Weekend Reading, 14/3/28: On Wage Fixing, Parenting and Texas Abortion Law

1.  Wage fixing, anyone?  This story is worth wading through.  The US antitrust laws lost most of their teeth a long time ago.  I'm still hoping for a good set of dentures, because even the free-market acolites should acknowledge that market power isn't the same thing as the power to do good.

2.  Parenting can be very tough, especially because everyone and their uncle Harry are willing to critique those attempts as "experts."  Then there are the actual experts, with study after study on various parenting outcomes.  Parenting often looks like tightrope walking while carrying a week's worth of groceries and nappies/diapers.

Thus, if you are a parent you might be relieved or upset (depending which way you are tipping on that tightrope) by the renewed focus on "free range" childhoods and how important they are for creativity.  You might also be relieved or upset by the recent finding that parental help with homework is not at all helpful*.

If all that is too much for you, read this parenting article, put up your feet and have a large glass of nectar.  While someone else watches your children, naturally.

3.  The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals:

ruled Thursday that two provisions of a Texas abortion law are constitutional, including one that has closed a third of the state’s clinics. The unanimous panel, made up of three women appointed by Republicans, had already allowed the full brunt of the law – the same one now-gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis tried to block – to go into effect.

....

The Supreme Court has held that laws restricting access to abortion can’t put an “undue burden” or have the purpose of putting a “substantial obstacle” in the path of a woman seeking an abortion. But in a decision written by Judge Edith Jones and signed onto by Judges Jennifer Elrod and Catharina Haynes, the Fifth Circuit argued that Texas’s law wasn’t harsh enough to meet that standard.

...

In the oral argument in New Orleans in January, an attorney for the clinics had pointed out that the closures disproportionately burdened women living in the Rio Grande Valley, which had only two clinics. The judges were skeptical then, and they elaborated in their decision: “Even if we were to accept that both clinics in the Rio Grande Valley were about to close as a result of the admitting privileges provision, however, this finding does not show an undue burden,” they wrote. In fact, they don’t have to “accept” anything – both clinics closed three weeks ago.
The closures are not an undue burden, write the judges because “it takes less than three hours on Texas highways” to get to Corpus Christi. (The Corpus Christi clinic is expected to close in September.) “Although some clinics may be required to shut their doors, there is no showing whatsoever that any woman will lack reasonable access to a clinic within Texas,” they add, but only heed evidence from the trial in October, when the law had barely taken effect.

I'm not a goddess of law but I wonder how courts decide when something is an "undue burden."  Sometimes just having to fill in a form can be argued to be a burden, sometimes having to travel a long distance is not an undue burden, even if travel costs money and time.   So.
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*I can think of a reason why this might be the case.  The point of the homework is not to submit a perfect set of answers but to learn from going through the tasks, and that learning includes taking on the responsibility for the task as well as for the particular items the homework tries to teach. 

It's the process which matters, more than the outcome, and premature help with the process (or even knowing that a parent will go through the answers later and will fix any mistakes before the teacher sees the) could dilute the incentives to work hard on the assignment.

On Tech, Panties, Construction Sites and Street Harassment: Occupational Gender Segregation in the Popular Culture.

How about an interesting juxtaposition of stuff about gender and tech?  Here's a story about a different way of getting young women interested in computer science careers.  And here's a new (not safe for work) website for tech fanciers.  It's going to offer everything about mobile technology, with a sexy twist!

Sexy, in this context, means women with panties around their ankles, because sex is equated with the female body.  The website offers lots of goodies:

Readers can interact with the magazine by playing embedded mini-games and puzzles or joining in conversations via the magazine's in-app Twitter feed. Readers can also enjoy audio and video of hotties reading the articles, similar to a podcast. And readers can vote in the app for the Wannabe a Hottie contest, in which readers will choose a "girl next door" to be flown in for a photo shoot and feature at the end of the year. Hot Tech Today is everything a tech enthusiast needs in one app.

Mmm.  As far as I can tell, all the "hotties" will be female.  Imagine a "boy next door" competition!  Perhaps that would draw in more women interested in tech?

Just kidding, sadly, because that website doesn't try to draw women into tech, rather the exact opposite.

Occupational gender segregation does seem to take their cues from stuff like this.  It's not that different from gender-coded toy aisles (where it seems that physician kits are now in the boys' aisles!), except that young women in tech might have to view themselves both as the participants and as one of the sideline objects of participation, and that can be hard to take in the long run.

Speaking of occupational gender segregation and street harassment, have a look at this Australian Snickers chocolate bar ad.  The joke is at the very end.

Schools Policing Gender

Two recent US items of interest in this context.  First, a boy with a My Little Pony lunch sack was told by the school not to bring it in because the lunch sack (coded for girls in this culture) was a "trigger" for bullies. 

Second, a Christian school told the grandparents of an eight-year-old girl that she looked (and acted?) too much like a boy.

These gender-policing examples may no longer be extremely common in the wider American society (though I have witnessed parents doing this quite a bit, by replacing the toy a child holds with a different toy etc.)  But the camp believing in mostly innate sex differences should make a note that cultural forcing does take place and that gender roles are being policed, even by the children themselves.

Fun And Games in the Supreme Court. The Hobby Lobby Case And Women's Human Rights.

In the oral arguments about the Hobby Lobby case.  First Justice Kagan points out what will happen if we are going to regard for-profit corporations (which don't possess souls)  as religious believers with religious values worthy of honoring in the marketplace:

When Clement tried to deflect this list, Kagan came armed with an even bigger what. What of religious employers who object to gender equality, or the minimum wage, or family medical leave, or child labor laws? If the Supreme Court agrees with Hobby Lobby’s brief, which argues that laws burdening a corporation’s purported religious faith must survive the “most demanding test known to constitutional law,” then there would be few laws corporations could not exempt themselves from following.

Bolds are mine.   Just for your elucidation, Clement answered like this:

Paul Clement, the attorney for the companies, rejected that by calling it a “parade of horribles” that would not materialize.

Which is extremely reassuring...

And keep in mind that the religious values the market is expected to honor here are the social and cultural values of nomadic shepherding communities from two thousand years ago or so, at least in the context of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  That's worth pointing out, because it is those social values that the rest of us, with different religious beliefs, are most likely forced to honor under the corporations-are-believers view. That is bad news for women, but not only for women.

Does that sound extreme?  Two reasons for the way I wrote that.  First, there is no obvious way to limit the possible religious rights of for-profit corporations to just birth control or abortions, and a decision that way in the Hobby Lobby case would automatically mean that 

“You would see religious objectors come out of the woodwork,” Kagan said.

As I mentioned in my earlier post on the Hobby Lobby case, a firm could then refuse to promote women in the organization, based on the fundamentalist belief of some sects that women must never be placed above men in any hierarchy and so on.

The second reason for my dismal mood is that the five conservative Justices appear to be ready to rule for Hobby Lobby, which opens the gates of hell, so to speak.  Indeed, Justice Scalia is eager to accept corporations in the pews of his Catholic church:

"There's not a single case that says a for-profit enterprise cannot make a religious claim," Justice Antonin Scalia said.

And finally, the case seems to be about abortion, once again, based on the scientifically very questionable idea that emergency contraceptives and IUDs constitute abortion, mostly just because someone believes that they do.   As Justice Kennedy hates abortion, that means a five-four decision for Hobby Lobby, because no firm should be made to pay for abortion or even for contraception which forced-birthers have decided is abortion in their minds. 

But of course the firms aren't really "paying" for abortions in the first place, unless we take such a tremendously wide view of "paying" that just giving a woman her properly-earned wages means that.  Because that's what the health insurance offered by firms ultimately is:  part of the total wage package.
 

The Hobby Lobby Case And The Supremes

Tomorrow the Supreme Court of the United States is going to hear oral arguments in two cases having to do with the ACA's coverage of contraception for women (and, incidentally, for men, given that it takes two to tango, and also because the same rules would most likely cover a male contraceptive pill if it ever became generally accepted).  The more famous of the cases is the Hobby Lobby case:

The owners of Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties don't have a problem with offering insurance that covers most forms of birth control, but they aren't willing to cover emergency contraceptives — like Plan B or ella -- or IUDs. Hobby Lobby contends its "religious beliefs prohibit them from providing health coverage for contraceptive drugs and devices that end human life after conception." The question these cases are seeking to solve is whether for-profit companies have a right to exercise religious freedom under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a federal law passed in 1993 that states the “Government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability." If they do, does the government have a compelling interest to override it in this instance?

From my divine (not lawyerly) standpoint, these cases matter greatly because if for-profit corporations can be regarded as having religious beliefs of the type covered by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, then what's to stop a firm from discriminating against women, say? 

After all, some fundamentalist sects argue that all women should stay at home and more of them argue that no woman should ever be in a position to lead men.  I find it hard to see how for-profit firms could have a religious exemption applicable only to the coverage of contraception and not to all the ancient misogynistic and anti-gays&lesbians ideas so easily found in various holy texts.

Then there's the question of defining emergency contraceptives and IUDs as abortifacients.  That's the "scientific" basis of the suits, I guess, despite pretty obvious counterarguments.  Does it matter if a legal case is based on possible pseudoscience?

Peeling Onions. Or Writing This Blog.

That's how I see what I try to do here: peeling onions, but not just the skin of the onions.  I keep on peeling, layer by layer, trying to understand the issues I write about.  Mostly I fail, and then, of course, tears have to be shed when peeling onions.

It's the deepest levels of "why?" that I wish* to pursue.  Why do we humans do the things we do, both bad and good?  To what extent could we change our behavior? 

It may be that this pursuit is pointless, that it doesn't interest most people, that because we, so to speak, live on the outer skins of the onion who cares what happens in the deeper layers?

But it is the deeper layers which ultimately define that outer skin.

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Where did these thoughts come from?

Partly from the struggles I have with myself (boxing gloves worn by both halves of me) about how to pick among the many, many topics which interest me, because I cannot write on all of them, partly from some of my recent thoughts about the differences between activism and the kind of work (if you can call it work) that I try to do on this blog.
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*It's not even a question of pure wishing, because that makes the choice look too voluntary.  It's how I'm built. 

Americans Don't Like Female Bosses?

Bryce Covert talks about this:

In its annual report of the Highest Rated CEOs of 2014, based on employee feedback gathered during the last year, just two women appear on Glassdoor’s list, and they don’t break into the top 30. The top 10 are all white men. 

Sharen Turney, CEO of Victoria’s Secret, is ranked at number 35 with an 85 percent approval rating. The only other woman, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, ranks second to last (there are 51 on the list due to an error that originally left someone out) with a 79 percent rating, only beating GE’s Jeffrey R. Immelt.

...

Part of the problem is clearly that there are so few female CEOs to begin with. They make up less than 15 percent of executive officers at Fortune 500 companies and haven’t made any significant progress in four years.

Covert then talks about two studies which shows that people prefer male bosses, among those who express a preference, though the percentage expressing no gender preferences in their bosses is actually pretty big and growing.  From a 2013 piece by her:

Friday Cat Post

Norway has a different kind of a reality show:

Now the channel behind Norway's marathon "Slow TV" broadcasts – billed as an antidote to the frantic data overload of the internet and twitter – has excelled itself with Piip Show, a strangely addictive "reality-TV show with wild birds".

Guess who is watching this show?

Here's the answer:

Weekend Reading on Reproductive Justice, Stand-Your-Ground And Inheritance as Women's Issues

What you might want to read over the weekend:

A good summary of what can happen with the fetal human rights movement.  This is the story of Rennie Gibbs, but the article covers several aspects of the treatment of women as incubators:

Rennie Gibbs’s daughter, Samiya, was a month premature when she simultaneously entered the world and left it, never taking a breath. To experts who later examined the medical record, the stillborn infant’s most likely cause of death was also the most obvious: the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck.
But within days of Samiya’s delivery in November 2006, Steven Hayne, Mississippi’s de facto medical examiner at the time, came to a different conclusion. Autopsy tests had turned up traces of a cocaine byproduct in Samiya’s blood, and Hayne declared her death a homicide, caused by “cocaine toxicity.”


In early 2007, a Lowndes County grand jury indicted Gibbs, a 16-year-old black teen, for “depraved heart murder” — defined under Mississippi law as an act “eminently dangerous to others…regardless of human life.” By smoking crack during her pregnancy, the indictment said, Gibbs had “unlawfully, willfully, and feloniously” caused the death of her baby. The maximum sentence: life in prison.
Seven years and much legal wrangling later, Gibbs could finally go on trial this spring — part of a wave of “fetal harm” cases across the country in recent years that pit the rights of the mother against what lawmakers, health care workers, prosecutors, judges, jurors, and others view as the rights of the unborn child.
A judge is said to be likely to decide this week if the case should move forward or be dismissed. Assuming it continues, whether Gibbs becomes the first woman ever convicted by a Mississippi jury for the loss of her pregnancy could turn on a fundamental question that has received surprisingly little scrutiny so far by the courts: Is there scientific proof that cocaine can cause lasting damage to a child exposed in the womb, or are the conclusions reached by Hayne and prosecutors based on faulty analysis and junk science?

The "Stand Your Ground" laws and women's immunity from prosecution is covered in this article about the case of Marissa Alexander.  This piece covers the prosecutors' arguments concerning the applicability of the "Stand Your Ground" law to this case.  Whatever one's conclusions about that specific law might be,  the Alexander case looks like an outrage when compared to other recent Florida cases which have employed the "Stand Your Ground" defense.

Inheritance laws, both religious and traditional laws, still handicap women in several African countries and in Muslim countries which apply the shariah law to inheritance.  An example of the latter from Morocco is covered in this article, which also notes the usual problem with religion-based discriminatory rules:  The women themselves do not wish to go against their holy books.  A reinterpretation can be difficult, however much it is needed.

This article from last January talks about the impact of traditional inheritance rules on widows in Tanzania.

Both types of unequal inheritance laws, have included certain protections for women, such as the implicit understanding that men have been culturally regarded as responsible for the monetary support of their mothers, daughters, sister-in-laws etc., via various arrangements.  But those protections have never amounted to the same thing as legal ownership of the assets and the right to determine how they are being used.  They have many more loopholes than legal ownership rights offer.

Likewise, one can argue that such laws were more ethical and practical in the traditional patriarchal system (though they always had those loopholes).  But the case for those arguments is even weaker today, and change is urgently needed. 

Market Ideas in Education. When Things Go Wrong.

Can you have something for nothing?

In economic resource terms, pretty much never.  Yet people keep on trying.  For example, conservatives want teachers to teach just because of their devotion to children, conservatives want schools not to need budgets, and conservatives expect that cutting teachers' pension benefits will have no negative consequences to the ease with which we can find good teachers.

What's fascinating about that example is the contrast with, say, financial markets, where nobody expects people to work just because they like their jobs so much and where good pay is obviously utterly and completely deserved because the markets say so.  That  teaching is an occupation with quite a few women in it while finance is regarded as testosterone-fueled may matter for those conservative ideas.

When is a little knowledge very dangerous?

A good example is taking Economics101 (a basic micro course), learning about the model of competitive markets (which applies to very few real-world markets), and then deciding that all sorts of things (not covered in Econ101) which do not lend themselves to market provision should be turned over to the cruel and reckless claws of anarchy-markets.  Because of the appealingly simple models in that course!  I come across people on the net all the time who think they know economics because of one course they have taken.  That little knowledge is dangerous, especially when it is viewed as the entirety of all economic theory applying to markets.

Consider the popular conservative idea that schools should be turned over to the "free markets" everywhere.  Those who support that should ask themselves why basic education has so very seldom been offered by profit-making firms, why, instead, it has almost always been constructed on a not-for-profit basis.  There are economic reasons for these institutional characteristics, and though technological change may increase the ability of for-profit solutions to work in education, the essential characteristics of the product which education offers have not changed, and those characteristics make for-profit solutions rather bad ones.

What are those essential characteristics?

The Job Of A Wife, According to Dennis Prager

This is worth looking at, despite the original source being from 2008, because Prager, a conservative talk-show host,  is co-hosting a fund-raiser for Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

What Prager stated in 2008:

Prager has penned a number of op-eds for conservative publications like TownHall.com and National Review that outline his views on feminism, which he’s said has produced an “awful legacy” for women, and sexual relations in marriage, which he’s argued is one of a wife’s “mutual obligation[s]” to her husband.

Writing on TownHall.com in December of 2008, Prager compares a man’s obligation to go to work, regardless of his “mood,” to a woman’s obligation to have sex with her husband.

“Why would a loving, wise woman allow mood to determine whether or not she will give her husband one of the most important expressions of love she can show him? What else in life, of such significance, do we allow to be governed by mood?” he writes.

“What if your husband woke up one day and announced that he was not in the mood to go to work?”

So in Prager's view marriage is a heterosexual labor contract where the female spouse provides sex, childcare, meals, laundry services, house-cleaning etc. and the male spouse pays for those services.   Once you understand that definition of marriage, Prager's views become crystal-clear:  He believes that the workers are failing in their duties if they don't provide sex on demand, given that they are being paid for it. 

Those views also reflect, I believe, one of the major problems among many/some conservatives:  This is their definition of marriage, and it drives several of the socially conservative policies they support, their obliviousness for the need of labor rights for women, their opposition to daycare or pregnancy leaves and so on. 

That view has at least two major problems.  First, the majority of wives in the US work in the labor market, earning money, and Prager's patriarchal marriage doesn't acknowledge that aspect at all.  He just waves a magic wand, and suddenly paid work is all male.  If we decided to keep the interpretation of marriage as a labor contract, the fact that the wives also have earned incomes would mean that they, too, are then buying services from their husbands, right?  But in Prager's world the husbands owe their wives nothing but financial payments.

Second, Prager assumes that sexual services are included in the job description of wives.  That definition means that marital sex is paid sex work.  An interesting interpretation from a conservative anti-feminist.

Lawrence Summers On Envy. Or Why We Should Not Tax The Rich More.

Our Larry has cropped up again with interesting comments, this time about income and wealth inequality in the US:

“Reducing inequality is good, but it’s 50 times better to do it by lifting those up who are low than by tearing those down who are high,” said Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary whose bid to become Fed chair got derailed by the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party. “The politics of envy are the wrong politics in America. The better politics are the politics of inclusion where everyone shares in economic growth.”

OK.  Let's see what this would amount to:  Don't tear down those who are high would mean not taxing the wealthier more than they are being taxed now. Everyone shearing in economic growth would mean that the poor, the middle class and the rich would all get wealthier as the economy grows.

This is so beautiful.  It also dispenses with the accusation that concern with income and wealth inequality is based on nothing but that deadly sin of envy.

But imagine, for a moment, a society in which 99% of people are just barely surviving and where 1% of people own almost everything, living in guarded enclaves where the faucets and toilet seats are gold-plated.  There's nothing about such a society that would preclude the winning 1% from using the envy argument.  In that sense it is an empty argument, one which cannot be disproved and one which doesn't even have to be false, in the sense that of course the suffering poor would be envious of those who have their bellies full of food.

What Summers' statement hides is that there are other arguments we can make about income and wealth inequality being bad for all of us, even ultimately for the very rich.  How about the possible collapse of extreme unequal societies?  How about the unpleasantness of living in a society where the haves must hire private guards to protect themselves against the have-nots?  How about the damage inequality causes for the proper functioning of democracy?

To wipe all that under the "envy-mat" could come back to haunt us later, Larry.

Then there's the problem that economic growth benefiting everyone would still have to benefit the poor and the middle-income people more than it benefits the rich if growth is to be the major policy to be used in reducing income and wealth inequality.  But once we redefine the cake-division as applying not to the existing cake but to the growth in that cake, the envy argument can slip back in.  Who are the critics to argue that the wealthier don't deserve larger chunks of any cake growth?

I get that the linked article is about money in the US politics, that the Democratic Party doesn't want to frighten away its rich donors and so on. But think about the need for such articles in the first place.  They are necessary because the political system is already geared towards the desires of the wealthier among us.

Short Posts On Weird Stuff About Gender

1.  One conservative, Bryan Fischer,  thinks that the proper goal of women is to strive to be women:

"We don't need women trying to be like men," he added. "We need more women whose ambition in life is to be a woman"

That's based on the idea that men and women are non-intersecting sets in all their characteristics, but it's also an interesting plan for allowable female ambitions.

2.  The manufactured thigh gap that looks like a missing Lego piece.  This is funny on one level and nothing but horrible on a deeper level.  For an antidote, have a look at this story.

3.   Did you know that there will be a new reality show called "My Five Husbands?"  Well, I lied there.  The new reality show will be called "My Five Wives" and it joins other recent shows which portray polygyny (one man with several wives) in the US ("Big Love" and "Sister Wives").  The husband of those five wives states that he is a feminist and all the five wives also regard themselves as feminists.

To address those claims would take a proper post.  Though polyamory could be gender-egalitarian, the situation of that family doesn't quite look like equal sexual freedom for all participants.  Brad has five partners but his wives, Paulie, Robyn, Rosemary, Nonie, and Rhonda, each have only one partner, and the five share Brad between them.  There's a small adding-up problem* in that, for those who argue that the arrangements provides sexual equality. 

Now, a polygamic situation like that could have many theoretical interpretations.  For instance, the man could be viewed as having a harem or the women could be viewed as having a toyboy they share as they deem appropriate.  In other words, how egalitarian such an arrangement is depends on how power is divided inside it.  The traditional forms of polygamy give the man the lion's share of the power.  Whether egalitarian polygyny or polyandry is possible in real life and not just in theory seems an open question to me.  But the traditional type of polygyny certainly isn't gender-egalitarian.

I'm not as fascinated by this attempt at a feminist angle of the most recent polygyny series as I am by the question why there are enough American viewers for essentially gender-retrogressive stories about marriage and gender.  And when are we going to see that "My Five Husbands" series?
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*The fundamentalist Mormon polygamy has another adding-up problem which these kinds of series probably don't address, and that is what happens in a community where some men have many wives so that other men cannot have any wives.  The Lost Boys is what happens.  More generally,  polygyny cannot be a stable societal arrangement without some way to get rid of all the surplus men, even if the women in the society have no say about whom they will be married to.

Quvenzhané Wallis as Orphan Annie, Ben Kingsley as Gandhi. Looking at the differences.

The Oscar-nominated ten-year-old actor,  Quvenzhané Wallis, is playing Orphan Annie in a new adaptation of the original musical (Annie).  Several sites have gathered together tweet comments expressing racism or anger about the actor not being white and read-headed as in the original musical and book it was based on.

It's hard to know how common those kinds of comments are, without going back to gather all tweets about this news, but some people obviously feel that the character Annie should never be played by an actor who doesn't exactly match the original specifications and some of those people are racists*.

To compare this to related decisions, consider the classical film Gandhi.  Because it came out before we had the blessings of Twitter it's not easy to find out if people were at all outraged that a British-Indian white actor**, Ben Kingsley,  was to play Gandhi.  After all, Gandhi's essential characteristic for the purposes of that film was that he was an Indian leader of the people.

Then there is Waiting for Godot.  Evidence suggests that the playwright, Samuel Beckett, was opposed to having female actors play the roles in his play:

Beckett was not open to most interpretative approaches to his work. He famously objected when, in the 1980s, several women's acting companies began to stage the play. "Women don't have prostates", said Beckett,^[79] a reference to the fact that Vladimir frequently has to leave the stage to urinate.
In 1988, Beckett took a Dutch theatre company, De Haarlemse Toneelschuur to court over this issue. "Beckett [...] lost his case. But the issue of gender seemed to him to be so vital a distinction for a playwright to make that he reacted angrily, instituting a ban on all productions of his plays in The Netherlands."^[80] This ban was short-lived, however: in 1991 (two years after Beckett's death), "Judge Huguette Le Foyer de Costil ruled that the production would not cause excessive damage to Beckett's legacy", and the play was duly performed by the all-female cast of the Brut de Beton Theater Company at the prestigious Avignon Festival.^[81]
The Italian Pontedera Theatre Foundation won a similar claim in 2006 when it cast two actresses in the roles of Vladimir and Estragon, albeit in the characters' traditional roles as men.^[82] At the 1995 Acco Festival, director Nola Chilton staged a production with Daniella Michaeli in the role of Lucky,^[83] and a 2001 production at Indiana University staged the play with women playing Pozzo and the Boy.^{[citation needed]}

Setting aside the difference between the creator of a work of art opposing recasting and the possible audience for the work of art opposing it, these three cases do share a similar smell.  Or should share it, because I doubt that the casting of Kingsley as Gandhi caused much protest outside India (though I may be mistaken about that).

The essential question in such casting decisions is probably whether they change the central messages of the work of art.  I don't see how that would be the case for the musical Annie or even for Waiting for Godot (as some menopausal women have to pee pretty often, say) because neither piece explicitly demands a certain race or gender to keep its central message the same.  On the other hand, something like A Raisin in the Sun would be hard to recast with white actors at this time and in the United States, because it would stop making sense.

Not allowing more flexible casting of roles hurts actors belonging to racial minorities, because there are fewer works explicitly written for them.  If we are never allowed to rethink casting, minority actors will have more trouble staying employed. 
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*Hunger Games' casting decisions caused similar complaints about the race of some characters, even when the book had specified them.
**Sorry, got that wrong.  Kingsley was born Krishna Pandit Bhanji.  But he is British. Thanks to pixelfish for the correction.  For a better example of this phenomenon, the 2013 remake of the Lone Ranger might do:

Despite the producers citing the presence of an adviser from the Comanche Nation, some debated the advisability of casting of Depp as a Native American and whether the film would present a positive and accurate representation of the Comanche.^[97] Depp has stated he believes he has Native American ancestry, possibly from a great-grandmother. He has said that he considered the role a personal attempt "to try to right the wrongs of the past", in reference to portrayals of Native American culture in the media.^[98][99]

The Centennary of Tove Jansson's Birth

If you don't know any small children to whom you could read the Moomintroll books you should hire a few, just as cover so that you can read them yourself. Tove Jansson, the author responsible for those books, was born a hundred years ago this year:

This year Finland is celebrating the centenary of the birth of Tove Jansson, creator of the Moomins, and one of the most successful children's writers ever. Her life included war and lesbian relationships - both reflected by the Moomins in surprising ways.
There is Moomintroll, Moominmamma and Moominpappa - little white trolls who live in Moominvalley, with other fantastical creatures such as the Hattifatteners, Mymbles and Whompers.
Tove Jansson's Moomin books have sold in their millions, and been translated into 44 languages.
Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials, has described her as a genius. Other devotees include Michael Morpurgo, writer of War Horse and dozens of other children's books, and Frank Cottrell Boyce, who scripted the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony.
"I was completely blown away and enchanted," says Boyce, who read Finn Family Moomintroll as a 10-year-old, after discovering the book in a Liverpool library.
"I didn't realise it was set in a real place. I thought she'd made Finland up. Finland was like Narnia, with these incredible characters that were so strange but instantly recognisable because you had met lots of them - noisy Hemulens or neurotic, skinny Fillijonks."

The books are aimed at children.  Don't let that stop you from reading at least the Tales from Moominvalley, a 1962 short-story collection.  

It is one of the books I might take with me to a deserted island, because of the vast psychological riches the stories contain.  It's hard to pick a favorite among them, but if I had to do so I'd pick "The Fillyjonk Who Believed In Disasters,*"for reasons I discuss in this post.
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*The story is so good that a summary doesn't give it any kind of justice.  I know because I tried.

A Crime Post: On Gun Rights And Rape Kits

Which covers the love of guns, its consequences and the way rape kits are analyzed in the US.  Or, rather, not analyzed.

First, on guns.  The state of Georgia has a new proposed bill about "gun rights":

In addition to overturning current state laws and dramatically rolling back concealed-carry restrictions, HB 875 would loosen other gun regulations in the state. The law would:
    •    Remove the fingerprinting requirement for gun license renewals
    •    Prohibit the state from keeping a gun license database
    •    Tighten the state's preemption statute, which restricts local governments from passing gun laws that conflict with state laws
    •    Repeal the state licensing requirement for firearms dealers (requiring only a federal firearms license)
    •    Expand gun owner rights in a declared state of emergency by prohibiting government authorities from seizing, registering, or otherwise limiting the carrying of guns in any way permitted by law before the emergency was declared
    •    Limit the governor's emergency powers by repealing the ability to regulate the sale of firearms during a declared state of emergency
    •    Lower the age to obtain a concealed-carry license from 21 to 18 for active-duty military and honorably discharged veterans who've completed basic training
    •    Prohibit detaining someone for the sole purpose of checking whether they have a gun license
The sweeping bill would also expand the state's Stand your Ground law into an "absolute" defense for the use of deadly force in self-protection. "Defense of self or others," the bills reads "shall be an absolute defense to any violation under this part." In its current wording, the bill would even allow individuals who possess a gun illegally—convicted felons, for example—to still claim a Stand Your Ground defense.

Don't you think the list sounds like civil rights demands for weapons?  Not even for the people owning them, but for the guns themselves?  Less regulation of guns!  Guns should be allowed everywhere and there should be no trace of the guns in any statistical source!

To put all that in perspective, for about ten days I have made a note of any story which tells us how a child has killed or hurt someone with a gun or gotten killed or hurt by a gun.  This is not an actual search for those stories, by the way.  I just made a note when I saw one.  Here is the recent crop.  David Waldman at Daily Kos writes frequently about various types of "gun fails."

Studying Gender Stereotypes in Science. Or We All Know That Women Can't Do Math

Are there fewer women in STEM-fields just because women don't choose them as often as men?  Or could it be that there are demand-side reasons for the relative scarcity of women?  Those "demand side" reasons mean that the people responsible for hiring and promoting workers might have (perhaps subconscious) prejudices about women which affect the likelihood that a woman is picked for a job or an educational slot which requires mathematical skills.

A new study, How stereotypes impair women’s careers in science, by Ernesto Reuben, Paola Sapienza and Luigi Zingales tries to answer the latter question, about the possible impact of our prejudices concerning mathematics and gender.   Bryce Covert summarizes the study findings:

Researchers from Columbia Business School, the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University conducted an experiment that had both men and women complete an arithmetic task that both genders, on average, perform equally well as potential job candidates. Then test subjects had to decide who to hire. “Our results reveal a strong bias among subjects to hire male candidates,” the researchers note, which was true of both men and women. When the prospective employers were only shown a candidate’s physical appearance, making their gender clear, they were twice as likely to hire a man than a woman. This was because women were expected to perform worse on the math problems, even though it was a task they were equally like to do well.
Women were still less likely to be hired even after the candidates told prospective employers how they did on the task “because men tend to boast about their performance, whereas women generally underreport it,” the authors write. Employers don’t take this into account, particularly if they went into the experiment with a strong bias against women in math.
Things improved when those doing the hiring were given full information about how the candidates did on the task, but even then discrimination wasn’t totally eliminated.

Stuff To Read, 3/12/14

I always say that writing can be as fast as your ability to type.  It's the research that props up the writing which takes time.  That's another way to say that I've been doing a lot of research and very little writing today.

So what could you read, instead of me?  Let's see.

This piece talks about a new study which suggests that money buys access to politicians, but that even the smell of money isn't quite enough to guarantee face-to-face access.  More on the power of money in American politics can be found in this editorial.

What the Hobby Lobby case reveals about the US religious right's attitudes toward contraception.  A spoiler:  They think contraception destroys marriage and makes men disrespect women.

The US is ranked 98th in the global ranking of national legislatures when it comes to the number of women in them.  Sure, some other countries achieve a higher ranking through quotas, but many don't need quotas to get there.  This country is behind Kenya and Indonesia and just ahead of United Arab Emirates.  Part of the reason for America's less-than-stellar performance is the two-party system which makes atypical candidates less likely than multi-party systems.

On crowdworkers.  A new kind of labor market and mostly unregulated.

And one more example of the Republican wingtip-in-the-mouth syndrome when it comes to so-called women's issues:

New Hampshire state Rep. Kyle Tasker (R) posted a joke about domestic violence to Facebook on Monday while defending a fellow lawmaker's comments about abusive relationships, according to William Tucker's New Hampshire politics blog, Miscellany: Blue.
Tasker posted a graphic joke about domestic violence that read, "50,000 battered women and I still eat mine plain!"
Tasker has since deleted the joke from Facebook...

Put Me On A Pedestal

So that you can look up my skirt more easily?

Mike Huckabee, the former Republican Governor of Arkansas, tells how he has run against female candidates in political races:

“I’ve twice run against women opponents, and it’s a very different kind of approach,” he tells me. Different how? “For those of us who have some chivalry left, there’s a level of respect. ... You treat some things as a special treasure; you treat other things as common.” A male opponent is “common,” a woman requires “a sense of pedestal.”

“I’ll put it this way,” Huckabee says. “I treat my wife very differently than I treat my chums and my pals. I wouldn’t worry about calling them on Valentine’s Day, opening the door for them, or making sure they were OK.”

That's just wonderfully informative.  And funny, given that he seems to equate female political rivals with his wife and male political rivals with his pals (presumably all men).  Or at least he has trouble trying to explain how those female politicians might differ from male politicians, except in some extremely deep and gendered ways  which require chivalry from him, probably Valentine's Day cards, opening doors and making sure that they are OK.  I'd think it would be fairly easy to beat Huckabee if that's how he plans to run any future races against women.

Chivalry, by the way, is an interesting concept.  Many conservatives seem to assume that in the olden days the world was full of chivalrous men, opening doors, even when a woman didn't want to go anywhere, rising when women entered the room and so on, but now chivalry is almost dead and that's because of feminazis.  Indeed, some not-so-nice sites suggest that the price of chivalry is submission, and that the alternative to chivalry (of the imagined type that once ruled everywhere) is not being treated with respect and politeness as a human being but being treated with extra nastiness for overstepping the boundaries of traditional gender roles.

That's not what Huckabee is saying.  His ideas come from his own traditional gender norms, perhaps reflected in his earlier support for wifely submission in marriage.

I can't help feeling a bit sorry for our Mike.  He's trying too hard to make the Republican war on women come out right, but he just doesn't get it, because in his worldview women really cannot take the kinds of roles those uppity women are taking.  Sadly, there are no ready-made answers to the proper way of campaigning against someone who is both supposed to stand on a pedestal and then get that pedestal toppled. 

Today's Science Snack. On Hormones And Women's Voting

Remember that study in 2012:  "The Fluctuating Female Vote:  Politics, Religion and the Ovulatory Cycle" by Kristina  M. Durante,  Ashley R. Arsena and Vladas Griskevicius?   It argued that women's voting is affected by their menstrual cycles, and linked the argument to the usual evolutionary psychology stuff about reproductive drives and how they might influence women differently at different stages of the ovulatory cycle.

The next stage of the game:  A new study*, Harris, C., & Mickes, L. (2014). "Women Can Keep the Vote: No Evidence That Hormonal Changes During the Menstrual Cycle Impact Political and Religious Beliefs Psychological Science" argues that a replication of the Durante et al. study failed to find the same effects.

Neuroskeptic, at a Discovery magazine blog, writes about some of the methodological concerns with that particular field of psychological studies which might exist in both the original studies and in the replications, especially something called "researcher degrees of freedom," from here:

[I]t is unacceptably easy to publish “statistically significant” evidence consistent with any hypothesis.
The culprit is a construct we refer to as researcher degrees of freedom. In the course of collecting and analyzing data, researchers have many decisions to make: Should more data be collected? Should some observations be excluded? Which conditions should be combined and which ones compared? Which control variables should be considered? Should specific measures be combined or transformed or both?
It is rare, and sometimes impractical, for researchers to make all these decisions beforehand. Rather, it is common (and accepted practice) for researchers to explore various analytic alternatives, to search for a combination that yields “statistical significance,” and to then report only what “worked.” The problem, of course, is that the likelihood of at least one (of many) analyses producing a falsely positive finding at the 5% level is necessarily greater than 5%.

I'm not sure if that's a polite way to hint at the possibility that researchers can go on fishing trips with the data until they find significant results in at least one tiny part of the analyses, and that it is those significant results which then will be published.

Setting all that aside, replication still matters, even "replication"** suffering from possible "researcher degrees of freedom" problems.  That's because replications which fail to produce the original results tell us something about the fragility of the results,  so to speak, and about the ease with which opposite results can be manufactured.

Finally, it's worth noting that the women-and-their-hormones (and men-and-their-hormones) field also needs to be studied by people outside the evolutionary psychology camp, because any overt biases of the researchers will be different.  Evolutionary psychologists seek to verify their reproductive theories, those outside that field have different basic theories and thus different blinders.
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*I have not read this replication study or the response to it, though I did read the original Durante et al. study.
**In quotation marks, because replication should not deviate from the steps the original study took.  But if we don't know what those steps where...