Uber. On "New" Alternatives To Traditional Worker-Employer Arrangements

Uber, one of the alternatives to traditional taxicab companies, has been in the news for all sorts of reasons, including its founders apparent sexism.  Those are all negative news, but  Uber and other companies of similar ilk are obviously doing quite well, and there are objective reasons for that:

They can fill gaps in markets where taxi medallions are monopolistically awarded by increasing the number of cars-for-hire, they can offer extra income for students and others who own a car and some extra spare time for driving, and they can even reduce a certain kind of racism, the kind where a cab will not stop to pick up a passenger who is black, say.

But on one level Uber doesn't look like a traditional corporation at all:  It looks more like a marketplace.  Note that it doesn't provide the workers with cars, it doesn't maintain the cars, and it most likely does not offer the drivers retirement benefits or health insurance.  Its main task is to match buyers of driving services with the sellers of driving services, and that sounds more like a market than a firm, though the Uber app itself is also a form of capital which belongs to the firm.

The reason I put the "new" in the title of this post between two raised sets of fingers is that the arrangement is not really new.  Indeed, in Victorian England poor seamstresses had to provide their own scissors, thread and needles before they could be paid for sewing work, organized by larger entities which looked like corporations.  The seamstresses were entrepreneurs in the sense that they carried the risk if the needles broke or rusted or if the thread turned out to be of low quality and useless for the job:  When that happened their earnings were much reduced.  The entity which hired them for work, on the other hand, only paid for the finished work some constant sum.  That moved some risk away from the presumed real entrepreneur and to the workers themselves.

It's that aspect of who-bears-the-risk that I find most interesting here, as an example of economic theory.  The usual econo-babble argument is that firms make profits partly because they bear the risks:  Many entrepreneurs go under while others thrive, and that's because of the risk game.   You lose some, you win some, and in a way it is the risk-bearing aspect of entrepreneurship which most appeals to our ethical antennas and reassures them of the rightness of those extra profits for the winners.

But what happens when the workers are all independent entrepreneurs?  Can the average Uber driver figure out the replacement costs of the car in his or her profit calculations?  That there is an actual per-mile cost of wear and tear and gasoline consumption when driving customers around?  Has that average Uber driver looked into the question of car insurance?  Will the company which insures the car accept claims which come from a professional use of a car that was insured for family use?

As far as I know, Uber insures the customers of the Uber cars, not the cars or their drivers.

Uber is not alone among the "new" arrangements of risk-sharing in labor markets.  In a sense the giant eBay is nothing but an app for getting buyers and sellers together, but it has also contributed to the slow death of the bricks-and-mortar antique and second-hand stores and increased the atomization of the market on the seller side.  It has made the transactions more invisible, because we no longer really know who we are trading with, whether the buyer will pay or send back a flawed specimen of the same product, demanding full repayment or whether a fraudulent seller simply disappears, to pop up shortly under a different name.  Even though eBay is clearly a roaring success, it also contributes to a certain amount of risk juggling downstream.

Or take this example of FedEx drivers: FedEx argues that its drivers are not employees, entitled to all sorts of employee benefits, but independent contractors.  The courts will decide if that works, but here's the reason why firms pursue that avenue:

Treating workers as independent contractors can save companies as much as 30 percent of payroll costs, including payroll tax, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, and state taxes, according to the National Employment Law Project (NELP), a workers’ rights group. Using independent contractors offers companies advantages, says James Baron, a management professor at Yale. “[It’s] driven in part by uncertainty about demand, and about future conditions, and a feeling that the firm has more flexibility with respect to scaling up and scaling down,” he says.*
Because independent contractors aren’t covered by wage and hour rules, they don’t have to be paid overtime, and they can be required to pay for uniforms and truck maintenance. Contractors don’t have the right to unionize and aren’t covered by employment protections in the Civil Rights Act, so they can’t use those provisions to sue over sexual harassment or discrimination.

I have bolded the last sentence because it suggests an additional problem for women and/or people of color in these arrangements.

This post was caused by something I read today, about Uber facilitating subprime car loans for its drivers:

Uber is reportedly facilitating subprime auto loans to its drivers. According to a report by tech blog Valleywag, the car share company is hooking up drivers with loans through Santander Consumer USA that can be paid off through Uber paychecks. The company is specifically marketing these loans to drivers with bad credit saying, "Even if you have bad credit or no credit at all, we can help you get behind the wheel in a week." Uber contends that these loans are low-risk, but others think that this is indicative of a larger auto-loan bubble in the U.S.

Fascinating stuff!  Once you have a loan like that, your incentive to keep on driving for Uber is strengthened.  But it's you, the driver, who bears the risk of default, not Uber, the company.

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*Translate that part into ordinary speech and it says that risk will be transferred downstream..

All the New Republican House Committee Chairs Share One Thing

They are all men:

Notably, none of the new House committee chairs are women. Current House Administration Committee Chairwoman Candice Miller (R-Mich.) remains the only female on the roster of panel leaders, which was announced earlier.

Is "House Administration" like housekeeping?

The Republican Party sighed a great sigh of relief after deciding that the war-against-women issues didn't seem to work in the last midterm elections.  Now they can run the party the way it should be run, as an old white boys' tree-house, and ignore those pesky wimminz' issues.

All this is hilarious.  Or would be hilarious if I was reporting on it from outside the country and if the Republican Party didn't vote almost 100% against everything that would make women's lives easier (family leave, equal pay, contraceptive choice etc. etc.)

But there's a technical reason for that dearth of women on the top of the Republican pyramid:  There aren't that many Republican women in the Congress in the first place, so the pipeline is nearly empty (or the oven turned off).

PS. I always remind readers in these posts that the relevant way to judge "diversity" is by thinking about population percentages and how well the percentages in the Congress reflect those.  From that angle Republican women are sorely under-represented. 

A Housekeeping Post

Can you see the comments link when you read the blog?  I noticed that my SeaMonkey (a backup browser) doesn't show the comments link at all.  If you use SeaMonkey, do you see a door to the comments?  It should be right below each post.

Anything else I should know?

When Life Gives You Don Lemon...

(This post is about sexual and physical violence.)


The background to this story is a vast and tentacled one*,  about the fifteen (so far) women who have accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault at some point of  his long acting career.  One of those women, Joan Tarshis, was interviewed by Don Lemon about her experiences.  The transcript:

LEMON: Can I ask you this, because -- and please, I don't mean to be crude, OK? 


TARSHIS: Yeah. 


LEMON: Because I know some of you -- and you said this last night, that he -- you lied to him and said "I have an infection, and if you rape me, or if you do -- if you have intercourse with me, then you will probably get it and give it to your wife."


TARSHIS: Right. 


LEMON: And you said he made you perform oral sex. 


TARSHIS: Right. 


LEMON: You -- you know, there are ways not to perform oral sex if you didn't want to do it.
TARSHIS: Oh. Um, I was kind of stoned at the time, and quite honestly, that didn't even enter my mind. Now I wish it would have. 


LEMON: Right. Meaning the using of the teeth, right? 


TARSHIS: Yes, that's what I'm thinking you're --


LEMON: As a weapon. 


TARSHIS: Yeah, I didn't even think of it. 


LEMON: Biting. So, um --


TARSHIS: Ouch. 


LEMON: Yes. I had to ask. I mean, it is, yeah.



TARSHIS: Yes. No, it didn't cross my mind.

On one level Lemon asks one of those questions which are commonly asked of people who come forward only a long time after an alleged sexual assault:  Why didn't you go to the police then?  Why didn't you resist or resist more?  Why did you go out with him (or ended up alone with him) in the first place?

Some ask those questions because they wish to ascertain (from the answers) the truthfulness of the allegations or because they wish to give the person interviewed a chance to explain her or his reasons for staying silent such a long time.  Some ask those questions as a form of victim-blaming, and some appear just clueless.

I think Don Lemon falls into that last category, though I'm willing to put him into all the categories if he so wishes.  But it's clueless to suggest that a woman in those circumstances should bite the man's penis,  perhaps to bite it off (thus causing him potentially to bleed to death).

Consider the circumstances:  You are alone with a man larger and stronger than you, a man much more powerful and famous than you, and you are told to escalate the situation by biting his penis.   What could possibly go wrong?

A lot could go wrong, both immediately (risk of physical violence increases, someone might die) and in the longer-run (a possible court case about excess use of force in self defense, combined with trying to prove the sexual assault in the first place (so that it is just excess force in self defense, not in an attack), a probable end to one's current career plans, stigmatization for life if the case becomes public).  Indeed, the circumstances in which biting-the-penis results in a happy ending for the victim are extremely improbable.

I can't believe I actually wrote the above paragraph!  But then Lemon's comments would have seemed pretty incredible a few days ago.
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*Even vaster if you set it into the framework shared by Jhian Ghomeshi, a Canadian television celebrity who has recently been accused of hitting and choking women he dated.  Ghomeshi's defense is that he was acting the sadist's role in a fully consenting sado-masochistic relationship.  The women who have come forward say that they were not asked for consent and did not consent.

That larger framework is about more questions:  The power of the powerful, the pitfalls of power, the differences and similarities between those cases and the alleged or proven sexual and/or violent assault cases by less powerful individuals.

The imbalance of power in the Cosby and Ghomeshi cases has received shorter shrift than it deserves. It doesn't only affect the initial settings of the alleged acts but the likely consequences of reporting the acts to the authorities. 

Music Tuesday

Just because.

And A Little More About That Shirt Debacle: Glenn Reynolds Chips In.

In some ways it really began as a storm in a teacup, and I missed the ball on something important when writing my previous post, though Crissa in the comments pointed the omission out:  There was no big feminist uproar about the shirt-with-the-leather-corseted-women, if by "big" we mean something written out on very large numbers of feminist blogs and/or talked about on various list-serves.

Indeed, after I checked all this, I found nothing about the shirt on those list-serves.  Glenn Reynolds (newly come to his full blossoming as an MRA (Men's Rights Activist)) also tells us is that there really wasn't much of a storm in the first place.  He states that two women whose jobs are linked to science commented on the shirt:

The Atlantic's Rose Eveleth tweeted, "No no women are toooootally welcome in our community, just ask the dude in this shirt." Astrophysicist Katie Mack commented: "I don't care what scientists wear. But a shirt featuring women in lingerie isn't appropriate for a broadcast if you care about women in STEM." And from there, the online feminist lynch mob took off until Taylor was forced to deliver a tearful apology on camera.

I'm not sure what this online feminist lynch mob looks like.  It couldn't have been enormous, because I missed it for quite a time. But sure, there were a few blog posts on the shirt.

What Glenn Reynolds seems to have missed is the responses Rose Eveleth, for instance, received.  They are not mentioned in his article so I'm going to put a few of them here:

Those are good to keep in mind when thinking about this bit from Glenn:

"Mean girls" online mobbing may be fun for some, but it's not likely to appeal for long. If self-proclaimed feminists have nothing more to offer than that sort of bullying, then their obsolescence is well deserved.

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Added later:  It's almost impossible to measure various "mobs" on Twitter.  They could be a handful of people in some cases and a large group in other cases.  So we should be careful when using words like a "Twitter mob".  What can be measured, to some extent, is the number of responses individual tweeters get.

The Story of The Shirt With Leather-Corseted Women

This BBC article summarizes the story, with relevant pictures.  The scientist in the quote is Matt Taylor:

One of the leading scientists on the Rosetta Project gave a string of TV interviews in a shirt emblazoned with half-dressed women. The angry reaction online spawned two hashtags, spoof images and has now led to a tearful apology as well.

The Story of the Shirt has indeed provoked lively debates online and possibly elsewhere, too.  There are two major sides to these debates, and because I happen to be bilingual in this stuff, I'm going to give you the main messages of both sides, in terms which are clear to people on the other side!  Isn't that useful and wonderful?

Let's begin:

First, the side which can be simplified into "women-in-science and women interested in those banned-word* issues":

Here we go again!  An important public interview about the fun and excitement in science, a major moment in the history of space exploration, and women are present in leather corsets sticking out their butts and tits from the shirt.  The broculture in action!  It's their world and we can only visit it if we are willing to stick our butts and tits out the same way.  If he had to wear a shirt with women on it, why not this one?

  

And this is what Taylor said in the interview:

During an interview about the landing, Dr Taylor had branded the comet landing 'the sexiest mission there’s ever been. 

'She’s sexy, but I never said she was easy.'

Got that?  It's good to remember that Taylor's field is covered with guys, in statistical terms.  All this (and the broculture) should be kept in mind when considering the above message from one world.  It's also important to remember that this shit is drip-drip-drip, nonstop, even though consisting of tiny and essentially trivial jabs in one's eyeballs and ears.

Second, the defenders of Matt Taylor.  This group consists of people who think Taylor is just a bit of a goofball:

The guy is socially clumsy.  After all, scientists are socially clumsy.  He was trying to make the point that he's just the average guy, having fun, wearing a shirt a friend made him, showing all of us that science is fun and that nerds aren't really nerdy at all but ordinary folk:

Before the emergence of #shirtgate, Dr Taylor, a father-of-two and the son of a brick layer, praised on Twitter for being 'a proper cool scientist' and 'definitely not boring'. 

One Twitter user wrote: 'Dr Matt Taylor is what every scientist should look like - rad shirt, sleeve tattoos. Rad,' while another said: 'Matt Taylor causing thousands of people to choke on their cornflakes this morning.'

And imagine if you were given this public treatment for the way you were dressed somewhere in public (I once wore a black shoe and a blue shoe)!  

The scavengers have landed on the still-warm corpse of someone who offended the feminazis!  Poor guy.  He didn't mean anything sexist with that shirt.  He was just showing us the human side of being a scientist.  At the end of this idiotic debacle he had to apologize and he was in tears, and that's the real injustice, right there.

Got that?  Some people made a giant mountain out of a molehill and then tried to suffocate a well-meaning but socially inept scientist under that mountain.

And what do I conclude from all this, given my divine viewpoint?

That both sides are correct in some ways.  I doubt very much that Taylor tried to explicitly make women feel that they don't belong in science, and I doubt very much that he chose to see the project as a woman who must be seduced etc in order to put women in their proper place (outside science but sexually available).

At the same time, that's the message he was broadcasting, if ever so slightly.  And the reason for that is pretty obvious:  The ways we define "a normal guy" and "just having fun" do not exclude shirts like that or statements like that unless you are well-versed in gender issues and the complaints linked to the broculture in STEM fields.  Some people have the luxury of not having to be well-versed in those issues, and for that group the whole incident looks like people taking out a cannon to kill a mosquito on the poor man's forehead:  Reactions utterly out of scale with the presumed crime.

Compare that to the drip-drip-drip aspect of all those little acts that are tilted by gender.  Perhaps another mosquito parable would apply here:  One mosquito you can swat away, but if you are always surrounded by a horde of them you do become rather sensitive to mosquito stings.

Whatever you might think about that, someone probably failed in organizing those interviews and in making sure that Taylor was appropriately dressed for the occasion.
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*That would be feminist.  See Time magazine for more details.

Speed Posting Thu 11/13/14: Living While Female in China, India and El Salvador

In China employment discrimination against women sounds a bit like the US of 1960s.  There may be laws against it but the cultural norms don't find that much wrong with it.  Still, this article suggests that times they might be a-changing. 

On the other hand, removing the one-child policy could have complicated effects on the goal of gender-equality:  More women are expected to take more time off from the labor market, which makes them less desirable employees, and the valuation of daughters might go down when fewer people don't have to stop at the one daughter but can keep on trying for the sun son.

On the third hand, the linked article suggests that feminist awareness is rising among the young women in China!

In India, at least eight women have died after sterilizations.  Tainted drugs are suspected.  The government offers sterilizations at no cost to the patients, as a way of combating India's population growth.  But here's the bit which is worth noting:

About 37% of Indian women have undergone sterilization procedures, the highest rate in the world, compared with 1% of Indian men. Karat said state and local governments opt for the surgeries instead of educating women — most of whom are uneducated — about other contraceptive measures.

Can that 37% figure be right?  Even if it isn't, the difference between the male and female figures probably is roughly correct.  When you consider the fact that female sterilization is a more invasive procedure than male vasectomy...

Of course tainted medications could have killed patients of either sex.  The point is that the risk, on average, is considerably greater for women than men when it comes to sterilization.

In El Salvador abortions are illegal for any reason.  Combine that with a culture which views a pregnant unmarried woman as a slut, to be shunned, and you get this:

El Salvador's ban on abortion is driving hundreds of girls who become pregnant after being raped to commit suicide every year because they see no other option, a government official said.
Teenage pregnancy is one of the leading causes of suicide in the Central American country of 6 million people. Three out of eight maternal deaths in El Salvador are the result of suicide among pregnant girls under 19, latest government figures show.

Read the linked article to spot the role of the Catholic church in all that.  Then think about the fact that the extreme fringe of American forced-birthers want to copy the laws and culture of El Salvador.

The Social Justice Warrior: Now It's a Slur And Used So by Andrew Sullivan

The speed of change online and in the media is fascinating to watch.  If you turn away for a second to get your eleventh cup of coffee, you miss something crucial.  For instance, the midterm elections cured the Ebola fear epidemic!  They did.  Now if we could only put the reason into a new vaccine.

Sigh.

I was supposed to talk about Social Justice Warriors (SJWs). They used to be people like Gandhi or Martin Luther King or Elizabeth Cady Stanton.   But now they are people who bite righteous (that's how the world is and too bad but I'm able to admit it) sexists or racists  in the butt, who try to steal gamer boys'  inborn right to have nekked women in the computer games, to possibly pretend-rape or pretend-kill them and so on*.

They are people who try to drown the freedom of speech, to initiate that long-gray-corridors-and-slamming-metal-doors era of government communism on the free and wild cowboy Internet!   Only this time the faceless bureaucrats will have a face:  It's that of a leftist feminist or a revolting-disgusting-all-powerful feminazi.  And yes, Virginia, SJWs can include men.  Those men are called manginas (man-vaginas, which is intended to be a slur) or white knights (men who defend women, those slutty filthy vermin),

Oh my.  I've spent too long in certain places online.  My apologies for that.  Now Andrew Sullivan (of the why-men-are-hormonally-superior-to-women fame) has jumped in the fray, with his fears that the feminazis have captured Twitter and are now removing the accounts of anyone who hates feminism.  Not just accounts which are abusive, mind you, but accounts of someone erudite-in-his-hatred and not at all threatening (such as Milo Yiannopoulos, a writer for Breitbart, and a self-identified leader of the Gamergate)!

What lit the fire under Sullivan's tail this time?  Probably the new cooperation between WAM and Twitter:

Sullivan’s panic was occasioned by news that the small nonprofit Women, Action and the Media, or WAM!, is working with Twitter to try and make it more responsive to rampant gender-based harassment. The arrangement, contrary to Sullivan’s headline, doesn’t give WAM! power to decide what is and isn’t allowed on the service; it simply gives the group a direct line to Twitter to report verified cases of abuse and monitor their outcomes. “WAM! will escalate validated reports to Twitter and track Twitter’s responses to different kinds of gendered harassment,” says the group’s announcement. “At the end of the pilot test period, WAM! will analyze the data collected and use it to work with Twitter to better understand how gendered harassment intersects with other types of harassment, how those attacks function on their platform, and to improve Twitter’s responses to it.”

Michelle Goldberg, the writer of that quote, then notes that Sullivan doesn't seem to have read anything by women on online harassment or anything about online harassment in general.  I spotted the same thing.  He believes everybody faces exactly the same levels of death and rape threats and that everybody would manage just fine with a skin as thick as his.  Given recent stories like this one and this one, I'm not at all certain that women don't have an extra helping of hatred on their online dinner plates for just being women.

I have not studied the experiment WAM has with Twitter, and I cannot judge how it is going to work, but the whole thing smells a bit like an attempt by Twitter not to follow its own ethical guidelines but to make someone else do the work.  The crucial question Sullivan asks is, of course, whether accounts could be canceled for ideological reasons and not just for threatening violence or harassing someone nonstop.

But you cannot find the answer to that by asking only the people whose accounts have been canceled, just as you cannot necessarily believe someone in court who is accused of committing a crime.  Yet that's exactly what Sullivan seems to be doing:

Let me know if you’ve been suspended for ideological reasons – and not for harassment or stalking or threats of violence. And if you know of a Twitter account that has been rightly suspended for actual threats to individual women, ditto. 

What's this all about, then?  Sullivan would say it is about the freedom of expression, and he might coin himself the First Amendment Warrior.

I think a lot of this is, deep down,  about the hatred of women that waxes strong inside some Twitter users.  Attempts to regulate the forms that hatred takes in public are necessary, but they are not getting to the root of the problem.   For note that a woman can be guilty of as little as tweeting a joke about a sports team, and down come the hordes, ready to commit imaginary vile crimes on her, to punish her for her Twitter crime.  Which is to speak, especially if it is in an area others regard as properly male.

See how Sullivan and I both ended with freedom of expression concerns?  He is worried about the silencing of certain voices, I point out the silencing of different voices, and the two concepts dance together.  A danse macabre?




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*There's a second definition of that term, too, having to do with some Twitter groups.  Goldberg refers to it in her article.

 

    

 

Eleven Years. An Anniversary Post.

My Beloved Readers,

Eleven years is an elegant number, beginning with an elegant letter and very suitable for this middle-of-the-road gateway blog to feminazism and other horrors.

It's the eleventh birthday of this blog.  I'm out of my mind to do something like this for eleven years, but then you knew that already.  Is there going to be cake?  But of course!  It's going to be made out of chocolate, with whipped cream filling, and the decorations on top will be marzipan mice and chocolate snakes chasing them.

Thank you, my erudite and kind readers for these years or whatever snippets of them we have shared.

The next week or two will contain some posts that I've thought about for a long time or researched for a long time.  Anniversary posts. Some of them are like prey for those predators whose yellow eyes you see glittering under the dark online trees.  Some of them are just the usual boring stuff, but I hope one or two will also be fun.

Echidne

And A Little More on the Midterm Elections: Why Right-Wing Evangelicals Rule Us

Rich Yeselson's "Six Points on the Midterm Elections" is worth pondering about.  For example*:

My “favorite” exit polling of this election has these percentages: 78-20-26; 43-55-74. The first is the percent of white evangelical Christians who voted Republican, Democratic, and their percentage of the overall electorate. The second is the result from the rest of the electorate — in short, Democrats carried the “everybody else” cohort by a pretty good margin. But the overwhelming support of white evangelicals, more than one-quarter of the electorate made all the difference for Republicans. (The white evangelical breakdown was almost identical, by the way, in the last several elections).

To give you an idea how impressive that 26% of the electorate is: the entire polled cohort of “people of color” — blacks, Latinos, and Asians (other “of color” people voted, but too small a group to sample) — totaled 23%. The people who tell you that the Christian Right has faded are wrong. And the Republican Party will never “moderate” (whatever that means) as long as it gets over 40% of its vote from a group that is deeply reactionary (both socially and economically).

The so-called culture wars will be with us for a very long time, because the money boyz will need those right-wing fundies and the fundies want the gays back in the closet and the wimminfolk back in the kitchen.  That is the bloody meat they will be thrown in exchange for the wallet brigade getting lower corporate taxes, corporate Internet**, fracking and so on.  That marriage, between the fundies and the corporatists, is not made in heaven but it's still unlikely to lead to a divorce.

Ironically enough, the Republican Party must not "overreach" in what they offer to the white evangelical Christians.  If abortion and same-sex marriage were actually made illegal the fundies would no longer have much of an incentive to vote for the Republicans.

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*I'm not sure if this is raw or adjusted exit poll data.
**Like always having the choice between an expensive but fast toll road or a free-but-slow gravel road full of potholes.  What's wrong with that?  Given the income inequality in the US (and the rest of the world), a lot is wrong with that.  We don't usually privatize infrastructure, for fairly obvious reasons.  

What to Grumble About. Or Trivial Complaints for Saturday.

This will be fun!  The curmudgeon goddess gets to talk!  Usually it's the goddess of gloom.

First complaint:  Imagine getting in your car early in the morning, ready to drive to work, and someone has changed all the dials around and the gear-stick is now on the other side of the driver's seat.  You get a little message when you power on, telling you that all is now "new and improved."

That never happened to you?  Well, it's happened to me three times during the last week, but not in the car.  At my computer.  The people who change things around never seem to put any weight on the problem I've tried to clarify with the above parable:  Learning is a cost to the users, and changes in the system should take that cost into account.

Second complaint:  How microwave ovens and other domestic gadgets are designed to make cleaning as impossible as possible (heh).   The designers never did any cleaning?  The designers have large investments in the toothpick and Q-tip industries?  The designers hope that consumers buy another product when the previous one is full of gunk and goo?

Here's another (though trivial) reason why we need more women in design, not because there's anything gender-essentialist about women and cleaning, but because women are more likely to have cleaned such gadgets in the past than men and more likely to have to clean them in the future, sadly.  This article gives you more reasons for getting more women in the STEM field.

I don't get why consumers don't rise up and demand gadgets which are cleanable and which last longer.  Those would be better for the environment, too. 

Third complaint:  I don't have a third complaint today.  But one needs to count to at least three to get a listicle!  And listicles are the new face of online journalism.  That might work as the last trivial complaint.

Have a complaints video:

Speed Posting, 11/6/14: On Pickup Artists, the Gamergate and Street Harassment

1.  Julien Blanc, a PUA (pickup artist) is giving heterosexual men expensive seminars on how to talk to women, with the pu**y as the goal.  The way you get a woman's interest is by grabbing her head and sticking it to your dick, to quote the speaker's own words.  I'm not sure if you are supposed to say "hi" first or just attack the first woman that walks by you in the street.  This guy crawled from under some weird rock, all slimy and tentacled (apologies to all the slimy and tentacled creatures for that comparison) and equipped with something like the Rapist's Bible, based on the messages he has left in social media.  More about this charming individual:

Mr. Blanc, who describes himself as the executive coach for Real Social Dynamics, makes a living selling men the “important investment” of his advice in the fine art of picking up women. It’s a course he calls PIMP, that includes techniques in “How to destroy her Bitch Shield,” by among other things, commanding women to “Get down on your knees, call me Master, and BEG ME to kiss you…”  

His views on Japanese women are a bit like someone's views on sushi.  If you get my meaning.  Women are prey, and different types of prey animals are either easier or harder to catch.  But the Great White Hunter does really well in Tokio!  Head to dick, you know.  (I watched the video).

Blanc is now facing opposition online,  and one hotel in Australia has dumped his planned series of academic lectures on the fine art of seducing a woman (head to dick, head to dick).  That's because the students would probably want to practice what they learn with the hotel guests, like how to break through her Bitch Shield, how to make her kneel and call him the master etc.

2.  The Gamergate continues.  I found this post by a man pretty interesting.  He cannot take the harassment he is getting, and he's on the Gamergate side (the side which worries about ethics in game journalism and only harasses women sorta accidentally).  Not surprisingly, he gets most harassment from his own side. 

This YouTube spoof based on the Hitler movie which has been used for many, many similar spoofs is very funny if you have followed the Gamergate.

3.  Finally, more on the street harassment video. People in New Zealand redid the experiment and the woman in that video didn't get any cat calls whatsoever.  As I wrote in my earlier post on this, the phenomenon is cultural and shows great local variations.  Some countries are worse than others (Italy has a long history of street harassment as men's entitlement, Cairo is very bad, based on what I have read), and even in the US cities vary in this culture.

That is good news, because cultures can be changed.

And here's Collie Myerson on the first NYC video and the question of the harassers' race and ethnicity.   We need similar videos taken in different parts of cities, in different countries (I've seen one from Egypt) and with women of different race and ethnicity before there's anything like a full picture on street harassment of women.

The Morning After The Midterm Elections

It's not the morning but I was up most of the night so there.  The results were as predicted by historical patterns for midterms but worse than that for Democrats.  At the same time several pretty progressive initiatives won.  For example, raising the minimum wages got support in five states which are not exactly deeply blue states:

Voters in Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota supported proposals to raise wages for their lowest-paid workers–an issue that is of particular concern for small employers, who tend to operate on thinner margins. Illinois approved a non-binding measure, which won’t immediately change the current law.

And both North Dakota and Colorado rejected the Egg-American-Rights initiatives:

The radical “personhood” movement was dealt a significant blow on Tuesday night, when voters in North Dakota and Colorado resoundingly defeated two ballot initiatives that would have redefined life to extend legal protections to fertilized eggs.

But then there is this, from Charlie Pierce, on all the election results (read the whole thing):

I think it was contemplating the fact that both Sam Brownback and Paul LePage both may have survived as governors that was the last straw for me tonight. Brownback has wrecked his state. Even Kansas Republicans believe that. LePage is a local embarrassment who became a national embarrassment in the final days before the election. Even Maine Republicans believe that. But Brownback will go back to wrecking his state, and LePage will go back to embarrassing his because of an attitude that Republicans, and the conservative movement that has powered the party, have cultivated carefully over the last three decades.

The Ebola Panic Epidemic Continues

A teacher in Louisville, Kentucky, resigned because of the Ebola panic in the US:

Susan Sherman, a religious education teacher who is also a registered nurse, was recently on a mission in Kenya in eastern Africa. When she returned, St. Margaret Mary school requested she take a precautionary 21-day leave and produce a health note from her doctor, according to a statement from the Archdiocese of Louisville.

How close did Susan Sherman go to the areas of Ebola?  This map gives you an idea if you remember that Kenya is on the right edge of the African continent:

Kenya is shown on this map:

I'm too lazy to figure out the distance from Kenya to the nearest country which does have people with Ebola.  But it's sort of wanting to quarantine people who have been to Louisiana because Oregon had some illness.

All these reactions may be understandable, because of the hind-brain response to new and poorly understood threats.  But information is the proper vaccination here, and information seems sorely lacking.  And some politicians play on that fear.

Speaking of Ebola and politics, can you even imagine what would happen if the party in power during a real Ebola epidemic in the US were the one which wants to choke the public health care system to almost-death and save lots of money through privatizations?  Vote.  It's important.

VOTE, in the USA

In the US the day of the midterm elections is tomorrow.  Most forecasts predict a Republican House and Senate*.  That means the bus which was stopped for a few years will, once again, start careening towards the abyss.

But whatever your political views might be you should vote, rather than skip the midterm election.

You should especially vote if other people try to stop you from voting by direct actions, such as the movement trying to stop voter fraud not at the machines (where it's probably a bit more likely) but by mostly imaginary illegal voters.  The impact of the movement that requires specific types of IDs in order to vote hits the poor harder, hits the elderly harder, and hits the minorities harder.

Then there are the recent statements by various right-wingers arguing that young women shouldn't vote because they are too stupid to vote.  One way to respond to that is to list all the possible classes of people who might be too stupid to vote, but I won't stoop that low.  The point is that the right to vote was won with great sacrifices and should be treasured by the simple act of using it as it was intended:  Vote.

It takes less time than a dental cleaning** and is much more pleasurable.

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*Largely because the competitive slots are mostly in Republican-leaning areas and because midterm elections tend to favor the party which doesn't have the presidency.  But general apathy also matters, and these predictions are not the same as final outcomes. Less than a thousand votes gave George Bush Jr. the presidency and all that followed from it.  Thus, it's never safe to assume that your vote or its absence wouldn't matter.

**Assuming you don't belong to one of those groups which others try to stop from voting.  Then it might take longer.

Working Too Hard

Esther Kaplan writes about Americans who work too hard.  One consequence of the "jobless recovery" can be exactly that:  Fewer people doing far more work.

That can have serious consequences, because people are human, need rest and sleep, and make mistakes if they are overworked. 

Most of Kaplan's examples come from hospitals, though it should be noted that treating nurses as if the nursing forests were full of dead trees in need of felling is a longer term trend*.  But similar concerns apply to other "post-recovery" industries, including schools, factories, mines and stores.  Overwork can kill or hurt, and the victims are not only the workers themselves.

As an aside, this aspect of working very hard is seldom addressed in the moral sermons about the need to work hard rather than to ask for help.  Nobody is at their best after a twenty-hour shift in a hospital, say, and I wouldn't want someone investing my money (to give an utterly imaginary example!) after they have been working twelve to fourteen hours without a lunch break.  I don't want truck drivers on the roads without adequate sleep and breaks, either. 

Then there are the related concerns:  Workers have families and if workers are always supposed to be working (at least always available for work), the family duties will suffer.

At least many nurses have unions.  The non-unionized workers have few options when the labor markets push them into the choice of working incredibly long or tiring hours or not working at all.
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*Caused by a complex mixture of events:  Less severe patients are sent home so the average case-mix in the hospitals is sicker, even if there might be fewer patients overall, the pressures to cut costs by reducing the staff at hospitals, especially in for-profit hospitals, and the fact that defining the output of nurses is difficult and can be debated over.  For instance, which tasks should be performed by nurses and which can be performed by other, less expensive staff, is something that can be manipulated.
 

Happy Halloween

If you celebrate it.  The festival used to be for older children and pre-teens in the US.  That might be the only group which isn't that keen on Halloween these days.  Or so I judge on the basis of my social media surfing, where dogs, cats, adults and tiny babies wear Halloween costumes.

Speaking of social media, Twitter and the like, it might be worth confessing on this BOO! day that using logic, looking at the evidence and treating everyone with preliminary respect (as a possible human being, goddess. god, elf or whatever) is not the way to win hearts and minds in politics, be they the traditional type or sexual or gender politics.  You need something different.

Chews on a piece of straw while meditating on that.

You need to appeal to emotions, you need to  show only the data which supports your argument, even if it is the only study in the whole wide world which does so (looking at you, David Brooks), you need to look at only the extreme opposite ends of distributions (like compare Mother Theresa with Hitler or Einstein with Paris Hilton in gender analysis) or simplify complex evidence in weird ways (add apples to oranges, divide by lemons and get bananas), and when someone points that out to you, you need to move the focus of the argument to something quite different (you know how this is done).

Or just blow your stack (how DARE you analyze data!).  That always works wonders.

The other stream of stuff I'm unhappy with is the Twitter phenomenon of talking about the way we talk about what we talk about.  The circles go on forever.  It's not that linguistic analysis, including linguistic power analysis, wouldn't be useful.  But the infinite circles are not useful, and they never lead to any concrete resolutions or practical policies.  For that we need to look at the infrastructure:  health care, education, housing, jobs, utilities, clean air, voting rights, honest electoral politics, properly regulated markets and so on.

That was today's rant.

For its exact opposite (and anti-Halloween) here's Hildegard von Bingen:

Wolf Whistles, Cat Calls And The Gauntlet of Compliments

By now you may have watched this video:

Hollaback, an organization that wants to stamp out street harassment and intimidation (a.k.a. catcalls), produced a video in which it videotaped a young woman walking around Manhattan for 10 hours this past August. A hidden video camera was placed in the backpack of a man walking in front of her, catching every catcall, whistle, and even one persistent character who walked alongside the woman for five minutes.
The results are startling. According to Hollaback, there were over 100 instances of verbal harassment in that 10-hour walk, not including winks and whistles. In the video, the woman remains silent. She is dressed in a T-shirt and jeans.

The responses to the video range from one extreme to the other.  If you feel masochistic today, spend some time (which might feel like an eternity) reading the comments at the YouTube site (or probably the comments attached to any article about the video).  

I looked in, rather quickly, about four million views ago, and found the debate raging, with all the usual fronts covered:  Those who were shocked to find that this happens (including the new "of course I hate all feminists but" gang!), those who argued that the woman was rude in not responding to the compliments, those who wanted the video to be about hunger and war peace, those who stated that they were women and loved getting wolf whistles and compliments and of course large numbers of women who pointed out that this happens a lot and it gets pretty wearisome after a while.

I didn't come across the rape threats that supposedly were deleted from the YouTube site.  But then YouTube comments about anything having to do with women usually have something of that sort so they may not have registered in my hardened mind.

Two responses arguing back at the video stuck to my mind.  The first one was a comment in the long thread at the YouTube where someone asked how he was going to find pu**y if not by complimenting strangers  who are walking to work or to school or to the dentist or to the grocery store.  That one was funny.  I immediately imagined that the pu**y harvesting time is now and the way to harvest it is by approaching total strangers happening to be walking somewhere.

The second one is a tweet by a conservative:

That's a funny one because a) it assumes (rather than proves) that no woman walking alone in Victorian NYC would have been harassed (hah!  middle-and-upper class women were not supposed to go out alone ever, poorer women might have told about worse than harassment),  b) it offers women the choices of submission or harassment and, c) it hints at something rather nasty behind that veil of "enforced chivalry."

Then to the boring-but-necessary extra analysis: 

First, street harassment does vary by city and between countries and probably by the streets in individual cities.  It depends largely on local culture.  So what we see in the video may not apply to other places on this earth.  In some she might not have been addressed at all, in others she might have suffered much worse. 

Those cultural variations suggest that we can change street harassment.

Second, those cultural variations also mean that only some men engage in these practices.  That's worth pointing out.  What is going on in the sub-cultures which condone or support harassing behavior and how can it be changed.

Third, what about the idea that all the woman received, ultimately, were compliments (well, what with a little bit of gentle stalking).  What's so bad about getting compliments?  Why couldn't the b**ch thank for them or at least smile?

Sorry, that last sentence was influenced by a few of the comments I read.  More seriously, the statements in the video are a lot milder than some of the stuff I have experienced in my past.  Much milder.  But here's the dilemma one faces when receiving such compliments:

What to do next?  The person has not asked you if you want to talk or whatever, but has simply decreed that this exchange will now take place. 

And the only choice you have is how to respond.  If you smile or say thank you or even nod your head, will that person accelerate the attempt at a connection?  What then?  If you ignore the attempt, will you get by safely or will something worse follow?  

Halloween Approaches

And I noticed how glum I have been on the blog during the last few months, and if not glum then overly neutral.  The reason, my friends, is in the stars. *

Well, not in the stars as such, but partly in what's happening  (ISIL!  Ebola!  Climate Change!), partly in my own battle fatigue  (as in: "haven't I already written about this struggle some time during the last eleven years?", and: "did it make any f***ing difference at all?").   Yes, Virginia, sometimes I'm a pretty egoistic goddess, hoping that what I do matters more than a hill of beans in this crazy world.

To return the ball to the home plate (I'm trying to cram this post full of incomplete quotes, bad similes and so on), I can't think of anything to write about the politics of Halloween costumes that I haven't already written.
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*And also "Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall"  because I've been coping with some family health problems which are finally clearing.

Added later:  Something completely new for Halloween

It's About Ethics In Game Journalism. A Parable.

Some hardcore Gamergate supporters*  gathered for a party at a strip club.  Because the movement has been accused of sexism and misogyny, they made an effort to point out that ladies were present, and not just those ladies who offered lap dances or table dances for a fee, but female Gamergate supporters:

The 8channers gathered at the club moved their chairs into a ragged line and gawked for a few obligatory minutes as a compact Asian dancer extricated herself acrobatically from a fishnet body suit, before forming into tight-knit clusters around small round tables. They were overwhelmingly young white men in their early to mid 20s. An enormous bald man named Hans, an 8channer who had flown from Texas for the party, pointed out three women in attendance, two bona-fide female 8channers, and one girlfriend, a model and actress with a neat Suicide Girl look who was the only partygoer dressed more for the club than Comic Con. “Naturally, accusations of misogyny are thrown around, but as evidenced by the presence of women, of which there are a few, it is a diverse group.” Hans paused, then winked. “By the way, table dances are $10 and lap dances are $75, if you’re interested. May I recommend Ms. Rain?”

....

Suddenly Brennan zoomed into the apartment, sparking applause. Someone wheeled in a suitcase full of cheap booze to even more applause. A MacBook was set up to live-stream the party and Brennan posted a link from 8chan’s official Twitter account. He read a message from an 8chan user. “They said, ‘Where are the girls? You said there would be girls.'” Everyone laughed, and Sarah and Brooke waved at the camera.

Fascinating.  This story is a parable for the Gamergate, implicitly defining the rules for women's participation in a particular type of world.  The party is at a strip club, aimed to please heterosexual men with its services.  Girl gamers can be present, too!  But it must feel awkward for them.  A little like being an honorary chicken guest at the foxes' annual chicken dinner celebration.**

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*This post gives a short summary of the issues.  Gamergaters argue that the movement is about ethics in gaming journalism, their critics argue that the movement looks to be largely about misogyny.  Data tends to support the latter rather than the former argument.

Oh, and the title is because there's an Internet meme using "it's about ethics in gaming journalism" applied to all sorts of utterly unrelated things, to demonstrate how unlikely it is as an explanation.

**There's much more to that story than the parable I pulled out.  We could peel the onion of ideas much deeper to try to understand why one of the gamers present felt this:

...but a skinny guy named Mike, who had flown out to California to help Brennan with the move, became increasingly agitated. SJWs were trying to take away one of his last bastions of freedom and he felt personally under attack. “They think everything we have is shit, and they want to change it!” he shouted. “This is all we’ve had — for years!”

I wish the writer of the article had asked Mike more questions about what he would want to have, in the meatspace world, and why certain aspects of the games are so important for him.  Is this about someone whom life has treated especially harshly?  Or is this about someone who would like the reality to be like the most misogynistic games out there?  How much is entitlement and how much is pain?   And why must a game be a certain way to be exciting for him?


  

On Ebola Panic And Bitches

Via ql at Eschaton, this CNN tweet about NJ Ebola quarantine got 37 responses:

Out of those 37 responses five used the term "bitch," as in "quit bitching bitch" or "fuck that bitch" or "no bitch youre a walking plague" or "she needs to relax holy shit it's one thing criticizing but now she's sounding like a bitch" or "it's bigger then u .... BITCH."

One tweet just stated "fucking women" and was favorited 43 times.

This example is interesting because it is about something where the hind-brain takes over and tells people to panic, especially if those people lack the necessary information.  And because it's the hind-brain, out comes that misogyny, in the sense that women should shut up.

But it's also crucial to understand that the tweet itself got favorited 900 times, that the responses above are a small minority and that we shouldn't draw inferences about the general population of Twitter users from those responses.  Nevertheless, anger and fear are clearly infused with sexism in this example.

Speed Posting 10/23/14: Hobby Lobby Goes to Guantanamo, Athletes Behaving Badly And Murder As The Logical Consequence of Romantic Pursuit

1.  This is probably the weirdest attempt to apply the Hobby Lobby decision to religious freedom:  A "high-value" Guantanamo detainee argues that his religious values are violated if female guards are allowed to touch him:

Bin Attash, a Yemeni, is a devout Muslim whose religious beliefs prohibit physical contact between unrelated men and women. But a new policy at Guantanamo's Camp 7, the top-secret facility that houses more than a dozen former CIA captives, now requires female guards to have physical contact with the high-value detainees when escorting them to meet with their attorneys. A detainee's wrists and ankles are shackled when he's moved; two guards stand on each side of him, holding his forearms.

I doubt that the Hobby Lobby decision would extend to Bin Attash (one of the alleged plotters of the 911 massacres).  But the very idea that he could argue so is nightmarish.  For instance, all three large Abrahamic religions include texts which suggest that women should never give orders to men.  Imagine a man arguing that his religious rights are violated because his teacher or his boss is a woman.

The whole Hobby Lobby case shows us what might happen when someone's "religious rights" are determined to require fewer  rights for other people.

2.  Florida State quarterback (a talented college football player for those of you who are not in the US) Jameis Wilson has been in recent news:  First he yelled "F*** her right in the p****" (how the asterisks are yelled I do not know) on top of a table in the middle of the Florida State campus.  Then I read that he is facing a disciplinary hearing into charges that he sexually assaulted another Florida State student in 2012.*

This story reminds me of the British case of Ched Evans in the sense that the two men are  much valued by their respective sports, and some sportswriters turn into pretzels trying to separate the "ethical dilemmas" from just being allowed to root for the players of their choice without any insomnia.  I grant that this problem is a real one.  But most ordinary people don't get to pursue a wonderful career after a prison stay.

Then there's the sentence of Oscar Pistorius, a famous disabled athlete in South Africa who put several bullets into his girlfriend,  Reeva Steenkamp, killing her dead.  Pistorius has been given five years in prison for that, though he may serve only ten months of that in prison and the rest under house arrest.  As Pistorius' father stated:

“This has been an incredibly hard and painful process for everyone involved"

 
Not for Reeva Steenkamp, though, as she no longer exists.

3.  Finally, from the "Worst Headlines Ever" folder, this:
  

Romantic pursuit may have sparked murder-suicide near Houston hospital

So.  And it's not just the headline:

The suspect, identified as a 58-year-old male, walked up behind the female coworker and shot her several times before turning the gun on himself in an outpatient pharmacy near Ben Taub General Hospital, according to Houston police spokesman John Cannon.

Cannon told the Los Angeles Times that at least seven other employees heard the gunshots, and several colleagues told police that the suspect may have been trying to "enhance" a relationship with the female victim.
“Some of the employees are telling us in recent days the suspect had been trying to further a relationship with her. … That’s the only possible motive we are working on right now," Cannon said in a phone interview.

 If you can't "enhance" the relationship, just shoot her, I guess.  I don't know about you, but my idea of "romance" doesn't include stalking people or killing them dead if they spurn your advances.




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*It's worth noting that after the "F*** her right in the p**** comment Wilson apologized to the university, the coaches and his team.  He then apologized again to his teammates, quoting his selfishness as the reason why he yelled what he did.  Can you spot the people he didn't address in his apology at all?



 

That Pew Online Harassment Survey

Suggests that lots of people have been harassed online:

Forty percent of American adult Internet users say they’ve been harassed online, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center, which found the harassment is often by strangers on social-networking sites.
More than half of those who experienced online harassment did not know the person involved in the most recent incident of harassment. Some 38% said a stranger was responsible while 26% said they didn’t know the real identity of the people involved. Two-thirds of those who experienced harassment said the incident occurred on a social networking site or app.

What does the survey mean by harassment?  It didn't define harassment but

... asked respondents if they had witnessed or been subject to six behaviors: offensive names, physical threats, harassment for a sustained period, stalking, purposeful embarrassment and sexual harassment.

Because studies of online harassment are still in baby diapers all the surveys I've seen have various types of problems.  For example, this survey might classify vastly different levels of nastiness into the same group.

Take calling someone names.  That could cover labels such as "stupid," "c**t, "n***er" and "fa**ot."  The anger reflected in those is of a different nature.  The last three are class slurs, the first one probably isn't.

And what does purposeful embarrassment mean?

All this matters when the next stage compares percentages of people experiencing online harassment.

Another aspect which matters is how to control for the types of sites people visit.  Some of the finding that young people are especially likely to be harassed may be because of the types of sites they visit.  And yes, I get that the sites we visit are partly our own choices and not extraneous determinants of the level of harassment.

All this means that I'd take the most recent Pew survey with a dose of salt.  Still, it's probably true that the group which faces the highest level of online harassment consists of young women.  From the survey summary:

Online harassment is especially pronounced at the intersection of gender and youth: women ages 18-24 are more likely than others to experience some of the more severe forms of harassment. They are particularly likely to report being stalking online (26% said so) and sexually harassed (25%). In addition, they are also the targets of other forms of severe harassment like physical threats (23%) and sustained harassment (18%) at rates similar to their male peers (26% of whom have been physically threatened and 16% of whom have been the victim of sustained harassment). In essence, young women are uniquely likely to experience stalking and sexual harassment, while also not escaping the high rates of other types of harassment common to young people in general.

Other differences the survey found were between black and Latino users on the one hand and white user on the other:  The former were more likely to report having experienced harassment.  This suggests that the intersection effect for young black women and Latinas might be quite high.

I would like to see an online harassment survey which more carefully separates harassment by acquaintances from harassment by strangers and which also looks at the reason the harassment happens in a different way.

To explain the latter by an example:  It matters quite a bit if I'm harassed by a stranger because I wrote something controversial or even nasty or just because the harasser decides that I am female (insert here any other group category of the same type)  and therefore obvious prey for harassment.

More Men Are Raped in US Than Women?

You may have come across that assertion before if you have the habit of visiting MRA sites on the net.  I've seen it, but never found any sources for it, except for fuzzy hints that it's because of prison rape of men is not included in the general rape statistics.

But the Gamergate led me to the tweets of one of its avid supporters, and the  result is that one of this gentleman's earlier tweets provided me with a source for the view that men are raped more often than women in this country.

The link he so kindly provided is from October 2013 Daily Mail.  The crucial bit is at the very beginning of the story:

More men are raped in the U.S. than woman, according to figures that include sexual abuse in prisons.
In 2008, it was estimated 216,000 inmates were sexually assaulted while serving time, according to the Department of Justice figures. 

That is compared to 90,479 rape cases outside of prison.

Let's look at those figures.  First, a caveat:  It's possible that there are other sources which support the view that more men than women are raped in the United States (though I doubt that). All I try to do in this post is to analyze one particular source, the Daily Mail one.   Second, it's crucial to note that prison rape is horrible, that men, indeed, can be the victims of rape and that all rape victims deserve our concern and support. But we can do that with actual data, right?

To see what drives that paragraph above, note the following three criticisms:

1.  It compares "sexual assault" with "rape" by giving us numbers about the former for prison and jail inmates while quoting some undefined source on the latter for the general non-institutional population.  Sexual assault in the prison study the Daily Mail article refers to includes not only rape and attempted rape but any kind of unwanted sexual touching. 

The concept of rape does not include that third category.  Whether it includes attempted rape depends on where that 90,479 figure comes from.  Thus, the above paragraph compares apples to oranges in the sense of the acts included under the categories of rape and sexual assault.  The latter is a much wider category.

2.  It's difficult to determine from that paragraph the source of the rape counts for the non-institutional population.  Sexual assault statistics tend to come from two sources:  one consists of reports to the police or other authorities, the other consists of self-reporting by random individuals in the community.  The former gives much lower rates of rape and other forms of sexual violence, partly because many forms of sexual violence are never reported to anybody.

The prison and jail data in this case comes from the latter kind of study:  self-assessment by the inmates.  We should compare that data to similarly created data from the general population, not to reported rates of rape. 

I searched for roughly comparable figures for 2008 and found the following:

The total number of sexual assault victims in the non-institutionalized population was 203,850.  The share of female victims was 164,240 and the share of male victims 39,590.

The figure given in the Daily Mail article for rape (90,479)  is not the correct measure for the comparisons the article attempts to make.  For women that would be 164,240 if we compare sexual assault figures*.  Note that you should not now run to compare that figure with the prison-and-jail victimization figure of 216,000.  That's because of the next criticism:

3.  The study the Daily Mail article  relies on  covers BOTH male and female inmates in US prisons and jails.  It's wrong to assume that all the 216,000 inmates reporting sexual assault in 2008 were men.  The quoted 90,479 figure for general rape rates may also include male victims.  But in any case the comparisons become muddled when female victims in prisons and jails are put into the male victim category.  This is how:

The 2008 prison-and-jail sexual victimization survey tells us that 4.4% of all prison and jail inmates reported being the victim of sexual assault that year.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find such overall figures separately for female and male inmates.  The study does give us data by the gender of the inmate but it's split into categories by the identity of the offender:  either other inmate/inmates or prison or jail staff.  Some inmates reported having been assaulted by both other inmates and the staff.

 If we assume that the last category is the same, percentage-wise, for men and women victims, then my rough calculations suggest that 4.3% of adult men in prisons and 3.0% of adult men in jails were the victims of assault that year.  Compare that with 6.3% of adult women in prisons and 4.2% of adult women in jails who reported that they were the victims of assault that year.

Here's where I began truly questioning the original statement that more men than women are raped in the US.  Now, the original data in the Daily Mail article doesn't compare rape with rape, in any case, but looking at the last set of figures it's  clear that the overall victimization rates are higher for female inmates than for male inmates.

In 2008, the general percentages of sexual assault per 1000 non-institutionalized persons over the age of 12 in the US were 0.3% for men and 1.3% for women.  However hard I try, I cannot make the magnitude ranking of those percentages flip by adding that prison-and-jail data with proper population weights. Because the female victimization rate inside prisons and jails is still higher than the male victimization rates.

Looking at the population inside prisons and jails does decrease the overall difference between female and male sexual assault victimization rates. That's because the male population of prisons and jails is much higher than the female population and because sexual assault is much more common in those institutional settings than in the general population.

But it doesn't flip the percentages.  The Daily Mail article is wrong: Self-reported rates of sexual assault are still considerably higher for women than for men.

The point of this post?  It's always good to know what the data actually tells us.  With the general warning that we should be careful about comparing disparate data sets, collected in different ways, it's pretty safe to believe that more women than men are raped in the United States. 

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*It's impossible to know if the general population survey questions are exactly comparable to the survey questions the inmates answered or if the possible response biases are the same in the two cases.  All the comparisons should be treated with care for that reason.

To give you an example, one of the sources of the Daily Mail article also addresses the sexual victimization in juvenile facilities in 2011-2012.  The rates of reported sexual assault by other inmates in those facilities were 5.4% for female inmates and 2.2% for male inmates.  The rates of reported sexual assault by staff in those facilities were 8.2% for male inmates and 2.8% for female inmates.

These figures define sexual assault or sexual misconduct by staff as including contact initiated by the inmate or contact without any coercion.  The data on female and male inmates together tells us that 3.5% of the respondents reported forced or coerced sexual contact with staff, 4.7% reported sexual contact with staff without any coercion, force or threat.

The latter type of sexual contact amounts to the abuse of authority by the staff.  But sexual contact of this type is not counted in the sexual assault statistics of the general non-institutionalized population.  If it were, any apparently voluntary sexual contact between the young and authority figures should be included.

Even if we decided to include non-coerced sexual contact with the staff of juvenile facilities in the "prison rape" category, the overall statistics on sexual assault by gender would not flip in magnitude rankings, because the number of juveniles in these facilities is so small.

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Added later:  Jill Filipovich wrote about similar issues in 2012
 

On Mice and Men. Another Weird Research Popularization

This one, from the UK Independent (though extensively available elsewhere, too), with the title:

Man flu is real: Scientists say men have weaker immune systems

And this picture:

  We are told that women have stronger immune systems than men.  We are then told that a study has shown this.  We then find out that it's mouse women who seem to have stronger immune systems than mouse men,  at least against the bacteria streptococcus pneumoniae:

Scientists from Harvard University have discovered that the female sex hormone oestrogen fortifies the immune system, and men are suffering for its absence.
In the study, published in Life Sciences medical journal, a simple dose of oestrogen was capable of curing both male and female mice of bacterial pneumonia.

Bolds are mine.

I know the arguments used to justify rodent studies as possibly applicable to humans.  But there's a pretty large leap from mice to men, and there's always the very real possibility that a similar study done, say, on rats, wouldn't have found the same results.

Or perhaps it would have.  But if it hadn't  it wouldn't have been popularized.

Popularizations which take rodent data and treat it as if it was data on humans are not uncommon when it comes to female rodents and women.  Indeed, those studies have been used to lecture women on ethically correct behavior.  I haven't spotted many popularizations which equate men with male mice and then try to teach men how to behave better*.   I wish we didn't do that crap for either gender.
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*The one exception I recall is this.

What Made Women Scarce in Computer Science Courses in the US?

 This NPR program is worth listening to.  It tries to find what happened around 1984 to cause the anomalous drop in the graph below for women in computer science:

I'm sure other explanations are possible, but the one that program uses is a pretty credible one.  It consists of  looking at a particular time when computers became coded "male," a time when it first mattered that women and men beginning computer study courses at colleges had not had the same exposure to home computers. 

Before that date most people had not had that exposure.  After that date men were more likely to have had it*, and as practice matters, men then looked more competent in the introductory courses (which made more women consider themselves unsuitable for computer science).  The reasons for the exposure difference is discussed in the program, but mostly it had to do with the societal coding of computing as male through advertisements, popular movies and so on. 

Once that happened, that more female students dropped out of the computer science programs, that the programs became more male, those things would reinforce the initial gender coding and the cycle would then perpetuate itself.  To find out how to break that cycle, listen to the program.

All this is interesting when trying to understand the problems women have in the IT industry.  The change is fairly recent, after all.  It's only thirty years since 37% of computer science graduates were women.  Now that percentage is eighteen.  But we regard the field as belonging to male geeks and nerds, as if that was based on eternal biological gender differences.
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*The program does talk about access to computers by girls and boys during that era.  It's likely that parents carried out some of the gender coding.  It's not easy to figure out what happened.  But some data suggests that boys' toys are more expensive than girls' toys.  That could have made parents more hesitant to buy a computer for a daughter than a son.  But it's also possible that girls didn't ask for personal computers, for whatever reason.