And Yet More on The Ezekiel Gilbert Case in Texas

When I wrote my first blog post on this topic, I expressed a bit of cynicism about the idea that Texas could actually acquit someone on the shooting death of an escort,  based on the right to retrieve stolen property.  But then I got carried away with the flow of articles on the topic.

Now Bridget Dunlap at Rheality Check has written a piece about the case which clarifies some issues:

First, the defense used two arguments, one of which was the Texas law about retrieving stolen property.  The second one was the argument that the accused aimed at the tires of the car in which the victim and her driver were seated, and therefore did not intend to kill.

We cannot tell which of those arguments (if the jury chose one over the other) was used as the basis of the acquittal decision.  Thus, the outrage shouldn't have been aimed at the jurors but at that particular Texas law which the defense used.  And perhaps at the judge in this case.  Dunlap writes:

One would expect the jury to find that shooting at a car with an AK-47 is at least “reckless,” in which case he could have been convicted of manslaughter. But the prosecution didn’t charge him with manslaughter, only murder. Manslaughter is a “lesser included offense” of murder and the judge is entitled to instruct the jury if the evidence supports that charge, but it appears she did not. The jury can’t convict on a charge that isn’t before them.
I think Texas’s defense of property law is abhorrent and my gut reaction was that it was a reprehensible defense. This reaction suggests, that you should think twice before hiring me as your defense attorney, sadly. As Professor Michael W. Martin of Fordham Law’s Federal Litigation Clinic reminded me: “If the law allows the defense, the lawyer must use it, if it is viable, unless there is a good strategic reason not to. Otherwise, it is ineffective assistance of counsel. If the lawyer feels like he is ethically barred from using a legal, viable defense, he should ask to be relieved.”

I'm glad about this additional  legal information.  I feel a little less like someone suddenly waking up in an alternate reality.

You're Doing it Rong. John Pilger Explains What Feminists Should Do.

In a Truthout piece titled "There Is a War on Ordinary People, and Feminists Are Needed at the Front."  By ordinary people Pilger means the poor and perhaps the middle class.  His argument is a class argument, though it's more than that, as I will discuss further down.

But for the time being it's enough to note that John Pilger wants feminism to be about class concerns and not about gender.  I guess the term "feminism" has so many definitions (lots of them  reviled and hated, many of them contradictory, quite a few of them unknown among the larger public) that it's no longer regarded as odd for someone to argue that feminism shouldn't be about gender.  But it's like saying that anti-racist movements shouldn't be about race.

There have been many,  many nights where I have lain awake, staring into the darkness while asking myself if I AM a feminist.

That's because of the many and very complicated debates that are ongoing within various circles interested in either explaining women's roles and economic lots in life or working to improve the status of women.  My mind runs around a squirrel wheel, going from "yes, but" to "on the other hand" and back again.

So far I think the important distinction when comparing and contrasting various groups of people in the Oppression Olympics is this:  Whatever our own activism,  we need to understand that  the underlying theories about why certain groups don't fare as well in the society are not interchangeable.  It matters to understand where misogyny comes from and it matters to understand where sexism comes from.  It matters to understand poverty and attitudes towards poverty, and it matters to understand the roots of sexism.  One single theory cannot account for all of those.

It also matters that feminists can be classist and racist, that anti-racists can be sexist and classist, and that those who fight classism issues can be at least sexist, if not racist (the latter depending on the country).

Back to John Pilger who will teach me more about what feminists are all about and what we should do.

He begins rather wonderfully, by arguing that the UK Daily Mail is a feminist publication.  It's an inauspicious opening if he wishes to persuade feminazis of my kind, because I have studied that publication intensively in the past, and here are the kinds of things the newspaper's Femail section, intended for women, gives us in the archives for searching the word "feminism":

Feminism was going to liberate both sexes, but instead it destroyed a generation of men

How feminism destroyed real men

Has feminism killed the art of home cooking?

Why I loathe feminism... and believe it will ultimately destroy the family

Feminism has turned men into second-class citizens, but have women's victories come at a price?

You've got what you want, girls, stop whining: Has feminism made women unhappy? (well THIS certainly will)

'Quit work to help your husband', says a controversial new book that has infuriated feminists


And so on and so on, for 407 references. 

Pilger goes on in his article in a way which suggests that he has been personally hurt and angered by feminist writings about gendered violence, feeling accused himself and feeling powerless to affect the debate, which he believes has been kidnapped by feminists:

This is now standard media practice. "Most weeks some lovely, caring berks tell me I am a man-hating witch," wrote Suzanne Moore recently in the Guardian, "so let's get it out there. Sometimes I am. The acceptable kind of suck-it-up feminism (I love men really!) is hard to sustain after yet more abuse stories … Do I think all men are rapists? No. Do I think all women can be raped. Yes?"
How quickly the broad brush of blame is applied to a rash of dreadful murder and kidnap cases. Throw in an abduction in Cleveland, and the arrest of "yet another TV personality," and, according to Cynthia Cockburn and Ann Oakley, this represents "the profound, extensive and costly problem of male sexual violence."
Part of the problem, another commentator insinuates, is that men don't care as much as women because they don't use Twitter enough to express their abhorrence of rape and kidnap. This all adds up to a "crisis in masculinity," requiring men to join in a "conversation" about their social and moral deficiencies on terms already decided.

...

The problem with media-run "conversations" on gender is not merely the almost total absence of male participants, but the suppression of class. It is tempting to say real politics are missing, too, but bourgeois boundaries and prescriptions are real enough. Thus, gender, like race, can be presented in isolation. Class is a forbidden word, and gender subordinate to class is heresy. The Daily Mail model is built on this.

One might argue that feminists "kidnapped" this topic because it was an orphan nobody else wanted at all.

But I can understand Pilger's hurt feelings.  Generalized guilt on the basis one's sex, race or ethnicity is not a terribly productive start for solving any types of problems in the society, as we should have learned from recent discussions of Islamic extremists, just as generalized prejudices about one gender or race are bad.  Still,  Pilger may be skipping stages there, by assuming that the "crisis in masculinity" is about men as biological beings or about something that cannot be changed, rather than about socially defined norms of masculinity, especially among teenagers, athletes and other groups which build their own sub-cultures based on the approval of others in those sub-cultures.

Whatever,  Pilger is  clearly angry and clearly not on the same side with feminists.  That's what makes his argument that feminists are not on his side interesting.

His side is classism, roughly.  But here's the deeper problem about Pilger's arguments:

Feminists have, for many years now, used the lens of intersectionality to gender issues, by noting that those issues intersect with race, income, ethnicity and religion.  Likewise, there are many, many feminists organizations which work on the issues of immigrant women in the US, on the issues of race and gender, on the issues of poverty and gender, on the issues of LGBT and women, and on and on and on.  Pilger probably didn't think of using Google to  research all that.

May I now say that I think Pilger is mansplaining a bit?  Giving us a hastily written and angry first draft, rather than doing the additional research that was needed?  Hmm.

Finally, there are problems with the assertion that feminists should stop caring about violence and other issues and focus on poverty and class issues.  First, many feminists are already focusing on poverty and class issues.  Second, if feminists don't talk about the gendered aspects of violence, then nobody will, pretty much.  And third, obviously there are feminist activists who are not into class issues, just as there are class activists who equally obviously are not into gender issues.





 

More on Ezekiel Gilbert And The Right To Use A Weapon To Retrieve Stolen Property in Texas

I wrote about this case yesterday.  A man hires an escort, expecting sex (note that this expectation was not based on a written contract, say,  given the illegality of the trade).  The escort comes into his house, is given the money but the sex doesn't happen.  She leaves, or at least goes out, and he shoots her, paralyzing and ultimately killing her.  He is sued for the act but the jury acquitted him, based on a law which gives Texans the right to use a gun to retrieve stolen property "after nightfall."

It was the money ($150) that was viewed as stolen property by the jury, which interpreted the trade the way the accused did:  He should have been given sex or his money back.  Thus, the jury regarded an illegal trade (in Texas) as one that the john had the right to enforce.

But reverse this.  Suppose an escort has sex with a client in Texas, and then the client refuses to pay.  It's after nightfall, they are in the escort's house.  Based on this acquittal, she has complete rights to kill her client dead, to retrieve her stolen property.

Based on this Vanity Fair article, my interpretation should work, because the law used in the case was all about the right to use guns.  But I very much doubt that the jury would have acquitted an escort for the reverse crime.

Fox And The War on Women

Andrea Tantaros of Fox News gives the usual (for Fox)  alien-from-outer-space statement about the appointment of Susan Rice as National Security Advisor:






For those who cannot watch the video, Tantaros states that the Obama administration appoints women as human shields, possibly in the Republican war on women! 

Isn't that precious?  I never have so much fun with the lefties or the muddy middle.

A war on women would mean that men are used as the human shields.  Or possibly children.  But not women, because women are that enemy, see?

Whatever.  Tantaros implies that to avoid being blamed for waging war against women the Republicans cannot criticize Democratic female politicians at all.  Not at all.

I love that, and wish that rule to be immediately applied on this blog.  Nobody can criticize Echidne because then you are waging a war against a goddess.   Send chocolate or I will be thunderous.

But criticism is a requirement in politics.  We have to keep our elected and appointed servants honest and their noses to the grinding wheel, and polite but cogent criticism is the way to go.  So yes, Andrea, Republicans can criticize Democratic women in politics. 

But if they wish not be viewed as sexist asshats, that criticism should not be about the women's  looks,tits,  butts or how those women somehow in general exactly replicate the worst aspects of all those billions of people in the group: women.  Just keep your criticism on the issues and you will do fine.

Could it be that this is  a novel idea in the land of Fox News?  That distinguishing between the two types of criticisms is just beyond those folks?

More on Fox News' difficulties with that weird and awkward half of humanity can be found here.

Only in Texas?

The Google doesn't have a lot about this story, so you may wish to take that into account in judging it.  But the outline is this:

In 2009 a man, Ezekiel Gilbert,  contacts a woman working as an escort, Lenora Ivie Frago,  via Craigslist,  and gives her $150, in expectation of sexual services which are not forthcoming.  Rather, the escort leaves the man's house with the money.

He shoots her, paralyzing her. Ms Frago  dies several months later from the consequences of the shooting.   The case goes to court, and the jury acquits the man in her shooting death:

The verdict came after almost 11 hours of deliberations that stretched over two days. The trial began May 17 but had a long hiatus after a juror unexpectedly had to leave town for a funeral.
During closing arguments Tuesday, Gilbert's defense team conceded the shooting did occur but said the intent wasn't to kill. Gilbert's actions were justified, they argued, because he was trying to retrieve stolen property: the $150 he paid Frago. It became theft when she refused to have sex with him or give the money back, they said.
Gilbert testified earlier Tuesday that he had found Frago's escort ad on Craigslist and believed sex was included in her $150 fee. But instead, Frago walked around his apartment and after about 20 minutes left, saying she had to give the money to her driver, he said.
That driver, the defense contended, was Frago's pimp and her partner in the theft scheme.
The Texas law that allows people to use deadly force to recover property during a nighttime theft was put in place for “law-abiding” citizens, prosecutors Matt Lovell and Jessica Schulze countered. It's not intended for someone trying to force another person into an illegal act such as prostitution, they argued.

Can this really be true?  If it is, why is a transaction that is illegal in Texas (selling sex) given this type of property rights protection?  If I hired someone to kill another person in Texas, and the hired killer ran off with my money without doing the agreed-upon murder, could I then kill him or her and not get punished for it at all?  Or is it the case that Mr Gilbert will get a separate punishment for being a john?  Is that even illegal in Texas?  (I'm too lazy to research it.)

Then there's the sum of money which is deemed adequate to cause someone's death, 150 dollars.  Is that the worth of a life?

The story is hard to believe.  I'm also concerned about the jury thinking that being an escort automatically means selling sexual services, when that is not written down anywhere at all.  My concern is because similar one-sided interpretations could spread to all sorts of exchanges, and juries appear to be ready to favor the "buyer's" interpretation here.

Let's flip this over.  Suppose that Ms Frago had had sex with Mr Gilbert and Mr Gilbert then refused to pay her.  Would she have been within her rights in Texas if she had then killed Mr Gilbert?  As far as I can tell, that should be the case.  But I very much doubt the jury would have acquitted her.
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Via Gawker 

Stuff To Read, June 5, 2013

Or speed-blogging, if you wish.

First,  the Republican-led Wisconsin legislators don't like the idea that journalism students learn investigative journalism:

At the conclusion of a marathon overnight session, Wisconsin legislators early this morning added a provision to the state budget that would expel the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, a nonprofit investigative journalism institute, from its offices at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The measure also prohibits university employees “from doing any work related to the Center for Investigative Journalism as part of their duties as a UW employee.”
With the budget now cleared by the Joint Finance Committee and poised for final approval soon, journalists and educators are scrambling to preserve what is widely regarded as a successful collaborative model that both trains emerging reporters and produces high-quality investigations.

There may be more valid reasons for the move.  But investigative journalism is part of our world's total immunity system.  It gives us early warning about dangerous social and political diseases.

Second, the International Monetary Fund now admits that it may have sorta miscalculated when it placed its hand-made stockbroker shoe on the necks of the Greek people:

The International Monetary Fund is to admit that it has made serious mistakes in the handling of the sovereign debt crisis in Greece, according to internal reports due to be published later on Wednesday.
Documents presented to the Fund's board last Friday will reveal that the Washington-based organisation underestimated the damage austerity would cause to the eurozone country, which has required two bailouts in the past three years.

I hope this won't end up as one of those mistakes-were-made-now-let's-move-on debacles which never change anything.

Third, the Smithsonian Magazine has a story on the color pink as denoting girliness and all things icky.  It mentions the relatively late onset of the craziness that is pink, pink and a little purple for girls.  This is the part I especially liked:

Another important factor has been the rise of consumerism among children in recent decades. According to child development experts, children are just becoming conscious of their gender between ages 3 and 4, and they do not realize it’s permanent until age 6 or 7. At the same time, however, they are the subjects of sophisticated and pervasive advertising that tends to reinforce social conventions. “So they think, for example, that what makes someone female is having long hair and a dress,’’ says Paoletti. “They are so interested—and they are so adamant in their likes and dislikes.”

The more I've read about gender-awareness in early childhood, the more I think that this theory is correct:

It's not that girls innately prefer pink to other colors.  It's that girls and boys, possibly due to innate reasons, really want to know what it means to be a girl or a boy, and until they realize the genders are not dependent on stuff such as what one wears or what one plays with, children will gender-police themselves.

On Sexual Assaults in the US Military

A topic on which Powerful People (US Senators) are pontificating right now:

Sometimes one picture really does tell more than a thousand words (unless they are my words, natch.)

I have followed the events, including the worrisome news that the men responsible for programs aimed at reducing sexual assaults  themselves got caught acting like foxes in charge of the chicken coop:

Last week, the Pentagon said the U.S. Naval Academy is investigating allegations that three football team members sexually assaulted a female midshipman at an off-campus house more than a year ago. A lawyer for the woman says she was "ostracized" on campus after she reported it.

In recent weeks, a soldier at the U.S. Military Academy was charged with secretly photographing women, including in a bathroom. The Air Force officer who led the service's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response unit was arrested on charges of groping a woman. And the manager of the Army's sexual assault response program at Fort Campbell, Ky., was relieved of his post after his arrest in a domestic dispute with his ex-wife.

I have also heard that the Senators are not going to hear from many (any?) female victims of sexual assault at these hearings, though that could be incorrect.

The reason I haven't written more about the case is that to say something worthwhile requires the kind of data I can't access. 

A few examples:  The reported cases of sexual assault have gone up:

The Pentagon estimated in a recent report that as many as 26,000 military members may have been sexually assaulted last year, up from an estimated 19,000 assaults in 2011, based on an anonymous survey of military personnel. While the number of sexual assaults that members of the military actually reported rose 6 percent to 3,374 in 2012, thousands of victims were still unwilling to come forward despite new oversight and assistance programs aimed at curbing the crimes, the report said.

Do we know how much of this increase may be because there's more encouragement to report than in the past and how much is due to an actual increase in the number of sexual assaults?

Then there's the question about who should have the authority to investigate and decide on sexual assaults.  Right now that authority is vested in the complaint-maker's superior officers.  There are several reasons why that is not a good idea, and perhaps some reasons why it might be a good idea:

Dempsey and the service chiefs warned against making the dramatic changes called for in Gillibrand's legislation. Removing commanders from the military justice process, Dempsey said, would undercut their ability to preserve good order and discipline in their units.

"We cannot simply legislate our way out of this problem," said Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army's chief of staff. "Without equivocation, I believe maintaining the central role of commander in our military justice system is absolutely critical to any solution."

But Gillibrand defended her proposal, which has garnered 18 co-sponsors in two weeks. She said victims of sexual assault are reluctant to report the crimes to their commanders because they fear their allegations will be dismissed and they might face retaliation. Aggressive reforms in the military's legal code are needed to force cultural changes, she said.
"You have lost the trust of the men and women who rely on you," Gillibrand said. "They're afraid to report. They think their careers will be over. They fear retaliation. They fear being blamed. That is our biggest challenge right there."

To judge this would really benefit from finding out how often those who commit sexual assaults are in a superior organizational position to those who become the objects of the assault.  If that is frequently the case, then giving all the powers to the superior officer pretty much guarantees that no complaint will be taken seriously.

Let's finish this post with some hilarity.  Well, the healthiest take on this is that it is ludicrous:

Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) on Tuesday suggested that the “hormone level created by nature” was to blame for rapes in the military and that all pregnant servicewomen should be investigated to make sure their condition was the result of consensual sex.
At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on sexual assaults within the military, Chambliss opined that the Pentagon’s decision to allow women in combat roles was only going to make the problem worse.
The Georgia Republican recalled that “several years ago when we had the first females go out on an aircraft carrier, when they returned to port, a significant percentage of those females were pregnant.”

It's a wonderful tangled knot of both victim blaming (though men, too, are among the victims of sexual assault in the military) and of excusing assaults as just-hormones-gone-wild. I love it when a wingnut remains consistently illogical. 

Get Lucky at 35 000 feet

That's the new (late April) Virgin Airlines promotion campaign.  Sir Richard Branson explains how it works  in a video.  The idea is that a passenger can send drinks, snacks or meals to someone else on the plane, with perhaps a message which says "your seat or mine?"  Branson states that the chances of deplaning with someone new are at least 50% after this.

Mmm.  What a great campaign if you want to fly in an enclosed singles bar with no escape hatches.  If, on the other hand, you just want to get to your destination and deplane only with those people you began with, can you turn this whole thing off?  So that you don't get unwanted approaches of any kind?

The campaign doesn't tell us, which suggests to me that if you don't wish to be approached this way you should probably fly with some other airline.

Speed Blogging: On Suicides Among Baby Boomers, On Employed Mothers As the Cause Of All Ills and on The Riots in Turkey

Speed-Blogging, like speed-dating, right?  Short and sweet posts on several topics.

1.  On the increased suicide rates of baby boomers in the US.  This WaPo article  asks why the rates have gone up so much, but underplays or omits the most obvious reason for the increased rates:

The collapse of the housing markets and the bad recession of recent years.  If someone in late middle age loses the value in his or her dwelling and then loses a job as well, the stress is much, much higher than for someone who is younger.  There's simply not the time to make up those losses before retirement and getting a new job is harder the older you are.

2.  On Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant (R) stating that women in the labor market is the cause for the US education problems.  I quote:

Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant (R) said Tuesday that America’s educational troubles began when women began working outside the home in large numbers.
Bryant was participating in a Washington Post Live event focused on the importance of ensuring that children read well by the end of third grade. In response to a question about how America became “so mediocre” in regard to educational outcomes, he said:
I think both parents started working. The mom got in the work place.
Bryant immediately recognized how controversial his remark would be and said he knew  he would start to get e-mails. He then expanded on his answer, saying that “both parents are so pressured” in families today. He also noted that America seemed to be losing ground internationally in regards to educational outcomes because other nations began to invest more in their own school systems and make progress.

My bolds.

Now that gave me the first belly laugh of the day!  The reason, of course, is that Finland currently leads the education competitions on this planet,  and employment of women is sorta pretty common and uncontroversial there.  Has been for a long time, actually (Hi mom!  Love you a lot!).

I get why Bryant would say something so inane.  It's because his party doesn't want to spend any money on education at all, so blaming something or someone outside the formal system of education is the obvious alternative.  But at least pick something which international statistics support, please.

Though there IS an odd shadow truth in what he says, in the following sense:  When most jobs were not really available for women in the US, smart women often had to choose to be teachers, one of the handful of socially acceptable jobs for educated women.  So in the past the talent pool for teaching was large and the pay didn't have to be that high to get good teachers.  That changed when opportunities for women in the labor market increased.  Now you have to compensate teachers properly, and Bryant doesn't want to.

3.  On the Turkish Riots:  

This article gives a good  background about the riots.  Turkey has very divided voters, by the way.  Those rioting belong to the more secular middle classes.  Whether their discontents apply more generally is something I don't know.

Today's Evolutionary Psychology Post

It began (via a tweet from Martha Bridegam)  with a now-deleted  nasty fat-shaming  tweet by a professor of evolutionary psychology, though Jay Rosen saved the tweet.

You can follow the discussion about that on Twitter.  The tweeter,  Geoffrey Miller apologized for the tweet.

Miller is also tweeting an enormous bunch of interesting and weird stuff about presumed sex differences in competitiveness, how women become more musically creative when they think of long-term mating (how on earth do you measure something like that????) and how men run so much faster and throw so much better than women and so on.

There's a meeting of evo-psychologists and all this is what they do.  Naturally.

But among those tweets was a link to a 2011 post at Psychology Today, the bargain basement of all psychologyish leftovers, and I read it.

It's about monogamy, and how come we are no longer polygynous (one man with several women)*.  I will quote the explanation we are given, which is based on the idea that monogamous groups can grow larger than polygynous groups so they win all those violent battles for world dominance:

Why can monogamous groups grow larger? Because men want wives, and if you need a lot of men on your team, you must offer them something that they want. In monogamous groups, unlike polygynous ones, high status males cannot hoard large numbers of women for themselves. The more equal distribution of women in monogamous groups means that more men can acquire wives, and fewer men have to leave the group to search for wives elsewhere. And the larger the group, the more men there are to fight in battles and to pay taxes for the funding of wars. Socially imposed monogamy, therefore, emerged in the West as a reciprocal arrangement in which elite males allowed lower-ranking males to marry, in exchange for their military service and tax contributions.

All bolds are mine.  They are used to highlight the fact that this author, Michael E. Price, has a basic theory which assumes that high status males decided on everything and that wives were sorta bought and sold to get the services of the lower-ranking males.

To see what I mean, let's write that same quote with one word changed.  Woman=Beer:

Why can monogamous groups grow larger? Because men want beer, and if you need a lot of men on your team, you must offer them something that they want. In monogamous groups, unlike polygynous ones, high status males cannot hoard many barrels of beer for themselves. The more equal distribution of beer in monogamous groups means that more men can acquire beer and fewer men have to leave the group to search for beer elsewhere. And the larger the group, the more men there are to fight in battles and to pay taxes for the funding of wars. Socially imposed monogamy, therefore, emerged in the West as a reciprocal arrangement in which elite males allowed lower-ranking males to drink more beer,  in exchange for their military service and tax contributions.

Now, that's a possible theory, sure.  But what it really hinges on is the assumption that the only people with any real power in those groups were the high status men and that the women in the group did not respond in any way to the incentives the system provided.   They acted like beer barrels.

There are alternative stories about the role of polygamy in the human past.  Although it is true that the institution of polygyny has existed in many societies and the institution of polyandry is known to have existed in relatively few, the really important question is the numbers of actual monogamous vs. polygynous marriages in any one society.  What I mean by that is this:  Even a society which is formally counted as polygynous may have had very few marriages of that type in any one time period and many more monogamous marriages.

If this is the case, it is incorrect to state that humans were predominantly polygynous in the past, as Price suggests:

To answer that, we should examine the types of small-scale societies in which nearly all of our evolution has occurred. When we do so, we find that these hunter gatherer and tribal societies have, throughout the world, historically practiced polygamy. Although most men in these societies strive for polygamy, however, only a minority can achieve it, because maintaining a large family requires an often prohibitively high degree of wealth and status. Further, because it is generally difficult to store and hoard wealth in small-scale societies, even men who do achieve polygamy can usually afford no more than two or three wives. It wasn't until the emergence of large-scale agricultural civilization, a few thousand years ago, that wealth-hoarding became possible and powerful men began accumulating large harems of hundreds or thousands of women. This pattern occurred in similar ways all over the world, as Laura Betzig describes in Despotism and Differential Reproduction. So once the ecological constraints on polygamy were lifted, high status men began accumulating many more wives than they had in small-scale societies.

Bolds are mine.

This quote is confusing to interpret.  First, note that Price's evidence seems to be that polygyny was rare in the distant past.  Then quite recently "powerful men began accumulating large harems of hundreds of thousands of women", and Price interprets this to mean that the ecological constraints were removed.

But if polygyny actually was rare earlier, what caused the presumed evolutionary adaptation in all men to want many wives?  I guess we could pedal back to the story about sperm-is-cheap and the idea that men are more promiscuous by nature. That is not the same thing as supporting multiple wives, however, assuming that the wives had to be supported and were not actually additional labor resources.

And the ecological constraints of the presumed Environment of Evolutionary Adaptations (EEA, the hypothetical place and time in which human gender adaptations are assumed to have been fixed in evolutionary psychology) surely were part of the environment which affected those adaptations?

This matters quite a bit.  The usual assumption is that evolutionary adaptations were fixed when humans lived in small nomadic hunter-gatherer groups.  It is more difficult to explain how polygyny of the support-all-your-wives type Price assumes could have been profitable.  Note, also, that nomadic hunter-gatherer groups in the recent past have been found to be fairly egalitarian, which makes the concept of polygyny as an evolutionary adaptation for high-status men problematic.

Whatever the case might be, Price argues that humans were predominantly polygynous on grounds which have nothing to do with the question whether the numerical majority of humans were in polygynous or monogamous marriages.  Which is an odd argument, in my view.

Those large harems of hundreds of thousands of wives, by the way, were extremely rare.  I'm willing to bet all my chocolate reserves on the assertion that marriages were overwhelmingly monogamous even when one Sultan or pharaoh had humongous harems.

What's the point of this post?  To demonstrate the hidden parts of the theory used here, in particular the assumption that societies were utterly hierarchical in the sense of being ruled by high-status men, even though the groups in the EEA are more likely to have been fairly egalitarian.  And perhaps also to note alternative explanations for the rarity of polygyny among humans.  Those do exist.

For instance,  decreased sexual dimorphism in humans is one offered explanation.  In other animals, large size differences between males and females (with the former being larger) usually denote polygyny, small or nonexistent size differences usually denote monogamy.  Some argue that human females and males have evolved to become closer in size and that this could explain  the increase in monogamy.  What the benefits of this might have been are discussed in the linked article.

A theory off the top of my hat concerns genetic diversity.  Extremely polygynous societies might have doomed themselves to extinction because of lack of such diversity.  This is most likely not such a great theory, but I'm thinking of the impact of over-breeding with one male as the sire  in a few dog breeds in the US.  If that male carries genetic weaknesses, they are spread widely and rapidly.

Finally, from an economic point of view (or perhaps a demographic point of view), societies with extreme polygyny are inherently unstable.  What's to be done with all those spare men who can never find a mate?  They could be kicked out of the group as appears to be done in the old polygynous Mormon sect, but that would only work in a system where neighboring groups weren't equally polygynous.

None of my amateur theories are intended to be regarded as real explanations.  I list them, because they are not considered in the original post at all.
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*Strictly speaking, the post discusses a moderate form of polygyny where some men have many wives, some are monogamously partnered and some have no partner.

The Challenge: Prove that Gender Discrimination in Labor Markets Exists

SleeZee Lyers in the comments to my earlier post on the gender gap in wages asks this question:

Regarding hidden discrimination, I would think that in the 50 years since the Equal Pay Act of 1963, that if such hidden sex associated wage discrimination as you hypothesize existed, that you would be able to find testimony to that effect from retired managers, retired executives, retired HR employees.
Surely someone must know and be ready to talk!

...

Occam's Razor isn't the be all and end all, but given a choice of personal choice / no discrimination or discrimination hidden by thousands for 50 years, I'd say the burden is on you to demonstrate that discimation.

This post is my answer to that Occam's Razor argument, though I wish to preface it with the fact that I believe the earnings differences reflect many reasons:  Choice based on societal expectations about what is appropriate for women and men,  gendered differences in family responsibilities, gendered preferences (whether innate or societally molded or both) and discrimination of various types.  Thus, there is no reason to go for just one explanation, such as choice.

To return to the main point:  That the burden is on me to demonstrate that gender discrimination exists in the labor markets:

First, there are fields of studies which do exactly that.  The audit studies are one group.  These consist of using trained actors, in this case men and women, to go out and apply for jobs in some industry.  The actors are coached to say all the same things and they are provided with equally good resumes.  The studies usually randomize the order in which they visit the firms and do other stuff to guarantee that the results make sense.  The studies then measure call-back rates and other measures to see whether the female and male job applicants, otherwise the same, are treated the same. 

The classic study in this field is a 1990s study about server job applications in Philadelphia restaurants. It demonstrates some discrimination against female applicants to server jobs at that time and in that place.

The other important example of studies which have demonstrated the impact of gender discrimination is the classical orchestra study.  Musicians audit to get employed by orchestras.  A simple change in auditing rule:  introducing a screen so that the evaluators cannot observe the appearance of a musician but only his or her musical talent increased the probability that a female musician would be hired by an orchestra.

A further group of studies which can be used to study possible discrimination in hiring are the correspondence studies where various evaluators are asked to judge an application.  Some evaluators get the application with a female name, others get the exactly same application with a male name.  Given that the actual application is the same for both names,  in the absence of any discrimination we would expect the average evaluations of the candidates to be the same.

This is sometimes the case in such studies, but not always.  A recent study in this field shows that science faculty evaluated fictional female applicants to a laboratory manager position more severely than the fictional male applicant.  In other words, being called "John" rather than "Jane" caused the same application to be treated less harshly and also resulted in higher estimated salary offer.

Both male and female evaluators treated "Jane" worse than "John," by the way.  Thus, what these studies find is probably a societal and unconscious gender bias, not some kind of explicit discrimination by either men or women.  Other studies in this field have also found that female evaluators are usually no less discriminatory than male evaluators.

Correspondence studies about gender do not always show discrimination just against women in gender studies.  What seems to matter here is whether a job is regarded as somehow "belonging" to men or somehow "belonging to women."  Women are judged more harshly in traditionally male-dominated occupations (such as science and in writing plays), men are judged more harshly (in at least some studies) in traditionally female-dominated occupations (such as secretarial work). 

Most of this appears to be something the evaluators are unaware of.  In other words, they are not explicitly singling out applicants with female or male names. 

But note that whatever the causes for this might be, the likely effect this tendency has is to keep occupations more gender-segregated:  Men are more likely to be hired in traditionally male occupations and more likely to be offered a higher starting salary, whereas the reverse applies to women in traditionally female occupations.  That the latter occupations pay much less is, however, important to remember in this context, because the benefits the applicants accrue from being treated as "typical" for their occupations are smaller for women than for men, on average.

Second, the existence of discrimination can also be measured from court cases which decide for the plaintiff in gender discrimination cases.  Such cases have appeared in the years since the 1960s and are too numerous to list here.  A few examples:  The AT&T case, the Price-Waterhouse v. Hopkins case and the Lily Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire&Rubber Co case.

It is more difficult to study the existence of any possible gender discrimination in long-term labor contracts, because we cannot force actors to keep on acting roles over time and because it is much harder to control for individual differences in skills etc. under that setting.  The multiple regression techniques which studies us are a way around that.  If we could establish and measure all the variables which are non-discriminatory but which affect earnings, we could create studies where whatever gender difference we have been unable to account for after controlling for all those other variables would clearly be due to men and women being treated differently just on the basis of their gender.  But in reality there are always variables we don't have data about.  This means that the unexplained residual even in good studies could be an overestimate of discrimination.

At the same time, some of the variables which are included in the "neutral" category could themselves have a partially discriminatory background.  For instance, in my earlier post I noted that if women don't get promoted into certain jobs then the fact that they are not in that job category terribly often might not be a "neutral" part of the explanation.  That would require that occupations are simply chosen in the same way by both men and women.

This post is most likely a partial one.  It probably should include a discussion of the different concepts of discrimination (including institutional discrimination etc.), but I think I have written enough for the time being.

Fun With Economics: The Politics of The Gender Gap in Wages

Some of you may be familiar with my three-part series on the gender gap in wages.  If not, click on the site given at the top of this page and read it.  The study I use in it is a bit old by now but all the theory should be fresh as dew.

Politics doesn't handle the earnings gender gap at all well.  Some lefties rush into regarding the gross (unadjusted) gap as all discrimination, most (in my experience) righties and every single anti-feminist view it as women's private choices.

Neither is correct.  But in many ways the wingnut view is less correct, for one very simple reason:  Studies can sometimes prove that sex discrimination exists in the labor markets, but studies cannot really prove that the absence of concrete evidence means that the differences are just choice.  You pick chocolate ice-cream, because you like it!  I pick a dead-end job because I happen to be regarded as responsible for children!

The same thing, in the wingnut minds.  But more importantly, we cannot conclude free choice as the explanation for wage discrepancies from the sort of studies used that way by the conservatives, and that is the purpose of this post:  To explain why that is the case in some detail.

The most recent study which "proves" that the little ladies choose their lower earnings is this one:

Salary tracking website PayScale released a report Thursday pushing back on the idea of a gender pay gap.
The report found that although women earn an average 81 cents on the dollar to when compared to men, it's because women choose lower paying jobs.
"Unequal pay for equal work? Not really," wrote Katie Bardaro, lead economist at PayScale.
The site found that the salary difference between men and women with the same types of jobs was negligible. The reason for the wage gap is that females tend to gravitate toward jobs that are societally beneficial, where as [sic] men choose more lucrative careers, according to the report.

Salary differences for the same types of jobs were negligible after controlling for occupation, experience, education and so on? 

I am unable to find a writeup of the study at the PayScale site, though I have now asked them for one.  The lack of that makes interpreting their results difficult.  But let's try.

If you go to the site, you can see the raw gender comparisons in a graph and then choose to see the adjusted comparisons.  It's not that there are no differences in the second graph.  There are, but they are much smaller.  I want to see the actual numbers, because essentially all studies of the gender gap find that not all of the gap is unexplained by education, experience and so on, and it is only the unexplained part of the gap which could be discriminatory.

Let's inject a political point here:  To focus so much on a study which isn't a proper academic study (or at least isn't presented that way) is usually driven by politics.

Now onwards and upwards:  I did find a methodology section at the PayScale site.  From that we learn which variables the research took into account when it moved from the gross earnings gap to the adjusted earnings gap:

Using our unique database and compensation algorithm, we estimate the controlled median pay by adjusting for outside compensable factors across genders. These factors include years of experience, education, company size, management responsibilities, skills and more.  In order to provide an apples-to-apples comparison, we determine the characteristics of the typical man within a job and then adjust the characteristics of the typical woman in the same job to match those of the average man. The result is the median pay calculated for the average woman if they had the exact same breakdown of compensable factors as the average man.

The last two sentences sound like they used the Oaxaca decomposition method but only in one direction.  It would be good to see what the average man would have earned if he had had the exact same breakdown of compensable factors as the average woman.  These two figures may not result in the same net residual if the labor market rewards men and women differently for education, experience and so on.

But  that's not important.  What is important has to do with that list of  characteristics I have bolded in the quote.  They are controlled for because they are regarded as factors which naturally explain why someone would earn more, in the absence of any discrimination.  That there is something called "more" is pretty important, because I think the list over-controls and thus may be wrong about the lack of discrimination against women.

Note the term "managerial responsibilities."  That one is controlled for as just one of the innocent outside reasons for higher earnings. 

But you get managerial responsibilities at least in part by being promoted.  If I hate green-eyed people* and want to pay them less at my snake company, the easiest way to do so and not to get caught is not to promote them at all!  Alternatives, such as paying them less for the same job, can get me into trouble if people find out.  But I can probably invent good reasons why the people I promote don't have green eyes.

The lesson:  It's dangerous to control for variables which can hide discrimination in studies like this one.  That the list of controlled variables is not complete is also worrisome.

Alternative explanations for the "managerial responsibilities" variables exist.  Perhaps women don't want them and choose not to apply for jobs which have them.  But you can't assume that this is the case because the data does NOT tell us the relevant reasons.

Then to the wider question about women holding lower-paying jobs than men and the reasons for that:  It is possible that women and men have "freely" chosen the types of jobs they tend to congregate in.  It is possible that women choose lower-paying jobs because they are more concerned about flexibility of a job than its pay, given the societal expectation that they are going to be responsible for child-care.  It is possible that men choose higher-paying jobs and women lower-paying jobs because both expect the man to support a full family one day.

But none of this is proven by finding that men and women tend to be found in different kinds of jobs and that the jobs women are found in pay less, on average.  That's an important point, because the above quote dives straight into assuming that what we have here is free choice.  Have another chocolate Sundae!

To return to my hatred of green eyes (I have those, by the way), suppose that I want to keep green-eyed people earning less (for whatever reasons) and that I do this by approving their applications to jobs which pay less but not approving their applications to jobs which pay more.

If I'm careful I can get away with that and nobody needs to be the wiser.  Or I can rename jobs which are roughly the same by moving some stuff between them and giving one of the jobs a new name.  I can then make sure that the green-eyed person is in the job that is going to pay less.  Or I can have annual increases vary in size between green-eyed people and the rest. 

In short, finding men and women in different job categories does NOT disprove the existence of discrimination and it does NOT prove that the job choice was freely done by the workers.

At the same time, it is clear that there are more young women than young men who choose to study for lower-paying occupations.  This could be because of societal views about the kinds of jobs which are appropriate for women and men or it could be because of the gendered division of labor about child-rearing, assuming that lower-paying jobs are more flexible (not necessarily the case).

Here's the final puzzle for you:  Are women choosing lower-paying jobs or do jobs become lower-paid when many women choose them?  There's some evidence for the latter, too.

I hope I haven't bored you.  The purpose of this post was to introduce some of the complexity that goes into studying discrimination and alternatives as explanations for the gender gap in earnings, and to point out how simplistic the uses of studies are when they are employed as political weapons.

If I had a dollar for every time some MRA* or anti-feminist has told me on the net that "everybody knows the gender gap has been shown not to exist" I'd be a goddess with a yacht.  I get that those people go from their desired conclusions to the search of supporting data, not from a general study of the data to whatever conclusions that leads to.  But at least here is an alternative story.

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*This example is not meant to be taken seriously.  Hatred is probably not a common reason for discrimination.  It stands for the real reasons here, such as the belief that women will have children and drop out so they are not worth promoting, or the belief that men are more suited for leadership roles or the belief that women don't care as much about money and promotions etc.

Why Lou Dobbs Is Sad About Employed Moms

He elaborated on that today, with a blackboard and all!  So that we can be educated, I guess.



There you have it.  Dobbs is of course overjoyed, elated, even, about the success of those mothers who make more than their husbands.  Weak applause.  But what he is concerned abolut are the single mothers who have very low earnings.  If only those single mothers would get married, they would no longer be poor and all would be well in Lou Dobbs' world!

The lecture he gives us links all this to the boys' school crisis.  It's not quite clear why that link is being made.  It could be because a study earlier this spring speculated that perhaps it is the boys who grew up in female single-parent families who end up with low ambition and no desire to go to college.

Or Dobbs might be saying that the poorer single-mothers are single because men aren't going to college enough and are therefore poor prospects to marry?

Hmm.  It could also be the case that Lou Dobbs has nightmares about a topsy-turvy world where women do the sort of stuff he has been doing for years and where he might have to do the sort of stuff many women have done for years.

I report, you decide.

I'm not making fun of the problems of poverty or of boys dropping out of high school or of not going to college.  But I do want to make fun of the assumption that Dobbs' use of a blackboard and a few income figures is the same as a deep study into the causes behind single-parent families or that the solution of more marriage would work just by every single mother saying "okay" aloud to the world in general.  Reality is much, much more complicated than that.

To give a few examples of those complications,  many female single parents would be poor even if they weren't parents, because they come from poverty and because they have lower average levels of education.

Then there's the fact that it's not only the lack of a second adult worker in the family which causes low incomes among single mothers.  It's also their gender,  in the following sense:

Single fathers have much higher median earnings than single mothers.  In 2010, for example, the estimated median household income for single-mother families was $32,031.  The estimated median household income for single-father families the same year was $49,718.

Thus,  it is not the single-parent status alone that might make a family more likely to be poor.  It is the female single-parent status.  And that could be because the jobs women do are less well paid than the jobs men do.  That, in turn, could be influenced.*

But Dobbs wants these people to get married.  Perhaps we could have a giant auction where all single parents are forced to pick a partner in a lottery?  Because there are many more single mothers than fathers, we could just force lots of unmarried men to also participate in this lottery.  Take one for the team, so to speak.

That's ridiculous.  But the mechanical approach Dobbs has to the whole question boils down to something similar.

I'm also 100% convinced that if Pew came up with a study which shows 100% of husbands earning vastly more than their wives and the percentage of single-parent households at 0% our Lou would be very happy.   He's a traditional kind of guy, right?
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*The numbers I quote here are from the census, but they are household incomes.  Some of those households may have earnings by an older child, say, which could explain why the numbers are higher than those based on 2009 worker data or those given in the Pew survey.

It's also possible that the single-father households have higher incomes for reasons other than the gender difference in earnings.  For example,  perhaps single fathers are more common in other income classes than the poorest, whereas the reverse holds for single mothers.

Good News Friday: The NYT Editorial on Facebook And Misogyny

The WAM Facebook campaign has worked, as I mentioned before.  This is fantastic news.  Now the New York Times has written an editorial on it,  noting that Facebook has acted promptly to remove other types of hate pages their own rules ban but not those about women being demeaned or even abused:

Some of the misogynist pages had headlines that read “Violently Raping Your Friend Just for Laughs” and “Kicking Your Girlfriend in the Fanny because she won’t make you a Sandwich.” Other pages included images of women being abused. Some pages had been on the site for a couple of years, even after users complained about them, according to Jaclyn Friedman, an organizer of the campaign. Many pages were in clear violation of Facebook’s policies, which does “not permit individuals or groups to attack others based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability or medical condition.”

The deeper point is naturally that a certain kind of misogyny is the societal background to our lives, the humming of the air conditioner on this hot day.  It's not visible the way other hate-speech is.  It's just for laughs or it's OK because women are not a numerical minority but really because it is part of the culture.  Not an explicit part, but that continuous background humming.

I am elated about the success of the campaign, though it remains to be seen whether Facebook will make any real changes.  It is important to treat misogyny the same way as other generalized hatreds are treated.

More on the Demonization of Employed Mothers at Fox

This gets quite interesting, because at least one woman at Fox is not happy with the very muddled thinking and arguments of the Famous Four:



Megan Kelly took Erickson on, asking what makes him dominant and her submissive, and Erickson happily bared his confused and muddled and ignorant thoughts about science.  I do love that kind of obliviousness!

But I realized yesterday (fencing with lots of MRMs) that what I truly hate is muddled thinking and lazy sourcing and the reversal of the usual cause-and-effect chain by starting with the conclusions and then by picking and choosing any crappy evidence that might support it. 

I'm not proud of that, because the ranking of my moral values makes me look bad.  Still, if someone is going to demand that his muddled thinking is enough to prove my eternally submissive and contemptible place in life for which I should be grateful, well, hating that muddled thinking might be the right reaction.

This links to the Fox Four because they regard the question of women's proper place (in the kitchen) so obvious that they have the luxury of not checking any of their supposed arguments for it.  The contempt that reveals might also be why I get angry.

Today's Musical Interlude

The incomparable Hazel Scott and Peace of Mind.  Yes, I want peace of mind.

Four Men On Fox Explain Why More Breadwinning Moms Will Destroy The Society

Here is the video:



What Erick Erickson says there is worth discussing further:

Erick Erickson, one of Fox's newest contributors, was troubled by female breadwinners and claimed that people who defend them are "anti-science." Erickson told viewers:
When you look at biology, look at the natural world, the roles of a male and female in society, and the other animals, the male typically is the dominant role. The female, it's not antithesis, or it's not competing, it's a complimentary role. We as people in a smart society have lost the ability to have complimentary relationships in nuclear families, and it's tearing us apart.

" When you look at biology, look at the natural world, the roles of a male and female in society, and the other animals, the male typically is the dominant role. The female, it's not antithesis, or it's not competing, it's a complimentary role."  Hah.

Remember that the topic is women who earn money for their families.  So Erickson seems to be arguing that no female animal goes out to get food ever, that it's the male lions which feed the pride and so on, and that the female wolves never go out to hunt.

That is all total rubbish.  In fact, I can't think of any mammal where the female stays in the nest or lair with the young and the male goes out and brings all the food home.   If that happens, at least among mammals, it is extremely rare.  My suspicion is that single mothers are much more common among mammals than that alternative fable.  Indeed, chimpanzees seem to have the single mother system.

What these four men are upset about is the fear that the traditional gender roles are breaking down.  They like those gender roles because they like to be dominant.

But in most ways the traditional gender roles aren't even that traditional, because very few people in the olden days could live like the Victorian images of a bourgeois nuclear family.  Farm-wives worked, wives of artisans worked and so on.

This debate is also muddled because it confuses single-parent households with the couple households where the woman earns more.  As I mentioned in my earlier post, the latter group is only 24% of all married couples.  Yet, my friends, the sky is falling.

Meanwhile, in El Salvador, A Woman's LIfe/Health Is Worth Less Than Protecting A Nonviable Fetus

From Salon:

After more than a month of delays, El Salvador’s Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday to deny a critically ill woman a lifesaving abortion. The 22-year-old woman, identified only as Beatriz, is 26 weeks pregnant with a nonviable, anencephalic fetus; her doctors have warned that, due to severe health complications related to Beatriz’s lupus, cardiovascular disease and kidney functioning, she may not survive the pregnancy.
Abortion is illegal under all circumstances in El Salvador, and the court’s ruling is final, according to her lawyers. “The only way now is to go to the international courts,” Victor Hugo Mata, one of Beatriz’s lawyers, told CBS News.

You don't remove dying fishes from an aquarium just because the aquarium might break.   Duh.

That was the kindest way I could express my anger.  More about the court's ruling:

The judges voted 3-to-2 Wednesday to reject the appeal by the woman’s lawyers, who argued that continuing with the pregnancy puts her life at risk.
The court says physical and psychological exams done on the woman by the government-run Institute of Legal Medicine found that her diseases are under control and she can continue the pregnancy.

Yup.  The aquarium might not crack, after all, so no problem here.

More on the case here.  El Salvador does not allow abortion for ANY reason.

Today's Science Granola. With Strawberries.

Two interesting things for science geeks.  Andrew Gelman writes about the problems with psychological studies and what the data might mean on his blog.  The particular study is about men's upper-body strength and how that supposedly affects men's political views in three countries.

It sounds like an evolutionary psychology take, doesn't it?  I've often thought that the problem with some ep studies is a lack of training in how to look for alternative explanations.  If your framework is upper-body strength, then you jump from that to various fuzzy measurements of biceps and so on you may sorta forget that there is a large group of researchers out there who spend their lives studying the variables which are most commonly correlated with political views, and you might also not realize that things such as biceps circumference might correlate with some of those variables (such as age, say, as Gelman notes). 

And you might also fail to think about how any exaggerations in self-reports of biceps size could correlate with political views, given that certain parties are based on the Strong Daddy or Brusque Masculinity ideals for men.  Finally, biceps size is something one can change by working out.  In general women are not urged to enlarge their biceps but men are, and it may well be the case that the message works more on those men who hold certain political views.

Gelman's general points are also about the problems that I fairly often see in these types of studies:  The unavailability of simple descriptive data on the sample, and the feeling I get that there's been some data fishing going on.  The latter doesn't mean intentional falsification or anything of the sort, but if a researcher begins with a particular framework it can be difficult not to view certain findings as important and others as OK to omit.

The second interesting study concerns self-control and behavior in children.  I have not looked at the actual study, but it might be worth a closer look.  This is because the researchers found larger gender differences in the US than in three Asian countries:

A new study shows there is a gender gap when it comes to behavior and self-control in American young children -- one that does not appear to exist in children in Asia.

In the United States, girls had higher levels of self-regulation than boys. Self-regulation is defined as children's ability to control their behavior and impulses, follow directions, and persist on a task. It has been linked to academic performance and college completion, in past studies by Oregon State University researchers.
In three Asian countries, the gender gap in the United States was not found when researchers directly assessed the self-regulation of 3-6 year olds. The results appear in the new issue of the journal Early Childhood Research Quarterly.
"These findings suggest that although we often expect girls to be more self-regulated than boys, this may not be the case for Asian children," said Shannon Wanless, lead author of the study.

Something cultural appears to be going on here.  The overall results are more complicated (read the link), but they do remind us that behavior can be affected by societal norms and upbringing.

If the findings hold, they might offer a different way of looking into ways to improve boys' school performance.   The next step in following that embryo theory would be to look at the gender statistics on school completion etc. in those three Asian countries, China, Taiwan and South Korea.

And here are the promised strawberries:

Good News: Facebook Will Consider Changes To Its Policy Of Not Policing Misogyny

All thanks go to the campaign led by Women, Action and the Media; Laura Bates of the Everyday Sexism Project; and Soraya Chemaly.  The campaign pointed out that Facebook bans pictures of breast feeding but allows misogynistic sites:

The letter highlighted Facebook pages with names like “Violently Raping Your Friend Just for Laughs” and “Kicking your Girlfriend in the Fanny because she won’t make you a Sandwich,” and other pages that included graphic images of women being abused.
The groups asked Facebook to improve how it trains moderators to recognize and remove such content. They also asked Facebook users to use the Twitter hashtag #FBrape to call on companies to stop advertising on Facebook if their ads have been placed alongside such content. A petition on the site change.org had almost 224,000 supporters by Tuesday evening.

The campaign focused on advertisers:

“We thought that advertisers would be the most effective way of getting Facebook’s attention,” said Jaclyn Friedman, the executive director of Women, Action and the Media. “We had no idea that it would blow up this big. I think people have been frustrated with this issue for so long and feeling like that had no way for Facebook to pay attention to them. As consumers we do have a lot of power.”
David Reuter, a spokesman for Nissan, said in an interview on Tuesday that the automaker has stopped all advertising on Facebook until it could assure Nissan that its ads would not appear on pages with offensive content.

What a wonderful example of Leaning In!!!  I"m sure that Sheryl Sandberg would approve.