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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We must do better.

On the WSJDLive Sausage Fest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phyllis Schlafly on Hypergamy

I bet you never thought you'd read that combination of words in a title!  Phyllis Schlafly is an older version of the American conservative female anti-feminists, a type which has more recent examples many of the gals of the Independent Women's Forum.  Schlafly is well known for her opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s.  But she also deserves to be well known for preaching to other women about the importance of staying at home and not having a career while making that preaching into a nice career for herself.

Anyway, Schlafly has now opined on the question of the gender gap in earnings, and here's where things get very interesting.  She states:

Another fact is the influence of hypergamy, which means that women typically choose a mate (husband or boyfriend) who earns more than she does. Men don’t have the same preference for a higher-earning mate.
While women prefer to HAVE a higher-earning partner, men generally prefer to BE the higher-earning partner in a relationship. This simple but profound difference between the sexes has powerful consequences for the so-called pay gap.
Suppose the pay gap between men and women were magically eliminated. If that happened, simple arithmetic suggests that half of women would be unable to find what they regard as a suitable mate.
Obviously, I’m not saying women won’t date or marry a lower-earning men, only that they probably prefer not to. If a higher-earning man is not available, many women are more likely not to marry at all. [...]
The best way to improve economic prospects for women is to improve job prospects for the men in their lives, even if that means increasing the so-called pay gap.

So delicious!  Never mind lesbian women or women who choose not to partner at all, never mind that the pay gap is much smaller in some other countries than in the US, and people still date and marry across the gender divide.  What Schlafly hints at here is the old conservative trade-off between marriage and independence:  Want to get educated and have a career, girl?  Then you will die alone except for those hundreds of cats.

This is a very common anti-feminist meme and it doesn't die even when evidence doesn't support it.

Next that hypergamy bit.  It's probably straight out of evolutionary psychology of a certain type.  The idea is that women "marry up" in terms of resources and that men "marry up" in terms of their female partners' looks, youth and overall fecundity.  This is assumed to be a hard-wired sex difference, created as an evolutionary adaptation during a time when prehistoric humans lived in small extended-kin based nomadic groups.  That nomadic tribes of that type are unlikely to be able to accumulate the kind of male resources the theory stipulates for the adaptation to be selected looks like a major problem to me.  The sexually attractive resources of anyone, whether male or female,  in such groups would most likely be embodied in health, youth and various food-acquisition skills.

The alternative theory is, obviously, that the tendency for women to "marry up" cannot be disentangled from the long history of laws, traditions and norms or from the history of women's lesser access to alternative ways of making a living than through marriage.  In short, hypergamy cannot simply be assumed to be some innate sex difference, as long as cultures organize the resource-accruing activities differently for men and women and when that organizing results in women earning less than men, on average. 

Indeed, if hypergamy is caused by societal rules about women and inheritance, women and paid work and what the proper gender roles should be (with emphasis on a division of labor which leaves women without independent sources of income), then Schlafly's own argument would contribute to it.  Was it taken seriously, that is, as a "simple but profound difference" between the sexes.

For more on how hypergamy looks to be changing when the genders are more equal, see my post here.
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Added later:  Given the Ayaan Hirsi Ali honorary doctorate debate (see below), it might be fun for you to know that Phyllis Schlafly was awarded an honorary doctorate in 2008 by Washington University in Saint Louis.  The explanation for that award was:

In bestowing this degree, the University is not endorsing Mrs. Schlafly's views or opinions; rather, it is recognizing an alumna of the University whose life and work have had a broad impact on American life and have sparked widespread debate and controversies that in many cases have helped people better formulate and articulate their own views about the values they hold.[58]

Speed-Blogging Monday 4/14/14: On Scott Walker, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and The Silence About Earnings

This is the Tax Day in the US and time for me to face how much money I lose by writing so much for nothing.  On the other hand, Uncle Sam won't get that money to pass it on to corporations in the way those subsides often work.  But you could send me money if you have any under the sofa cushions/pillows (or wait until my May fund drive).  (Why do I find begging so hard?)

First, on one of the nine Nazgûls, the governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker:

Amid reports that Wisconsin ranks 25th in the country in paying women as equally as men, Gov. Scott Walker is taking flak for repealing a state law that allowed workers to seek punitive damages for pay inequality and other discriminatory workplace practices.
The criticism was leveled at Walker on Equal Pay Day, April 8, the symbolic day when women’s earnings finally catch up to men’s earnings from the previous year.
Wisconsin passed an equal pay law under Democrats in 2009, allowing plaintiffs to sue in state court as well as federal court. Supporters argued the federal Equal Pay Act did not provide adequate financial compensation to aggrieved workers.
But Walker and the Republican-controlled Legislature in 2012 repealed the state equal pay law, leaving Wisconsin as one of only five states in the nation without one.

There's something about governor Walker which rubs my scales the wrong way.  If you think I'm just typically female in being overly emotional, have a look at the stuff he has managed to do in the past in that poor state.

Second, Brandeis University first offered Ayaan Hirsi Ali an honorary doctorate and then withdrew the offer.  You can guess the kinds of things this combination of events lends itself to, including accusations of liberal fascism and the culture of "shut-up"   and of course the Ross-Douthat interpretation of what's going on at Brandeis:

According to Douthat, Brandeis is trying to silence Ali, but to get to that point he has to conflate the Brandeis case with the Brendan Eich case at the Mozilla Foundation.  Because Ali was invited to come and speak at Brandeis, so she wasn't really silenced.  On the other hand, it's true that people who get their honorary doctorates first dangled in front of their faces and then snatched away publicly probably won't want to come and speak at the offending university.

I don't have anything interesting to say about the underlying dilemmas which could be discussed for the next hundred years.   Obviously, of course,  universities should study the backgrounds of people they are going to reward with honorary doctorates, given that honorary doctorates are about rewarding.

Third, why is it the customary rule in the US that salaries are secret?  Here's one answer to the question:  because firms require that secrecy.  Michelle Chen notes that the Paycheck Fairness Act (which Republicans suffocated at birth) would have made some salary information more visible:

The Paycheck Fairness Act would have shielded workers from retaliation if they discuss their salaries with coworkers. Employers would have had to “prove that pay disparities exist for legitimate, job-related reasons,” according to the National Partnership for Women & Families. In addition, the bill would have closed disparities in the legal remedies available for violations of the Equal Pay Act, so workers could claim the same kinds of damages provided under other wage discrimination laws. And overall, workers would have had an easier time seeking compensation in federal court, rather than the bureaucracy of the National Labor Relations Board, which tends to yield weaker penalties.
The bill would also have directed the Labor Department and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to proactively gather data and investigate wage discrimination on a broader scale.

If you don't know what the guy in the next cubicle makes, you might not know that you are not being paid fairly (or that he isn't paid fairly).  So all this links to the ease with which a firm could be sued for race and/or gender discrimination, which is the reason why Republicans had to kill the act.  

Blog Housekeeping Questions And Other Adventures in Cooking

First blog housekeeping question:  Are you, my sweet (and possibly nonexistent) readers interested in the more granola-type dissection of news which are not exactly studies?  For instance, the new Pew survey about the rise of stay-at-home-mothers in the US from 2000 to 2012?  I have a long piece about it stored in my brain, but I'm not typing it out if it's not of interest to anyone else.

And a related question:  Are the longer posts readable or not?  Should I chop up stuff more or not do long-form writing at all?  I have two posts which would become very long, one on the question what is rape culture and the other one on the question of what feminists think about prostitution.  Both of these topics have been recently much debated in articles, books and on Twitter, but, as is the case usually, I first do long debates inside my skull and then people are onto other games.

Then the cooking adventures:  A beetroot loaf recipe came to me much praised, so I decided to try it last weekend.  The ingredient list called for three beetroots, to be grated.  I chose what I deemed to be medium sized ones, not knowing the weight which the recipe didn't state. 

After grating them, I had grated beetroot in all the bowls in the kitchen, I looked like someone who had just carried out a mass murder, and most surfaces in the kitchen were covered with red droplets.  The more serious problem was how to adjust the other ingredients, given that I just may have grated too many beets and given that I pretty obviously didn't have enough of the other ingredients.

For reasons not known to anyone, I decided not to discard any of the grated beets but just to stretch the rest of the recipe to three large beet loaves.

The result wasn't appetizing.  And beetroot loaves go bad really fast even inside the fridge.

This is probably a metaphor about life and the need for balance between work and family and such.

On Body Hair And Gender

I was going to write a funny post about the spring fashion trends in armpit hair:  do you bleach it, curl it, braid it or do you just use it as a noose to kill all those men you so obviously hate if you have armpit hair.  That's because of the new Veet ads which tried to argue that not having armpit or leg hair is an innate female characteristic.  But Veet, the honorable rat, pulled the ads, which left me nothing to write about.

Why waste a good post?  Topics having to do with leg hair or armpit hair or shaving off all your pubic hair don't rank terribly high in feminist importance, certainly not compared to stories like this one or this one or even this one.  Still, it is good to understand how we decide what being a woman should look like in various cultures, and body hair enters those definitions in pretty significant ways.  The most common rule is that women should have long hair on their heads and long eyelashes.  The rest of their bodies should preferably be completely hairless (with the exception of lines for eyebrows).

The same rules implicitly define what it means to look like a man in those same cultures, though you cannot get the male conventions as simply reversals of the female rules.

Several things about such rules are worth pointing out:  

First, the societal conventions turn incredibly rapidly into the kind of rear-brain loathing reactions towards anyone who has violated the rules.  This makes people interpret them as natural, as something that has always been true and always will be true.

As an example, I have read several recent Internet comments where the idea of pubic hair on women is used as an insult and as something revolting and disgusting, yet adult women usually do grow pubic hair, just as adult men do.  Likewise, in the US the assumptions that men should have very short hair and that women should shave their legs are both quite recent when put into a historical concept.  But the power those expectations have or have had is out of proportion to their purely cultural nature.

And I think the reason for the strength of such feelings is that they help in making men and women look more different from each other.  They can be added to the list of things one can use to tell someone's gender, and once they are in that list they become identified with biological differences.

Second, what is odd about the way body hair is conflated with secondary sex characteristics is the fact that women and men can both grow armpit hair, that women and men can both grow leg hair and pubic hair.  In some sense the way women ought to look, as biological creatures, is not the way biology has built women!  And that must be fixed.

The usual explanation for that tendency is to exaggerate biological average sex differences.  While I agree that there's something to that theory, it doesn't explain the whole process.  For example, men naturally have quite a lot more facial hair than women.  Why don't we have enormous pressure (outside the group of Islamic fundamentalists) for men to grow luxuriant beards? * Why don't we have beard care creams and beard perms and beard decorations (little swords or baseball team logos?) 

I think cultures assign women most of the work of exaggerating of sex differences, from Victorian wasp waists to 1950s pushup bras to silicone breast implants and the need for Brazilian waxes.  Not all the work, but most of it.

Third, the reason why violating the rules is met with such revulsion by many is not only because they have been merged together with secondary sex differences but also because those violations are then seen as attempts to deny the existence of secondary sex differences and ultimately to fight against the existing gender roles and norms. 

Thus, the so-called feminazis who refuse to shave their armpits or legs are not viewed as biologically natural women (which would be the actual definition) but as not-real-women, because what that rear-brain in some people tells them is that these women are rejecting the social norms for womanhood altogether, and by doing that they are threatening the social norms for manhood, too.  It's an attack, my friends, on everything some hold dear!

It's good to be aware of all this because it teaches us about the cultural coding of gender.  At the same time, we don't have to take it too seriously in our own lives.  Shave if you like the idea.  Leave stripes if you wish!  The body hair will not beg you to live or scream when the razor cuts, and you could always save the cut-off bits for years until you have enough for a pair of nice woolen socks.
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*Or bald heads.  That would work, too.  That men often fight against the arrival of baldness is probably not linked to the way we assign gender to people but to the desire to come across younger.  Both men and women spend effort and money on that.

Autism And Obese Fathers. Today's Research Popularization Critique.

A Norwegian study has found a statistically significant correlation between autism in children and their  fathers'  obesity:

A Pediatrics study finds the risk for autism spectrum disorder strongly associated with paternal obesity (that is, with a BMI of 30 or more).
Investigators examined the relationship in a Norwegian cohort of some 93,000 children, whose health was tracked in national databases. By the end of follow-up, at a mean age of 7 years, the odds ratio for autism spectrum disorder among children of obese fathers was 1.53, compared with those of normal-weight fathers. Maternal obesity was not significantly associated.
The authors express surprise at the findings, which suggest an unidentified genetic or epigenetic mechanism.

I would be a bit hesitant about interpreting the results at face value until they have been replicated in other studies.  The reason, oddly, is that very large sample of data (93,000) that they work with*.  Even though a larger sample is usually  better than a smaller sample, analyses which use very large samples can sometimes be too good a thing.  For instance, they can find differences which are tiny or unimportant in practical terms statistically significant, because (from the comments to the linked post by its author):

In short, it happens because a large sample size greatly increases the power of an analysis to detect a difference. And THAT occurs because the test statistic that determines statistical significance is based on a formula that, in effect, gets multiplied by a value based on the sample size (such as the square root of the sample size). So, assuming a given difference and a given standard deviation for the data, increasing the value of sample size (n) increases the test statistic and results in an increased likelihood of statistical significance. Therefore, a humongous sample size can "override" a difference of very small size, inflating the test statistic, and result in statistical significance, even though the difference is so small that it has no practical consequence.

Indeed, the head researcher warns us about taking the results as definitive, though he also seems to believe in a genetic or epigenetic explanation.

But what I really wanted to talk about is the tentative interpretation of what to do IF the results are meaningful in practical terms.  An example from Fox News site:

What To Read On Equal Pay Day: A Delicious Smorgasbord of My Writings!

Today is the National Equal Pay Day for 2013 earnings.  The day is defined like this:

Throughout our Nation's history, brave women have torn down barriers so their daughters might one day enjoy the same rights, same chances, and same freedoms as their sons. Despite tremendous progress, too many women are entering the workforce to find their mothers' and grandmothers' victories undermined by the unrealized promise of equal pay for equal work. On National Equal Pay Day, we mark how far into the new year women would have to work to earn the same as men did in the previous year, and we recommit to making equal pay a reality.

I have written vast mountains of text on the gender gap in earnings, on the question what "equal pay for equal work" means in contexts such as the one above and so on and so on.  Rather than rewriting all of that, I'd like to propose a short program of reading.  It's all on this blog, so you don't have to go anywhere!  And I've tried to make it clear and simple.

If you are very interested in the gender gap in earnings, you might wish to read my 2006 series.  The first part is about the theories trying to explain why women, on average, earn less than men, on average.  The second part shows one example of how economists analyze the evidence, and points out that the answer is never a simple one.  Though the data in that example is now outdated, the methods of analysis are not.  The third part addresses some of the common conservative counter-arguments, the kind you will see pasted all over the net today, too.

What's the role of labor market discrimination in explaining the gender gap in earnings?  The basic answer can be found in the above series.  Two additional posts, written expressly as responses to the conservative argument that such discrimination cannot exist or doesn't exist, come recommended by me:

The first one cracks the old chestnut which goes like this:  If men and women are equally productive workers but men cost more, why would any profit-focused firm hire men?

The second one answers a question I was posed, which was to "prove" that gendered labor market discrimination exists.  It covers several types of studies on that phenomenon.  Many more could be found in my archives.

Here are two posts I wrote in response to a  2011 anti-feminist piece that came out around the National Equal Pay Day then.  The first post is about gender differences in unemployment, the second post about misconceptions concerning how to interpret the gross gender gap in earnings.

Last, but certainly not least, I have written a lot about occupational segregation by gender recently, especially in response to Christina Hoff Sommers'  piece on the topic which was entitled "No, Women Don't Make Less Money Than Men."  I recommend the whole three-post series.  Different posts in it address slightly different questions. 

The first post is a get-to-know-the-different-types-of-gender-gaps and has lots of important stuff about what can legitimately explain such gaps and what cannot.  The second post  is a long (and interesting?) treatise on the meaning of occupational segregation by gender and how that segregation relates to the gendered earnings gap.  The third post is all about the choice of college majors, about STEM careers and so on, mostly because Hoff Sommers chose to go there as an explanation of the overall gross gender gap in earnings.

Virgin Toothbrush Looking for A Mate. Or Conservative Views on Premarital Sex.

Do you know what having too many sex partners does to you?  It makes you icky and yucky and disgusting.

Imagine you are a wet lollipop which has fallen on the floor and rolled around in all that dust and grit and pet hairs.  Would anyone like to lick that lollipop now, hmh?

This is a common conservative metaphor when it comes to premarital sex and young women, the idea that you are food and if other people have been salivating on you or nibbling at you then nobody in their right mind would wish to have a monogamous long-run relationship with you.  Some misogynist sites make the point much more nastily, by calling women who have had more than one heterosexual partner cumbuckets.  They have no comparable term for men who have had more than one heterosexual partner.

The most recent example of the use of food metaphors in abstinence education comes from various conservative sex education classes:

According to the Los Angeles Times, teachers in Oxford, Miss., are asking “students to unwrap a piece of chocolate, pass it around class and observe how dirty it became.” Says Marie Barnard, a public health worker and parent: “They're using the Peppermint Pattie to show that a girl is no longer clean or valuable after she's had sex—that she's been used. … That shouldn't be the lesson we send kids about sex.”

...

Last year, a school district in Texas instructed teachers to compare people who have had sex to dirty toothbrushes and sticks of gum. “People want to marry a virgin, just like they want a virgin toothbrush or stick of gum,” the guide read. 

Neither of the quoted cases seem to single out women, which is a reason to rejoice, because now we can all be disgusting hair-and-dirt-covered half-chewed lollipops.  Or lollipops still inside the cellophane wrappers.

Except that this doesn't quite work, because virginity has never been a requirement for men and everybody knows that the dirty lollipop really is the slutty girl.

The food metaphors in abstinence education (and elsewhere) are pretty lamentable, because it turns at least one potential partner in a relationship into a dinner dish and the other one, possibly, into the diner, and when it is applied to only women it reinforces the idea that a woman's value is pretty much in her unopened gift package of sexual and fertility services.

But consider hotel beds.  Consider the eating utensils and glasses and cups we are given at restaurants and coffee bars.  Consider touching door handles in public places.  The metaphors collapse really rapidly, unless one actually sees women's bodies as a type of sexual food, something that can be unwrapped, the lid removed and then heated quickly in the microwave.

Note, also, that none of the metaphors quite work unless one regards sex as inherently filthy and nasty and degrading, as something that leaves its marks on the participants, as something that turns them into used goods.  All this is a tango between the objectification of women's bodies and the simultaneous transfer of sexuality to market-type circumstances.  Love doesn't enter into it.

Speed-Blogging, April 7 2014. On Bodies, Sexual Harassment And How Politics Makes Us Stupid

These pictures about the bodies of elite athletes are fascinating.  They show the variety of what it might mean to be fit, or perhaps fit for something.

It's hard to study the prevalence of unpopular opinions, for obvious reasons (people cover them up because of social stigma).  One recent study on male college students argues that those students which blame women for becoming the objects of sexual harassment are more likely to identify with sexual harassers themselves.  I haven't looked at the study itself so I cannot comment on how well it was done.

The new Vox.com site, by Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias and Melissa Bell has an interesting piece by Ezra Klein:  How Politics Makes Us Stupid.  It's about the way humans might interpret information which conflicts with their prior world view. 

I say "might," rather than "do," because the real-world way of acquiring that information is somewhat different from the research Klein describes.  For one thing, people debate data with other people, and they might also read different interpretations of the same data, and these consecutive rounds might change any initial interpretations.

But the basic argument in Klein's piece does apply:  Politics is no more based on the kind of "believe-the-best-evidence" thinking than any other field of human endeavor where our fears, our relative societal rankings and our whole world view can be threatened.


On the other hand, the comparison the article makes, in the words of the researcher Dan Kahan makes ignores something important:

Kahan is quick to note that, most of the time, people are perfectly capable of being convinced by the best evidence. There’s a lot of disagreement about climate change and gun control, for instance, but almost none over whether antibiotics work, or whether the H1N1 flu is a problem, or whether heavy drinking impairs people’s ability to drive. Rather, our reasoning becomes rationalizing when we’re dealing with questions where the answers could threaten our tribe — or at least our social standing in our tribe. And in those cases, Kahan says, we’re being perfectly sensible when we fool ourselves.

What is that important point the comparison ignores?  The fact that politics is full of propaganda, studies twisted out of shape, studies carefully hand-picked to present one side of the aisle as correct and the other side of the aisle as deluded, sound bites which are intended to be taken as deep wisdom, surveys with loaded questions and so on.  Not all political information is propaganda and not all political studies are biased.  But a sufficient number are, and knowing this might play some minor role in explaining the findings of Kahan et al..

Good News Friday: Rennie Gibbs, The Bechdel Test And Movie Profitability and the Saimaa Ringed Seal As A Metaphor

My puny attempt to report more on positive things.  First, Rennie Gibbs doesn't have to go to court for her miscarriage many years ago.   I wrote about her case recently.

Second, having more women in movies doesn't seem to hurt financially, even if the women actually talk to each other about something else than the men in the movie:

We did a statistical analysis of films to test two claims: first, that films that pass the Bechdel test — featuring women in stronger roles — see a lower return on investment, and second, that they see lower gross profits. We found no evidence to support either claim.

This matters, because the most common argument to explain the scarcity of women in Hollywood movies is that the markets (often defined as teenage boys and young men) don't like watching women unless the women are in those traditional roles (eye-candy, partners of the male stars etc.).

Third, and this link is only in Finnish, sorry, volunteers helped the endangered Saimaa ringed seals to give birth to more pups by creating human-made snowdrifts (necessary for more pups to survive as the alternative is to be born on the open ice).  Those were needed because of the unusually warm and snowless winter.  The population of Saimaa ringed seals was estimated to be about 100 in the early 1970s.  Current numbers of adult seals are estimated to be above 300.

The early counts suggest that at least 27 pups were born in the human-made snowdrifts.

I like this news because it reminds us that humans can change things, that environmental degradation and the extinction of species is not something we must just accept.




 

Contrast And Compare: Street Harassment Videos

When I read the comments to this UK Guardian street harassment video, which turns the tables, I remembered the Snickers bar video from Australia (more on that in an earlier post).

The Guardian video shows a woman approaching men in inappropriate ways (such as asking for a woman to serve her in a store because a woman would know more, natch, and by sexually harassing them).  The point of the video is an obvious one, to turn the tables on street harassment, to show how it might feel if the shoe is on the other foot.

But that cannot be done, actually, because the effect of street harassment is largely because of its drip-drip nature, because it happens over years and even over decades, even when you are coming back from your grandmother's funeral.  As several people in the comments pointed out, the reversal might feel like a joke or a compliment or something odd and potentially a little embarrassing.  But it will not give the actual flavor of real street harassment.

The Same Political Speech Rights For Every Dollar! McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission.

That's how American democracy works, my sweet and smart readers, and had you any doubts about that the most recent Supreme Court case on political donations lays those to rest:

The specific issue in McCutcheon was whether Congress could enact “aggregate contribution limits” on political donors. Under the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (“McCain-Feingold”), individual donors are limited in how much they can give to individual candidates or party committees. These limits, called “base limits,” were not at issue in McCutcheon. But the BCRA also limits the “aggregate amount” any one donor can give to all federal candidates and committees in a given election cycle—a total of $48,600 to individual candidates and $74,600 to committees.
Plaintiff Shaun McCutcheon, an Alabama businessman, wants to give more than that—$1,776.00 to a total of a dozen more candidates than he has already supported during the 2014 cycle. He brought suit alleging that the aggregate limits burden his First Amendment rights. Four justices of the Court (Roberts plus Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Samuel Alito) agreed that the aggregate limits violate McCutcheon’s rights; Clarence Thomas provided the fifth vote for McCutcheon, but wrote separately to suggest that both base and aggregate limits are unconstitutional.

The plaintiff's dollars weren't given the rights for political speech!  He had many which had to stay silent, hiding in his pocketses.  Sure, he could send small "I love you" checks to many politicians, but he wanted to send large "I love you" checks.  Well, now he can, to really express his gratitude.

On that gratitude, here's one of the five conservative Justices whose views of democracy are such that they worry a lot about the political rights of dollars and very little about the voting rights of flesh-and-blood human beings:

“[G]overnment regulation may not target the general gratitude a candidate may feel toward those who support him or his allies, or the political access such support may afford,” Roberts writes. “They embody a central feature of democracy—that constituents support candidates who share their beliefs and interests, and candidates who are elected can be expected to be responsive to those concerns.”

And that gratitude can now be multiplied by those who have more dollars to give.  Those dollars give them more access to politicians, more "thank you" letters from the same politicians and, naturally, enough, more attention to the causes the dollars support.  That the richer you are the more access you will get to this "central feature of democracy" doesn't matter in the alternative reality Justice Roberts inhabits, because there every dollar is created equal, and it's not the fault of those dollars if they are rather unequally divided across the populace.

Once we have all drunk that Kool-Aid and accepted the new definition of Dollar Democracy, why have any sort of regulation of political giving at all?  Why not let the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch and others of that ilk simply buy the best government money can get for them?   After all, the Republican Supremes are not worried about rent-seeking, not at all.

Well, they mutter reluctantly, there's still some limited scope for outright corruption but what with all those computers and IT, any actual crooks will be easily caught.  But as Justice Breyer notes in his dissent: 

...the First Amendment advances not only the individual's right to engage in political speech, but also the public's interest in preserving a democratic order in which collective speech matters.
What has this to do with corruption? It has everything to do with corruption. Corruption breaks the constitutionally necessary "chain of communication" between the people and their representatives. It derails the essential speech-to-government-action tie. Where enough money calls the tune, the general public will not be heard. Insofar as corruption cuts the link between political thought and political action, a free marketplace of political ideas loses its point. That is one reason why the Court has stressed the constitutional importance of Congress' concern that a few large donations not drown out the voices of the many. [...]

Bolds are mine.  If we allow only a few people access to the foghorn in the political debates, the voices of those without the horn will not be heard at all.  What's perhaps more important, they won't matter much in a system where only dollars are awarded equal political speech rights.

-----
The decision can be found here (pdf).  Some ideas for activism can be found here.

Meanwhile, in Kenya, Polygyny Politics

This story about the Kenyan government is a few weeks old.  When I read it I realized that I was grinding my fangs into bonemeal, which is a relatively rare thing for me, given the sort of topics I write about.  One gets a hard shell.

But there's something about this particular example which made me fume.  Was it the apparent plot to pass the polygyny laws when half of the female members of the parliament were absent?  Or was that absence just a fluke?  Or did the women absent themselves so that they didn't have to address this issue?

I have no idea.

Here's the gist of the story:

Female MPs in Kenya have stormed out of a late-night parliamentary session in a row over the legalisation of polygamy.
The law is intended to bring civil law, where a man is only allowed one wife, into line with customary law, where some cultures allow multiple partners.
But male MPs voted to amend the new marriage bill to allow men to take as many wives as they like without consulting existing spouses.
Traditionally, first wives are supposed to give prior approval.
...

MP Samuel Chepkong'a, who proposed the amendment, said that when a woman got married under customary law, she understood that the marriage was open to polygamy, so no consultation was necessary, Kenya's Daily Nation newspaper reports.
Mohammed Junet, an MP representing a constituency from the western Nyanza province, agreed.
"When you marry an African woman, she must know the second one is on the way and a third wife… this is Africa," Kenya's Capital News website quotes him as saying.

...

Proposals to ensure equal property and inheritance rights were also watered down - a woman will be entitled to 30% of matrimonial property after death or divorce.
Under current Kenyan law, a woman must prove her contribution to the couple's wealth.
There was also a proposal to recognise co-habiting couples, known in Kenya as "come-we-stay" relationships, after six months, but this too was dropped.
It would have allowed a woman to seek maintenance for herself and any children of the union had the man left.

The amendment to the law removing the need to ask for the first wife's permission in customary law marriages seems to have been a sudden one.  As far as I understand what this means (and I may not have this right), a man under the customary law is entitled to as many wives as he wishes, and any already existing wife has no say in whether yet another wife joins the family.  Under the same customary law, no woman can ever be guaranteed anything but a fractional husband, and how large a fraction she might get depends on what that husband decides to do.

And of course polyandry is not legally recognized in Kenya.

This is one of the many examples I have written about where religion and tradition directly clash with gender equality.

An April Fool Post

Even though this Fox News chart was from the month of March:

To the credit of Fox News, they have apologized for the mistake and shown the graph today with the necessary adjustment on the vertical axis (I couldn't get the video to work but you should be able to view it at this link.) 

For more examples of lying with graphs or making a mess out of statistical arguments, check out this, this,  this and this.

Shanesha Taylor and Robert H. Richards IV. Two Mug-Shots, Two Stories.

(Contents include sexual violence towards children and child endangerment.)



You should begin by reading why Shanesha Taylor is in the news.  Then read the newsworthy story about Robert H. Richards IV.  The two cases come from different states, one is about abuse charges and the other one is about sentencing for child rape, and those differences obviously matter.

Likewise, many more people (including the police officer in the Taylor story) are going to feel empathy, pity and anger at the unfairness of it all on Taylor's behalf than on Richards' behalf,  and the final outcomes of the cases are going to differ, too.

Now think about the role of income and the influence it has in these two stories:  Taylor left her small children alone in a parked car on a hot day (with windows slightly opened) because she had a job interview and because she was homeless.  Her lack of income severely limited her choices.  Homeless people don't have child care arranged for job interviews.

The culturally approved answer to homelessness and lack of money is to try hard to get a job.  That means needing to turn up for job interviews, preferably not with a toddler and a baby in tow.  Because doing the latter will be interpreted as not having the organizational skills a reliable worker needs, right?  

What are the options for someone like Shanesha Taylor, then?  If she cannot find anyone to mind her children, leaving them in her car (which might be her home, after all) looks like a solution.  It is a dangerous solution, sure, and visible as one.

Richards, on the other hand, is not going to prison, because

Jurden gave Richards, who had no previous criminal record, an eight-year prison term, but suspended all the prison time for probation.
“Defendant will not fare well in Level 5 [prison] setting,” she wrote in her order.
“It’s an extremely rare circumstance that prison serves the inmate well,” said Delaware Public Defender Brendan J. O’Neill, whose office represents defendants who normally cannot afford a lawyer. “Prison is to punish, to segregate the offender from society, and the notion that prison serves people well hasn’t proven to be true in most circumstances.”
O’Neill explained that he has previously argued that case if a defendant was too ill or frail for prison, but he had never seen a judge cite it as a “reason not to send someone to jail.”
He added that the public might come to see Richards sentence as the result of  “how a person with great wealth may be treated by the system.”
According to court records Richards is listed at 6 feet, 4 inches tall and weighing between 250 and 276 pounds.
Court records do not cite any physical illnesses or disabilities.
Richards, who is unemployed and supported by a trust fund, owns a 5,800-square-foot mansion in Greenville , Delaware, and also owns a home in the exclusive North Shores neighborhood near Rehoboth Beach.

The role income and the influence might have in this case looks pretty different from the previous case.

The cases also differ along the dimensions of race and gender, and the three dimensions:  socioeconomic class, gender and race, interact in complicated ways. Shanesha Taylor, a woman of color, is unlikely to benefit from the position inherited wealth provides, she is more likely to end up poor in this society and because she is a woman she is more likely to be the person responsible for her children's well-being and thus being blamed for possible child endangerment.