Hilarious! In Louisiana You Should Go To A Dentist For Your Pap Smears

This is the hilarious side of the Republican war against women.  Just check for yourself, if you don't believe me:

When Louisiana state officials announced their plans to terminate Planned Parenthood’s state Medicaid contract in late August, they argued that there were plenty of doctors who could take on the more than 5200 patients the reproductive health organization sees each year in New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
They even provided a list of those doctors to the US District Court when Planned Parenthood filed suit against the state (Planned Parenthood argues that breaking the contract is a violation of federal law). It’s an impressive 37 pages long, including 1146 Medicaid providers near New Orleans and 864 near Baton Rouge.
But actually reading their list reveals that very few of those doctors are qualified to give pelvic exams, provide contraceptives, or administer screenings for STDs or breast and cervical cancer. The list is actually of every provider who takes Medicaid in the region—including dentists, along with anesthesiologists, eye doctors, radiologists, cardiologists, pharmacies, and nursing homes.
…

The Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals submitted a revised list of providers on September 8. This list is much shorter. It includes just 29 providers, 24 of which provide the same range of services as Planned Parenthood. Only five providers are in Baton Rouge; two have three-week waits for new patients, and one is not accepting new patients.

Bolds are mine.

Read the linked article.  It has a fun discussion of how a Federal judge reacted to the original list.

What's not so hilarious is the utter do-not-f***ing-care-about-women's-health that presenting the original list demonstrates.  Breast cancer and cervical cancer fears?  Go to a dentist, for godssake!  Or lie down in a nice nursing home bed.

More On Religions And Women's Rights

It's hard not to notice the impact of certain religious dictates as one of the major barriers to true gender equality in this world.*

Take the Catholic hospitals in the US:

By the close of 2011, one in nine hospital beds in this country existed in a Catholic or Catholic-sponsored health-care facility. If viewed together as one corporate entity, the ten largest Catholic-sponsored health systems of hospitals and clinics would constitute the largest in the country. And these hospitals are routinely denying medical care to women, citing Catholic doctrine as justification.

The crucial point is that it doesn't matter if this happens to patients with different faiths or none at all, because they have no other hospital to go to:  They, too, will be potentially subjected to the Catholic rules about contraception, abortion and sterilization, and they, too, might find themselves at risk of not getting the best possible medical care when pregnant.

Or consider the case of the Iranian cartoonist, Atena Farghadani:

An Iranian artist currently serving more than 12 years in prison for criticising the government now faces further charges of “indecency” for allegedly shaking her male lawyer’s hand.
Amnesty International reports that Atena Farghadani, 29, who was jailed after she depicted Iranian government officials as monkeys and goats in a satirical cartoon, may face a longer sentence amid claims over the handshake.
Charges of an “illegitimate sexual relationship short of adultery” have been brought against Farghadani and her lawyer Mohammad Moghimi amid allegations he visited her in jail and shook her hand - which is illegal in Iran.

And it is illegal in Iran because of the gender segregation rules which are based on that country's interpretation of Islam.  It is the gender segregation that is the problem here, because it's extremely unlikely that such a system could ever produce equal rights for women.  Separate cannot be truly equal.**

These two examples demonstrates the inherent clashes between many conservative interpretations of religion and women's rights to full human existence.  It also follows that when people demand certain religious rights which benefit or harm men and women differently, the shadow attaching to those rights is often a reduction in the rights of women, whether those women are believers or not. 

That's because the religious dogmas we still follow are ancient, and if taken ultra-literally would guarantee that women's rights remain at the level societies considered appropriate two thousand years ago.
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*  For more on this topic, read here and here.

**Except perhaps in a science-fictionish arrangement of two separate-but-equal countries, one for men and one for women, where the trade is one way in sperm and the other way in baby boys.

I haven't found out if Farghadani's lawyer will also be sued for shaking the hand of a woman.  But in general sex segregation laws have more severe consequences for women who in the extreme forms are excluded from positions of power because those places are full of men. 

Today's Idle And Not-So-Idle Echidne Thoughts

1.  Watch this video about women's fashions in the West changing from 1915 to 2015, because it's both fun and because you can then watch it again while thinking about the economic, technological, political and social influences behind the changes you see.

2.  I was struck by one interaction in this Salman Rushdie interview :

[Q.] Your novel is a homage of sorts to the myth of Scheherazade, who told stories every night to delay her execution, and the title is a riff on “One Thousand and One Nights.” It struck me that you have experienced the inverse of the Scheherazade story, after being a target for execution for your novel “The Satanic Verses.”
A. Yes, the anti-Scheherazade. My life is what it is, and clearly it affects what I think. Scheherazade is one of the great authorless figures. No one has any idea who made her up, so it’s easy to think she made herself up. But there she is, one of the immortal characters of literature, and how can you not fall in love with somebody who civilizes savage people by telling them stories?

I love the idea of stories having such powers!  If only that was the case.

Still,  in some deeper sense it is true that telling stories is an inherent aspect of being human, of trying to understand this bewildering mess that is reality, and, most importantly, of trying to reach others.

3.  This Huffington Post article argues that gender equality is the most critical of global goals. 

Whether it is the most critical depends on how we define such goals (as climate change, for example, might become so drastic as to wipe out the need to talk about a now-extinct species and the forms of inequality it accepted for millennia), but I have come to the conclusion that a shared global goal on gender equality is absolutely necessary. 

It's insufficient to let various countries or cultures pursue those goals for themselves only.  The world no longer consists of many isolated cultures, after all, but of something much more integrated, and what happens inside one culture affects other nearby cultures

Productivity Rises Much Faster Than US Average Wages

Here's an exciting article by Josh Bivens and Lawrence Mishel for all you economics nerds!  It talks about the possible reasons why the pay of a typical American worker has not risen as much as the overall productivity tells us it could have risen.   Look at the graph:

What's important in that graph are its two halves, divided by the vertical line.  Before the time marked by the vertical line productivity and the compensation of a typical worker went pretty much hand-in-hand:  When productivity* rose, workers' real earnings rose.  After that date, not so much.  The extra productivity which could have enabled higher average earnings instead enabled something else.

Bivens and Mishel argue that this "something else" is higher incomes for the owners of capital and for a small group of very highly paid workers, such as the CEOs in the financial sector.  In short, average real earnings could have risen considerably more, but they did not.  Instead, the income accruing to capital and the highest earners grew disproportionately.

What's behind that decoupling of average earnings growth from productivity growth?  The article notes that one factor consists of

 ...the passage of many policies that explicitly aimed to erode the bargaining power of low- and moderate-wage workers in the labor market.

I'm not certain if outsourcing and globalization is included in those policies, but its effect on reducing the bargaining power of workers in this country has certainly been much greater on low- and moderate-wage workers than those earning the high salaries.




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*Here productivity is defined as:

Productivity is simply the total amount of output (or income) generated in an average hour of work. As such, growth in an economy’s productivity provides the potential for rising living standards over time.

The Bivens-Mishel article goes into a lot of detail about various theories that might explain the divergence shown in the above graph.

Europe's Refugee and Migrant Crisis: What About The Women?

I have spent a lot of time trying to understand the wider ramifications of Europe's* current crisis with mostly Syrian refugees and Europe's general longer-standing crisis with migrants and refugees.  The numbers in the long-run are not manageable, the short-term situation is utterly devastating for the refugees and the real solutions are either politically unfeasible or pie-in-the-sky (stop the war in Syria, make Eritrea and Libya into  safe places, reduce income differences between Africa and Europe).

I'm not going to write more about the humanitarian catastrophes or who is most at fault for creating them, because I have nothing useful to say about that, or at least nothing that you couldn't read elsewhere.  Neither am I going to write about the horrible plight of the refugees and migrants because I have nothing extra to say about that, either, except to agree that the situation is horrible and that aid (both places of safety and much more money) is urgently needed, and that Greece, in particular, needs help in its attempt to cope with refugees.

Instead, I am going to write about why young men seem to be the largest group of refugees and migrants currently seeking asylum in Europe.

That's because this is a blog writing about gender issues, and because my Internet surfing showed me that many comments sections asked why the refugees and/or economic migrants** seem to consist of a majority of young men traveling on their own.  Some more right-wing commentators ask why those men are not fighting ISIS (or Assad?), why they look so healthy and well-fed, what they are escaping from if it was safe enough to leave the women, children and the elderly behind and so on.

The Official Back-From-The-Vacation Post

With a smidgen of jet lag and the usual post-flight migraine.  It's nice to be back at the Snakepit Inc. and it's also oddly nice to once again hear the louder American speech pattern.

My usual type of blogging will commence after the weekend.  Until then you will only get fuzzy thoughts.

The War Inside My Body: Or What Ben Carson Thinks.

The Republican Presidential hopeful Ben Carson promises to give a lot of grist for my sarcasm mill!  Just ponder this fairly recent comment of his:

“They tell you that there’s a war on women,” he said. “There is no war on women. There may be a war on what’s inside of women, but there is no war on women in this country.”

A very fine distinction our Ben tries to make there!  If only women had, say, prostates and penises, then we wouldn't have a war about their insides!

But more seriously, Carson hints at the dismal treatment of women in many other countries, and he is correct about that.  Women are not equally oppressed everywhere in the world. 

That's no excuse to let things get worse here or in any other country where older battles were won, because then we have to fight those battles again.

And even more seriously, much of the forced-birth movement is ultimately about who gets to control fertility and changes in population size.  Because such large parts of the "fertility factories" are inside women's bodies, of course the war on women is about those insides.

Research Monday 5: Wrapping It Up

This is the last day of this series.  You might want to end it by reading this audit study about white privilege on Australian buses.  Audit studies are very useful, because they manage to hold lots of stuff constant while analyzing the impact of something like race or gender or ethnic group on the way people are treated.

That "holding constant" means that the actors playing the roles in the study are trained to do everything the same.  For instance, if the actors are to look for jobs in the study they are provided with equally good resumes and trained to ask and answer all questions the same way.  If this is done well, any differences in the average treatment of, say, men and women or blacks and whites can be attributed fairly safely to discrimination.

And here are some of my thoughts about the kind of group blog we'd need for the critical evaluation of research and its popularizations.

No, there will be no quiz.  But I hope you found some of this series useful.

On The Duggar Ideology: Multiply At Any Cost. A Re-Posting

(From last May.  You might also wish to read this post about the coverage of the case.  It equates the Duggars' sect with Christianity in general.)

Many have written about the recently revealed child molestation accusations against Josh Duggar, the oldest son of Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar, the Quiverfull parents of nineteen children whose lives are depicted in a now (temporarily?) withdrawn reality show 19 Kids and Counting.

The basic ideology of the Quiverfull movement is well summarized by the description of Kathryn Joyce's book* about the Christian patriarchy cult:

Kathryn Joyce's fascinating introduction to the world of the patriarchy movement and Quiverfull families examines the twenty-first-century women and men who proclaim self-sacrifice and submission as model virtues of womanhood—and as modes of warfare on behalf of Christ. Here, women live within stringently enforced doctrines of wifely submission and male headship, and live by the Quiverfull philosophy of letting God give them as many children as possible so as to win the religion and culture wars through demographic means.

Hence the attempt to maximize family size, even if that might lead to the impossibility of adequately feeding, caring for, or supervising all those children.  They are arrows in the war against the infidels, and the manufacture of the maximum number of such arrows requires the women's submission and compliance.

This is the proper background for interpreting what happened after Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar found that their fourteen-year-old son had fondled the breasts and genitals of minor girls, many of them apparently his own sisters, while they were supposedly asleep.  The son was sent to therapy or perhaps just away for a while, a police officer (later sentenced for child pornography) gave him a stern speech and the girls who were fondled presumably forgave him.

The Duggars apologized for those events:

Back 12 years ago our family went through one of the most difficult times of our lives. When Josh was a young teenager, he made some very bad mistakes and we were shocked. We had tried to teach him right from wrong. That dark and difficult time caused us to seek God like never before. Even though we would never choose to go through something so terrible, each one of our family members drew closer to God.   We pray that as people watch our lives they see that we are not a perfect family. We have challenges and struggles everyday. It is one of the reasons we treasure our faith so much because God’s kindness and goodness and forgiveness are extended to us — even though we are so undeserving. We hope somehow the story of our journey — the good times and the difficult times — cause you to see the kindness of God and learn that He can bring you through anything.

Let me see what's included there:  God's forgiveness?  Check.  What the family gained from the events?  Check.  Josh's "bad mistakes?  Sort of check.

What the daughters went through?

Crickets...

And that's the fundamental problem with the Quiverfull ideology and those right-wing Christian beliefs which suggest that victims of abuse should bear responsibility for it happening, that God may have allowed it because of something the victim did or failed to do.

I stress this ideology, because it is what all the choices** of Duggars are based on and it is ultimately what their reality show is disseminating as a good conservative way of life.
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*I strongly recommend that book, by the way.  Kathryn's work is always painstaking and objective.
**Read that.  It's funny.  Then send me money.

Mail-Order Husbands?

You know about the women who are called mail-order brides, right?  From the point of view of, say, American men who seek such a wife  the market is for foreign women who seem to be viewed as more biddable, more willing to cook and clean, more willing to accept male leadership in the marriage and more exotic than homegrown women.   Some of the MRA sites, for instance,  advocate that men should order their wives from abroad so as to guarantee that feminism hasn't corrupted them yet.*

But the market for mail-order brides is only one way to look at what's happening.  That's because the market tries to match women to men, on the basis of various characteristics, and so the market could equally well be called one for mail-order husbands.  After all, the women who advertise their availability for marriage are looking for a mail-order husband.

Why, then, the focus on brides in this market?  Is it because the men participating are wealthier and more powerful?  Or is it because of our cultural conditioning?  Think of "wife-swapping," for instance.  When wives are swapped, so are the husbands, but somehow the cultural clutter makes that harder to notice.

Reversals of this kind can be incredibly useful.  When we think of "mail-order husbands" we then start asking what the women in that marketplace want to buy.  What kind of a husband?  For what reason?

And then, almost unavoidably, we start asking whether the desires of the women and men in this market actually match, whether participating in this market is equally unconstrained for both sides, or whether at least some women might be in the market because of the direst economic necessity.
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*I don't intend to paint all men as MRAs or all men who have married foreign women as thinking in the above terms  What that paragraph reflects is a common meme among the so-called manosphere, however, and it's useful to spell it out. 

Food Stamps As Democratic Bribes To Buy Votes. A Re-Posting.

(Originally from last February.  Not much has changed about the situation, though of course Scott Walker,  the governor of Wisconsin, wants to test food stamp recipients for illegal drug use.  This article explains why it's nuts.  But note that  if Democrats are supposed to use food stamps as bribes to buy votes, then at least some Republicans use food stamps to buy votes, too:  Those votes which want to punish the poor for getting government subsidies.  As the linked article notes, if getting government subsidies is the logical reason for drug tests, then we should test all mortgage applicants who plan to deduct their mortgage interest payments from their taxable income, because those deductions mean that other taxpayers are subsidizing the mortgage holders by having to pay more taxes.)

Fox News' Stuart Varney explains how the president buys votes with food stamps. 

You should watch the video at the link (I couldn't get it to embed).

In it Varney explains how the US cannot afford food stamps or any things from a long list of government "handouts" (which, by the way, includes health care for the poor and social security payments for the elderly). Then he explains that these "handouts" are paid by the tax payers, thus suggesting that those getting them never were or are taxpayers themselves.  Think about that division of people into two groups.  One gets all the undeserved benefits, one pays for all of them.  That the retired, for example, paid towards social security all their working lives is irrelevant.

And "we" cannot afford all these handouts!  "We" must take out loans to pay for them.  For Varney that "we" does not include the people on the "handouts."

I liked listening to Varney, because he is so good at triggering the anger and fear of the conservatives.  Someone is getting something for nothing and I am not! 

The logic is also fun to watch.  First Varney argues that the recession is over so why aren't people coming off food stamps (and "we" cannot afford those food stamps as "we" don't have the money but in fact we (as the government) should have the money if the recession is over).  But then he argues that two-thirds of Americans don't think the recession is over!

Gotcha, he mutters.  But of course there's the possibility that this recovery from the recession is another one of those weird ones where all the gains go for a small group of people on the top of the income distribution.  Varney tries to stuff to contradictory arguments down our throats:  Either there's no need for so many food stamp recipients anymore or there is, but Obama is to blame in both cases.

If you step a little back from these thoughts you could well ask why "we" cannot afford social security or Medicaid or food stamps but can afford a military system three or four times as expensive as the next largest military force on this earth.

Or you could ask why the government can afford to give "handouts" to corporations but not to individuals.

But then you would get depressed.

Instead, let's ask if giving a lot of food stamps indeed makes people vote for Democrats.  That's a silly sentence.  To answer that we would need to control for the incomes of the potential voters and what the two parties actually propose to do for the affluent and the less affluent and so on.

Still, it's unlikely that food stamps work as money to be paid for Democratic votes.  That's because a) the highest percentages of people on food stamps tend to be found in Republican-voting states and b) because the poor are much less likely to vote than the more affluent.

Motherhood Tuesday 4: Mother-Blaming Studies And Mothers in Politics

This popularization about a study concerning breast-feeding was hilariously bad.  I had fun writing about it, in a dark-humor sense.  This older post looks at how alcoholism is covered when it applies to women with children.  This post talks about obesity and children and whatever the mothers might be doing wrong, and this post takes apart one study on how bad mothers cause fat children.  And this tells us why mother's depression matters:  It might lead to shorter children.

I could have added many more such studies to this final Motherhood Tuesday report.

That's because researchers are really keen to study such questions as whether working/obese/etc mothers cause childhood obesity but don't seem at all interested in any potential relationship between working/obese/etc fathers and childhood obesity.  Indeed, if you study almost any field of research into children's development mothers are much, much more likely to be studied than fathers.

That is changing slowly.  I'm not sure if I should cheer for the arrival of new father-blaming studies.  It would be better if parenting research was popularized more carefully and if the biases didn't show as much as they do now.

To round off this series, I recommend this New Statesman article about being a mother or not being a mother in UK politics.  It tells us that childless female politicians are often asked about why they don't have children (or taken to task for it) and that female politicians with children are doubted as not being able to fully engage in politics.  The same is not true about childless male politicians and male politicians with children.

At the same time, the UK political institutions are still run on the assumption that there's a wife somewhere in the background, taking care of the politicians' children.

As the link article notes, children are an asset to male politicians but problematic (whether in their absence or in their presence) for female politicians.  This is a direct result of traditional gender roles expectations (mothers are to take care of children) and the (most likely subconscious) belief that women are really supposed to be mothers and only mothers.

Even this is changing, though perhaps slowly.  I write about it to make it change faster!

Research Monday 4: The Not-Yet-Published Research Problem

This is something I often fume about, the pre-publicity of papers not yet published or not yet available.

Why is this custom bad?  Because no potential critic can read the paper!  So those promoting it have all the aces up their sleeves.  How can you even ask another expert to comment when the paper is not yet available?

Suppose that the paper is then never published at all (yes, this has happened)!  Or suppose that it's published but has serious methodological problems.  Will there be a second wave of debates about it?

You can guess the answer to that question.  Once again, amateur readers will be left with the impression that the original advertising wanted to give.

The most recent example of this I came across can be found in this post.  And no, I never got an answer from the author.

The worst experience I've had about unavailable research papers is described in this 2006 post.  It's written a bit euphemistically but you can read between the lines.

Saturday Night Music: Gracias a La Vida

By Violeta Parra:



And by Mercedes Sosa:



It's fun to compare different artists' takes.

Monopoly. The Game. A Re-Posting

(From last March)

Yesterday (i.e. March 19th) was the eightieth anniversary of the game called Monopoly.  There's an interesting subtext to the history of the game.  Or a sub-game, if you wish:

Legend has it that Charles Darrow, an unemployed salesman, invented the game in his kitchen in 1930. But the roots of Monopoly actually date back a few more decades, to a game called the Landlord's Game created by Elizabeth Magie in 1903.

The Landlord's Game was meant to be educational, illustrating economist Henry George's belief -- inspired by the Gilded Age -- that property ownership by individuals is inherently unfair. Magie's game was an underground success, leading to a number of offshoots, including the one that Darrow tweaked. Parker Brothers bought her patent for $500 in 1935, closing the loop.

The New York Times recently published an article about Elizabeth Magie and her Landlord's Game as the possible basic source for Monopoly.  I recommend reading the whole piece, because it's a fairly representative case study of the "disappearing women"  phenomenon:

Magie’s game featured a path that allowed players to circle the board, in contrast to the linear-path design used by many games at the time. In one corner were the Poor House and the Public Park, and across the board was the Jail. Another corner contained an image of the globe and a homage to Henry George: “Labor Upon Mother Earth Produces Wages.” Also included on the board were three words that have endured for more than a century after Lizzie scrawled them there: “Go to Jail.”
...

It was a version of this game that Charles Darrow was taught by a friend, played and eventually sold to Parker Brothers. The version of that game had the core of Magie’s game, but also modifications added by the Quakers to make the game easier to play. In addition to properties named after Atlantic City streets, fixed prices were added to the board. In its efforts to seize total control of Monopoly and other related games, the company struck a deal with Magie to purchase her Landlord’s Game patent and two more of her game ideas not long after it made its deal with Darrow.

Magie never really benefited financially from her game, whereas Darrow became very rich indeed.  The reasons why history ended up that way can be many, but Magie's gender certainly would not have helped.

There's something about the way we (as humans) write history which downplays or erases the contributions of individuals which don't fit the subconscious patterns we have in our minds,* and women working in science or literature have frequently found their work  ignored or reinterpreted for that reason.  Sometimes the erasure is conscious, but often it is not.

What fascinates me is that often the unconscious or conscious rewriting seems to take place a short time after** the events, not immediately, as if it's the slightly more distant observers who have erased, say, any women from stories of inventions or scientific discoveries or assigned them to the more "natural" helper roles.   That could be because the effect of the unconscious patterns becomes more powerful when the actual individuals are no longer known.

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*The case of Rosalind Franklin is a well-known example of this.

For an example outside gender, consider the case of Sir Edmond Hillary and Tenzing Norgay as an example.  The early recognition went mostly to Hillary, perhaps because Norgay was seen as someone just doing his job whereas Hillary was the white adventurer.

**Time is a relative concept here, and I refer to such things as the evaluation of literary merit of various writers a generation after their work, rather than hundred years later.

From my Classics Archives: The Islamic State and Women.

(This mini-series of classics covers a few of my recent long posts, the ones that required a lot of hard work.  Each of them is of value about the individual phenomenon it covers, but I hope that each of them is also of value in a more general sense.

This series of posts (still missing the fourth post, sorry*) is about the views of ISIS/IS/Islamic State on women's proper position, about its views concerning sexual slavery as proper and legal and about the reasons why Western women have joined it.

The series is an example of how extreme subjugation of women might look like.  In that sense it's not easily generalizable to other movements wanting that extreme subjugation, mostly because they don't have the power.  But many of the principles of ISIS are basic social conservatism principles taken to the absurd end point (patriarchal marriage where the man is the leader, the control of women, the attribution of all sexual attraction or abuse to the sin of being female in the wrong place or at the wrong time or dressed wrong, the insistence of keeping women inside the house etc.)

The posts are here, in order:


Introduction

The Rules for Sunni Women

Sexual Slavery of the Yazidi Girls And Women

Western Women Joining ISIS 

Note that people are fighting back, in general against the Islamic State and in particular for the enslaved Yazidis.  Here is a heart-warming story about the latter.
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* I have no other excuse for that except I don't want yet another couple of weeks of nightmares right now. 

Three Short And Scrumptious Economic Posts: On Income Inequality and Lack of Information. A Re-Posting.

 (Originally posted here.  Everything in it still applies, income inequality is still growing and so on, and it's still worth your while to read the post if you haven't.)


1.  This is a neat bar graph about how the big economic cake is sliced and divided between various groups in the American economy.  It shows what has happened to the extra cake (income increases) in various economic expansions.  The latest expansion is passing most of that extra cake to the top ten percent of earners:

That's about how income inequality grows, right?   But what do people believe about income inequality in this country?

2.  A recent survey asking questions about what people believe CEOs here earn tells us this:

...Americans told researchers they thought CEO pay at major corporations was approximately 30 times more than their own. Actually, CEO pay averages 354 times what a worker earns at the same company.
Americans also said they thought the pay gap between CEOs and workers should be approximately 7 to 1. To achieve that ratio, workers would have to make $1.8 million each year, a separate study concluded.

Boggles your mind, doesn't it?  These results support earlier ones which suggest that Americans think general income inequality is a lot less than it actually is and would prefer even lower levels of inequality.  The Scandinavian ones.

To return to those CEOs, in other countries the multipliers are smaller.  From 2013 but still much bigger than the idea that CEOs would earn roughly thirty times as much as the average worker in the same company:

The ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay in neighboring Canada is 204, in Germany it's 147, in the U.K. it's 84, and in Japan it's just 67.

The Huffington Post piece notes that perhaps income inequality doesn't energize US voters because of this lack of information about its true size.  That may well be the case.  But it's also true that many not-rich in this country see themselves as just temporarily hampered potential billionaires whose interests lie with the top one percent and that class-based segregation in most everything further helps to disguise the magnitude of the differences.

3.  Speaking of lack of information:  The practice of maintaining secrecy about earnings in general is one reason why it's difficult for someone who suspects they are being paid less for discriminatory reasons to verify or falsify that.  If you don't know what others doing the same job are earning, how do you know if your pay is fair?

To take an example from gender differences in earnings, a Washington Post primer notes this:

 The one employer with relatively fair pay between men and women, Maatz said, is the federal government. Why? Because salary scales are published and widely known — so women, who historically have not negotiated for higher salaries, or are punished when they do — have more information about where to start.

That kind of transparency, among other provisions, is exactly what the Paycheck Fairness Act calls for.

Motherhood Tuesday 3: How To Discuss Gender Roles in Survey Results

That clumsy headline is an attempt to describe what I went through while studying a Pew survey on changes in the numbers of stay-at-home mothers.

But it can also be taken as the basis for a wider meditation about the way our ideas about motherhood and apple pie tend to crowd out the analysis of actual data in studies and surveys about how it is that women do parenting, and how easy it is to forget that mothers, too, are full human beings, who might stay at home to care for young children but who might also stay at home because they cannot get a good job or who might have gone back to school or who might be too sick to look for work and so on.

Although these old posts of mine about another Pew survey (in 2005!) are not about parenting, they describe somewhat similar problems of focus and magnification in survey results.

Research Monday 3. On Women And Men in the Labor Markets

These two studies about men and women in the labor markets are worth reading, despite their focus on the upper classes.

For a fairly good door into the magical world of economic research into work and gender, check out this post with its references.

The material it covers is still very important, especially given the crude treatment of the pertinent research by many MRAs who argue that men earn more because they work more and because they work harder, and more dangerously*.

That the discrepancies exist after controlling for working hours etc, albeit  reduced, is important to notice.

And that new right-wing chestnut, about young women presumably now out-earning young men, doesn't hold water (if chestnuts can be said to hold water).  That's because the study found it only to be "true" for unmarried and childless young women and men and only in large urban centers. 

Men earned more than women in the married category.  Even the results for urban singles were most likely caused by the fact that young women in urban areas are, on average, more educated than young men in urban areas.  To look for gender differences in earnings we must compare otherwise as identical people as possible (only differing in perceived gender).  That means comparing equally educated men and women, not comparing people with different average education levels.

Limiting the comparisons to people at the very beginning of their careers (a common trick in conservative writing about gender and earnings)  is also problematic if we are to analyze overall gender differences in earnings.

That's because most earnings differences, whether discriminatory or not, take time to appear.  Firms must have time to promote or fire people at different rates, workers must have time to get children and then perhaps drop out of the labor market for some years and so on.  The only possible discriminatory earnings differences that could exist at the initial point of hiring are those caused by discriminatory hiring practices (e.g. picking men for the better-paid jobs), not usually by direct gender  discrimination for people in the same occupational category.
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*See this post for an explanation of gross and net earnings differences between men and women.  The MRAs only talk about the gross differences.

The reference to dangerous jobs is something I have discussed earlier, but the gist of the counterargument is that the number of men in those dangerous jobs is too small and the jobs are not paid well enough to account for the overall average gender gap in earnings.  It's not the fishermen who make loads of money, it's the stock brokers.

More Saturday Night Music

Camille Saint-Saëns - Danse Macabre :






I often think of that as the music of war.