What I Learned From The Firing of Jill Abramson

Remember how in my previous post about this I pointed out that the abrupt and brusque and pushy firing of the first female executive editor at the New York Times less than three years into her tenure was noteworthy because of the abruptness of the firing (which even clearly bad past executive editors didn't have to suffer) and because it was less than three years into the tenure of the first female executive editor at the Times?

And because the Times (or Arthur Sulzberger) seemed to have been utterly oblivious of the chance that this might provoke a few comments from the vast hairy-armpits-feminazi-army?  No Plan B, as far as I can tell, with the possible exception that Abramson was replaced by the first man of color to lead the Times (a good journalist, as far as I can tell,  who deserves a better beginning for his reign).

Here's the hilarious thing:  It seems that Arthur Sulzberger now has a brand new Twitter account, in which he reassures us all that none of this debacle had anything to do with sexism or gender problems:

If the account is real, this might be the Plan B!

The first lesson learned:  Lots of people don't take all that wimminz stuff that seriously. I'm not saying that this proves Sulzberger is a sexist, not at all.  What I'm saying is that he most likely never bothered thinking of that aspect of the story.

Or to put it in different terms:  Sulzberger might have managed a slower and more honorable firing had he thought this through.  It could be that Abramson wouldn't agree to anything of the sort, but in that case you need your Plan B all ready in your hot little fingers.

The second lesson learned (in three parts) concerns new data on the actual salary discrepancies at the Times.  I cannot tell if the data is correct, sadly, but here we go:

Let’s look at some numbers I’ve been given: As executive editor, Abramson’s starting salary in 2011 was $475,000, compared to Keller’s salary that year, $559,000. Her salary was raised to $503,000, and—only after she protested—was raised again to $525,000. She learned that her salary as managing editor, $398,000, was less than that of the male managing editor for news operations, John Geddes. She also learned that her salary as Washington bureau chief, from 2000 to 2003, was a hundred thousand dollars less than that of her predecessor in that position, Phil Taubman. (Murphy would say only that Abramson’s compensation was “broadly comparable” to that of Taubman and Geddes.)
Murphy cautioned that one shouldn’t look at salary but, rather, at total compensation, which includes, she said, any bonuses, stock grants, and other long-term incentives. This distinction appears to be the basis of Sulzberger’s comment that Abramson was not earning “significantly less.” But it is hard to know how to parse this without more numbers from the Times.

What's the lesson here?  There are three, in fact.  The first is a reminder that people can, in principle, be paid less for the very same job than someone else if nobody knows what the pay levels are.  I've personally known a few cases where the information is revealed, accidentally, and shows tremendous and unjustified pay differences.

This is important to remember when you get those arguments on the net about how laws make paying less for the same job illegal.  If you have no idea you are being paid less, how would you take the case to court?

Should you wish to do so.  The second reminder here is that trying to get your salary raised on such grounds probably doesn't work if you also still want to remain employed in that same firm:

Abramson’s attempt to raise the salary issue at a time when tempers were already frayed seemed wrongheaded to Sulzberger and Thompson, both on its merits and in terms of her approach. Bringing in a lawyer, in particular, seems to have struck them as especially combative. Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for the Times, argued that there was no real compensation gap, but conceded to me that “this incident was a contributing factor” to the firing of Abramson, because “it was part of a pattern.”

The take-home message in all that seems to be that a very powerful woman cannot get away by "Leaning In Like The Boyz Do."  Indeed, that very Leaning-in is judged as part of her whole problematic package.

It can be the case that none of the firing of Abramson had anything to do with her gender, at least if we decide not to dwell into those deep layers where the same move by a man and a woman is judged differently because they are a man and a woman.  But even so these events tell us something about the advisability of Leaning In.  It can be tricky to do that and not to topple over, and the reasons don't have to be your fault.  Though of course they may be, because telling discrimination apart from one's personal failings can be complicated as Ann Friedman reminds us here.

The third reminder about salaries is the response I've seen in a few places which boils down to the argument that it doesn't matter if the very highly paid workers are not getting paid the same by gender (or race, I guess), because even the lower paycheck is plenty to live on.  

I get that paying less to women  (or to men who belong to minorities) who are earning minimal wages to begin with is much worse.  But it's dangerous to assume that the patterns we observe among the one percent workers wouldn't be reflected on lower levels at the workplace, and it's dangerous to ignore the symbolic value of what happens on the highest rungs of the societal ladders:  Some people don't deserve as much money as other people on the same rung.  It's also dangerous to ignore what we learn about the power of negotiating from this particular case, especially because Jill Abramson should certainly qualify as one of those women whom Leaning In would help.

Besides, if we use that argument at all, how are we going to justify the even higher salaries of the men or white workers on the top rungs?  Or do they just get away with earning more, even if it's not required on the basis of objective factors?


The third, and final lesson I have learned (or, rather, been reminded of) is the one Friedman writes about:

From the outside, depending on your point of view, Abramson’s firing was either sexist retribution or a gender-blind decision to ax an ineffective boss. But from the inside, incidents like this are never so clear. Women never know whether they’re being met with a hostile reaction because of their performance — something that they can address and change — or because of both male and female colleagues’ internalized notions of how women should behave. I’ve asked these questions about my own career: Am I struggling because I’m not playing the game well enough, or because the game is rigged against me? Like Abramson, I’ve been a top-level editor who’s had trouble getting along with male bosses — so much so that a friend once offered to purchase acting classes for me so I’d be better equipped to “play nice.” If you’d asked me then, I would have said that learning how to get people on board with your ideas is an art, one that requires work to master no matter what your gender. I also would have told you that I was the only woman on a senior leadership team of more than ten people. 

The most intractable problem about any kind of discrimination is that it applies to an individual (usually in a state of relative isolation from his or her "group"), but derives from that individual's group membership.

Because no individual ever is perfect, almost any firing or demotion or not-being-hired can be justified by apparently objective criteria, even when the decision was based on some type of discrimination.   And this doesn't take into account that a personality conflict, say, might not be about two individuals not getting along but about one individual not getting along with people belonging to a particular demographic group.

What all that means is that the individual worker is usually unsure about what's going on.  Do I really talk too quietly/little/much at the meetings?  Am I imagining that the set of rules I was given for promotion suddenly are different when I completed all the previously required steps?  Is it really just the case that Don is a nasty guy who is nasty to everyone but happens to pinch my butt just because?

It can be a hallucinatory experience, that inner questioning, the attempts to fix whatever can be fixed, the odd shifts which do seem to come from outside (but then perhaps they come from outside to everybody?)

And this is why evidence is so important, why I tried to look at earlier firings at the New York Times and the way male journalists were treated or criticized.  Even that isn't enough, because Abramson is just one single individual.  If similar patterns applied to men and women more widely, we'd be on firmer ground.

Not everything is discrimination in the labor markets, not all workers are good workers, and that's what makes telling the different reasons for how Abramson was treated so difficult.  It helps to look at her Pulitzer prizes or how the newspaper has been doing under her tenure and it helps reading about the specific accusations others have aimed at her.  But ultimately the only fool-proof way of judging the impact of gender in this case would be if we could have all the same history but with Jack Abramson, Jill's identical-except-for-gender twin.

In the absence of that, getting lots of evidence and preferably evidence about many individuals at the same time is the best way of answering these types of questions.  That, and the kind of consciousness raising feminists in the US practiced in the early 1970s and which is now carried out by many different demographic groups on the net.  Once you learn that others have had exactly the same experiences (or not had them), the hallucinatory atmosphere becomes more breathable.

 

The Firing of Jill Abramson

She was the executive editor of the New York Times, from September, 2011 until now.  That is one of the top jobs in journalism on our puny planet, and Abramson was the first woman in that job.  But it's crucial to remember that one man truly rules the New York Times:   publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.. 

Sulzberger gets what Sulzberger wants, in other words.  And what he wanted was to fire Abramson, in a way which has rarely done before.  I'd call the manner of her going abrupt,  rude and punitive.

But then Abramson has a reputation of being mercurial, pushy, a bad manager.  Not At All Nice.  And Sulzberger never got on with her.

Now it may well be the case that Abramson is an unusually rude person, an unusually bad manager, an unusually uncooperative peg in the vast machinery of the newspaper.  It may even be the case that she would have been fired "unceremoniously" had she been a good journalist with the same credentials but called Jack Abramson.  But the history of firings at New York Times suggests that even pretty bad editors didn't get fired just so speedily and abruptly.  Take the case of Howell Raines:

The last editor to be forced out by the Times, Howell Raines, was someone who, like Abramson, did not always enjoy a fuzzy reputation within the newsroom. “Howell ruled by fear,” was how one source described his tenure in 2003. Raines was forced out after it was discovered that one of his reporter protégées, Jayson Blair, had been fabricating stories. But even in the midst of the tumult over Blair, Sulzberger remained affectionate toward Raines, at one point handing him a stuffed moose. When Raines finally left the paper, it was with an address to the staff; his wife was present. In the paper’s report about the departures of Raines and his deputy Gerald Boyd, Sulzberger was quoted as wanting to “applaud Howell and Gerald for putting the interests of this newspaper…above their own.”
Observing the sharp contrast between this kinder, gentler transition and the cold glee with which Abramson was tossed on her ass today made me hope that eventually we will learn that she was stealing from the company cash register. Because that’s pretty much the only crime I can think of that would merit as swift and brutal an exit for a woman who—good or bad at her job, or, more likely, like most bosses in the world, some combination of the two—represented an undeniably historic first in journalism and at The New York Times.

The Gaming America Cover in Reason Magazine: Freer And More Fun. And Sexist?

The Reason magazine' recent cover about video games in the US provoked some comments.  Here's the cover:

I haven't read the insides of the magazine from which the cover is taken, so what I write here is about the cover, and in particular about the sentence:  How gaming is making America freer -- and more fun.

Two people are picked to represent this story.  They are both white, one wears a business suit and sits on a bed, kinda relaxed.  The other one stands in the doorway, arms akimbo, either in a somewhat hostile position or perhaps a defensive one.   That one wears sedate bikinis and winter boots.

The player, sitting on the bed is a man, the bikini-clad observer is a blond-haired woman. She's not playing.  It's hard to know what her role in this cover might be.  Is she disapproving?  Is she standing for a character in the game?  Is she coming in to play?

How To Attract Women. The Republican Campaign Primer As Interpreted by Paul Ryan and Jeb Bush.

I have followed the talk about the US Republicans' woman problem with awe and fascination.  It's terribly exciting, a bit like some Earthian trying to figure out which end of an alien the food should enter and which end it should leave. 

It must be very very hard to have to learn, quite suddenly, how to do political campaigning that could reach a little more than one  half of all American voters!

Heh.

Here's one approach that will be tried:

O'Connor singles out an ad aired by Monica Wehby, a pediatric neurosurgeon seeking the Republican nomination for Senate in Oregon. In the ad, a woman tells the story of Webby operating on her daughter.
"Dr. Wehby was going to open her back and reconstruct my daughter's entire lower spine," the woman says. "She just hugged me and kissed my forehead, and she said, 'It's going to be OK, sweetheart. I've got her, and I am going to see you in a couple of hours.' "

 "This is a 60-second ad and it's not particularly issue-driven," O'Connor says of the spot. "It sort of goes to this point that when talking to women, I don't think you necessarily have to be delivering factual information to move them. I think connecting with their heart and really trying to build emotion is more effective."

That may sound a little sexist, but appealing to emotions is what all effective advertising does. And the fact that Republicans are trying to do it is the biggest new development in political ads aimed at women.

Isn't this great?   Bolds are mine, of course, as are the happy tears of emotional attachment to this particular campaign strategy.  Now I can't stop thinking of all the kinds of ads we are going to get from the Republicans:  Benghazi and hugs, Benghazi and fuzzy kitten, Benghazi and evil monster Hillary Clinton attacking fuzzy kitten.

Never mind that, because there's a real live example of this, out of the mouths of Jeb Bush (yes, of that extended presidential family) and Paul Ryan:

Bush and Ryan offered a decidedly softer tone on the nation's problems than some of their more conservative Republican colleagues.

Having toured the country in recent months focusing on the nation's poor, Ryan declared that "the best way to turn from a vicious cycle of despair and learned hopelessness to a virtuous cycle of hope and flourishing is by embracing the attributes of friendship, accountability and love."

"That's how you fight poverty," Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman and 2012 vice presidential nominee, told a crowd of roughly 750 dressed in tuxedos and gowns.

Bush, the son of one president and brother of another, called for more welcoming immigration policies, while offering his own poverty prescription: "A loving family taking care of their children in a traditional marriage will create the chance to break out of poverty far better, far better than any of the government programs that we can create."

All the bolds are mine!   Are our conservative politicians learning yet (to paraphrase the most recent Bush president)?

I love love love all this talk about love, and in particular the sneaky way "traditional marriage" enters the love-fest.  Because the meaning of that is in the moist eye of the beholder.  It could be a statement opposing same-sex marriage or it could be a statement telling us that the husband is the head of the household and the wife the compliant helpmate, or it could be about single-parent households as not being filled with love at all and therefore so very poor.

And indeed, this particular conversation isn't very issue-driven!  Love and friendship are not terribly effective in combating poverty, unless the love and friendship is felt by the politicians and "job creators" who actually have power to affect the economy!  But it's good stuff for the wimminfolks!

China's Excess Women Problem

Didn't that headline shock you?  After all, what China has is the exact reverse of that: an excess men problem.  Indeed, the probable number of young men who will not be able to marry (at least within China and into a monogamous heterosexual marriage) is now around 32 million.

But the Chinese still have time to worry about the poor, poor educated women who will never be able to marry men above themselves in the societal hierarchy.  The Economist recently reviewed a book about China's return to worrying about uppity single women: Leftover Women:  The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China:

In 2007 China’s official Xinhua news agency published a commentary about women who were still unmarried at the age of 27 under the title, “Eight Simple Moves to Escape the Leftover Woman Trap”. The Communist Party had concluded that young Chinese women were becoming too picky and were over-focused on attaining the “three highs”: high education, professional status and income. Newspapers have since reprinted similar editorials. In 2011 one said: “The tragedy is they don’t realise that as women age they are worth less and less, so by the time they get their MA or PhD, they are already old, like yellowed pearls.”

If any of that sounds familiar to you, it might be because several conservative anti-feminists in the US write identical warnings to women:  Education and motherhood do not mix!  And NO! you cannot both go to school and have children!  Hurry up and marry before your eggs go all stale and smelly!

What's so mind-boggling about all that is the real problem in China, which is very much about the leftover men, not about any leftover women.  The upside-down focus on women as the sex with leftover bits really is just the death throes of patriarchy whining about the societal changes that are happening.   Or so I hope.

Dorothy Hodgkin Day On Google Doodle

This is an interesting story about her 1964 Nobel Prize and how it was written up in the UK:

Hodgkin remains the only British woman to have ever won one of the Science Nobels, which she was awarded in 1964, but the British press were unable to forget her gender. The Daily Mail reported at the time: "Oxford housewife wins Nobel", while the Telegraph wrote: "British woman wins Nobel Prize – £18,750 prize to mother of three."

A salutary reminder of the fact that progress does happen and that things have gotten better over time when it comes to such reporting.

The Pew Survey On Stay-At-Home Mothers: Problems of Definition and Data For Comparisons

I wrote this post some weeks ago.  It's delayed, because I contacted the Pew researchers for further information.  I never got it, so here is the post, just in time for the US Mothers' Day.

Introduction

The recent Pew survey on the percentage of mothers (with children under eighteen) who are now stay-at-home mothers begins:

After Decades of Decline, a Rise in Stay-at-Home Mothers

The rest of the long report is mostly about the details behind that sentence.   Except, my friends, the details turn out fuzzy for some very boring reasons.  Here's the first boring reason:

What that beginning really should have said is this:

After Decades of Decline, a Rise in Women Not Having Paid Work Who Also Have Children Under Eighteen. 

That looks like I replaced a clear sentence with researchy gobbledegook, though that's not so.  To see why, note that the mothers in this survey can be single mothers, the mothers in this study can be married to a partner who also has no paid work (which could make that partner into yet another stay-at-home-parent),  and the mothers in this survey can have all sorts of reasons for why they don't have a job in the labor market.  Some of those reasons are that they can be enrolled in school, too sick to work or unable to find paid employment.

They can also state that they are at home because they are taking care of their minor children, and the majority of the mothers without paid employment surveyed by Pew do give that answer.  But all those other answers could have been given by women (or men) who don't have children under eighteen at home, too.  Thus, it's the presence of children at home that is being used to distinguish between different groups of adults here.

For many valid purposes this doesn't matter.  But it matters greatly if we are going to analyze these findings against the background of the cultural debates about proper gender roles and about the question whether mothers of young children should stay at home or not. 

My Last Post on Monica Lewinsky

Partly because I didn't follow the events when they happened, but partly because others have written the more interesting stuff.

But there's a lesson to be learned from the "Monica Lewinsky scandal," beginning with the fact that it was called that and not the "Bill Clinton scandal."  Such "love or sex triangles" do not have equal sides, in terms of negative consequences, and neither did this one.

If I had to make an uninformed judgment I'd say that Lewinsky's life and career have truly suffered from what happened, but Bill Clinton's life and career have not.  His approval numbers went up with the impeachment attempts, his career didn't suffer and he even kept his marriage intact.  If anything, his hounddog reputation has enhanced him in some minds.  How much Hillary Clinton might suffer depends, to some small extent, on this latest go-around.

The point is that women do tend to bear the burden of such sex "scandals."   But is it because of our sexual scripts about women's responsibilities for both keeping their husbands sexually sated and for keeping the gate closed in extramarital relationships?  Is it because of that ancient slut-archetype, applied to women who cannot prove that they were forced to have sex?  Or is it, perhaps, that the blame is passed down the hierarchy and because women, on average, stand on lower rungs of that hierarchy they are most likely to be stuck with it?

I also find the way agency seems to have been treated in this case fascinating.  Many of the questions that are raised in the above links to other writings are about Lewinsky's agency.  But the agency of Bill Clinton appears to be treated as something akin to a switch in his hind-brain overwhelming everything else.  Yet he was the person with the most power of all types in this case. 

Why is all this the talk of the week again?  Because of Lewinsky's book, of course, and the timing of that book is most likely based on there still being a likelihood that Hillary Clinton might run for the president of the United States.  I don't grudge Lewinsky the money her book might make, by the way, but much of the political discussion about these events has to do with how to stop Hillary Clinton, not with the questions we appear to be debating. article in the Vanity Fair.  My apologies for the initial mistake.  I have no idea why I thought she had written a book!  Perhaps it's time to stop blogging...

Women And Their Eggs. How Ovulation Makes You Act And Other Tales From Evolutionary Psychology.

A new meta-study looks at the vast field of evolutionary psychology studies into menstrual cycle and women's impregnation preferences*.  That term is mine, to cover the field where women are argued to prefer pictures of rough male faces when they ovulate and pictures of smooth and babyish male faces when they don't, and so on.  These preferences are seen as indications of the type of man the woman would prefer to be impregnated by, trading different unconscious objectives:  The rough face provides the best genes but the baby-face is more likely to hang around and help in childcare etc, so women are more likely to pick the rough face to be the baby daddy but let the baby face wear the horns.  And so on.

The menstrual cycle studies even argue that women vote for manly men when they are in the ovulatory part of the cycle.  Or that women wear red or pink when ovulating.

Anyway, the meta study abstract tells us something interesting:

In evolutionary psychology predictions, women’s mate preferences shift between fertile and nonfertile times of the month to reflect ancestral fitness benefits. Our meta-analytic test involving 58 independent reports (13 unpublished, 45 published) was largely nonsupportive. Specifically, fertile women did not especially desire sex in short-term relationships with men purported to be of high genetic quality (i.e., high testosterone, masculinity, dominance, symmetry). The few significant preference shifts appeared to be research artifacts. The effects declined over time in published work, were limited to studies that used broader, less precise definitions of the fertile phase, and were found only in published research.

Bolds are mine.  As PZ Myers notes in his write-up of the study, the work that was not published may have been lower in quality.  But it may also have remained in the file drawers because it found a negative.  Research journals still favor new-and-shocking findings over no-effect findings.

Whether this meta-study gets it right or not, future studies, better done, could find such ovulation effects.  Though I personally doubt that.  Or rather, I doubt that any such effects would be large enough to matter when studied within the complicated context of human cultures.

The reference to "less precise definitions of the fertile phase" in that study abstract is also significant.  For example, if the fertile stage is defined widely enough, then those who want to see when women wear red or pink might be actually (and by accident) measuring women's desire not to wear red or pink when they are menstruating or close to that phase in their cycles.  The reasons for such avoidance (not saying it exists) are rather different from evolutionary explanations.

But what about the guys and ovulation?  Evolutionary psychology has something to say about that, too.  Remember the 2010 study which found that men could smell female ovulation by sniffing at women's sweaty t-shirts?   It was widely popularized, especially by John Tierney of the New York Times:

It may seem hard to believe that men could distinguish a woman who’s at peak fertility simply by sitting next to her for a few minutes. Scientists long assumed that ovulation in humans was concealed from both sexes.
But recent studies have found large changes in cues and behavior when a woman is at this stage of peak fertility. Lap dancers get much higher tips (unless they’re taking birth-control pills that suppress ovulation, in which case their tips remain lower). The pitch of a woman’s voice rises. Men rate her body odor as more attractive and respond with higher levels of testosterone.

It's that body odor stuff which comes from the 2010 study.  But a 2012 study didn't find any such testosterone effect.  That study wasn't an exact replication of the earlier one.  For example, it didn't prime the men by telling that they were going to smell the t-shirts worn by women and it didn't use shirts at all.  On the whole, it looks to me like a more carefully done study.  From the abstract:

Here, we collected axillary sweat samples from women on days near ovulation. In a crossover design, men who were not explicitly aware of the specific stimuli smelled the sweat samples in one session and water samples in a second session. There were no differences in testosterone responses across the experimental conditions.

 Now make a guess.  Did John Tierney write about that 2012 study or not? 

Sigh.  One reason I criticize the coverage of these kinds of studies is the easy pass they get from science pundits such as John Tierney (who has his own views on us wimminfolk).  Another reason is something I've spotted when I read through the articles.  Far too often the literature reviews in evolutionary psychology omit the critical studies, the studies which found nothing, the studies which were unclear.  That makes the edifice look formidably strong but writing the review that way is not ethical, in my humble opinion.  I hope to see this practice change in the future.

--------
 *Thanks to Latverian Diplomat in the comments for the first three links.

While Reading About The Stagnant Race Gap in Reading and Mathematics Scores

At MSNBC website, the right-hand column listed most recent comments attached to this topic.  The one I saw at the time of my reading was:

Liberals Scumbags get a job17 minutes ago
In reply to: Frank from Victoria #3
Thats becaus most liberals are like all commies...corporatist elitests that want a 2 class technocratic system ...,.
Where these people are the proletariat.
Platos Republic.

It diverted me from the article for a second or so and turned me into that favorite channel of wondering why comments are so stupid and why they exist at all.  But it also made me see an example of the failures of the US school system.

Returning to the actual topic:  The disparities in the achievement numbers by race and ethnicity are linked to lower incomes, less access to resources, racism and the way residential segregation follows both income and ethnic/racial lines. 

The best resource-based solution to this is to stop funding schools from just local taxes.  When the average incomes of areas differ the quality of the schools will, too, because some areas have a lot less money to spend per student.  I'd also like to see more resources steered into poorer areas and higher teacher pay in them.  Positive discrimination, to counteract the negative effects of poverty in early childhood.

Of course trying to affect the lower incomes and income inequality in general would work even better but that really is too radical a proposal in this country.  The next best thing is to focus on the schools, because everyone agrees that the children themselves are not to blame for their bad lottery results in life.



   

Back To The Nineties: Monica Lewinsky And "You Women's Rights Ladies."

It may shock some political pundits in the US, but eighteen years is a long time, when measured by human experience.  I  recall reading about the sex scandal involving Bill Clinton, then the president of the country, and Monica Lewinsky, then a White House intern.  I even remember thinking that Lewinsky was treated most unfairly and that the whole scandal was framed in archetypal terms as a triangle drama between the Frigid And Controlling Wife, the Impossible-To-Change-Hounddog and The Other Woman, A Slut.  Which leaves the hounddog free to sniff around and lift his leg wherever he wishes.

Now Lewinsky has written a book about her experiences during that time, and naturally all the pundits discuss the events again.  Joe Scarborough, a conservative pundit on US television, blew a gasket in this context.  To quote him:

The "Morning Joe" panelists were discussing a column by the New York Post's Andrea Peyser, titled "Self-pitying Lewinsky should go away," when Scarborough became incensed.
"This is not about Bill Clinton. This is about the women who were eviscerating Monica Lewinsky, who for 18 years was quiet and, by the way, lived a life of shame and her entire existence reduced to a punchline," Scarborough said. "And she stays quiet, shows a lot of dignity, a lot more dignity than people who preyed upon her and tried to turn her into a slut or a nut. A 22-year-old daughter, really? And now they're coming out kicking her in the face?"
"Please, you all are sick. You 'women's rights' ladies, you were sick in the '90s," he continued. "You all went around, you defended the wrong person time and time again. Whether it was Juanita Broaddrick, whether it was Monica Lewinsky, you defended [Clinton]. And you're doing it 18 years later. You're pathetic."

The writer of that column, by the way, is a conservative, anti-woman columnist.  She once compared the female Danish prime minister to a tart or a piece of Danish pastry.

What is interesting about Scarborough's reaction is the use of group guilt.  Every feminist is sick, because of Scarborough's opinions about how Lewinsky was treated.  It doesn't matter if I was doing anything feministy in the 1990s; the same accusations apply to me.  I'm sick.  Indeed, it doesn't matter if some feminist was then still in diapers/nappies, that person is every bit as sick as all the other "ladies" for "women's rights."  Men for women's rights would perhaps be a concept so sick that it doesn't even occur to Scarborough.

The use of group guilt is a topic which deserves a much more fine-tuned treatment than I'm giving it here.  This example differs from many others in important ways, but it brings home the point that large groups are seen by humans as having a life, as having a history and as being responsible for that history.  But large groups consist of mortal individuals and the actual identity of those in the groups change over time.  And it is the individuals now in that group we rant at.

That's how we get into the kind of situation where Echidne is responsible for what made Scarborough angry.  If she took all this seriously, of course, and ignored the political hay that was being made both then and now.

A Pretend-Review Of New Evolutionary Psychology Research

This is a pretend-review, and mostly about the write-up of the study,  because I couldn't read the study without paying for it, so all I have to go is the abstract and the one write-up I found.  Let's begin with the write-up:

Big eyes and full lips may turn male heads in Japan, but in Nepal, men aren't as interested in pretty, girly faces.
Those are the findings of a new study of men's preferences for female faces in 28 nations. The results reveal that guys are drawn to feminine looks – large eyes, pillow lips and a soft jaw — to a greater extent in countries that are the healthiest.
The reason for this difference isn't clear, but scientists suspect that evolution may drive these attractions, at least subconsciously. Men in harsh conditions may have a better chance of fathering children who survive if they mate with a woman who can hold on to resources, said study researcher Urszula Marcinkowska, a doctoral candidate at the University of Turku in Finland.

There ya go!  Except that big eyes and full lips are not defined exactly the same for different racial and ethnic groups, right?  The study is one of those look-at-photographs-and-decide-whom-you-want-to-mate-with ones, and the photographs are manipulated to get versions which the researchers (but perhaps not the subjects of the study?) deem to be more or less feminine or masculine.  I fervently hope that the photographs showed women of the racial or ethnic group the men belonged to, by the way, and that they didn't define "feminine" features on the basis of white faces only.  I'm going to assume that they did all that correctly.

So what were the findings?  We are told that men in Japan, Australia and the United States preferred "feminine" faces whereas the men in Nepal, Nigeria and Colombia didn't, or at least not to the same extent.  If "feminine" means big eyes and full lips, then that's what Japanese men like the best, right?

Right?

What are we going to do with these findings?  Here's where my pretend-review turns into nothing but questions, because we are told a) that women with more feminine faces are more fertile and b) that women with less feminine faces are more dominant in the society and have more access to resources:

Feminine looks are an evolutionary signal of fecundity, said Dan Kruger, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Michigan. In healthy environments, men may subconsciously look for women who can bear lots of children.
In unhealthy environments, however, it might be more important that your potential mate survive to have any children at all. Social dominance — marked by relatively masculine features — might signal that a woman can do just that.
"It seems like there's a trade-off going on, where in the harsher environments, men are putting less preference on femininity," Kruger, who was not involved in the research, told Live Science.

Is there an actual study somewhere in the archives of evolutionary psychology which conclusively demonstrates that women with more feminine faces indeed are more fecund?  Likewise, is there a similarly well-done study in those archives which proves to us that women with more masculine features indeed are socially dominant?

I have no idea.  But Dan Kruger does seem to suggest that all this is the case.

The problem I have with these deep-dives from data to some fundamental explanation is not just the possibility that the data we need to prove relationships between social dominance and masculinity in women or between feminine features and greater female fecundity might not exist, but also that had the findings been reversed (so that more feminine faces would have been preferred in the poorer countries) the obvious explanation would have been that having lots of children is important when most of them are going to die young!  Along the lines the leading researcher speculated:

Earlier cross-cultural research found that "macho" men with stereotypically masculine faces are most preferred in less-developed nations. A strong jaw, squinty eyes and a dominant brow might signal that a guy has strong genes to pass to his child, researchers suggested in March 2013 in the journal Biology Letters. [5 Things Your Grin Reveals About You]
Marcinkowska and her colleagues were interested in turning the tables and examining male preferences for female faces. It was possible, she said, that harsh conditions might promote a preference for sexual dimorphism: Women would want masculine dudes, and men would want girly-girls.

Bolds are mine.

Who knows what studies of this kind mean?  Perhaps the researchers are correct, though I'd truly like to see some sort of controls for the cultural impact of Western ideals of female beauty.  Those ideals are by now fairly widely spread, though they may not be as common in Nepal, Nigeria or Colombia as they are in Japan, Australia or the United States.  That alternative cultural theory is worth keeping in mind when evaluating studies of this type. 




 


  

Good News/Bad News On US Pregnancies

The bad news first, because the good news at the end leaves you feeling better: 

A World Health Organization report on maternal mortality rates notes global improvement in those rates.  The annual number of women who died due to childbirth or pregnancy fell from 523,000 in 1990 to 289,000 in 2013.

That's great, though we can do better.  What's not so great is the trend in the United States:

A Friday Small Thought on Twitter and Writing

My ability to write and Twitter are mortal enemies.  Just realized that.  If I spend time reading tweets I somehow cannot write.  This may be because the format of Twitter is 180 degrees from the way I think  or it may be because tweets, when arriving at my place from all over the universe, cover everything and ultimately cover nothing very deeply, yet they make me leap and dance and jump and pirouette all over the intellectual space until my energy has all been poured out. 

That thought might be of no interest for anyone who isn't trying to write on one single topic and at greater length than 140 characters, and it's not intended to be a criticism of Twitter or a denial of its benefits.  Just that everything has a price, so from now on I will write before reading tweets.

Rand Paul's Abortion Views

I get letters from all sorts of people, including a recent one from Rand Paul (probably from his minions).  It asks for money, in support of the egg-Murkans-human-rights initiative* (justifying it like this (quote from the email)):

Dear Ms.,

For over 40 years, nine unelected men and women on the Supreme Court have played God with innocent human life.

They have invented laws that condemned to painful deaths without trial more than 56 million babies for the crime of being "inconvenient."

There ya go!  It's all about convenience, nothing else, and the painful  baby deaths can be assumed to take place, even if science disagrees about whether zygotes, say, can feel pain.

Just to make sure that I understood that "inconvenience" argument correctly, I checked what Rand Paul himself thinks about when abortions should be banned:

Paul is opposed to abortion, even in cases of rape or incest.

Which sorta clashes with the idea that abortions are all about "inconvenience."

Then to the politics behind this:  Paul has angered forced-birthers by seemingly showing some ambivalence about abortion.  Hence the firm correction towards the right edge.

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*This initiative means that a fertilized egg has all the legal rights not-pregnant already-born people have,  but pregnant people have far fewer rights, given that they are also the aquaria for the fertilized eggs.

Where's The Next Alexander Fleming*? Or Why Corporations Don't Have Incentives to Create New Antibiotics.

The recent predictions that we are entering a post-antibiotics age, an age where a small scratch can, once again, mean death, must be added to those archives where the environmental end of the world, all those wars based on religion and greed for power etc. also live and procreate.  The "eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we shall die" archives.

One part of me has that very reaction.  The wiser (or more optimistic) part notes that apocalyptic news and fears are not exactly uncommon in human history and that the proper reaction to such news is to invest resources in combating whatever the direst threats are.

So what are the resources we need to combat the threat that antibiotics will no longer work because of their overuse in "meat production" and in the treatment of human illnesses? 

Research into new antibiotics and into antibiotic resistance.  Here's the problem with the corporate model of such research: 

There have been no new classes of antibiotics for 25 years, he said.
Pharmaceutical companies cannot cover the costs of research and development because new antibiotics have to be used sparingly, for fear of resistance developing – and when that begins, they have a short lifespan. "New antibiotics coming on to the market are not really new," he said. "They are variations of those we already have." That means that bacteria are likely to develop resistance to them that much sooner.

Translated to everyday language:  Governments should put a lot of money into this research**.  The benefits are wide-spread but cannot be captured by profit-making units. 

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*Alexander Fleming is credited with the formal introduction of penicillin into our medical cupboards.

**Another reason for governments to address this market of pharmaceuticals is that the use of antibiotics has strong external effects which the market hasn't internalized: My consumption of antibiotics has a direct effect on whatever condition I'm treated for but it also has an indirect effect:  to increase the likelihood that the same antibiotics won't work on some future condition you might develop.  Yet that side-effect does not enter my calculations or the calculations of animal farmers, which means that the use of antibiotics has been higher than would have been socially optimal.

This is similar to the anti-vaccination decisions where parents, say, refuse to vaccinate a child because any side-effects from the vaccination will fall on the child but the protection the vaccine gives to the rest of the society doesn't enter the family's calculations.

Today's Research Topic: Wide Hips and Promiscuity

I've got a backlog of studies I should write about, but in some cases the popularizers didn't dare to touch them (women have an evolutionary adaptation to get sexually abused)  and in a couple of other cases I haven't figured out what's going on with the methods yet (70-page articles take time).

But a recent evolutionary biology/psychology study about how narrow-hipped women are less likely to engage in one-night stands than their wider-hipped sisters is kind of fun to talk about, because all the popularizations are about that finding.  The researchers argue that this is because narrow hips are a health hazard in giving birth and so women with narrow hips would have some hard-wired evolutionary chip turned on to avoid situations where they might end up pregnant without a committed male partner.  Presumably the idea is that if the woman dies then the baby is more likely to survive if its father is around.

Or so it all sounds, superficially.  But if you read the research paper itself, things get a bit murkier, and that is clear (if murky things can be clear) from the very title of the paper:

Evidence to Suggest that Women’s Sexual Behavior is Influenced by Hip Width Rather than Waist-to-Hip Ratio.

So the researchers, Victoria J. Simpson, Gayle Brewer and Colin A. Hendrie, actually wrote about something a bit more complicated.  They wanted to see if the mythical albatross theory still hanging around the necks of evolutionary psychologists, about the presumed universal male preference for a certain waist-to-hips ratio, predicted which women would have more one-night stands.  Here the hypothesis is that the closer a woman's waist-to-hip ratio is to the ideal, the more potential bees would be swarming her flowers, so to speak.

Alas, they found no correlation with the waist-to-hip ratio and the proportion of a woman's sexual history which consisted of one-night stands.  Hence the focus on the hip width and its correlation with that number. Here the approach does a kind of a u-turn.  From the paper:

In this context, where opportunities for sexual encounters exist, it is women who decide, in all but the most extreme of circumstances, whether mating takes place or not (Clark & Hatfield, 1989). Signals of fertility and attractiveness, such as WHR, serve to influence the number/quality of men available to them (e.g., Hendrie, Mannion, & Godfrey, 2009). However, variations in hip width per se have a direct impact on women’s risks of suffering serious birth related traumas and these have the potential to lead to permanent gynecological damage or even death. Therefore, it was predicted that there may be some relationship between women’s hip width per se and their sexual behavior.

It's a bit muddled, I think, and gives short shrift to the mutual negotiations of sexual interactions.

Why aren't the men making choices here?  After all, they either swarm around the ideal waist-to-hip goddess or they don't, and that swarming is a choice, right?  If no bees are humming around a woman, her choice is meaningless.  Then there's the fact that the research this paper discusses didn't find any correlation between the waist-to-hip ratio and the number of one-night stands as a proportion of the woman's total sexual history.

More generally, I find the idea of "sexual history" slightly odd when the study subjects had an average age of first intercourse of sixteen years and when the age distribution in the study was from 18 to 26 years.  What would happen if studies like this were done on women in their eighties, say?

The study also omitted women who had never had intercourse.  That omission is most likely because the original idea was to study the waist-to-hip theory of attractiveness, and virgins don't provide information on that.  But once we move to the hip width theory, virgins would have been an important sub-group to include, because, following the logic of the researchers, they should contain the women with the narrowest hips.

The study measured hip width (based on bones) and it measured hip and waist circumference.  But other than those measurements, variable collection looks really minimal to me.  We know the women's ages, but we don't know anything else about them.  Yet the environment matters for casual sexual encounters, and not controlling for that may affect the findings. 

For instance, students living on campus have more access to one-night stands than women living in the countryside, cultural and religious norms may differ in studying something like casual sex and they should have been somehow controlled for.  And so on.  --  This is a common problem with evolutionary studies which simply ignore social and demographic data, because it's not in their model and they are not really familiar with the alternative models because they belong to different disciplines.

None of this means that the finding might not be a real one, but it suggests that better studies are needed to study it.  Such studies should look at the actual width of the birth canal, not the distance between the extreme ends of the hipbones, and they should collect all the relevant social-and-demographic data.

More on the Kidnapped Nigerian Schoolgirls

It's difficult to find out what is happening (my earlier post is here).  The rumors are that the kidnapped teenagers have either been sold as wives outside Nigeria or that they have been forced to marry some of the Boko Haram extremists.  Relatives have tried to find the girls, without success so far, but it's not clear what, if anything, the Nigerian government is doing.

The crime of the girls was to be at school.  Boko Haram is opposed to all Western-style education, but not apparently to the kidnapping and rape of young girls.

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Added later:  Two stories relevant for understanding what the Nigerian government is doing and should be doing.

Speed-Blogging 4/29/14: On Rights For Guns, Religious Education and How One Gets To Be Judged As Outnumbered

1.  This is the sort of thing liable to happen when guns must have rights to be carried everywhere.

2.  A Republican candidate for South Carolina's lieutenant governor wants to end public education and replace it with religious schools.  He hasn't figured out yet how madrasas would be built into that system, because in his mind it's about Christian schools only.  I always find it fascinating how much brethren-under-the-skin the extreme religious people of the right-wing type are.  They want their religion to provide all the information anyone could acquire and they are always, always into caging up wimmenfolk.  Yet they hate each other, too.

3.  Fox News has a brand-new show called "Outnumbered!"  It's based on the idea of four women and one man talking gender wars.   I got a good laugh out of that, because of course a show having four men and one woman as hosts would not be seen as anyone being outnumbered. 

A Biased Snapshot of Campus Rape: Rod Dreher Opines

Lawyers, Gun and Money discusses  Rod Dreher's conservative ideas about why Swarthmore College has been accused of covering up sexual assaults.  Because Dreher is a conservative, what's wrong at Swarthmore College are bad liberal values.  Obviously.

That Dartmouth College, the alma mater of so many famous conservative pundits, has been in the news recently for apparently having a big problem with college rapes  and for not doing enough about them is not mentioned in Dreher's article, because he is taking biased snapshots.

Indeed, Dartmouth, and many other colleges of various political stripes (even, or perhaps especially,  religious colleges), have been accused of very similar things as Swarthmore:

Dartmouth is currently under federal investigation for potential violations of Title IX, the federal gender equity law that requires universities to ensure a safe learning environment for students. A group of Dartmouth students and alumni have also filed a Clery Act complaint alleging that administrators have failed to accurately report incidences of sexual violence and hazing on campus.

Thus, Mr. Dreher picks a case and addresses it, assuming that the specific aspects of Swarthmore College explain what might be happening there, when in reality the problem is independent of the political or religious stance of a college.

Funny Stuff For Saturday: How To Review A Book You Haven't Yet Read, Philosophical Advice About Life And Being A Multi-Lingual

1.  I love Megan McArdle's beginning sentence in her book review of Thomas Piketty's book about wealth inequality*:

I apologize in advance, because I am going to talk about a book that I have not yet read.

It's very charmingly meta-meta criticism, and makes me feel much less guilty about the few times I've discussed a study based on nothing but its abstract and summaries by others.

2.  You know those little deeply philosophical sentences which are intended to make you feel clearer and better about your life?  Many of them are helpful, but sometimes my nastier side enjoys them for wrong reasons.  For example, I recently read this one:

Don't let other people bring you down. Be your own advocate.

Then there's the one of "having to face your worst fears by just doing whatever you fear the most."  Depending on what you fear the most this could result in some very final recommendations.  I think tugging the blanket over your head and squeezing your eyes shut is a healthier reaction to a lot of fears.  Check under the bed for monsters first, of course.

3.  Us multi-linguals may have multiple personalities! This sounds a bit like a cousin of the weak form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.  But I keep thinking of all the shadow-Echidnes which might slip out when the moon is round and the night dark or how very practical it is to take out my wallet and slip another personality card into the slot in my head.


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*A spoof take of McArdle's review can be found here.

From The Instant Expertise Archives: Will Infantine (R) On Why Women Earn Less

This is such a fun example of the Instant Expertise when it comes to the extremely complicated and much-researched question why there is a gender gap in earnings.  Will Infantine dropped one of those Instant Pills into his beer mug last night and -- presto! --  he knows the reasons for women's lower earnings:

Women are not as motivated by money as men are, men work more hours and in more dangerous jobs.  Or in his own expert words:

"Men, by and large, make more because of some of the things they do," state Rep. Will Infantine (R) said during a speech on a paycheck fairness bill. "Their jobs are, by and large, riskier. They don’t mind working nights and weekends. They don’t mind working overtime or outdoors."
Infantine's colleagues' protested almost immediately, to which he responded that he pulled all of his information from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics.
"This is not me," he said before continuing to explain why women make less.
"Men work on average more than six hours a week longer than women do," he said, adding that even among business owners, women earn less. "Women make half of what men do because of flexibility of work, men are more motivated by money than women are."

What's the problem with all that Instant Expertise, you might ask.  Only that those things cannot explain all of the average difference in earnings by gender, only that there is a difference even once one controls for hours worked, only that the dangerous jobs are far too few to somehow explain much about the gender gap in all earnings by all full-time workers, only that even in the so-called flexible jobs which women are supposed to prefer men make, on average, more.

Or put in a different way:  You can't buy Instant Muscles or Instant Slimness or Instant Expertise.  You have to actually delve deeper and you cannot stop with those explanations that most please your inner Manhood or Womanhood.

Let me recommend a few of my posts on these matters, available as links here.

Minor Goddess Thoughts: Post 2. On Sex Work and Gender

Melissa Gira Grant has written a book about prostitution (Playing the Whore), and Katha Pollitt writes about the book in her fairly recent column.  I have not read Grant's book yet, but I'm aware of the furious nature of most debates when it comes to sex work.  (This piece gives a flavor of Grant's arguments.  Pollitt's review offers some of the opposing arguments.)

This fury may be because data is hard to get on some aspects of prostitution, such as the demand side (the "johns") and also because data about trafficking and exploitation is, almost by definition, also difficult to obtain or interpret.  That leaves the debate wide open to individual views.  Those, in turn, depend on the individuals and their places in the hierarchies of the sex work marketplace.  Questions of "choice" and "agency" and such abound, but it's hard to get solid numerical data on the characteristics of mostly illegal markets.

So the debate is all over the place.  On one extreme endpoint,  sex workers are seen as women (mostly women) who were abused as children and never had a chance, who were possibly trafficked as sex-slaves or trapped as teenagers in the streets,  who are addicted to illegal drugs, who are exploited by pimps and who are essentially powerless to stop any of it.

The other extreme endpoint argues that there's nothing more exploitative about sex work than about, say, washing the bottoms of the elderly in a nursing home, that sex work is no different from any other poorly paid and exploitative occupation, such as flipping burgers, washing floors or serving customers at a Hooters bar.  According to this view, choosing sex work is a rational choice, especially for those whose other options are all linked to basic survival, and choosing sex work in the higher-paid part of the market is also a rational choice, because of the pay and the freedom the work offers.

Minor Goddess Thoughts. Post 1: The Confidence Gap Between Men And Women

I'm trying to create a series of small-to-medium thoughts, as a way to spring-clean some of the junk that hangs around in my brain.  This one is about all the recent conversations on how men have more self-confidence and how women need to get more of it and not be so focused on perfection.

The recent conversations are because a new book is out on the topic.  A flavor can be obtained from this Atlantic Monthly article by the authors. It puts together a lot of studies which show that men have more confidence in their abilities, even unwarranted confidence, and then speculates about the possible reasons for this confidence gap, all the way from testosterone to early childhood upbringing.

Because this post is only a minor goddess thought, I haven't gone through the studies or thought about why evolution would benefit from a confidence gap of that sort (though I did have time to wonder if the studies all use American data, and if so, whether the confidence gap might be cultural).

Instead, I wish to draw attention to this weird argument chain:

Do men doubt themselves sometimes? Of course. But not with such exacting and repetitive zeal, and they don’t let their doubts stop them as often as women do. If anything, men tilt toward overconfidence—and we were surprised to learn that they come by that state quite naturally. They aren’t consciously trying to fool anyone. Ernesto Reuben, a professor at Columbia Business School, has come up with a term for this phenomenon: honest overconfidence. In a study he published in 2011, men consistently rated their performance on a set of math problems to be about 30 percent better than it was.

We were curious to find out whether male managers were aware of a confidence gap between male and female employees. And indeed, when we raised the notion with a number of male executives who supervised women, they expressed enormous frustration. They said they believed that a lack of confidence was fundamentally holding back women at their companies, but they had shied away from saying anything, because they were terrified of sounding sexist. One male senior partner at a law firm told us the story of a young female associate who was excellent in every respect, except that she didn’t speak up in client meetings. His takeaway was that she wasn’t confident enough to handle the client’s account. But he didn’t know how to raise the issue without causing offense. He eventually concluded that confidence should be a formal part of the performance-review process, because it is such an important aspect of doing business.


The fact is, overconfidence can get you far in life. Cameron Anderson, a psychologist who works in the business school at the University of California at Berkeley, has made a career of studying overconfidence. In 2009, he conducted some novel tests to compare the relative value of confidence and competence. He gave a group of 242 students a list of historical names and events, and asked them to tick off the ones they knew.

Among the names were some well-disguised fakes: a Queen Shaddock made an appearance, as did a Galileo Lovano, and an event dubbed Murphy’s Last Ride. The experiment was a way of measuring excessive confidence, Anderson reasoned. The fact that some students checked the fakes instead of simply leaving them blank suggested that they believed they knew more than they actually did. At the end of the semester, Anderson asked the students to rate one another in a survey designed to assess each individual’s prominence within the group. The students who had picked the most fakes had achieved the highest status.

Here's the way I understand that long quote (sorry about the length):  Men can be too confident but because they are too confident honestly, it's all good.  Indeed, overconfidence gives social rewards!

Well, perhaps in studies which employ very young undergraduates as their subjects.  But I think most people learn about this thing called overconfidence when they get to know more and more people, and most people then calibrate down their expectations when they come across a very boastful person.

I may be mistaken about how general such corrections are, but I certainly carry them out frequently.  In short, overconfidence (false though honestly felt confidence) should not benefit people in the long-run if the reward systems are based on any kind of rationality, because overconfidence doesn't signal anything real.

This doesn't mean that lack of confidence wouldn't be undesirable, especially in those who actually have a lot to be confident about.  Neither does it mean that there wouldn't be a gender difference in the amount of confidence men and women express, on average, and in the US, at least.  Still, I find it fascinating how the natural lens in these kinds of articles is to assume that the problem is solely in how women are, so that the solution is change the way women are.  Perhaps judging workers and students on objective criteria might be better?

Then there are my personal experiences (you can add yours in the comments):  During my life I have been questioned about any expertise I have often enough that I have spotted the pattern in that questioning.  It's as if I need to prove myself over and over again.  Certificates and degrees are not sufficient. 

If such questioning is more common about women than about men, then some of the confidence gap may be created by the very fact that women meet more doubt.  At least such questioning may make some women very careful about what they say or double-check everything before saying it.

Add to that the traditional gender role ideas about women.  In many cultures those strongly discourage women from blowing their own trumpets, and if a woman does pick up a trumpet, the outcome might not be the same as a confident male trumpeter receives.  Because she has violated role expectations she are more likely to  get not only accolades but also a reputation as an uppity bitch.

The best remedy for the problem of too little deserved confidence is to see what else gets touted in your field, which types of people and what type of work get promoted and what ultimately successful people do when they first fail.  And no, you certainly don't need to be perfect.  Even minor goddesses aren't.

Cardinal Dolan on the Availability of Birth Control

This is from the know-nothing-but-priestsplain-files, and that's what makes it both funny and very sad.  Cardinal Dolan was defending the Hobby Lobby side of the birth control debate and stated this:

When asked whether allowing for-profit corporations like Hobby Lobby to claim religious liberty could set a “dangerous precedent” for the rest of the country, Dolan deferred, claiming it’s not a problem because birth control is already widely accessible.
“Is the ability to buy contraceptives, that are now widely available — my Lord, all you have to do is walk into a 7-11 or any shop on any street in America and have access to them — is that right to access those and have them paid for, is that such a towering good that it would suffocate the rights of conscience?” Dolan said in an exchange uploaded by Raw Story. “I don’t think so. I hope the Supreme Court agrees.”

Why it's hilarious is pretty obvious.  Either cardinal Dolan thinks of condoms when he talks about "birth control", or he thinks that the pill indeed is available in 7-11 stores. Then there's that bit about mentioning the divinity's name in vain.

More seriously, though this is not the clearest example of the trend of know-nothing-is-OK-when-we're-about-controlling-women's-fertility it's part of that same trend.  For example, post-menopausal women don't need gyno services, according to some, women have a little switch that turns off when they are "legitimately" raped so that no child is conceived and so on.

I don't know about you but I think it's a good idea to know the area in which one wants to legislate behavior before spouting about it.

The Kidnapped Nigerian Schoolgirls

Perhaps as many as 234 schoolgirls in Nigeria were recently kidnapped by Boko Haram:

The kidnappings are believed to have been carried out by Nigeria's extremist rebels, known as Boko Haram. Boko Haram — which means "Western education is sinful" — is violently campaigning to establish an Islamic Shariah state in Nigeria, whose 170 million people are about half Muslim and half Christian.
Boko Haram has been abducting some girls and young women in attacks on schools, villages and towns but last week's mass kidnapping is unprecedented. The extremists use the young women as porters, cooks and sex slaves, according to Nigerian officials.

Some of girls managed to escape, but most are still missing.  Let us hope all them will be found soon and in good health.

Boko Haram bases its terrorism on religion.  This article argues that it has shifted its policies to the question of gender during the last year or so.   But in any case, the goal of establishing Shariah law is linked with the goal of limiting girls' and women's choices.

Boko Haram has killed its male prisoners in the past but spared its female prisoners:

Part of the reason the military is loath to respond mightily may be because the girls who are kidnapped are raped, forced into servitude -- but rarely killed.

In February, 29 college students in the northern Yobe province were killed after an attack authorities blamed on Boko Haram. All of them were males. The women were spared.

In other instances, kidnapped girls were later rescued while working on farms. Many were pregnant or had babies -- the result of rape.

These choices may reflect Boko Haram's ideas of chivalry (though not kidnapping women and girls in the first place would seem more in tune with the idea of war being men's business), but they may also reflect the way gendered violence is used in warlike circumstances.  One leaves the women alive but impregnated by the enemy.  That way the women are viewed as "spoiled" and their children as belonging to the enemy.

Meanwhile, in the World of Comics: Power Tits And Digital Sexual Harassment of Women.

Janelle Asselin, who has edited lots of comic books, writes an article criticizing this comic book cover:

She notes:

Let's start with the elephant in the room: Wonder Girl's rack. Perhaps I'm alone in having an issue with an underaged teen girl being drawn with breasts the size of her head (seriously, line that stuff up, each breast is the same size as her face) popping out of her top. Anatomy-wise, there are other issues -- her thigh is bigger around than her waist, for one -- but let's be real. The worst part of this image, by far, are her breasts. The problem is not that she's a teen girl with large breasts, because those certainly exist. The main problem is that this is not the natural chest of a large-breasted woman. Those are implants. On a teenaged superheroine. Natural breasts don't have that round shape (sorry, boys). If you don't believe me, check out this excellent tutorial from artist Meghan Hetrick.

And what happens next?  Debate about her criticisms, sure.  But also:

We all knew this would happen. As Asselin explains on her blog: “I was called a whiny bitch, a feminazi, a feminist bitch, a bitter cunt, and then the rape threats started rolling in.”

Those who do that are not the majority of people or the majority of men or boys, either.  But even if they are a fairly small percentage, when everyone in that group aims their vitriol at the same writer at the same time that impact is considerable.   It's like an extra fee one has to pay if one is to write about certain topics.  Or write as a woman on almost any topic.  And the abuse can be much worse for women of color who get smelly packages which combine misogyny with racism.

Tauriq Moosa makes a good point about what we can all do to affect this:

Yet you should recognize the digital harassment environment of women is one that is maintained through its consistency and unrelenting nature. Similarly, so should the response: unrelenting, shouted from the highest and most respectable platforms and people. What you should want to create is a culture or community that immediately does not tolerate bigotry, harassment, and abuse.
As many, including Asselin, note, a powerful reason some men feel no hesitation when sending horrible messages to women is they believe they’re operating within a space that accepts it as the norm. But you should not have “acceptance” fed by feelings of futility; your response should be intolerance of intolerance. Silence and apathy are key ingredients to a tasty helping of bigotry. Though only specific groups are served, everyone in the community must endure the smell. And smell and taste are not so different.

What about the original Asselin piece and the points it makes?  I'm not a comics reader but she is certainly correct when she states that natural breasts are not that particular shape but pear-shaped. Wonder Girl wears very large implants.

Whether something like that matters when we are talking about drawn characters of something called superheroes is an interesting question.  The answer depends on who it is that is the intended reader of the comic book and what that person wishes to see in it.   It also depends on what a female superhero is expected to embody.  Finally, it depends very much on whose cheese it is that is imagines as pulled away, whose comic books someone is trying to change and whose "entitlements" are threatened.

My guess is that the incoherence of the misogynistic anger comes from those perceived threats.  Or, rather, the vitriol expresses those underlying fears.

Noblesse Oblige. Or One Of The Consequences of One-Dollar-One-Vote in American Politics

Given the Supreme Court Republican majority views on democracy and free speech, the way politics and various institutions will be financed and molded is going to increasingly depend on the small percentage of people who have a lot of money.

Thus, one might argue that president Obama was very smart to invite the philanthropically-minded young billionaires to the White House.* After all, the Democratic party should court them before the Republican party does, right?

On the other hand, wasn't all this supposed to be something that happened during the Robber Barons era of the American history?  Wasn't the idea that more people should have a say in how those institutions are created and how politics is run?  As Digby writes:

It's very nice that many of these young idealistic aristocrats want to do good deeds. But this is really nothing more than good old fashioned noblesse oblige which basically leaves the betterment of man to the whims of rich people. One of the big improvements democracy was supposed to bring was that the people themselves decided how to organize society rather than depending on the kindness of aristocrats. Even great philanthropists of the gilded age like Andrew Carnegie believed in a huge confiscatory tax of great estates in order that the government of the people might make the decisions rather than the heirs of great fortunes.

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*The story appeared in the Style and Fashion section.

Meanwhile, in Russia. Extreme Sexism in a Politician's Speech

On the one hand this man, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, is viewed as the right-wing clown of Russian politics, on the other hand he also happens to have power.  See what he says to a female journalist.

It's like a volcanic eruption of most of the nasty memes about women:  Pregnant women shouldn't be at press conferences, women's libidos (the "beasts" between women's legs) drive them to say stupid stuff with their "dumb bitch" mouths.  Indeed, such women should be raped hard, and any woman who defends other women is a lesbian (meant as a slur).

A rather nasty blob of primeval slime, this Mr. Zhirinovsky.

The good news is that the Duma's ethics committee has promised to look into this speech.

Egypt Cool With Divorce? What Do The Findings of The Pew Global Attitudes Survey Really Mean?

The Pew Global Attitudes project has a survey of eight "hot-button" issues, to see how the values associated with them vary in prevalence across countries.  The new Vox.com site has a quick summary of the findings.  The headline states:

France likes cheating, Egypt is cool with divorce, and other things the world believes about sex and marriage

It's the bit about Egypt being cool with divorce that is worth looking into a bit more, because the overall tone of the piece suggests that it's surprising how OK Egyptians are with divorce. Later the story states:

Divorce is slightly less polarized, with disapproval concentrated in Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia (and Bolivia, for whatever reason). Egypt stands out compared to other Muslim countries, especially nearby Tunisia; in Tunisia, about 55 percent of respondents giving an answer disapproved of divorce, compared to only 8 percent of Egyptians giving an answer.

I'm confused about those numbers, by the way, because the chart at the source reads to me as if 46% of Tunisians regard divorce as unacceptable while 7% of Egyptians do, but perhaps the different data comes from more detailed parts of the report.

Never mind, what's important about that link to the chart is the tiny writing on the left about the context:

Even in several socially conservative Middle Eastern nations, relatively few consider divorce unacceptable, including around 10% or fewer in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon.

And that's why I write about all this, and especially to the comparison with Tunisia.  Tunisia has a divorce law which is almost gender-equal, whereas Egypt does not.  Likewise, divorce in Islam has very particular features and is based on religious interpretations as something allowed to men in much wider circumstances than it is allowed to women.  As far as I can tell, divorce in Jordan, for example, is based on the Islamic sharia law.

The flavor of the Vox.com interpretation of Egyptians as somehow cool with divorce as a sign of something one wouldn't expect from that country, given its socially conservative culture, is misplaced, because a certain type of divorce IS part of that socially conservative religious tradition.  But it's not a gender-equal type of divorce, and finding it acceptable doesn't measure liberal values.
 

Hillary Clinton, a Grandmother-To-Be! Will She Now Not Run For President?

This is a silly post, suitable for a Friday.  USAToday wrote about the pregnancy of Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of Bill and Hillary Clinton:

Former president Bill Clinton and his wife have made no secret of their wish for a grandchild. It's unclear how Chelsea's pregnancy will affect Hillary Clinton, who is considering a race for president in 2016.
At the 2011 World Economic Forum in Davos, Bill Clinton told that audience, "I would like to have a happy wife, and she won't be unless she's a grandmother. It's something she wants more than she wanted to be president."

Being a grandfather doesn't seem to have affected past presidents, in terms of their professional ambitions, but in the case of a female politician, the effects of impending "grandmotherhood" are "unclear." 

Even though all this is silly (and naturally congratulations are due to all concerned!), it's worth pointing out that those silly statements have their roots in gendered ideas.  For instance, being a mother is seen more clearly as both a relationship AND a job than being a father, and some of that attaches itself to the perceived difference between grandmothers and grandfathers, too.  Perhaps USAToday imagines that Hillary Clinton will now want to do more babysitting than presidenting?

Then there's the idea that because Bill Clinton once said that his wife wants to be a grandmother more than she wanted to be president she might now be happy and satisfied and no longer interested in running for the president of the USA. That either-or thinking is not used for male politicians who can be both fathers and presidents and grandfathers and presidents.  Indeed, those who don't have any offspring or offspring of their offspring are regarded with slight suspicion.

Speed-Blogging on Purgatory Thursday, 2014: On CEO Pay, The Two Countries of the USA and The Plight of Black Girls

Purgatory Thursday is my translation of the Finnish name for this day in the Christian calendar (kiirastorstai).  I like the mouth feeling of the term.

What to read today, to go with the tone I set above?  How about executive compensations?

The Times reported that the median compensation for C.E.O.’s in 2013 was $13.9 million, a 9 percent increase from 2012. The Wall Street Journal, which did its own, smaller survey a few weeks earlier, described the 2013 pay increases as representing “moderate growth.”

Find out what the average growth rate in the US workers' wage packet is and then compare the two.  It's a lot better to be a CEO than the average worker, and the term "moderate growth" has a different meaning for the two groups.

Here's a fun picture of the executive compensations of non-profit leaders, separated by gender.  You can move your cursor over the dots and find out more about the people.  The blue dots are guys, the yellow dots are gals.

Talking of graphs and such, it's worth noting that the southern states in the US differ from the northern states along many social and economic variables.  These comparisons show a few of them.

The differences are partly due to history (and even earlier due to climate), but it's certainly worth asking how that pattern correlates with various states' political leanings.

Finally, do read this Salon post by Brittney Cooper about black girls.  She describes the impact of growing up in circumstances which may leave the same markings on children as growing up in war zones does and makes an important point about the societal invisibility of the suffering she describes:

What threads these women’s lives together is the collective lack of national care for their stories. Black women have been passing these narratives around the blogosphere and social media to each other, posting collective laments, and wondering if anyone else cares. These stories are not national news to anybody else, but they are national news to us.

We must do better.

On the WSJDLive Sausage Fest

Where The Digital World Connects.  That's the blurb for the WSJDLive conference, to be held next October.  Want to learn more about the conference?

At WSJDLive, leaders from both established and emerging tech companies will explore the most compelling tech opportunities evolving around the world. Through dynamic on-stage interviews, intimate roundtables with experts on cutting-edge topics, and interactive events, WSJDLive participants will connect with peers in an environment of unparalleled discussion, debate and global discovery.

Want to learn even more?  Here are the speakers.  They show some racial and ethnic diversity and there's variations in eyeglasses and hair color.  On the other hand, all the speakers are men.

My Twitter feed has lots of funny stuff about that last bit.  But the problem is a bit deeper than just the Wall Street Journal's usual preference to have sausage fests (as some called this) or their blindness to the fact that they are having one, again, and the problem is that most of those men are CEOs.  Capitalists, if you wish.  And women are scarce among the CEOs.

This doesn't mean that I'm defending the speaker selection process, and it doesn't mean that the conference couldn't find any female CEOs with the relevant experience.  Neither does it mean that conferences focusing on CEOs are necessarily the best idea to talk about how the digital world connects.

But it's important to note that inequalities of various types are not just interpersonal or perception dilemmas, amenable to simple solutions, such as reminding conference builders of the importance not to have gender or race blinders attached to their eyeglass frames.  Those reminders are not useless (and can be important as a way of opening the initial gates), but as long as the underlying structural problems remain, we need to put more effort into solving those structural problems.

Put in a different way, the problem here is twofold:  First the absence of female speakers in the conference, and, second, the absence of women among the relevant group of CEOs.  To ask for just more female speakers doesn't fix the second part.

Meanwhile, in Tennessee, Continuing Pregnancy Can Be A Crime For Users Of Illegal Drugs

Tennessee is going to make pregnancy into a potential criminal offense for women who are using illegal drugs:

The state legislature has passed a bill that would allow police to investigate drug-taking mothers if their unborn children are harmed by their addiction.
Tennessee may become the first state with a law that could criminally prosecute pregnant women if they harm their unborn children by taking illegal drugs. Miscarriages, stillbirths, and infants born with birth defects would be grounds for police investigation and charges that could put the mother behind bars for up to 15 years.
Last week, the proposed legislation to allow for criminal assault charges to be brought against drug-addicted pregnant women overwhelmingly passed the Tennessee Senate with bipartisan support after already sailing through the House. The bill states that “nothing shall preclude prosecution of a woman for an assaultive offense for the illegal use of a narcotic drug while pregnant, if her child is born addicted to or harmed by the narcotic drug.”

Now think about that for a while.  What's the best thing* for a women addicted to illegal drugs to do should she get pregnant, if she wants to avoid the chance of such investigations?

Yup, you got it.  She should get an abortion.  But because all this comes from the same ideological roots as the desire to ban all abortions, the forced-birthers have turned themselves into pretzels:**

Weaver and the bill’s other supporters feel that the Safe Harbor Act did not go far enough in reducing rates of babies born with NAS or punishing pregnant drug abusers. “Here’s the double standard. If I hit a lady who’s pregnant and they’re both [mother and fetus] killed, that’s two counts of homicide. But a woman who is pregnant can stab herself in the stomach and hurt her baby and not be charged with anything,” says Weaver. “It [the Safe Harbor Act] made a woman who was pregnant above the law.”

Those "two counts of homicide" are because people who have Weaver's opinions supported laws which define the death of a fetus as a homicide.  So Weaver is arguing against herself, in a fashion.

All these initiatives come from the desire to define personhood as beginning from conception (as long as it's not in a test tube but in a uterus).  That defining personhood this way reduces the personhood of the person whose uterus it is doesn't matter.  Women addicted to illegal drugs are seen as criminals, women injecting themselves in their own stomachs are viewed as potential killers of the real person inside them, and women giving birth to a child with birth defects could then be put behind bars for up to fifteen years, even if the birth defects had nothing to do with any drug use, and even if imprisoning the mother that way could be in the worst interest of the child.
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*Those who participate in drug treatment programs will not be charged, according to the bill.  But such treatments may not be available for all affected women, especially those in rural areas.
**NAS stands for Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome. As far as I can tell, its effects are temporary and treatable.