

In it she criticized the fact that women were encouraged to see housewifery as a career, and declared that women needed a purpose in life separate from their children and husbands. She also praised what we would now consider the first wave of feminism, which won the vote for women, and decried how popular culture had made feminism seem ridiculous and cold-hearted, or alternately insisted that all battles for women had been won.

The Feminine Mystique was extremely influential in the feminist movement, although it was criticized by later waves of feminism for its focus on upper-class housewives to the exclusion of the problems of other women. Still, the fact that most women were not fulfilled by full-time housework and should not be ashamed of their career dreams was a true and important point.  The Feminine Mystique  is also criticized for its homophobia – Friedan believed that homosexuality was at least in part caused by overbearing mothers – but it should be noted that this was an entirely mainstream idea at the time.

Friedan is also noted for co-writing"The National Organization for Women's Statement of Purpose" (1966) with feminist and civil rights activist Pauli Murray (1910-1985). Murray and Friedan both helped found the organization and Friedan was its first president. "The National Organization for Women's Statement of Purpose" is notable for its idealism; it declared that the goal of the National Organization for Women was “to take action to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now, exercising all the privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men,” and elaborated that women should have equal rights and responsibilities with men in all fields.

Chapter 1 of  The Feminine Mystique  can be read in its entirety here.

Chapter 2 of  The Feminine Mystique  can be read in its entirety here.

The“National Organization for Women's Statement of Purpose” can be read in its entirety here.

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (1960-1970s) The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee emerged from a series of student meetings held by civil rights activist Ella Baker in 1960. The “Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Position Paper: Women in the Movement” (1964), was written and submitted anonymously at the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee meeting in Waveland, Mississippi. It denounced the sexism of the Committee and called for the civil rights movement to “start the slow process of changing values and ideas so that all of us gradually come to understand that this is no more a man's world than it is a white world.”

The “Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Position Paper: Women in the Movement” can be read in its entirety here.

Casey Hayden (born Sandra Cason) and Mary King (birthdate unknown, both still alive) are left-wing activists. Their most noted feminist writing is “Sex and Caste – A Kind of Memo” (1965) which was based on their experiences as Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee volunteers. It is widely regarded as one of the first documents of the emerging second-wave feminist movement. In it they described and denounced the sexism of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which was common in left-wing movements at the time, and woke many women up to the fact that while they were ostensibly working for freedom and justice, they themselves were being oppressed.
“Sex and Caste – A Kind of Memo” can be read in its entirety here.

A Fun Colbert Show

From June 28, though he doesn't refer to Aaron Sorkin's views on women and such.  But it's priceless on the individual mandate decision.

A Neat Article on Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And A Neat Post on Nora Ephron.

The first can be found here.  It addresses her views on the individual mandate decision.

The second is by Katha Pollitt.

Books I Like. Laurie King's Folly

This might be a new occasional series?  About books that have had an impact on us or about books which are just really fun to read.  Such as Terry Pratchett's Disk World books.

Laurie King is a mystery writer who writes two types of books.  She's currently mostly writing about an imaginary Sherlock Holmes married to a woman some thirty/forty years younger.  They sleuth together.  Her other books (which seem to have dried out) are more current and, to me, more interesting.

I liked Folly.  It's not great literature but it's a good description of someone suffering from severe nervous exhaustion, depression and anxiety, and it's about the healing powers of nature, physical work and solitude.  It's also about how to take back one's right to self-determination which is also healing.  Add to that the fact that it's a thriller and you might like to take it to the beach.

Audacity and Modesty?

Our good friend David Brooks has written a not-so-awful column today.  Well, not-so-awful on the Brooks scale.  It's still titled "Modesty and Audacity,"  as if we were all Victorians, and it contains several errors.  It's also an ode to Justice Roberts.

Why am I trying to be nice here?

Sure, fee-for-service gives health care practitioners pretty bad incentives, as he points out.  But it's not the only remuneration system being used and it, alone, cannot explain the high health care costs.

And then Brooks writes this:

Liberals tend to argue that major structural changes can be made within the framework of Obamacare. Republicans tend to believe that the perverse incentives can only be corrected if we repeal Obamacare and move to a defined-benefit plan — if we get rid of the employer tax credit and give people subsidies to select their own plans within regulated markets.

I'm not sure that those descriptions correctly describe the opinions of "liberals" and "Republicans" (an odd pair to compare, by the way, as "Democrats" would have paired better with "Republicans" or "conservatives" with "liberals").   Never mind that.

Why is it so urgent to get rid of the employer tax credit?  Who would be giving those subsidies to people to select their own plans?   The evil government????  And how long would such subsidies exist if Republicans were in power? 

Much is wrong with the current system which ties health insurance to employment:   It leaves workers in firms which don't offer health insurance benefits  uncovered and forces them into the much more expensive individual policies market  and it cherry-picks because those able to work are at least fit enough to be able to work.

That doesn't seem to be Brooks' gripe, though.  It looks to me like he wants people to get paid less (which is the real impact of what he proposes, unless the subsidies are carefully tailored to exactly equal the lost tax credits which is pretty unlikely, given that we are talking Republican here).

The idea that people could take their subsides and shop, carefully, for a policy in regulated markets sounds quite nice at first glance.  But then it starts smelling like school vouchers!  And then I remember that Republicans are opposed to regulated markets!   And of course "consumer choice" is a very tricky kettle of fish in health care where consumers are unusually uninformed.  Offer them choices between this dollar amount of deductibles plus this coinsurance rate and these limitations on in-patient days and these caps on lifetime use!   Remember how well people chose their mortgages in the financial markets crisis?

For that proposal to work, the market regulation would have to be extraordinary, with guard dogs watching what the industry is actually doing and stepping in, whenever necessary.  That, plus the fuzziness about who would get that health care voucher in the first place colors me very skeptical.

Finally, the Republicans wouldn't do those things if they killed "Obamacare".  They'd just saddle their horses and ride into the sunset of the Wild West insurance markets.  We all know that.

All Dressed Up And Nowhere To Go. Thoughts on the SCOTUS Individual Mandate Decision.

Some very funny responses to the Supreme Court's Decision to uphold the individual mandate in the new health care law.  By people who don't like "Obamacare."  The idea that moving to Canada would be a good retaliatory tactic is giggle-worthy, given that Canada has a single-payer system.  Moving there for this reason is like jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

But of course it's true that few people are truly delighted about the individual mandate provision.  Those who prefer the single-payer system don't want to be forced to hand out loot to the insurance companies, for instance.  At the same time,  the individual mandate is an essential pillar of the whole law.  Without it the structure would collapse.

Or put in other terms:  We cannot have the no-pre-existing-condition-exclusions without the individual mandate because dropping the latter would mean that for many the optimal strategy might be to wait until one is sick before seeking insurance.   That is especially the case with the kinds of common policies where the patient is responsible for most routine care because of a largish yearly deductible.  Why be insured until one expects to spend more than the routine amounts? 

Not everyone would act on the basis of that calculus but it is the rational one, sadly.

The problem from the beginning has been this weird attempt at a compromise between a private sector based system and a single-payer system.  Once that compromise was created we were stuck with the individual mandate.  Either that, or the whole health care reform would have crumbled.

In an odd way Justice Roberts' justification mirrors that weird compromise because it uses the government's power to tax.  Of course taxes are exactly the way single-payer health care systems get most of their funding.

What's On Television?

Two pieces worth reading about the television and the recent "sexist-guy" dramas.  The first one is about Mad Men, Aaron Sorkin and his show The Newsroom.  Do read to the end of it and then read the  Sarah Nicole Pricket's piece it refers to.

The second one is about Charlie Sheen's Anger Management.  His name is almost enough to guarantee misogyny in this new series.

Television isn't all that bad.  Just making a note of its odd desire to give enough space to sexist a**holes.  Because giving that space to them requires, by definition, that we are giving space to seeing them in action.  And that requires the people who get the sexism done on them to be in that space, too.

Today's Shallow Thought: Circular Fashions

Based on reading fashion magazines at the hairdresser's today.  Fashion is circular so you should probably never throw your old-but-OK clothes away.  They will be the dernier cri once again.  In the meantime, however,  if you dare to wear them you are the lowest of the low.

Case in point:  Very pale blue jeans with narrow legs and a high waist, the 1980s style.   Was it only last year I read how gross such things are, how absolutely necessary it is to chuck them?  Now you can buy a pair for 275 smackers.  I swear.

Fashions have several explanations, ranging from psychological to economic.  The latter is mostly about encouraging people to buy new clothes when they are not needed, from an objective point of view.   To assure that, fashion tends to shift from one extreme to another, within a period of few years, to guarantee that an almost complete overhaul of the closet is required.

What's intriguing about fashion is the way it uses a form of social stigma to encourage adherence to its dictates.  To be out of fashion is bad.  A bit like being shunned in the Amish communities.

If you take fashions too seriously, of course.  They can also be fun.  Now carefully stow away all your low-waist boot-leg jeans.   For the future.

Nora Ephron RIP

Screenwriter and journalist Nora Ephron died yesterday. 



An interesting tribute to her includes this bit:

Two years ago, I sat next to Nora at dinner and we talked about the difficulty of women making films. I had to pinch myself. I was sitting next to the woman who had defined for me the idea that women who didn’t use beauty or sex to define value, could, in spite of so much evidence to the contrary, be successful. Smart. Funny. Funny trumped it all, because to me, if it wasn’t smart, it wasn’t ever going to be funny. Still, that night she shared some hard truths including the insight that being Queen of the Hill was not all it was cracked up to be. There was a film she’d always wanted to do, she explained, but she could not raise financing. She’d tried for years. Decades. Wrap your head around this: Nora Ephron couldn’t make the movie she longed to make. The excuse she was given over and over again was that women’s projects didn’t sell well internationally to the mostly male audiences who consumed action films. Swathes of young men don’t need to understand English or nuance or cultural tics when the screen is full of warriors battling giant robots, or aliens, or dinosaurs, or rogue waves.


We could question the intelligence of an industry that doesn’t seem to appreciate the fact that generations of movie viewers have consumed Casablanca, Philadelphia Story and Annie Hall in every form from the Million Dollar Movie (pulling in its Maxwell House millions in advertising) to VHS cartridges, to CDs, and now as downloads. We could try to discuss with a minimum of chest beating, the ethics of exporting, in large doses and as the largest proportion of the art, the lowest possible quality of material designed only to raise the highest possible level of blood pressure in its audience. We could talk about data that proves that while treated like a fringe minority, the demographic of women over 40 is the largest, richest segment of an affluent, culture-consuming population. But even if we believe in the economics of action films, how does one explain that Wes Anderson (Royal Tannenbaums, Rushmore, Life Aquatic), Spike Jonz (Adaptation, Being John Malkovitch), Clint Eastwood (Gran Torino, Bridges of Madison County) and a dozen other boy directors get funding to create whatever they want to make, year after year. Can you imagine an audience of young men in Saudi Arabia grasping the nuance of Susan Orleans dealing with Chris Cooper’s toothless orchid grower in Adaptation? Does this make economic sense? Nora Ephron made Sleepless in Seattle, for god’s sake. She wrote When Harry Met Sally. Her movies have, on average, made hundreds of millions of dollars. Hundreds of millions more, in fact, than Adaptation or Royal Tenenbaums, And, like Casablanca, her films will almost certainly continue their return on investment for generations long after we’re gone.

She was frustrated. She didn’t understand it either. And I thought as I sat there, bowled over by her clear, candid talk from the top of the mountain, Well, you’re Nora Ephron. You’ve got connections and power. You’ve got time on your side. I’ll wait. You’ll figure it out. I didn’t know that she didn’t have time.

On the other hand, the  Christian Science Monitor  argues  that she had the rare, crowd-pleasing ability to mix humor and feminism.  That headline requires more dissecting than I have time right now because I  have to go out and grumpily wave my armpit hair in honor of Ephron.

But she was certainly a very successful screenwriter and the difficulties she faced look to me like an industry in deep trouble when it comes to getting women to watch their movies.  Which they don't seem to desire, that much.

The Grunt-O-Meter In Women's Tennis

Such fun.  The authorities are planning to install a grunt-o-meter in women's tennis and to make too loud grunts punishable crimes.  This is, of course,  caused by fan reactions.   Fans don't like the loud grunts, at least when they are emitted by the ladies.

My first reaction to these news was to ask whether a similar grunt-o-meter would be used in men's tennis.  The answer appears to be negative:

The criticism leveled at women has caused some to point out that male players also grunt — some quite loudly. The issue is not perceived to be a problem on the ATP World Tour and has not been raised, according to ATP spokeswoman Kate Gordon.
"The women are definitely louder and more abrasive," Navratilova said.

Is there going to be an abrasiveness meter, too?  Why not use the grunt-o-meter in men's games, too, before deciding that grunting is not a problem for them?

There are several theories about why some female tennis players grunt.   Those range from "habit" to "distracting the opposition" to "eliciting maximum power."

Whatever the case, if grunts truly are so objectionable to the audience, why not simply use the grunt-o-meter in all tennis games, not just women's games?   That would achieve the same outcome and would not come across as sexist.

The Texas GOP 2012 Platform

Courtesy of Gromit, I spent a fun few minutes reading through this (pdf).  It's a description of the dream world of Texas Republicans.  Sadly, that coincides with a description of a nightmare world for me.

You can guess most of its contents, I bet:  No abortions, no taxes, no Environmental Protection Agency,  hidden guns should be quite legal and so on.  But a few things are so weird that they are worth special attention.

Like this:

Supporting Motherhood ― We strongly support women who choose to devote their lives to their families and raising their children. We recognize their sacrifice and deplore the liberal assault on the family.

How, exactly, do the Texas Republicans support stay-at-home-mothers?  Do they get something from the party?  Like financial support?  What if they are poor mothers and can't afford to stay at home?

The point, of course, is that the Texas Republican Party does shit-all to support those women.  And note that motherhood is defined as applying to only those mothers who don't work for money.

Then there's that "liberal assault" on the family.   As if liberals everywhere were demanding hidden carry provisions to hunt out traditional mothers or something similar.

That bit was just funny.  This one, about education, is frightening:

Early Childhood Development – We believe that parents are best suited to train their children in their early development and oppose mandatory pre-school and Kindergarten. We urge Congress to repeal government- sponsored programs that deal with early childhood development.

Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

The Texas Republican Party is anti-education.  The reference to those government-sponsored programs means that poor children should get no extra help.  The reference to opposing any critical thinking skills!  Because such skills would challenge the student's fixed beliefs and undermine parental authority!

I can't get over that.  If the student's fixed beliefs cannot take any challenging, then they are not that good, to begin with.

But more importantly, imagine a country that would do what the Texas Republican Party advocates.  There would be no inventions, no innovations, no change in anything.   People would be sheep.

The Bee Hive of Washington Post

This is a hilarious lesson on how to write about women for the Washington Post and other mainstream places (coughMaureenDowdcough).   The successful female writer in those places bashes women.  That's to guarantee objectivity, you see.

Or so I believe.  In any case, Petula Dvorak discusses the University of Virginia debacle from a fresh new angle!  Given that the ouster of the current president, Helen E. Dragas, is a powerful woman and the current president, Teresa Sullivan,  is a powerful woman, too, could it be that what we are really witnessing here is the "Queen Bee Syndrome?"

It is difficult to understand exactly why Dragas called for Sullivan’s resignation. The best we got was “philosophical differences” and a charge that she wasn't moving fast enough on a vision for the university’s future, in her two years there.
That’s why the Queen Bee scenario seems to make so much sense here. It is the classic archetype of the female leader, the lone woman who has succeeded but slams the doors on the sisters behind her. She wants no other woman to share her spotlight. Just about any woman I know has had one of these female bosses. Do you remember the Bee who stung you?
According to a 2010 study by the Workplace Bullying Institute, the Queen Bee is still buzzing over cubicles everywhere. Female bosses who bully their underlings target other women 80 percent of the time, according to the study.
“In 2007, the woman-on-woman bullying prevalence was 71 percent. Now it is 80 percent. Looks like the American workplace is growing ever more toxic for women, at the hands of women,” the study said.

Let me get this right.  When a powerful man ousts another powerful man we are looking at the Harem Syndrome?  The Lone Alpha Male Syndrome?  I can't think of a good name for that very common syndrome but you get the point.  We don't ask whether men oust each other for gendered reasons.

Then to that 2010 survey (not a study but a survey):  It didn't cover just female-on-female bullying but bullying by everyone.  Among the findings:

    •    35% of workers have experienced bullying firsthand (37% in 2007, given the MOE, essentially equivalent)
    •    62% of bullies are men; 58% of targets are women
    •    Women bullies target women in 80% of cases
    •    Bullying is 4X more prevalent than illegal harassment (2007)
    •    The majority (68%) of bullying is same-gender harassment





 And as a picture (where blue is men and yellow is women):

 I haven't looked at the survey in detail, but one important variable which should be controlled for  (and probably has not been) is the extent of possible bullying.  Most bullying isn't going up in the organizational chart, for obvious reasons.  To the extent that it's behavior by bosses then the gender composition of the people under the bullying boss in the organization matters a lot.

If, for instance, women bosses supervise more women than men then we are going to find that a general bully would bully more women, not because she chooses to do that but because that's what is available for her to bully.  It could also be the case that a female bully would be more hesitant to bully men because of the residues of traditional male power.

Whatever.  The point to be gleaned from that survey is that men are probably more likely to be bullies than women, and we still have no neat term such as "The Queen Bee Syndrome" for the bullying men.

Now to the hilarity in the WaPo piece!  After doing all this prep-work, what does Dvorak do next?

She performs a neat 180 degree turn!

But hold on. Another study released just this month and written about by our leadership columnist Jena McGregor said that Queen Bees are a dying breed, that the myth of woman-on-woman scheming and backstabbing in the workplace is on the wane.
A nonprofit research group called Catalyst found that women are more likely to be workplace mentors. In its study, 65 percent of women who received career development support are helping others get ahead compared with 56 percent of men. Meanwhile, 73 percent of the women developing new talent are developing women, compared with only 30 percent of men, according to the study.
As more women join the ranks of upper management, the workplace becomes less of the the winner-takes-all crucible that helped create the Queen Bee. On campus, the woman-versus-woman clash is not so important.
“I don't see this as a Queen Bee situation, no,” said Sharon Davie, the director of the University of Virginia Women’s Center.
Davie said the only way that gender plays a role in this issue is that having a female president at a university that was once known for its exclusion — in 1969, the Board of Visitors only allowed “qualified student wives and daughters of staff members” to attend class — shows amazing strides in diversity. But today, Sullivan is a great leader, not a great female leader.
“Terry Sullivan is a great leader, but not because she is a woman,” Davie said.

What a wonderful pattern!  Load all the queen bee crap in the top part of the article and then wash your hands of it in the bottom part of the article!

Mmm.   I don't think women are any less likely to be bullies than men, by the way, in the sense of being morally superior.  Bullying is a human sin.  But we expect women to be nicer, don't we?  And those who speak about "the queen bee syndrome" seldom put it into the context where it would prevail:  An organization willing to have one woman on top, one woman on the panel, one woman as op-ed writer and so on.

When you frame the competition like that you will get in-fighting among the group under maximum quotas.

But none of this applies to the University of Virginia case.  As far as I can tell none of that is about gender at all.

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Added later:  Sullivan has been reinstated as the president of the University of Virginia.

Concern Trolling?

Do you think the New York Times is testing Campbell Brown for a permanent slot in their opinionator stables?   Two pieces in a very short period of time....

In any case, the most recent one is all about Planned Parenthood being part of the Democratic Party and that this is why the Republicans try so very hard to slaughter it.  A neat idea would be to ask what would happen to Planned Parenthood if it did try to work with the few pro-choice Republicans.

It would still be slaughtered whenever Republicans are in power.  So the logical choice for Planned Parenthood is to try to make sure that the Democrats are in power.  This has nothing to do with anything but political pragmatism.

Or put in other terms, Campbell Brown is engaging in concern trolling.

Postcards from the US Economy. Wish You Were Here?

These statistics are worth a look (All of the fifty).  Corporate profits are thriving, salaries and wages not so much.  Yet what we keep hearing all the time is that firms need more help, that they should not have to face uncertainty.  The latter despite the fact that all Econ101 courses teach us that entrepreneurs get paid a profit mostly because they do face that uncertainty.

The economic theories of income distribution are out of favor, these days.  Still, it's useful to remember that the economic cakes is cut in two major slices:  one goes to capital and one goes to labor. 

Make up your own theories about what is happening here.

A Song for Saturday

Dar Williams and the war on women:

More Thoughts on Blogging

I have a post in the oven about this furor-provoking  Atlantic Monthly opinion piece.  "In the oven" sounds considerably more pleasant than the process itself.  Some topics make me suffer, they do.  It's like running the marathon (which I have never done) while fighting  a 200 lb black belt in martial arts (which I have done).  The hope is that whenever I finally get it written it will have been worth it.

Of course by that time the soundbites are about the most recent shocking revelations on the topic of how equality just means that women shoot themselves in that foot which really should be operated on to make it fit into f**k-me-now six-inch stiletto heels.

That's a real problem in wanting to think things through.  One is late for the horse-races.  But a goddess must weigh her choices carefully and I'd rather be right and lonely than wrong and popular.  Of course I'd prefer an apartment in Paris and faithful admirers everywhere.

Sigh.   That's the first problem.  I should have called myself the goddess of the snails.

The second problem is that "furor-provoking."  Provoking furor sells.  It increases readers and increased readers increase donations and advertising income and other pitiful forms some goddesses try to eke out a part of their living. 

Anger has its rightful place, especially righteous anger.  It's a good form of clean-burning energy and women in general should use their anger in constructive ways.  But anger provoked just to create more divide et impera for the powers-that-be?  That's an old method of ruling:  Telling people that they must all fight over the crumbs under the table of the actual rulers, that the enemy is that other person crawling there next to you, not the guys and gals sitting at the table.  The mummy/mommy wars are real but they are also excellent devices to keep women divided and thus easier to control.

We should probably all get anger training.  Some of us need to reign our anger in more, others need to let it out albeit in controlled ways.  But the kind of anger Wurtzel's piece provokes is not going to be used for any kind of constructive energy. 

This is why I don't want to join in the debates as such although the basic theoretical reasons why the debates exist need to be analyzed.   And that is why I want the anger aimed at the real culprit:  The system and its myths and how they manage us, not on other women. 

But what I do want to write is probably too theoretical and too arid.  I've jotted all the basic ideas down on various slips of paper around the Snakepit Inc..  When I look at them I think they are a book, not a blog post.

The third problem in blogging is always trying to know what is general and what is specific.  Which of my weird ideas were spawned by nothing than my weird mind and which are general ideas but not so general that a reader might just go "duh, how obvious?"  Mostly I cannot tell without writing the post and seeing what happens.  On those weird ideas:  Do you rescue insects which have entered your dwelling uninvited?  And if you do, how do you go about it?  Do you talk to them and then offer your arm as a landing field?  And are the daddy longlegs the only ones who refuse your help?

Mmm. 

Friday Fun

1.  From George Takei's Facebook page:

Note the second from the top.  It's the reigning mood of the Twilight series.

2. This is sorta serious but the underlying assumptions that require it to be said are funny:

Foot-in-the-Mouth Disease Among Michigan Republicans

Remember the Michigan Vagina Control Monologues? The ones in which Democratic State Representatives were not allowed to join:

State Reps. Lisa Brown, D-West Bloomfield, and Barb Byrum, D-Onondaga, were told today that they wouldn’t be recognized to publicly speak on any matters before the House because of comments they made Wednesday during an emotional debate on a bill that puts new restrictions on abortion providers.
Brown, who voted against the legislation, told supporters of the bill, “I’m flattered you’re all so concerned about my vagina. But no means no.”
And Byrum was gaveled out of order after she protested when she wasn’t allowed to speak on her amendment to the bill that would have required proof of a medical emergency or that a man’s life was in danger before a doctor could perform a vasectomy.
Today was the last day of session for the House before it takes a long summer break.

The Republicans in Michigan decided to make things worse for them by first clarifying their position this way:

Just to be clear, despite the misinformation being spread by Reps. Brown and Byrum, and Sen. Gretchen Whitmer, there are two representatives not being recognized on the House floor today because of their actions yesterday. It has nothing to do with their gender, their religion or the topic they were discussing. All day today, we have had representatives of both parties, both genders and several different religions passionately debating important issues that will significantly impact the future of Michigan. I would urge you not to become too distracted by temper tantrums designed to score political points.

I bolded the crucial words for you.

And what did they do next, to clarify their position?  This:

Michigan state Rep. Wayne Schmidt (R) recently compared prohibiting two Democratic women legislators from speaking to punishing a child.
“It’s like giving a kid a timeout for a day,” he told Lansing radio host Patrick Shiels. “You know, hey, timeout, you wanna comment too far, you spoke your piece. We’re gonna let these other people have their dissenting comments, and then we’ll get back to business.”

Bolds are mine.

Hmm.  Do we detect a pattern here?  Heh.

The Right To Work

Those euphemisms are really funny.  Because the Right To Work laws pretty much should be called the Right To Workers laws.  Michigan, the state where vagina is a naughty word, is also debating the adoption of the Right To Workers laws.

A Baby in the Briefcase! Look What Feminism Did!

Here's something for you to ponder:  The role of the Atlantic Monthly in the gender wars.  I first spotted it when Caitlin Flanagan ruled supreme about the desirability of returning to imaginary 1950s gender roles, it continued with articles which told uppity women that the sky is falling (no good men), that men are going extinct  (The End of Men) and it may have culminated with that blog post about how men are discriminated against in the US economy.  Though perhaps that was not the culmination.  I may be just oversensitive because I got called feminist scum in the comments.

But most recently the Atlantic seems to try to eat its cake and save it, too, by posting two at least quasi-feminist takes on the issues of women and work.  Well, on the issues of pretty well-off educated women and the kind of work they are trained for.

This post is about one of those two articles, Anne-Marie Slaughter's piece fetchingly titled
Why Women Still Can't Have It All

 Too bad that the whole message for those sailing past the actual article is in what I have shown you here because the article is much more complicated though still essentialist.   But that short message is the usual one the Atlantic Monthly has been sending to uppity women.

I encourage you to read Slaughter's article because she makes several good points.  But I also urge you to notice that the scenario she discusses involves living apart from her family during the weekdays while her husband takes care of their two young sons.  It is this arrangement that raises her doubts about whether women can have it all.  Of course any parent living apart from his or her family cannot have it all, given that the family is in another geographic location.   That's also true for the Philippine nannies who come to the US while leaving their own children at home.

I'm utterly sick of something that crops up in this context, so sick that I need to write about it before discussing any of the issues Slaughter brings up in her piece.

This is the way feminism, out of all social justice movements, is the only one blamed for anything that might go wrong in women's lives.  Advocate for  wider avenues for women?  If they are not as wide as we may have hoped, blame feminists, that lazy work crew which should have fixed the roads by now!

Urge women who want to have a career to pursue it?  You get told off for "having sold a fiction to younger women."

You know, I have read extensively in the literature of the second wave of feminism and I don't recall anyone promising that all women can have it all or  that there would be no resistance for entrenched sexism.  Such a book probably exists somewhere but the "have-it-all"  phrase probably came out of silly popularizations.  Do people really believe that anyone,  man or woman, can have it all?  To rephrase the idea that women, just as men, have a right to have both a family and meaningful work has now become "have it all?"  And nope, you cannot have it!

All that feminism-bashing!   Even Slaughter refers to that silly study about why women are presumably less happy now than when they were all tethered to their traditional roles!  That must be the fault of feminism so let's turn back the clock!

Be my guest.  Better still, turn it back to Afghanistan-time and see whether the work of past feminists had any value at all.

It's enough to make a goddess want to give up.

Now to the meat in the article:  Slaughter's own personal example of "no-she-couldn't-have-it-all" is an extreme case because she clearly is having it all with her academic job (if "having it all" means both meaningful full-time  work and time with the family).  But the points she makes are relevant for women in less high-flying occupations:  The US labor market is still organized on the implicit assumption that every worker has a wife at home to take care of everything.

This can  amounts to structural discrimination  when combined with the expected gender of those who are responsible for the running of the household, the care of minor children and the care of elderly and sick relatives.

Slaughter's essentialist argument is a bit trickier to handle.  She appears to state that had it been her husband who spent weeks in Washington D.C. while she continued working at Princeton and taking care of the children it all would have worked out better.  Her reason is that she felt she cared more than her husband did, in essence.   In the attached video she argues for a different essentialist explanation:  That with three males in the house her presence was needed to balance the testosterone.

What about the implications of this piece, then?  It has several good points, about the arrangements in the labor market and about the fact that most of us do really want to have both love and work, just as we need both food and water.   It mentions that work-home balance is an issue younger men are also confronted with because of the more involved fathers of the current generation.  And it urges for societal change, not just individual adaptations.

On the other hand, it's about a very privileged situation and some of the undertow is not helpful for most mothers in the labor force who need the paycheck and need good and affordable daycare.  Things like flexible work arrangements tend not to seep down in these kinds of organizations.  They are mostly helpful in the more powerful types of jobs.  And it's still true that the employers are not going to reward women for being family-centered,  rather the reverse, because that is seen as a signal about someone planning to quit.

Which means that the societal change she is looking for might be slow in coming.

Oh, I nearly forgot!  Do read Rebecca Traister's take on this.

Life Is Complicated

Sometimes I despair of people's desire for very simple solutions to complicated problems.  Life is complicated, human behavior is complicated and the causes for many phenomena are myriad and interacting.  Yet what most people want are the kinds of explanations which can be made into television soundbites or which can be understood immediately by a person who has no training in the field.

Hence the popularity of, say,  evolutionary psychology where my guesses about the past are as good as your guesses about the past, and neither one of us needs actual data from that imaginary past!  We can just make up simple explanations.  That's partly why those theories apply to so many.  Why they apply to misogynists goes without saying.

Take that Search For Simple Answers to politics and you get Ron Paul believing in some weird god of free markets who will take care of everything for him.  He's not the only politician or public person who loves Simple-But-Wrong-Answers, and they are not all on the right side of the political aisle.  But that search for simplicity appears to be almost universal.  And very wrong.

I've been following the obesity debates and the same thing is going on there:  The Search For One Cause.  It's much more likely that the causes are many and that they, once again, interact, though I'm willing to bet quite a lot that the most important part of that puzzle is some change in the practices of the food industry, sometime before 1980s.  Other causes do, however, also exist.  But the change in extreme obesity levels, in particular, was too fast to be caused purely by lifestyle changes and the shape of obesity itself looks to me to have changed as well.  Fat deposits on the sides, even in an otherwise thin person, for instance.

The obesity debate is also interesting in revealing that unpleasant moralizing side of Americans (and probably people in general).  If only we all had enough willpower we'd all be slim and supple!  This turns the focus to purely individual solutions, purely individual failings and leaves the societal changes and frameworks unaffected.   Never mind that the food industry advertises soft drinks all the time!  Never mind that exercise has been cut in schools, that fears of pederasts make middle-class parents keep their children indoors and that the environment really is too dangerous for poor children to play outside.  Never mind that healthy food is expensive and bad food is cheap.  It's all about willpower and even that is assumed to be something you can acquire if you are good enough.

OK, that aside was more like a rant.  It's a hot day here at Snakepit Inc..

The Search For Simple Answers often has false duality built into it.  If the choices for an explanation are apples or bananas we tend to accept the initial setup and vote for either apples or bananas.  But what if the cause is in both?  Or in neither?   Public political debates are usually set up in those falsely dualistic terms and any attempt to explain that things are more complicated becomes inaudible.  For some weird reason.

Then take the reductio ad absurdum.  This is a common trick in political debates:  All liberals want to live off the government so that only conservatives end up working hard and paying all taxes.   All feminists want to kill unborn babies.

Substitute your own reverse argument for that one.  Then note how common such arguments are in political squabbling.  There's no good way of responding to those arguments, by the way, not because they were true (they are not) but because the debate would deteriorate into addressing an absurd argument.  Their point is not to present facts but to express loathing or hatred of the political opposition, and they work for that purpose.

The soundbite mode of public conversation makes things much worse, much more focused on short emotional comments.  Think of Twitter or television programs.  Television, in particular, may warp our understanding more than it aids it, given the short amount of time one has for presenting complex issues.  The one with the funniest soundbite wins!

Let's Drop Ron Paul Into A Jungle

Armed with a machete (I'm kinder than he would be) but nothing else.  That's the sort of world he desires, the sort of world he thinks we should all desire, the sort of world he believes he would thrive in.

Or so I surmise, from this:

During an interview on MSNBC Tuesday, Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul admitted that he got a monthly Social Security check, a program that he eventually wants to eliminate (video below).
Rep. Paul said: “I want young people to opt out of Social Security."
Guest Sam Stein then asked: “Are you on Social Security? Do you get Social Security checks?”
“I do,” Paul replied.
Stein countered: “You just told younger generations that they should wean themselves off of this social contract but you haven’t done it yourself. You’re not the wealthiest man in Congress, I’m not saying that. But you have enough means to take care of yourself in retirement. Shouldn’t you provide an example?”
Rep. Paul answered: “No. I think the programs are so designed, just as I use the post office too. I use government highways. I do that too. I use the banks. I use the Federal Reserve system. But that doesn’t mean you can’t work to remove this. The same way on Social Security, I am trying to make a transition. I personally don’t see any inconsistency in that."

Never mind the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do bit.  Focus on the fact that Paul wants to get rid of government highways,  the post office and Social Security.  He believes in some weird nonexistent god of "free" markets, without apparently ever having gotten far enough in Economics 101 to learn about externalities or  uncertainty or lack of information.   His "free" markets are a weird religious concept, defined by the Deus ex Machina of Greek plays.  The markets just work if you give them a chance! 

A guy who doesn't want federal highways really would be happy in that jungle.  He could cut his own roads, hang his own lanterns for street lights and fight the predators with that machete.

The video of his comments:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Mitch McConnell: Lying Accidentally On Purpose?

McConnell is the Senate Republican leader and he doesn't like the US tax system.  It's too progressive!

In an interview that aired on "CBS This Morning" Tuesday, the Kentucky Republican said he is ready to sit down with "this president or the next president" and have an animated discussion about the tax code to "reach a conclusion" that would bring down the ballooning U.S. deficit.
"Almost 70 percent of the federal revenue is provided by the top 10 percent of taxpayers now. Between 45 percent and 50 percent of Americans pay no income tax at all. We have an extraordinarily progressive tax code already. It is a mess and needs to be revisited again," McConnell said in the interview, taped Monday.

What McConnell wants is a less progressive system, one in which the tax burden of the poor will rise and the tax burden of the rich will drop.  This in a country where 400 people have more wealth  than 50% of all Americans.

Yes, I know wealth is not income.  I referred to the wealth comment because of the vast income and wealth inequalities in this country.  Given those inequalities, McConnell's comment is disgusting.

It's also false:

Claim: The top 10 percent wealthiest Americans pay 70 percent of federal income taxes.
Fact: This statistic presents a deeply misleading picture of the actual federal tax burden because (1) it fails to include payroll taxes, which every worker pays, and which fall disproportionately on the middle class, and (2) because it doesn’t reflect that high-income Americans earn a disproportionate share of income.    
    •    Payroll taxes account for 34 percent of federal revenues. They only apply to income earned on the job – not income from capital gains on investments, which make up a much greater share of the income of the top 10 percent. And payroll taxes for Social Security are capped at $106,800.
    •    For both of these reasons, wealthier Americans face a disproportionately lower burden from payroll taxes.   According to the independent, non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the wealthiest 10 percent only pay 25 percent of all payroll taxes.
    •    Counting both payroll and income taxes, the top 10 percent only pay about 50 percent of that tax burden – not much larger than their share of our nation’s income (around 42 percent).
    •    The top 10 percent (households earning an average of nearly $400,000) has been earning a larger and larger share of our nation’s income. Twenty years ago, they accounted for 34 percent of our nation’s income. In the past twenty years – as tax rates have fallen for the highest earners – the income share of the top 10 percent has grown to 42 percent of our nation’s earnings.
    •    This aggregate figure also masks the fact that certain high-income Americans pay far less than others—and less than the middle class.  That’s what the Buffett Rule is meant to address.

Got it?  What the US has is a very mildly progressive tax system with respect to federal income taxes and payroll taxes combined.   It is NOT extraordinarily progressive, and if we add state taxes and sales taxes and all other taxes it comes out roughly proportional.

A small detour on the concepts of progressive, regressive and proportional taxes is in order.  A proportional tax means that the taxes you pay are the same percentage of each dollar you earn, whether you earn a lot or only a little.   The tax rate (e.g. 0.3 for a 30 cent tax on each dollar) remains constant.  This is the flat tax plan many conservatives support.  Sounds fair, right?  Everyone pays the same percentage!  But wait...

A regressive tax rate decreases as one's income rises.  The more you earn the less tax you pay on the last dollar you earned.  For instance, you might pay 30% on each dollar earned up to, say, 20,000 dollars a year, then 20% on each dollar earned for incomes between 20,000 and 50,000 and so on.  Regressive taxes are seldom sold that way because of their obvious unfairness.

A progressive tax rate increases as one's income rises.  The more you earn the more tax you pay on the last dollar you earned.  Thus, you might pay 20% on each dollar earned up to 20,000 dollars a year, then 30% on each dollar earned for incomes between 20,000 and 50,000 and so on.  Progressive tax systems are common in practice.

And there are good reasons for that.  The obvious one is that one cannot squeeze blood from a stone.  It is easier for the government to get money by going where the money is.  But there are deeper reasons for progressivity.

Consider someone very poor.  So poor that getting enough food and safe housing is extremely difficult.  If that person had to pay proportional income taxes those taxes could cause starvation.  To avoid that outcome, the government has two choices:  Either exempt the poor from paying income taxes (which turns the system into a  progressive one) or set the tax rate (percentage of taxes on each dollar) so low that even the poorest of the poor can afford to pay it.  The latter would mean a government which wouldn't be able to afford anything, not even the kinds of things drown-the-government-in-a-bathtub conservatives want it to be able to afford.

The deeper theoretical reason is this:  We want income taxes to be fair in terms of actual sacrifice.  But the sacrifice of, say,  an additional 100 dollars in taxes, is not the same for a person earning a million a year and a person earning 30,000 a year, because the value of money declines the more of it one has.  Just ask yourself under which income scenario you are more likely to take a cab when it rains.

What this means is that in order to have fair taxes (everybody contributes the same sacrifice) we need to have progressive taxes.  Probably even McConnell agrees on this.  But he regards the current, mildly progressive income tax system as extraordinarily progressive!

The real world tax system is messier than the simple case I've described, what with deductions and loopholes and so on.  Often (but not always)  those work to reduce progressivity.  For instance, to take advantage of the mortgage interest deduction you need to have enough money to get a loan from the bank for a house or an apartment, and only the wealthy can take advantage of intricate financial tax planning.

That's it from me, pretty much.  Except that I should note the reason why such a large percentage of taxpayers pay no federal income tax:  It's Republican tax cutting policies.  Those still cannot apply to only the rich so every such proposal has pushed more people into the group of non-payers.  Note, also that those Americans do pay other kinds of taxes, including payroll taxes.

Today's Picture

From the Michigan State Capitol, on the reading of the Vagina Monologues.  Thanks to knuckles for the link:

Credit.

This links to the Vagina Control Monologues ongoing in so many American states.

More On The Labor Market Sexism Study

After thinking about the results (i.e. that men with stay-at-home-wives have more sexist views of women in the labor force) I believer that the role of religion might be what drives the findings.  The researchers do mention religion in the preface to the study:

Finally, another benefit may be spiritual in nature since specific tenets within religious doctrines sometimes focus on gender relations and men’s and women’s roles for childrearing (Davis & Greenstein, 2009). So, for instance, a follower of a particular religion may feel more spiritually endowed by believing that it is women’s primary responsibility to nurture the children in her family (Hinckley, 1995).

They also indicate that they controlled for religion as a background variable but did not report the results on that due to space constraints.*  But the kind of religious impact I'm looking for would not be reflected in Christian/Jewish/Muslim etc. and not even in more specific denominational information.

What would be needed is knowledge about fundamental religions.  It's likely that fundamentalist believers would have stay-at-home-wives and it's also possible that those are the beliefs which drive the results.  After all, stating that one group exhibits more sexist opinions does not mean that all members of that group do so; simply that there are more such expressions in one group than in the other group.

This is just a guess and could be wrong.  But it might make sense to gather data on the fundamentalism axis of religions for a study of this type.

Are Men With Stay-At-Home-Wives More Sexist Than Men With Wives in the Labor Force?

An interesting study missed my snake-eye view in early June.  It's really a group of studies, done in different ways, but all on the same topic:  How married heterosexual men with stay-at-home wives differ from married heterosexual men who have wives who work (in the labor market)  when it comes to their views about women in the workforce.

Turns out that the former men express more sexist sentiments about women than the latter group of men.  The crucial question, for the researchers, is the chicken-and-egg problem:  Do men with more sexist values choose to have marriages where the wife stays at home?  Or does having a wife who stays at home make men more sexist in their opinions about women at work?

Perhaps both are true at the same time?

All the sub-studies are worth having a look at, but I'd like to address only one of them, the fourth study in the paper*:

Studies 1-3 focused on passive attitudes of men in different marriage structures toward women. In Study 4, we examined whether these men would actively engage in actions that would prevent women in the organization from advancing their careers. A second goal of the study was to examine our hypothesis using a sample of men who might be accustomed to making important decisions—managers. To this end, we conducted a controlled quasi- experiment using male managers that were married and working full time. In this study, we examined if compared to men from modern marriages, men from traditional marriages deny qualified female employees opportunities for promotion (Hypothesis 4).

I  picked this study for closer scrutiny because the subjects in it are managers which means that they might have real power to influence how their subordinates fare.  Also, this study is a pretty neat experiment.  It  consists of telling the 232 male accountants in the study that they are to judge the desirability of a candidate for a fictitious but fantastic MBA program (on full pay)  and a consecutive promotion at work.   The study subjects were asked to either recommend or not recommend the candidate for admission in the program, and they were told that accuracy is very important.

I bet you can guess what the researchers did next.  That's right.  Roughly half of those 232 accountants were given a package of information about a candidate called Diane Blake, the rest were given the same package but the candidate's name was David Blake.

I love these types of studies because they control for the possibility that David might, in fact, be the better candidate.  Given that the information about Diane is the same as the information about David, an unbiased assessment should find the two candidates equally good.

And indeed that is what happened in the current study.  A test attempting to establish whether the study subjects thought one person was more qualified than the other person showed no difference.  Thus, the study subjects did not attribute lower skills or ability to Diane or David.

Given this, it is fairly shocking that men with stay-at-home wives were significantly less likely to regard Diane a good fit with the MBA program than David.  Remember that this doesn't seem to arise from the kind of sexism where Diane is viewed as less able (even though she cannot be, given the same information for both candidates).

So what's going on here?   It could be that the men with stay-at-home wives believed that the fictitious Diane would be more likely to quit for family reasons than the fictitious David.  But as both pretend-people already  had 25 years of work experience this seems unlikely to be the main explanation.

Whatever the proper explanation,  this study suggests that managers with certain gender values could harm the career prospects of women.  Those values correlate with having what the researchers call "a traditional marriage."
-----
*Ever since I got the Mac I've had trouble with linking to pdf articles.  Let me know where I can find the link, please.  Also note that the methods in this paper come across as somewhat basic (off the statistics textbook) to me.  This is less of a problem because the different studies use different methods.  Thus, the findings are unlikely to be caused by simple methodological problems.  But one should be careful about not imputing too much power to the findings.

A Guest Post by Anna: A Feminist Literary Canon, Part Three: 1900-1950

Adeline Virginia Woolf (1882 –1941) was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist  literary figures of the twentieth century. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925): Orlando: A Biography (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own.  (1929).  

Mrs. Dalloway concerns Clarissa Dalloway, a woman in post-WW1 England, in a single day in her life. Clarissa at first appears to be a typical housewife, though she finds ways to express herself in the parties she throws, and of course her thoughts find expression in the novel itself, challenging the idea that women do not think much on matters other than stereotypical ones. The novel also brings up homosexuality in the fact that Clarissa recalls being very attracted to her old friend Sally Seton, but “had not the option” to be with her; Virginia Woolf herself had several same-sex relationships, though she was married. The novel eventually reveals that Sally Seton is now married and has become a typical housewife, far from the independent figure she once was.  

Orlando: A Biography concerns an immortal man who magically changes sex. Despite the restrictions on women at the time (which the book acknowledges) the character Orlando concludes, “Praise God I’m a woman!” 

 A Room of One's Own is a nonfiction essay arguing for both literal and figurative space for women writers. It most famously declares that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” noting that few women in the past did, so their failure to produce great literature should not be considered a failure of genius. It also discusses the low opinion in which women’s intellect and writing was often held, and their lack of access to education; Woolf herself was not sent to college, though her brothers were.

Mrs. Dalloway can be read in English here.

Orlando: A Biography can be read in English here.

A Room of One's Own can be read in English here.

Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, often shortened to Simone de Beauvoir (1908 –1986), was a French existentialist philosopher, public intellectual, political activist, feminist theorist and social theorist.  

She is now best known for her metaphysical novels, including She Came to Stay and The Mandarins, and for her 1949 treatise The Second Sex, a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism. 

Beauvoir researched and wrote the book in about 14 months. It denounces Christianity as oppressive of women, and it is worth noting that the Vatican placed it on its List of Prohibited Books.In the first volume, in addition to denouncing Christianity, she rejects Freud – then very much in vogue – details the history of women’s oppression and accomplishments, and details myths against women (such as "It is an indisputable fact that meat goes bad when touched by menstruating women." This particular myth appeared in no less than the British Medical Journal, as late as 1878.) 

In the second volume Beauvoir discusses the then-contemporary oppression of women, for example in confining her to marriage and motherhood. She concludes by wishing for a time in which “women raised and educated exactly like men would work under the same conditions and for the same salaries; erotic freedom would be accepted by custom, but the sexual act would no longer be considered a remunerable "service"; women would be obliged to provide another livelihood [other than homemaker] for themselves; marriage would be based on a free engagement that the spouses could break when they wanted to; motherhood would be freely chosen—that is, birth control and abortion would be allowed—and in return all mothers and their children would be given the same rights; maternity leave would be paid for by the society that would have responsibility for the children, which does not mean that they would be taken from their parents but that they would not be abandoned to them.”

The Second Sex helped to inspire subsequent feminist arguments against psychoanalysis, including those of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, and Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch. However, it should be noted that the 1953 English translation of The Second Sex, often reissued, was greatly flawed and omitted a great deal of the text. A more accurate and unabridged translation into English, translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevalier, was at last published in 2009 and is widely available.
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For earlier posts in this series:  Part I is here, Part II here.
 

A Lullaby

This is a Carelian/Karelian folk song





If I understand it correctly, it was originally sung by Larin Paraske, a most interesting woman who could easily have been forgotten had she not happened to be sought out by a collector of folk songs and traditional poetry.

According to Wikipedia (her whole bio is well worth reading):

Larin Paraske (December 27, 1833–January 3, 1904) was an Izhorian^[1] oral poet. She is considered a key figure in Finnish folk poetry and has been called the "Finnish Mnemosyne".^[2] Her frequent listeners included several romantic nationalist artists, such as Jean Sibelius, seeking inspiration from her interpretations of Kalevala, an epic poem compiled from Finnish folklore by Elias Lönnrot.^[3]
Paraske could recite over 32,000 verses of poetry, which made her an important source for Karelian culture.^[4] Her poems were written down by Adolf Neovius in the 1880s, and after several years of work, approximately 1200 poems, 1750 proverbs and 336 riddles were documented, along with several Finnic lamentations known as itkuvirsi, performed by crying and sobbing.^[5]

The Vagina Control Monologues

Remember this, from yesterday?

State Reps. Lisa Brown, D-West Bloomfield, and Barb Byrum, D-Onondaga, were told today that they wouldn’t be recognized to publicly speak on any matters before the House because of comments they made Wednesday during an emotional debate on a bill that puts new restrictions on abortion providers.
Brown, who voted against the legislation, told supporters of the bill, “I’m flattered you’re all so concerned about my vagina. But no means no.”

If all this wasn't on a very serious attempt to control who controls reproduction it would be necessary to point out that the Michigan Republicans are giving us vagina-control monologues but the term itself cannot be mentioned.  It's not decorous or mature to mention that what these forced birthers wish to control is intimately tied to the control of vaginas and the control of women.

My Twitter machine has gone crazy on the theme of vaginas.  It may well be that ridicule is the best weapon in this particular case.  At the same time, the people who don't want vaginas mentioned but do want to control them are deadly serious about their business.