New Hate Sites

The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated several "manosphere" sites as hate sites. The justification? This:

The so-called “manosphere” is peopled with hundreds of websites, blogs and forums dedicated to savaging feminists in particular and women, very typically American women, in general. Although some of the sites make an attempt at civility and try to back their arguments with facts, they are almost all thick with misogynistic attacks that can be astounding for the guttural hatred they express.

Yup. Guttural hatred would be the correct term. It's gotten more guttural recently. Wear a hazmat suit if you decide to visit the listed sites or any of the hundreds of other similar ones which exist on the net.

Those Automated Phone Answering Systems

Offer an interesting example of some changes which may save firms money but which also increase the true opportunity costs for their customers.

Sayz Echidne, after having spent a frustrating afternoon listening to canned messages and pressing digits on the mobile while trying to reach a real person. Because the problem I had did not have an automated answer.

The time I had to spend is a loss to me. I couldn't do other work at the same time, or not as well, and I couldn't do rest or relaxation, either. In economic terms this loss is a real cost. For instance, if it stops a person from carrying out work for pay either the pay for that work is lost or something else will be lost later when the work can be finally carried out. That "something else" is the value of what would otherwise have occurred at that time.

Yet when firms consider changes of these types to the way they operate, the extra customer costs are seldom factored in, until they results in a drop of revenues. Because all firms automated their phone systems at about the same time, customers are stuck with that extra time expenditure.

What's my point here, other than venting about a minor frustration? That when we calculate costs and benefits to various economic agents we should be careful not to ignore costs or benefits which are transferred to someone else, unless, of course, we are the accountants for only one economic agent.

For instance, sending seriously ill patients home from hospitals earlier will save hospitals money. But if those patients then need home-care, someone to stay with them or visiting nurses to see them, the total savings (if they still are savings) will be less than the savings to just the hospitals. This from the point of view of the whole economy, not just the hospitals.

The Rebuttals. Or Why The US Economy Is Not Biased Against Men

As opposed to being biased that way. It's important to remember that the initial argument goes like this: The US Economy Favors Women!

The Atlantic Monthly posted two rebuttals. One is by Bryce Covert:

Is there hard data we might examine in order to determine what's causing the gender wage gap he thinks is so misleading? In fact, there is. A GAO report tried to account for the difference in earnings between men and women and found that factors like work patterns (experience or time in the workforce, for example), industry, occupation, race, marital status, and job tenure do come into play. However, it then stripped all of those factors out, and it still found that women make 80 percent of what men earn. It concluded, "[W]e were not able to explain the remaining earnings difference." One of the possibilities, it said, is discrimination, pure and simple.

This is the study I use in my gender gap series.
The second rebuttal is by the Catalyst Inc. and makes the point that family-friendly policies benefit both men and women, what with men starting their lives as babies and then often becoming fathers themselves. So they are not a sign of reverse discrimination against men. And, astonishingly, the zero-sum game between men and women in the MRA view of the world is not zero-sum in the real world because (lo and behold!) men and women sometimes live together, help each other, even (gulp!) love each other:

But here's where it gets even more interesting: Men now have more personal reasons to support equality too. Take fair pay. Of the more than 25 million married couples with children in the US in 2010, 57.7% were dual-career couples. And in 2009, working wives contributed 37.1% to family income. Yet many women today still earn less and get promoted less frequently than men from day-one of their careers--regardless of their aspirations, credentials, work experience and parenthood status. Over the course of a 40-year career, this can add up to an average of $380,000 in lost wages. For fathers who rely on their partner's income, support for pay equity is a no-brainer. Equal pay equals more money for the family.

I still also recommend my direct rebuttal of the Nemko article below. Because it's almost as nasty as Nemko's piece and addresses his specific arguments.

Then to the media politics in all this: The Nemko piece has over 400 comments, which means that it was good piece for the Atlantic Monthly! That about half of them are misogynistic comments (all about what's wrong with those billions of women in the world) is of no consequence to the editors. Or perhaps they were babes-in-the-woods and never thought that the intended audience of a misogynistic piece might be misogynists?

What's extremely ironic is that the comments thread to the Nemko piece offers such strong evidence of misogyny among one group of commentators that it would outweigh any kind of evidence of bias against men in the actual article (had it offered such). Just imagine one of those guys in charge of the hiring process at some firm!

Is The US Economy Really Biased Against Men?

I debated myself for a while about the advisability of posting on this opinion piece in the Atlantic Monthly, by Marty Nemko, who appears to be the co-chairman of the National Organization for Men (!). Mostly because the initial opinion piece is intended to be a click magnet or linkbait and I don't wish to reward bad behavior by the Atlantic, especially if they don't offer a balancing post at all*.

But then someone must address the issues in Mr. Nemko's piece, so it might as well be me.

He begins with a parable:

You've just landed on Planet Zuto.
The Intergalactic Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (IEEOC) has sent you to determine whether Zuto's economy is fair to its two sexes: vozems and zems. Your boss suggests you'll probably find sexism against the vozems.
But your first discovery is that 60 vozems graduate from college for every 40 zems. You discover clues as to why. Despite the under-representation of zems, many scholarships are set aside for vozems, few for zems. The curriculum accentuates vozems' accomplishments, zems' failings. Student groups are funded to encourage vozems, for example, Future BusinessVozems, far fewer for zems.
You beam your first report back to the IEEOC: Zuto U's appear to be sexist against zems, not vozems.
Next, you examine the Zuto Bureau of Labor Statistics and find that the unemployment rate for vozems is 20% lower than for zems. You are shocked to discover that rather than trying to help zems land work, the government deliberately exacerbates zems' deficit: vozem-owned businesses get special preferences in landing government contracts and taxpayer-backed small-business loans are set aside for vozems.
You beam back your next report to the IEEOC: More signs of sexism against zems. Your boss responds, "But vozems earn 77 zits for every 100 zems earn!"

Good stuff, eh? But note the initial setting in its ahistority. We are not told why vozems seem to get such preferential treatment on that planet. The probable reason for that is intimately tied to the 77 zits figure. The vozems may have been barred from economic opportunities in the past but there are now attempts to change that.

That quote sets the stage for the whole article. Just substitute women for vozems and men for zems. Though be careful with that substitution, because men's unemployment rate in fact is no higher than women's unemployment rate over the long-run. It rises more in recessions and bounces back more rapidly when recessions end because there are many more male workers in the bellwether industries of construction and manufacturing.

Nemko's basic premise appears to be that things would be perfectly completely gender-equal if only there weren't any special set-asides or women-only groups in colleges and at work. But those arrangements exist for a reason, and that reason is that everything is NOT completely gender-equal. Whether they work to increase the representation of women in traditionally male-dominated industries is a different question.

But the reason why colleges and universities might have special groups for women who study physics or computer science, say, is because women are scarce in those fields, and because being one of the few women in the classroom can be difficult. It makes little sense to offer men support groups in those field as they are already a majority.

On the other hand, such groups for men who study, say, early childhood education, would be fantastic and deserve to be created.

What I conclude from the above quote is that Nemko is very much opposed to anything that smacks of affirmative action for traditionally excluded groups. He regards that as reverse discrimination.

But he has more to say about how the US economy hurts men:

The 77-cents-on-the-dollars statistic is calculated in a way that is biased against men. For example, while among all physicians, men earn more than women, men are more likely to be in specialties requiring longer training, high-stress, and irregular hours, for example, surgery and cardiology. In contrast, women are more likely to be pediatricians. Despite that bias, across all careers, surveys report that childless women under 30 make more than men. More than 90 percent of workplace deaths, military deaths, and severe workplace injuries (e.g., amputations, black lung disease) occur to men. Such dangerous work justify higher pay for men.

My answers to that:
1. Studies controlling for working hours and occupation still find a largish unexplained earnings difference between men and women. Indeed, good studies control for all those factors routinely. He is right that the 77-cents-to-a-dollar figure is not necessarily due to discrimination. But his arguments fail to account for a large chunk of the total difference, the chunk which obstinately stays there after researchers take into account education, experience, hours worked, occupation, marital status, age, number of minor children etc. What that unexplained residual might be caused by can be debated, of course, but it certainly leaves scope for discriminatory effects. See my gender gap series for more on this.

Or put in very simple terms: If we compare male pediatricians to female pediatricians, we find an average earnings difference to the detriment of the latter. If we compare male cardiologists to female cardiologists we also find an average difference to the detriment of the latter.

2. Then this:

Despite that bias, across all careers, surveys report that childless women under 30 make more than men.

Which surveys might those be?

Because Nemko doesn't give us a reference I'm going to hazard a guess that he talks about the survey which compared the earnings of young men and women in urban centers. But that study failed to hold education levels constant. As women in those areas have more education than men, the survey amounts to comparing oranges with grapefruit. To find out whether young childless women indeed earn more than young childless men we need to compare men and women with the same amount of education. Otherwise we run the risk of attributing an education bonus to gender.

In general it's tricky to make an earnings prognosis from very young workers. This is because most income differences accrue over time and not at the point of entry to work, whatever their causes might be.

3. Nemko argues that the higher occupational mortality of men justifies their higher pay. But this doesn't work. The reason is that the particularly dangerous occupations are not especially well-paid overall, certainly not when compared to the relatively safe environment of corporate boardrooms. And it's in the latter places that men earn large incomes.

This also doesn't work because the number of men in the truly dangerous occupations is not large enough to have any major influence on the overall earnings differences by gender.

The connection Nemko tries to build here is akin to arguing that because (relatively poorly paid) fishermen suffer from a high risk of death at work the guys who run the financial markets deserve to get paid a lot. That's pretty weird but not uncommon in this particular line of thought.

Two further comments on the higher occupational mortality of men: First the reference to military death rates is quite fascinating because women have traditionally been excluded from the military and are still mostly excluded from combat roles. This gender-based exclusion is now counted as an advantage to women! Or at least a reason why they also deserve to get paid less.

Second, as I have written before, prostitution just may be the most dangerous occupation of all and it is a predominantly female one. But because it is an illegal occupation it is not listed in those risk statistics.

What have we got so far? Nemko argues that men are discriminated against, in the sense of reverse discrimination. He also argues that women earn less than men for reasons that are to do with the valor, bravery and hard work of men. Or that is how I interpret the examples Nemko chose there.

So what comes next? Policies about childcare and pregnancy leaves and such are also discrimination against men!

In honest conversation, most people will agree that, on average, men are more often willing to do the things it takes to get promoted, for example, to make time to take advanced technical courses by forgoing recreation such as sports or shopping. Men are more likely to be willing to move to a God-forsaken place (Montgomery, Alabama, anyone?) for a promotion, and, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, to work longer hours.
Most people will also agree that, on average, women are more eager to have children and to be deeply involving in their upbringing. So women's committees and caucuses, with the help of outside advocacy groups with close ties to the media such as Catalyst, NOW, and AAUW, have pressured workplaces to institute programs for employees' children, for example:
• On-site child care, which diverts money from all employees' salaries and/or raises company products' prices, which ultimately costs jobs.
• Formal or informal policies that allow parents to leave work early, for example, to attend their kid's soccer game, leaving non-parents of both sexes to pick up the slack. And those non-parents, especially men, dare not raise a peep of objection lest they be dubbed sexist, which can hurt their career.
• Women's advocacy groups also were successful in pressuring the government to create The Family and Medical Leave Act*, which allows employees to--usually with minimal verification of need--take up to 12 weeks every year(!) to care for a relative, with a guarantee that their job will be held for them until they choose to return. (Women take the majority of FMLA days.) Now those advocacy groups are pressuring employers to make FMLA days-off paid days.
• For parents (again, disproportionately women) who wish to take years off to raise their offspring, many corporations have established on-ramps to help them get their career back despite having lost their technical and Rolodex's currency, and now often being less committed to work than are their non-parent coworkers.

Notice how nasty the text got in that section? Notice the sly reference to "shopping" as the activity women might prefer to the hard task of taking advance courses! A particularly odd argument given that Nemko began with the female dominance in education. And finally, have a look at how angry he feels at those horrible parents who return to the labor force despite having lost their skills and their commitment!

It's a Catch-22 for women. No, they can't have parental leaves or on-site daycare. And no, they can't come back after taking time off to care for children in other ways. All these policies amount to a bias against men!

I don't know about you but this was the part in my reading where I thought that the Atlantic Monthly must have gone crazy to let this guy in through the door. He's not just opposed to what he calls affirmative action for women. He's opposed to anything at all that might let them ever leave the house, and he assumes that any policies which help workers with children are policies which only benefit women. Presumably men do not have children or families in his world.

I wonder what would be required for Nemko not to regard the US economy as biased against men. The forceful removal of all women from paid employment?

At this point in my reading the article the wind was out of my sails. Nemko is just too, too weird. For example he wants men who work long hours to be called not workaholics but heroic. By whom? Presumably by their wives or someone dependent on them for money. But I don't quite see why the term "heroic" should be applied to total strangers just because they work long hours. How is not doing that an economic bias against men? Besides, I'm a heroic workaholic myself.

Or his rant about how much more common "Take your Daughter to Work Day" is in Google searches than "Take Your Daughter and Son to Work Day." The latter is the new form of that day, as far as I understand. The former term came about because at the time girls didn't necessarily think that they could work for money in the future, and the day was proposed as a way to change that thinking.

That particular purpose is now outdated and the change to a wider definition good. But if we are to think about what the male version of the initial "Take your Daughter to Work Day" might have been it would have been "Take your Son into the Kitchen." Because sons were expected to work outside the home and not cook or clean at home.

What's sad about Nemko's piece is that the weirdness of the article makes it hard to take any of it seriously:

The media influences how men and women are treated, and how boys perceive themselves relative to girls. Whether in commercials, sitcoms, or movies, even in non-fictional media, men are disproportionately characterized as sleazebags or doofuses shown the way by wise women. Don't believe it? Just turn on your TV. And have you not seen "Girls Rule" tee shirts? How do you think that makes boys feel?

Mmm. I fully admit that the portrayal of men in some commercials and sitcoms is awful. But so is the portrayal of women in much of the media. Tits, tight skirts and so on. Add music videos and Internet pron to that and it's hard to see how women could come out as winners in this game.

The reference to the "Girls Rule" t-shirts is just silly. I have never seen anyone wearing one and I wouldn't like to see one worn, either. But I did recently pass a car with (roughly) this bumper sticker: "Anything that bleeds five days a month and doesn't die must be rotten." Didn't make me feel good to pass the parked car. And no, I did not key it.

I wish that this piece would have been replaced by one which would have actually looked at the reasons why men's average real earnings in the United States are declining among those men who do not have college education.

The main reason is in the loss of well-paying blue-collar jobs due to outsourcing and the globalization of many heavy industries. These disappearing jobs are in male-dominated industries, whereas the new jobs that might replace them are in lower-paying service industries. Many of those have been traditionally female, though there's no barrier to entry for men who wish to enter them. Still, the changes have been tough for certain groups of men and have not received sufficient attention from the powers that be.

I wish Nemko had written about that or the deeper reasons behind the lower percentage of men in college and how to fix these problems. But he chose to go the zero-sum gender wars route where anything that hurts women is good for men and anything that is good for women must hurt men.
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*I have now been informed that there will be such a post.

The Problem of Uppity Nuns

The Catholic Church is gonna fix that problem. It's the next important topic on their to-do list:

A Vatican investigation of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), an umbrella group representing 80 percent of Catholic sisters and nuns in the United States, found serious theological errors in statements by members, widespread dissent on the church’s teaching on sexuality and “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith” a church report released Wednesday stated.
The church appointed Archbishop Peter Sartain of Seattle to oversee “reform” of the women’s organization.
NETWORK, a Washington, DC lobbying group founded by Catholic sisters in 1971 was singled out as “silent on the right to life”; the organization’s head said the group was not consulted during the inquiry. She said that its focus on poverty, immigration and health care stems from its founding mission.
“I think we scare them,” Sr. Simone Campbell, a lawyer who serves as the executive director of the lobby said of the church’s male hierarchy.

No comment necessary, really.

But I'm adding one a bit later because the NYT article on the same topic has additional information:

The Vatican has appointed an American bishop to rein in the largest and most influential group of Catholic nuns in the United States, saying that an investigation found that the group had “serious doctrinal problems.”
The Vatican’s assessment, issued on Wednesday, said that members of the group, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, had challenged church teaching on homosexuality and the male-only priesthood, and promoted “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.”
The sisters were also reprimanded for making public statements that “disagree with or challenge the bishops, who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.” During the debate over the health care overhaul in 2010, American bishops came out in opposition to the health plan, but dozens of sisters, many of whom belong to the Leadership Conference, signed a statement supporting it — support that provided crucial cover for the Obama administration in the battle over health care.

The bishop appointed to reign in the uppity women religious is a man because women cannot be priests. But note that one must also be male to be allowed to be "an authentic teacher of faith and morals."

It is most unfortunate that all this parallels traditional male authority as the only genuine one. Not a random coincidence, of course, but an intended one.

Indeed, the metaphoric value of all this is quite considerable, especially as it comes so soon after the statement by the church on birth control.

After A Very Serious Post. Or on t-shirts

I'm exhausted, knackered, too pooped to pucker and so on. So this post will be about my love/hate relationship to t-shirts. Hate them new. They are hard, cardboardy, trying to stand on me even when I sit, and they are hardly ever available in that deep forest green I want.

Love them old. They become second skin, and any stupid writing they may have once had has long since faded into oblivion. And so have the too bright colors I don't care for. They may be cotton but in their old age they become silk, fiber for the roalty. And me.

Then they fall apart, and we are back into that hate-cycle of the love-hate drama.

What I need is someone to pre-wear t-shirts for me for, say, five years.

T-shirts with messages on other people somewhat worry me. I always feel the wearers expect a reaction. But what is the proper reaction to a really insulting t-shirt? A quick takedown and boot to the head?

Right now I wear a t-shirt which states "Never believe anything I say." But I don't wear that when I go where other people are.

The Hand That Rocks The Cradle: Deep Thoughts About Parenting

Hilary Rosen's comment about Ann Romney and the resulting brouhaha may be emotionally exciting (or angering) to engage in but ultimately not very enlightening. They set stay-at-home-mothers (SAHMs) against mothers in the labor force, they point out that poor mothers on welfare are supposed to go out to work, even though otherwise staying at home with one's children is the most valuable work there is.

But however valuable work child care is (and it is) it is terrible in pay and in benefits (never mind this story, funny money does not count). Women who do it for their own children end up taking a financial punishment for doing so and women who do it for other people's children are among the lowest-paid workers in this country.

Then there's the feminist-bashing arguments. Feminists hate SAHMs! So much that being a feminist who wishes to be one is a daring move. And the truly nasty arguments you find if you dig in the bottom mud of comments threads attached to these pieces: Mothers who stay at home are lazy bon-bon eating golddiggers! Mothers who work are selfish careerists who mistreat their children! Women who don't have children are the worst of the lot because they have refused to carry out their god-sanctioned and biologically determined role in life!

It's all fun and games. But it doesn't bring us one step forward, for several reasons. The most important is that every woman gets equally threatened in these conversations by what are viewed as her "choices." The stories are linkbait for that very reason: Imagine all those shaking fingers typing on all those keyboards, all those gritted teeth, all those churning stomachs, all that unfocused anger!

Add to that mix the very patriarchal commenters who come in to tell women how to mother and feathers will fly.

So let's take a few long steps backwards and look at the very innermost layers of this parenting onion. Forget about the current debacle, forget about your place in this guilt-scenario. Indeed, even forget the planet we are on.

Instead, suspend your judgment and imagine another planet where creatures very much like us have created civilizations. They differ from us in one aspect, however, and that is how they procreate. Suppose that they work that bit out like frogs, that they leave tadpoles behind in ponds and that the children born that way are then quickly filled with all necessary information by some high-tech procedure.

In such a world neither sex would have to be in charge of long years of child care. What would such a society look like, in terms of gender equality? My guess is that it would look pretty close to equal.

Spend some time with that thought. You might ask yourself what would happen if that society decided, for some reason known only to themselves, to meddle with their reproductive system and to change it into something resembling ours, requiring years of hands-on care by at least one adult.

Would they choose one sex to do all the hands-on child-rearing? And if they did, what would that extra obligation mean to that sex's societal equality? How would sex roles change? What beliefs would be created about the proper life roles of male and female parents?

These musings can be enlightening. They lead to several obvious questions, the most important one being the question which underpins everything here:

Is it possible to have hands-on childcare shared by both mothers and fathers, in fairly equal amounts or is it never going to be that way?

This is the crucial feminist question on parenting.

What we have, right now in the United States, is a system where most people believe that it is the mothers who are ultimately responsible for the hands-on care of children.

Some believe that this is a managerial role, that she can delegate the actual care to either other relatives or to paid caregivers but that she is still the one responsible for all the scheduling and the overall performance of the arrangement. Others believe that only the mother herself should do the caring. The latter means, naturally, that she cannot be in the labor force while carrying out those duties. Very few people seem to believe that the managerial role should be shared by both parents (even on the left side of the political aisle), and voices arguing for a wider solution ("it takes a village") exist but get no political traction. Hence the miserable maternity leave and lack of accessible daycare in this country.

Return to our imaginary society, after the genetic manipulation, and assume that now the female adults of that species are responsible for child-rearing, either because they were genetically manipulated to want that role or because the society decided on that for some other reason, such as them now breast-feeding the babies. Assume, moreover, that the society decides not to help the female adults in that task in any other way except by decreeing that the fathers of any children should give her bed and board while she is raising children.

How would a mother in that society look back at the history of her planet, at the roles of the past? Would she be content with the changes and the obvious costs to her? How would her male partner view the situation? And what would the society do, to ensure the reproduction of the next generation under these conditions? What myths would be created, what arrangements would come about, what laws would crop up?

The answer is probably unfathomable and would depend on how strongly the female parents would wish to undertake the task they have been assigned and on other power-related questions in the society. But it's hard to see how such a society could have political or economic gender equality, without very conscious changes to ensure just that.

And those required changes are few on our planet or in this country. Hence the question I bolded above.

If, one day, fathers participate in hands-on childcare in roughly equal numbers or at least as a sizable minority, then gender loses much of its discriminatory power. Employers would no longer try to shy away from promoting women just because they might quit soon, to stay at home with children. Men would be equally likely to do that, you see. There would be more women among the political decision-makers because women who wanted such a task could do so by marrying a man who was more focused on the family. And, perhaps most importantly, questions about how to cope with children would have stopped being questions that only have to do with women.

Is this trend feasible? I don't know but that is my hope, not only because it would decrease gender discrimination in the labor markets and even out the earnings differences between men and women but also because it would offer a more balanced and emotionally richer life for all. Ultimately.

Current feminist economic and social activism makes sense if it is based on that implicit assumption about the future. But if this trend is not going to happen, the kind of feminist activism we need is quite different, consisting of attempts to get salaries and retirement benefits for SAHPs, of affirmative action for parents who return to labor force after taking care of children, of fights against seniority and work experience as a basis for promotions (when they are not equally available for both fathers and mothers) and possibly of political quotas for mothers. Continuing to fight for better and affordable daycare would continue but it would remain a women's issue.

These have been deep thoughts on parenting, not in their wisdom but in the depths I have plunged here. It makes sense to drill into the very center of the gender onion. It even lets me, at least, get a better handle on the question why the mommy wars rage so very easily: Parenting is seen as what "mothers" do, "mothers" are seen as an undifferentiated mass from the undifferentiated mass of "women", taking care of spoonfuls from the undifferentiated mass of "children" there is only One Correct Way To Mother And If Your Way Differs From Mine Then One Of Us Is Wrong.

And fathers are invisible elephants in the room.

Happy Pay Equality Day!

I still recommend my gender gap series (available at the website shown at the top of this blog. The empirical data in it is a bit old by now but the arguments are as fresh as ever.

Bryce has written a nice piece on seven steps which would reduce the gender gap in earnings. The first:

1. End salary secrecy. According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, about half of all workers are either prohibited or strongly discouraged from talking about how much they make with their colleagues. And it’s pretty hard to sue an employer for pay discrimination without first figuring out what everyone else rakes in. So, easy task: just force all employers, public and private, to let anyone talk freely about how much they make. Americans should quickly get over their queasiness about discussing money, and employers shouldn’t care if their lower paid employees start salivating over six-figure salaries.

I can't help noticing that out of that list of seven FOUR steps (3, 4, 5 and partially 7) are directly linked to the fact that women do most of hands-on child-rearing. If that societal chore was equally divided, those steps would no longer matter for gender equality in earnings*.

This does NOT mean that women "choose" to earn less, in the sense of choosing chocolate ice-cream over vanilla, say. What it means is that policies about parental leaves and childcare are essential if one wants to fix the gender gap. Changing expectations about the role of mothers, fathers and others are also necessary.
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*Gender segregation would not completely disappear but it would be greatly reduced because women would no longer need to pick occupations on the basis of how flexible they are for temporary exits and re-entries or how long the working days are. These are among the reasons which make women choose occupations where knowledge does not depreciate fast or where the expected hours of work are not above eighty hours per week. Occupations which offer the necessary flexibility also offer, on average, less pay.

And Here We Go Again: Mainstream Media Covers Feminism!

From here.


It's the Katie Roiphe piece I discuss below but made a thousand times worse. This, my sweet readers, is how "women's issues" are covered in the mainstream media, how one gets the cover photograph! A double-whammy, too, because both "working women" and "feminists" get properly bashed there.

I'm not sure what the Newsweek sexist editors think being a "working woman" involves, given the recent Ann Romney kerfuffle, but it appears that homemakers are absolved of any naughty reading material! Probably staying at home turns a girl into a dominatrix who waits with the whip for the hubby to come home after work.

Or something similar. It's hard for me to write anything sillier than the actual article. I do hope that Newsweek dies a quick death soon. Any magazine which thinks that attacking the majority of women is a good policy should die.

Fifty Shades of Grey

A thought experiment: Suppose that a murky e-book about women as sexual dominatrices became a best-seller among female readers. How would such a thing be written up in the mainstream media?

That it really IS the End Of Men? That civilization is dying? That the sky is falling? That the most feared scenario of the misogynists is becoming reality: A world where women reverse patriarchy and force men to experience what it feels like to be at the receiving end?

No such book has been written, of course, so you don't see those takes. But I bet you anything that they would have been the takes.

Instead, there's an equally murky book about women as sexual submissives (Fifty Shades of Grey) and, oh boy, aren't we going to hear about its success among women! Not only as a poorly written soft-pron book aimed at the female market but as An Indicator Of How Women Wish To Submit In Life. To men. Katie Roiphe's voice will be heard on that topic, as it has been in the past heard on the topic of how there is no date-rape and how feminists hate babies.

She is what is called a contrarian in a society where contrarianism, when applied to gender, amounts to supporting the existing unequal gender roles.

But Roiphe was late at the starting line. Maureen Dowd managed to sneak a story in faster, with an actual interview of a dominatrix! As the source of what percentage of women might be sexual submissives! I love the careful research in these kinds of pieces, I do. And the point is ultimately always whether women really want to be equal with men or not.

We have had these discussions many times before. Indeed, they are cyclical, like periods. They are not much based on actual evidence. Katie Roiphe, for instance, appears to accept the End Of Men bullshit and seems to equate the popularity of a certain book among women of certain demographic characteristics as indicating that most women are sexual masochists, perhaps even masochists in all aspects of their lives.

Yet actual data doesn't support any kind of End Of Men and data about women's (and men's) sexual desires is very hard to come by. It's even harder to deduce which aspects of those desires are created by our life experiences* (and thus affected by the societal norms) and which aspects are somehow innate.

But the biggest misuse of the mostly nonexistent data is the one Roiphe makes, to draw conclusions about women's societal role aspirations and the popularity of one SM book. Sexually submissive men can be bosses in large firms, perhaps even presidents of countries, for instance, and those who like this book may consist of mostly sexual submissives, not of some general cross-section of women. (Or of men. I have no idea whether we know who the readers are.)

I get how irresistible this story is to the mainstream media. It has everything! Support of patriarchal views and kinky sex! And it doesn't look at the mirror side at all. Even though the man in the book appears to be a sexual sadist and the woman just goes along with his desires, we get no careful discussions to place his sexual sadism into a wider societal context as something perhaps caused by his diminished dominance in other parts of life. Indeed, the mirror side in these stories has no reflection at all!

The data that would be needed for Roiphe's thesis (which appears to be that sexual submissiveness increases in women as their equality increases) doesn't exist because we don't have good historical data on what roles people preferred in sex in the past. But I'm skeptical of that claim, myself.

What's most interesting in these kinds of stories (the pseudo-trends about women not wanting equality or not wanting the high costs of equality) is how very visible their construction is. There's never any real attempt to research a question, but anecdotes, fiction or movies are used in its place. When the pseudo-trend turns out to be pseudo, nobody cares because by then we are busy with the next pseudo-trend.
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*Just one quick example: If you are taught that you are a slut or a whore (which is a bad thing) whenever you express any active interest in sex, how will you reconcile that with desire? Perhaps by adopting a passive role in your sexual dreams because then you are not a slut/whore but still get the hot sex?

Feel-Good News From The UK

About a week ago the UK Guardian wrote about a surge in feminist groups in that country:

"I just don't think I should have to look at that – it's degrading," said 17-year-old Isabella Woolford Diaz. "If people want to buy it, fine, but I don't think 11-year-old pupils should have to look at it."
Deciding to take the matter into her own hands, the student formed a feminist group at Camden school for girls, and before long a core group of 15 teenagers – boys and girls – were attending. "I was getting so frustrated at how women were portrayed and I wondered if I was just being pernickety," she said. "But I soon realised it wasn't just me."
The group is one of dozens of new feminist organisations springing up around the UK, according to the campaign group UK Feminista. Research carried out to mark the group's second birthday has revealed that the number of active grassroots feminist organisations has doubled in the past two years.
These are feminists who do not fit easily into stereotypical moulds: young and old, men and women, urbanites and country dwellers. A new breed of feminists is starting to rise up.
"It's a really exciting time. We are seeing a real resurgence in feminist activism that is moving from the margins to the mainstream," said Kat Banyard, founder of UK Feminista and author of The Equality Illusion. "People are willing to put up their hand and say they are a feminist without the fear of being ridiculed. Particularly in the past 12 months, we are seeing people standing up and willing to be counted." Like the Camden group's members, many of them are young, passionate and unafraid to take direct action.

I have no way of judging how real such an increase might be but it is certainly needed. Without a fairly loud voice the mainstream media mostly publicizes anti-feminist and anti-woman shit, as you may have noticed, and marginalizes feminists as those weird very rare creatures with braided armpit hair and ugly faces.

And yes, knowing that one is not alone is of crucial importance in any kind of activism.

Hahah! You've Gotta Read This: On Only Ugly Women Seeking Careers

And you gotta do it AFTER reading my three posts on the study, in order: first, second and third. Promise me.

Then read this popularization:

A controversial study has concluded that the real reason women pursue careers is because they fear they are too unattractive to get married.
The research team, made up of three women and two men, said when men were scarce, "women are more likely to choose briefcase over baby".
Research has suggested the real reason women pursue careers is because they fear not finding a husband. 

And the plainer a woman is, they claim, the more she is driven to succeed in the workplace.
Central to their argument was the idea that women have evolved to become homemakers and men the providers.

This is such a marvelous example of how the bad type of research on women is popularized and made even worse, how the ideas and arguments are sprayed into the slime of society, and how, after a while, what this study supposedly states has become not perhaps common wisdom but at least yet another weapon in the artillery of anti-feminists and misogynists everywhere.

But I do love the juxtaposition! Here I go, in red-hot rage, writing careful and dull prose after careful and exhausting research, and here goes that paper, tralala, making it all into something much worse!

This, my friends, is something you should keep in mind when you read popularizations of research on women. It may be an extreme example but not that extreme.
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Added later: I really have to point out that whatever the flaws of the study, it never argued that women have "evolved to become homemakers!" Given that the view of homemaking as women's proper role is most likely something that was created in the nineteenth century Europe and US, and only applied to middle-class women's lives, such an "evolution" would have been difficult to carry out!

Today's Deep Thought

What would aliens from outer space think of humans if all the data they had were those usual hateful comments on newspaper stories and YouTube pieces? They'd probably decide to come and check our ethical development in another thousand years or so, assuming that they were checking us out not as a food source but for some inter-planetary cooperation reasons.

Weekend Reading And Viewing

The War On Mothers. You may have followed the recent debacles. Here's a good take on some of the arguments.

The War On Women. This is the weirdest Republican take on it ever. Ever. It argues that we should not address gender discrimination in the labor markets and that it would help women to remove all worker protections. It barely mentions the unavailability of affordable daycare, it does NOT mention the pitiful unpaid maternity leaves and it goes on about aspects of the system (differential treatment of women who have been in the labor market vs. not in retirement benefits, say) which the Republican platform supports. I should write a post on it but it's Saturday. Maybe later.

This is a fun thought experiment on the financial markets, well worth reading.

Finally, and just for fun, here is a philosophical cat.

Friday's Fun Post

David Brooks has written an ode to the hard-boiled Sam Spade characters as the proper role models for young idealists who try to save the world:

The noir heroes like Sam Spade in “The Maltese Falcon” served as models for a generation of Americans, and they put the focus squarely on venality, corruption and disorder and how you should behave in the face of it.
A noir hero is a moral realist. He assumes that everybody is dappled with virtue and vice, especially himself. He makes no social-class distinction and only provisional moral distinctions between the private eyes like himself and the criminals he pursues. The assumption in a Hammett book is that the good guy has a spotty past, does spotty things and that the private eye and the criminal are two sides to the same personality.
He (or she — the women in these stories follow the same code) adopts a layered personality. He hardens himself on the outside in order to protect whatever is left of the finer self within.

He is reticent, allergic to self-righteousness and appears unfeeling, but he is motivated by a disillusioned sense of honor. The world often rewards the wrong things, but each job comes with obligations and even if everything is decaying you should still take pride in your work. Under the cynical mask, there is still a basic sense of good order, that crime should be punished and bad behavior shouldn’t go uncorrected. He knows he’s not going to be uplifted by his work; that to tackle the hard jobs he’ll have to risk coarsening himself, but he doggedly plows ahead.
This worldview had a huge influence as a generation confronted crime, corruption, fascism and communism. I’m not sure I can see today’s social entrepreneurs wearing fedoras and trench coats. But noir’s moral realism would be a nice supplement to today’s prevailing ethos. It would fold some hardheadedness in with today’s service mentality. It would focus attention on the core issues: order and rule of law. And it would be necessary. Contemporary Washington, not to mention parts of the developing world, may be less seedy than the cities in the noir stories, but they are equally laced with self-deception and self-dealing.

I have bolded the actual message in that piece, the conservative message.

But the reason I write about this at all is that a long time ago I wrote a few sentences from the angle of a noir heroine:

Today was a day like all other days that are also called Sundays. The same slowness, the same newly starched faces in all the same church pews, the same drunks at the street corners worshipping in their own way. I wake up with a hangover next to the face of a stranger. The whiskey bottles on the floor are empty, and I have a headache down to my kidneys. Remind me not to go out with gorillas in the future, especially when the keyboard sits there idle, filling me with guilt. I slug down the eau de toilet from the bathroom cabinet and light up a stogie end I find under the sleeping gorilla. Time for some heavy lifting. The audience is out there, somewhere, and one day they will hear about me and even pay me. Until then I'll be ok with the booze and my karate skills. The roads are hard for a gal all alone but you knew that already.

Then the doorbell rings and it's a client for my one-woman blogging agency: David Brooks, banging on the door, falling into my arms, sobbing, when I open it (after I hide the stogie under the pillow). Someone is threatening to publish his murky past as a Maoist activist in Nepal* and he wants me to whitewash it all for him. Hmm. That could work as a story.
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*This past is my invention. I think.

An EP Study On The Scarcity Of Men And Women's Career Choices. Part III: The Reason Why Female Education Is A "Tragedy"

I have written two earlier posts on this study. The first one discusses the medieval example the authors quoted and asks why they call an evolutionary psychology study an evolutionary biology study. The second one gives a fairly off-the-cuff set of criticisms about the four sub-studies in the paper. This post is about a section added to the end of the paper, a section which is not based on what those studies analyzed.

Remember, the studies were all attempts to see how a skewed sex ratio (with more women than men) would affect the career choices of women in general. It was not a study about the mating markets for educated women with higher earnings potential. But that's exactly what the authors speculate about in a section titled "The Sexual Paradox and the Effects of Women’s Economic Success."

What is that sexual paradox? The authors begin by asserting that

The effects of sex ratio on women’s career choices highlight some of the difficult life decisions confronted by many modern women, which can lead to a sexual paradox (Pinker, 2008). A fundamental challenge faced by all of our ancestors—and continued to be faced by humans today—is raising offspring (Kenrick, Griskevicius, Neuberg, & Schaller, 2010). Because human off-spring require an immense amount of time, attention, and care over many years of development, humans have historically solved this challenge through pair-bonding processes such as marriage (Geary, 2000). Such pair bonds allow a couple to pool their time, energy, and resources to raise children successfully (Marlowe, 2001). However, because females are the only sex that can gestate offspring and provide early nutrition via lactation and nursing, there has been considerable division of labor by sex within human cultures historically. Whereas men have typically contributed more economic resources to families (e.g., money, hunted game), women have contributed more direct offspring care (Hurtado, Hill, Kaplan, & Hurtado, 1992; Kaplan et al., 2000; Marlowe, 2003).

This division of labor, with men contributing more economic resources and women contributing more direct childcare, conferred a survival advantage to most offspring (Geary, 2000; Hurtado & Hill, 1992).

There ya go. At least the authors don't call this trend something purely determined by evolutionary "biology!"

In reality the historical way of bringing up children has not been based on isolated nuclear families but on larger extended kin settings where other family members (older siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles) participated in the childcare.

In reality, prehistoric women contributed economic resources to families by gathering activities and by the hunting of small game as well as probably fishing. Some studies have argued that the more recent hunter-gatherer societies got most of the nutrition from the gathering activities, not the hunting activities. But let's not pay attention to any of that. Let's just notice that we had this good system going, one which conveyed survival advantage, and now uppity women are messing it up, for their own detriment.

Here is why:

Women are much more likely than men to go to university, with the vast majority of colleges having more women than men. A consideration of evolutionary biology, mating psychology, and sex ratio suggests that these changes may lead to mating challenges among women.
First, despite changes in their economic independence, modern women continue to place great importance on economic resources and status when choosing long-term mates (Buss, 1989; Li, Bailey, Kenrick, & Linsenmeier, 2002). In fact, as women become more educated and economically independent, their mating standards tend to increase. Educated women who earn a good salary usually desire to marry educated men who earn even more than they do (Townsend, 1989). Yet as single women gain more education and climb the economic ladder, the pool of men who are acceptable as marriage partners shrinks considerably. Thus, as single women continue to climb the economic ladder, their chances of finding a mate who meets their standards quickly diminish.
Second, while women who climb the corporate ladder continue to place a premium on the financial status and earning power of their prospective mates, men who are wealthy and well educated do not place a premium on the earning power, wealth, education, or status of women when selecting a long-term mate (Buss, 1989; Buss & Barnes, 1986; Li et al., 2002). Thus, men often prefer to marry women who have less financial resources and education than themselves—with many men marrying women who have little to no financial resources. Because wealthy men are not seeking women of similar wealth, this further shrinks the pool of long-term mates for single women who continue to climb the economic and corporate ladder.

Third, women today are getting married later in life and having children at significantly later ages than they were 50 years ago. The median age at first marriage for women in the United States has increased more than 25% since 1970, moving from 20.8 years of age in 1970 to 26.5 years of age in 2009 (Elliott & Simmons, 2011). The average age at which women have their first child has also increased dramatically, rising to 25 in United States, 27.8 in France, 28 in Canada, and 29.2 in Japan. Moreover, a sizable proportion of women are delaying reproduction until much later, and an increasing number are not even having children (Mathews & Hamilton, 2009).

This means that educated women will die alone and childless, a natural end to the current experiment in the equality games.

The crucial question here is naturally whether these mating preferences are innate and unchangeable or whether they may change when (perhaps for the first time in history) women actually command economic resources in greater amounts themselves. The authors are not addressing that question but lean towards the innate explanation, in my opinion.

What their description of this "sexual paradox" fails to provide is data on the sad outcomes they predict. Indeed, some evidence suggests that educated women do pretty well marrying, at least:

Among mothers of all ages, a majority — 59 percent in 2009 — are married when they have children. But the surge of births outside marriage among younger women — nearly two-thirds of children in the United States are born to mothers under 30 — is both a symbol of the transforming family and a hint of coming generational change.
One group still largely resists the trend: college graduates, who overwhelmingly marry before having children. That is turning family structure into a new class divide, with the economic and social rewards of marriage increasingly reserved for people with the most education.
“Marriage has become a luxury good,” said Frank Furstenberg, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

...

Money helps explain why well-educated Americans still marry at high rates: they can offer each other more financial support, and hire others to do chores that prompt conflict. But some researchers argue that educated men have also been quicker than their blue-collar peers to give women equal authority. “They are more willing to play the partner role,” said Sara McLanahan, a Princeton sociologist.

Never mind data, perhaps. The theory looks better without it.

The question whether the gendered division of child-rearing is innate or not in humans is a valid question. But the four studies in the paper were not about that, and neither were they about a mating market for educated heterosexual women which would have been defined as consisting of only heterosexual men with equal or greater education.

So why include this section at all? I leave the pondering of the reasons to you, but I can't help sharing with you something I read today, by serendipity, on a similar discussion of women and education in 1946:

World War II is still raging, but Americans are reasonably sure the Allies are months rather than years from victory. Willard Waller took to the pages of The San Francisco Chronicle Magazine -- published in a city to which many of the men fighting in the Pacific would return -- to predict "The Coming War on Women."
….

If we are to have an adequate birth rate, we must hear less talk about women's rights and more about their duty to the race. The plain fact is, women do not produce children under the conditions of freedom and equality that have existed in the United States since the last war. The birth rate among educated, emancipated women is very low indeed, since few women manage to compete with men and, at the same time, produce their due number of children. Usually the career of a brilliant woman is bought at the cost of an empty nursery. The price is too high, even if the contribution is great... Now surely some old-fashioned feminist will say that a woman is the mistress of her own body; the nation has no right to force her to bear children. Well the man is the master of his body too, but hardly anyone questions the right of the nation to force him to expose his body to the risks of war. A woman's ownership of her body should be subordinate to her obligation as the trustee of the race. 

How utterly hilarious that piece is! After the slaughters of WWII women were told that the survival of the civilization depends on them. But the Atlantic Monthly writer who quoted from the piece, Conor Friedersdorf, then concludes with this:

The "War on Women" circa 1945 doesn't much resemble the one  today.

Ya think? Granted, only the "white-race-is-dying" conservatives write the very same stories today, but the stories about why the evident hard work of young women in getting educated is not something to be lauded but a very sorry thing for the women themselves? Those are plentiful.
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Unless otherwise linked, direct quotes in this post come from Kristina M. Durante, Vladas Griskevicius, Jeffry A. Simpson, Stephanie M. Cantú, and Joshua M. Tybur: "Sex Ratio and Women's Career Choice: Does a Scarcity of Men Lead Women to Choose Briefcase Over Baby?" Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Online First Publication, April 2, 2012. doi: 10.1037/a0027949

An EP Study On The Scarcity Of Men And Women's Career Choices. Part II: The Four Sub-Studies

This post follows my first post below on the topic and looks at the study ("Sex Ratio and Women's Career Choice: Does a Scarcity of Men Lead Women to Choose Briefcase Over Baby?") in more detail. The quotes in this post come from the paper.

It discusses four separate studies. The first one is a statistical analysis of fifty US states. The last three are experiments carried out on small samples of female university undergraduates. The object in each of them is to ascertain whether women are more career-oriented when there is a scarcity of marriageable men. The last study also tries to establish whether hotter women (based on self-assessment) are less affected about such perceived scarcity than less hot women (based on self-assessment).

The experimental studies all conclude that a seeming surplus of marriageable men had no effect on women's expressed preferences between careers and family but that a seeming dearth of marriageable men did affect those choices, in the direction of more emphasis on career. The hot/not-so-hot study argued that the effect was driven by the not-so-hot women becoming more career-oriented when exposed to fictitious information about the coming end of men.

You might be astonished to find that I read through all the four studies and wasn't that bothered about them, given that I clearly am very bothered over the overall paper. That's because I'm pretty sure that both heterosexual men and women would behave differently if there was a very large imbalance of sexes, and that those behavior differences would apply mostly to the case where the numbers of the "opposite" sex are much smaller than the numbers of one's own sex. This is because such an imbalance makes it much less likely that the person herself or himself would find a life partner, and knowing that at a young age would affect one's economic and social decision-making.

What really got me going was the bit at the end of the four studies, a bit which essentially does not follow from the studies itself but appears almost pure propaganda or at least a cobbled-together argument for a study the authors did NOT carry out. It is that bit the popularization I read focused on.

Then to the four studies: The first one is a statistical analysis which uses data from fifty US states on the ratio of unmarried men to unmarried women between the ages of 15 and 44, an "operational measure" of the sex ratio in the "mating markets" and a bunch of variables the researchers chose to express career vs. family focus on women. These are the percentage of women in the ten highest-paying occupations for women per state, the average maternal age at first birth and the number of children a woman has. The study consisted of crunching out correlations between those variables and the operational sex ratio measure (apparently only in pairs). The conclusions:

These results provide qualified support for our prediction regarding how operational sex ratio is linked to women’s career choices and family planning. As the number of marriageable men in an area decreased, (a) the percentage of women in the highest paying careers increased, (b) the average maternal age increased, and (c) the number of babies born decreased. These findings suggest that the availability of mates may have important implications for women’s decisions to choose to pursue a high-investment career path and hold off starting a family.

Perhaps. But there are alternative explanations. The one which seems to be the most obvious one to me is that the authors assume a causal chain from fewer-marriageable-men to all the other variables, whereas the variable they use is a ratio of unmarried men to unmarried women. It may be the denominator that is the crucial variable here.

Young people in the United States move a lot. They go to college in other states than their own, they choose to find work in other states than the one they were born in. Come to think of it, young heterosexual women (men) could move from an area with a scarcity of unmarried men (women) to one where this is not the case. Thus, the implicit assumption in the study that people stay put in a particular place does not hold.

But more importantly, the results could follow from certain states being more amenable to high-level careers for women than other states, with more of the necessary industries, a more affluent client base and more universities and colleges which women need to attend first to get into those career paths. In short, the operational sex ratio may not push the results because of a scarcity of men. It may be correlated with the results because an "abundance" of young educated women have settled in certain states: those with the best career climates for women. And educated women marry later and have fewer children.

The authors call the support these results gave "qualified," perhaps because only six out of the ten top paying jobs had a statistically significant zero-order correlation with the operational sex ratio measure. My view is that the authors should have included more variables and analyses to test for the alternative explanation I outline above. I would also like to hear why women or men cannot move to find a partner inside the United States.

But the authors do acknowledge that the analysis in the first study cannot be viewed as proving causality running from the operational sex ratio to women's career choices. Hence the three experimental studies which manipulate the perceived sex ratio in various ways and then ask the study subjects (young female undergraduates) to answer questions concerning their views on career vs. family of this type:

To assess how sex ratio influenced desire for career versus family, participants responded to three items. Each item began with the following instructions: “Please indicate which is more important to you in terms of your future.” The three items were on 9-point scales anchored with the following labels: (a) having a family—having a career, (b) spending quality time with my future children—having a satisfying job, and (c) having a happy and well-adjusted family—reaching my full career potential. The order of the items was randomized. Responses were combined into a family versus career tradeoff index

The purpose of each study was disguised by giving the study subjects false information about the various parts of the study as being separate studies. The bit were the study subjects were fed fictitious information about the sex ratio was presented as a study about memory, for example.

I have the usual reservations about collecting psychological information presumably applicable to the whole world from small samples (some of these are very small) of American undergraduate students. Neither am I certain that the way the researchers manipulated the perceived sex ratio properly reflects how the study subjects would make actual career vs. family decisions. After all, if a heterosexual woman gets told oh-my-god-men-are-dying-out her first reaction might well be to become more career-focused. Or to run out and snap up a man. But of course men are not dying out.

Yet in the first experimental study which showed the study subjects three sets of eighteen pictures from the local dating scenes the ones who got the "scarcity of men" alternative saw either 12, 13 or 14 female faces in each group of eighteen. That's between 67 and 78 percent female. I would dearly like to know whether it was the women who were shown the 78% female pictures whose responses drove the results.

The other two studies did not use pictures but fictitious newspaper articles about the number of men vs. women at nearby college campuses. The articles came in pairs, one describing more men than women at the campuses, one describing more women than men. That according to the authors.

But the Appendix to the paper appears to contradicts that description. The articles are not just about a fictitious scarcity of men or women in nearby colleges. They are about a life-long lack of marriageable men/women in general. Here's the article those women read who were given the "few men" material:



Fewer Men for Every Woman for Today’s Students

By MORGAN K. JAMESTON, Senior Writer

There was once a time when the average college student could look around campus and expect to see an even number of males and females in a class. Those times are changing rapidly, however, according to new sociological research. Whether it’s in class, at work, or at the bar, college-aged women today should expect to see more women for every one guy.

The U.S. Department of Education recently released statistics of current enrollment patterns at national universities. The trends show that significantly more than half the incoming students across the country are women. “It’s astounding,” says Susan Rice, chief admissions officer for the University of Texas system. “College campuses are overflowing with young women.”

Across the universities of the Big 12, for example, many co-ed dorms have more women than men. “We’ve had to turn some of our boy’s bathrooms into girl’s bathrooms,” notes Taylor Bryan, a residential coordinator at Baylor University. “Whenever I walk around the dorms now, I always see some guy surrounded by a group of single girls.”
Interestingly, most students do not appear to notice the skew unless it is made explicit to them. At the University of Texas, for example, several students were asked to observe people around them for five minutes. Christina Jenkins, a first-year student, quickly noticed the trend. “Everywhere I looked, there were groups of women,” said Jenkins. “I was intrigued that there were so many single girls and so few men. I guess I need to get used to this.”

Demographers note that this trend will continue into the near future. “Looking at high schools right now,” observes Ryan Connick, a professor at Texas A&M, “it’s pretty clear that more women will be applying to college in the next few years.” Connick notes that this trend is a result of the number of males and females born in a given year. “We had a series of years a while back when more women were born. There is nothing wrong with this, but it will have an impact on people’s lives.”

The high numbers of women are likely to influence both the academic and the recreational lives of women and men. But it’s important to realize that the sex ratio is a lasting generational phenomenon. As the current generation of college students gets older, there will continue to be more women than men of similar ages. “When women graduate from college a few years from now, they will see the sex ratio follow them into their jobs,” points out Connick. “I wouldn’t be surprised if a woman ends up working in an office filled with single women and only a few men.”

Researchers across the country note that the sex ratio has looked different in the past and will likely look different again in the future. People who are college age right now, however, should expect to be surrounded by an abundance of women.




What do you think of that, huh? It's not just an experimental adjustment of the gender ratio in the local mating markets, my dears. It's a full-fledged the-sky-is-falling scenario. It states that there will be lots more women EVERYWHERE, all through the lives of the poor study subjects who read this:

Connick notes that this trend is a result of the number of males and females born in a given year. “We had a series of years a while back when more women were born. There is nothing wrong with this, but it will have an impact on people’s lives.”

Besides, there is no way in hell that the study subjects who read the reverse article on many men on college campuses would believe that or the rest of that story. It's too much in conflict with their daily experiences.

OK, I'm not that happy with the four studies, after all. But wait until we get to the third post on the bit added to the end of the paper, the one which does not follow from any of these studies, and you will see why most of this didn't look that bad to me.
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All direct quotes in this post come from Kristina M. Durante, Vladas Griskevicius, Jeffry A. Simpson, Stephanie M. Cantú, and Joshua M. Tybur: "Sex Ratio and Women's Career Choice: Does a Scarcity of Men Lead Women to Choose Briefcase Over Baby?" Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Online First Publication, April 2, 2012. doi: 10.1037/a0027949

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I quote from this source so extensively for three reasons:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teen Pregnancy Rates Drop in the US

All across the country:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Earlier Puberty?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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