How A Star Is Born. A Study On Gender in How Biology Undergrads Rate Their Classmates' Knowledge

You can read the whole study here*.  It's an investigation into one type of possible gender discrimination:  Do our colleagues (either at work or at school) take gender into account when evaluating our performance?

The answer, from this study, is intriguing.  The Washington Post summarizes it like this:

Anthropologist Dan Grunspan was studying the habits of undergraduates when he noticed a persistent trend: Male students assumed their male classmates knew more about course material than female students — even if the young women earned better grades.
“The pattern just screamed at me,” he said.
So, Grunspan and his colleagues at the University of Washington and elsewhere decided to quantify the degree of this gender bias in the classroom.
After surveying roughly 1,700 students across three biology courses, they found young men consistently gave each other more credit than they awarded to their just-as-savvy female classmates.
Men over-ranked their peers by three-quarters of a GPA point, according to the study, published this month in the journal PLOS ONE. In other words, if Johnny and Susie both had A's, they’d receive equal applause from female students — but Susie would register as a B student in the eyes of her male peers, and Johnny would look like a rock star.

The researchers used data from three different classes of a fairly introductory biology course with large numbers of students.  In each class, students were asked to pick those of their fellow students (from class rosters) who seemed to show the greatest command of the material that was being taught.  These picks were repeated several times during each lecture series, and constitute the data the rest of the study analyzes.

As one might expect, not every student in those large classes got picked equally often as showing great command of the material.  Certain individuals got many more votes.  The researchers call them "the celebrities."

How does one become such a celebrity?

The objective basis in this context is actually having an extraordinary grasp of the material being taught.  But that is insufficient (and sometimes not even necessary) on its own.

Others also need to learn about that extraordinary grasp, either by observing the class participation of those celebrities, by observing them in the attached lab sessions or by learning about that grasp through friendships and other informal channels.  Perhaps some students tell others that they scored As in their exams?  Perhaps some students are much more vocal during the classes?

The crucial question here is how an impression of someone's excellence is created.  Is it based on just objective facts or is it also affected by various cultural prejudices?  Do students tell each other the grades they are earning?  Is the impression of excellence based solely on class participation, or does it matter who your friends are?  Does it matter if the potential celebrity is female or male?  Does it matter if the student doing the evaluating is female or male?

The study uses two fairly objective measures of someone's actual competence.  They are the student's exam grades and an evaluation of the students' class participation by the professors who taught the three courses.**  Note that the latter variable also measures one of the likely channels through which other students form their opinions.  Someone expressing smart opinions in the class will be assumed to have good command of the material, even if that person's examination grades are private information.

After controlling for those variables, the study finds a residual gender effect:

Results reveal that males are more likely than females to be named by peers as being knowledgeable about the course content. This effect increases as the term progresses, and persists even after controlling for class performance and outspokenness. The bias in nominations is specifically due to males over-nominating their male peers relative to their performance. The over-nomination of male peers is commensurate with an overestimation of male grades by 0.57 points on a 4 point grade scale, indicating a strong male bias among males when assessing their classmates. Females, in contrast, nominated equitably based on student performance rather than gender, suggesting they lacked gender biases in filling out these surveys. These trends persist across eleven surveys taken in three different iterations of the same Biology course. In every class, the most renowned students are always male. This favoring of males by peers could influence student self-confidence, and thus persistence in this STEM discipline.

In ordinary language, guys give other guys extra celebrity points for just guyness.  Gals, on the other hand, don't seem to be*** affected by the gender of the person they are evaluating.

How do we explain this?

The researchers explain their findings as implicit biases:

The finding that a gender bias impacts the perception of millennial students may at first seem surprising, but is supported by work on implicit biases. Implicit biases are unconscious associations that people hold related to certain groups. Across many cultures, STEM is associated with males and not females [26]. Interestingly, male STEM majors in the US hold the strongest associations between maleness and science, while female STEM majors show some of the weakest implicit biases between gender and science [27]. These differences in the gender-STEM stereotypes held may explain why male undergraduate STEM majors nominate more males, but females do not demonstrate this bias. It also helps explain why male faculty demonstrate biases in hiring and mentoring, but many female STEM faculty do not [28].

Bolds are mine.

That explanation makes sense on one level, but it introduces a deeper question:  Why would young men be more likely to hold these implicit biases than young women?   After all,  most male and female students in US universities share roughly the same cultural background and should have the same average implicit biases.****

I pondered this question for some time.  All I came up were these two theorettes (my name for baby theories), assuming that the results of the study hold after scrutiny by those more methodologically aware:

First, all this may have something to do with gender differences in circles of friendship.  Suppose that the way the "celebrities" are determined is in a wider circle of friends.  Suppose, moreover, that men tend to have mostly male friends and women both male and female friends.  If both of those suppositions were true, then the results of this study could follow, because more men than women simply wouldn't know high-performing women in the classes.

Second, it may have the same roots as women's inaudibility in meetings or women's invisibility as potential experts.  I have read about these phenomena and even experienced them myself. 

The usual scenario goes like this:  A woman says something in a meeting at work.  Her comment drops like a stone into still water.  Then, later in the same meeting, a man makes the same comment and it is eagerly discussed or debated. 

This is an actual pattern, but I don't know if it would apply in situations where women are not a small minority of those present.  Neither do I know how that odd invisibility/inaudibility is theoretically accounted for.

I'd love to see this study replicated and also carried out in other academic disciplines.  What the researchers write about may not be a STEM-problem but a more general one.





 



 

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* I have read the study pretty carefully, but should note that the method it uses is not one I am capable of criticizing in any detail.  So caveat emptor.

** Two of the courses had only male professors, the third had one female professor and two male professors.  That most of the "experts" in these courses were men could have had a subconscious male-favoring effect on the student evaluations.  But that effect should have worked equally for both male and female students.

The class participation measure is about outspokenness, not about outspokenness-combined-with-smartness.  This could matter, though I can't figure out how.  Also, the professors' evaluations of students' class participation levels could themselves be biased.  For these reasons the actual grades are probably a better measure of excellence.

***  The exception is the last survey in the course which had three professors, one of them female. Its results show a small and non-significant bias for women to nominate other women.   But the larger bias of men towards nominating men still persists.  As the researchers note, the solution to potential bias probably isn't to introduce opposite bias, however.

****  Indeed, most other theories I can think of slam into that same hurdle.  Take statistical discrimination.  It's a theory which applies to, say, evaluating job applicants when knowledge of their true potential is only partially known. The evaluators may then use more general evidence (either true evidence or just prejudice) about the group the applicant belongs to.  If that group, on average, does better than other groups in the job under consideration, the particular applicant may be given extra points for that group membership.  If that group does worse, on average, then the particular applicant will have points deducted from his or her final assessment.

Statistical discrimination hurts top performers who belong to a group which has lower average scores, because it pulls down their overall assessment.  As the average female grades in the courses the current study analyzed are slightly lower than the average male grades, a statistical discriminator might give top performing men extra points.  But that assumes the students knew the overall average grades in the courses.  I doubt that was the case, and even if those grades were known, the theory doesn't explain why men would adjust their assessment of men's performance upwards but women would not. 

Last Saturday's Republican Debate. A Review.

I finally watched a Republican primary debate!  The one held last Saturday, though I watched it from videos and read it from transcripts after the date.

It's some time since I've visited Wingnuttia and the necessary adjustment to cultural differences* took some time.  Until I was properly adjusted I rolled on the floor, laughing.

After all, Trump IS funny.  He is like that mythological crazy great-uncle in the attic who is let out only for Thanksgiving.  Or like the child who mostly speaks gibberish but once in a while states an embarrassing fact in a loud, clear voice.

But let's scroll the primary debate video to the start.  Into the room and onto the stage walk six men, all in identical suits, four wearing red ties and two wearing blue ties.

I cannot discuss wardrobe mishaps, sigh, because there are no female candidates and because men in politics wear a uniform.  I wish someone had affected a yellow tie so journalists could have written about the advisability of doing that and what it really means about the inner sluttiness of the man.

All the candidates in the race received applause from the audience in the room.  How was that audience picked?  This matters, because they booed later.  A lot, and mostly whenever Trump blurted out one of those "the emperor has no clothes" statement, such as the fact that 911 happened on Jeb Bush's brother's patch.  If the audience was picked randomly among fervent Republicans, the booing of facts makes me more worried than I already am.

Anyway, Ben Carson got the most muted applause, and Donald Trump the next most muted.  I think the establishment candidates got louder cheers, but it could be that in a small audience a few loud voices nominate.

Supreme Irony: On The Empty Seat of Justice Scalia.

The US Supreme Court has an empty seat after the death of Justice Scalia.  Who is going to sit there?  How can that person be found?

The US Constitution tells us:

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.
He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.
The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

Bolds are mine.  Get it?  The president shall nominate and then the Senate will vote on that nomination.

But the Republicans have a different take on what should happen. 

It's fun and instructive to see what the six remaining Republican presidential candidates had to say about the nomination of Scalia's successor in the last primary debate.  Here are their opinions on whether president Obama should nominate someone for the bench!

Trump:

I think he’s [Obama] going to do it whether or I’m O.K. with it or not. I think it’s up to Mitch McConnell and everybody else to stop it. It’s called delay, delay, delay.


Kasich:

Here’s my concern about this. The country is so divided right now, and now we’re going to see another partisan fight take place. I really wish the president would think about not nominating somebody.

Carson:

Well, the current Constitution actually doesn’t address that particular situation,..

Rubio:

No. 2, I do not believe the president should appoint someone. And it’s not unprecedented. In fact, it has been over 80 years since a lame duck president has appointed a Supreme Court justice.

Bush:

Of course, the president, by the way, has every right to nominate Supreme Court justices. I’m an Article II guy in the Constitution. We’re running for the president of the United States. We want a strong executive for sure. But in return for that, there should be a consensus orientation on that nomination, and there’s no doubt in my mind that Barack Obama will not have a consensus pick when he submits that person to the Senate.

Cruz:

Well, we have 80 years of precedent of not confirming Supreme Court justices in an election year. And let me say, Justice Scalia...

Get it?  It would be in poor taste and probably against legal precedent for Obama to nominate anyone.  But should he make that horrible mistake, at least the Republicans can simply delay, delay and delay.  Indeed, it is their honorable duty to delay!  It doesn't matter that no single person has actually been named.  ANY candidate by a Democratic president is simply unacceptable.  Beforehand. 

As an aside, I had such fun watching that debate!  I watched it several times, in fact, because I needed the laughs (more about that in a later post).  But isn't it wonderful to learn that there's all sorts of reasons why this particular president shouldn't follow the rules of the Constitution?

It is not just the Republican presidential candidates who are of the opinion that it is acceptable to block the consideration of any nominee president Obama might send to the Senate for confirmation:

Senate Republicans on Monday began to close ranks behind a vow by Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, to block consideration of any nominee to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, who died over the weekend, for the remainder of President Obama’s term.
Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, who faces re-election this year, said in a statement that the Senate should follow what he called “common practice” to stop acting on lifetime appointments during the last year of a presidential term. Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, agreed, leaving nearly every vulnerable Republican incumbent backing Mr. McConnell’s pledge.

There ya go!  This is such a fascinating example of the yearned-for compromises in Washington, D.C., of getting things done in politics, of the willingness of Republicans to work with president Obama, and other related crap.

I cannot get over McConnell's statement:  Only Mr. or Ms. Nobody would be an acceptable candidate for the Republicans in the Senate.  Perversely, it is as if McConnell is doing the nomination here.

It's the Game of Thrones.

The Zika Virus and Microcephaly: A Republican Opportunity To Work Against Abortions!

Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) and Chris Smith (R-N.J.) are two politicians who act like religious patriarchs.  They see their special flocks as consisting of all those wayward women who just don't make the right choices about abortion:
 

Pregnant women in South and Latin America who contract Zika, a rapidly spreading mosquito-borne virus linked to severe birth defects and deformities in babies, should not have access to abortion, Republican House leaders said Wednesday.
"This push for more abortion access is heartbreaking, especially since there are different degrees of microcephaly," Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, said at a hearing about the virus.

....

House Republicans running the Zika virus hearing avoided the issue of contraception and family planning access for women in endemic countries and instead urged women to welcome babies born with microcephaly. Duncan acknowledged that "many women do not have the luxury of simply choosing to wait" to get pregnant, but added that abortion access is not the answer, because many babies born with microcephaly "go on to lead very normal lives."
"Each child is made in the image of God and has inherent worth," he said.
Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) said the U.S. needs to work harder to "ensure that any child born with with disabilities from this or any other infection is welcomed, loved and gets the care that he or she needs." To back up his point, he highlighted the headline of a BBC article published earlier this month: "Microcephaly: 'It's not the end of the world.'"

Talk is cheap, and at rock-bottom prices when it is about something neither of these gentlemen will ever have to contemplate facing.  They cannot get pregnant, and neither are they poor women probably living in a country where getting the care a child with severe microcephaly needs is very unlikely.

That lack of care is not the case with the woman who wrote the BBC article Chris Smith (R-Forced-Birth) mentions.

There are varying extremes of the condition - Laney is towards the end where her brain has a lot more problems, but doesn't make her value any less.
She doesn't walk or talk, and she can't feed herself.
She has a g-button or gastrostomy button directed into her stomach. She is nourished through a feeding machine or a pump we use by hand and she gets all her medications that way too.

Laney's mother has found spiritual rewards and lessons in the care of her  very-much-loved daughter, and that is wonderful.  But Rep. Smith appears to use the case as a general ethics lesson, equally applicable to all women, wherever they live and whatever resources they might be able to harness.

This smacks a lot of the stories the Catholic Church uses to praise women who it deems sufficiently saintly, women who refuse a life-saving abortion for the sake of the fetus and then die, leaving their other children motherless and possibly taking the fetus with them to the land of death.  But at least they were saintly.

I always found those stories frightening, because they seemed to tell me what that church expected of "good women."  Connect those images with the ban on women in any position of power  in the Catholic Church, and it's hard to avoid thinking that all this is based on an ulterior motive not that far removed from misogyny.  Or at least the complete control of women's fertility.

I smell something similar in the statements of those two Republican gentlemen.  It may well be that many babies with microcephaly go on to lead fairly normal lives, but many will not.  And the people whose own lives will drastically change with the birth of a child with microcephaly are the women who give birth to them, not Mr. Duncan or Mr. Smith.

Primary Screams

Know what is very funny?  The personality changes which happen in some of the most avid supporters  during the US Democratic presidential primaries.

I recall the same phenomenon from 2008: 

Suddenly usually thoughtful people who enjoy debating stuff become intolerant of anyone who is not of the body.  Suddenly, only evidence tilting one way is packed into the debating bags.  Suddenly, previously politically agnostic individuals develop that red-hot religious fervor, that intolerance to anyone thinking differently or even suggesting nuances or complications in the tale of the Hero's Ascension.  Disagreement becomes impossible, because it is interpreted as proof that one is not of the body, as proof that one is (gasp!) the enemy.

So does any of that matter?   After all, it's just people advocating for their chosen candidate.

I believe it does, because non-stop advocacy introduces bias into the conversations and because advocacy makes planning for the general elections and the possible responses from the Republicans that much harder. 

For an advocate the goal is that missionary one: to convert others. For an "analyst"* the goal is to understand both the positives and negatives of the candidates and to try to predict what might happen in the general elections.  The latter includes being prepared for the potential Republican attacks.  Advocacy hinders that preparation.
 
--------
*An "analyst" here is not some objective entity, of course, but someone who would prefer a Democratic victory in November.  I couldn't come up with a better term.

  

The New Koch Plan

The New Koch Plan!  It's a re-branded, better-tasting version of the Old Koch Plan which included the following goals:

To shrink the government to its  three pro-billionaire functions: 

a) to protect the billionaires against foreign invaders (allow the military to exist),

b) to  protect the billionaires against domestic robbers and thieves (allow the police to exist)
and

c) to protect the billionaires against legal attempts to get at their money (allow the courts to exist).

To kill all other government functions

a) because they must be financed by taxes and the Kochs do not want to pay those, and/or

b) because they hamper the wild and lawless ("free") pursuit of ever greater profits (so kill  environmental protection, health inspections, worker safety rules and so on),  and/or

c) because they are unnecessary for billionaires.  Billionaires don't need mass public transportation, public schools, old age pensions, unemployment benefits or government subsidized health care, what with being billionaires.

The problem with that old plan is its poor "optics."  It's hard to get non-billionaires to support these billionaire-class identity politics.  So the New Koch Plan has added extra nutrients:  Empathy!  Fighting for a fairer criminal sentencing system!  Keeping poor teenagers from gangs!  Offering translation services and help to Latinos who wish to pull themselves up by their bootlaces by starting enterprises!

Jane Mayer writes about the new flavors of Koch. I recommend that you read the whole piece.  Here's a taste to get you interested:

The Kochs received equally positive press that fall, when, in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, they began speaking publicly about the need for criminal-justice reform. In February, 2015, when Koch Industries joined a bipartisan umbrella group for sentencing reform, the Coalition for Public Safety, the news made the Times. The Kochs were coming together with such avowedly liberal groups as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank. Among the most surprising of the Kochs’ new allies was Van Jones, a former senior fellow at the think tank, and the head of a criminal-justice-reform group called #cut50. Only months earlier, he had criticized the United Negro College Fund for accepting Koch money, arguing that “few people still alive have done more to promote policies that hurt African-Americans than the Koch brothers.”

 ....

It is true that, at least as far back as 1980, when Charles Koch enlisted David, then a company executive, to run for Vice-President of the United States on the Libertarian Party ticket, the brothers have publicly supported radical reform of America’s criminal-justice system. The platform of the Libertarian Party in 1980 called for an end to all prosecutions of tax evaders and the abolition of a number of federal agencies whose regulations Koch Industries and other businesses have chafed at, including the E.P.A., the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Federal Election Commission, whose campaign-spending limits the brothers opposed. But the Kochs, as hard-line libertarians, have had goals quite different from those of many of their liberal allies. Their distaste for the American criminal-justice system is bound up in distrust of government and a preference for private enterprise. Until recently, the criminal-justice victims the Kochs focussed on were businessmen who had run afoul of the modern regulatory state—that is, people like them.

The bolds are mine.

Get it?  The new plan builds bridges all the way across the political spectrum, finds partners in the most unexpected places (after funding their praiseworthy activities with what for billionaires would be pocket money),  and creates new shared goals so that the Koch goals (get rid of punishments for rich white-collar criminals) seem to coincide with certain progressive goals (get rid of racism in the sentencing system and the police).

I love it!  I especially love the idea that the Koch Plan needs to be "re-branded," the corporate thinking behind all this ruthlessness, such as this:

Fink was brutally honest about how unpopular the views of his wealthy audience were. “When we focus on decreasing government spending,” he said, and on “over-criminalization and decreasing taxes, it doesn’t do it, O.K.? . . . They’re not responding, and don’t like it.”

But he pointed out that if anyone in America knew how to sell something it should be the successful business leaders in the Koch network. “We get business,” he told the audience. “What do we do? We want to find out what the customer wants, right? Not what we want them to buy!”

It's like putting a picture of a happy cow on the wrapper of a block of margarine when people suddenly want to buy more organic products.

The Koch Plan is gaining power because of the Citizens United decision of the US Supreme Court, the first step towards one-dollar-one-vote in this country.  If you are interested in learning more about dark money in the US politics, get Mayer's book.  An excerpt can be found here.  Do read it to the very end.

Hi, Baby-Making Factories!

1.  The USAToday's Summary of New CDC Recommendations

The Big Brother has arrived!  According to the USAToday:

Women of childbearing age should avoid alcohol unless they're using contraception, federal health officials said Tuesday, in a move to reduce the number of babies born with fetal alcohol syndrome.
“Alcohol can permanently harm a developing baby before a woman knows she is pregnant,” said Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “About half of all pregnancies in the United States are unplanned, and even if planned, most women won’t know they are pregnant for the first month or so, when they might still be drinking.
"The risk is real. Why take the chance?” Schuchat asked.
The CDC estimates 3.3 million women between ages 15 to 44 are at risk of exposing a developing fetus to alcohol because they drink, are sexually active and not using birth control. Even when women are actively trying to get pregnant, three in four continue drinking after they stop using birth control, according to the CDC report.
There is no known safe level of alcohol at any stage of pregnancy, according to the CDC. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends women abstain completely from alcohol while pregnant.

The bolds are mine.  Read the first bolded sentence and then the second bolded sentence.  Notice any difference?  The hook in the article tells us that all women not using contraception who belong to a usually fertile age group should stop drinking, for the sake of future babies (whether planned or completely imaginary, and even if they will be born to someone else).  Even Lesbians, hermits, nuns, other celibate individuals and infertile people should abstain from alcohol!  Any woman might accidentally fall upon a penis, I guess.

Now imagine the Pre-Pregnancy Police coming for you if you try to get a drink and don't have enough wrinkles to prove your new legal drinking age! (1)  Bartenders and other volunteers might refuse to serve you that glass of wine or at least first demand to know if you are on the pill, and then decide if you are allowed to drink.

The Pre-Pregnancy Police doesn't yet exist.  But the Pregnancy Police, in the form of not only actual police but also concerned volunteers is a real thing and a real pest for pregnant women. I guess one advantage of this new recommendation is that now those helpful strangers can pester all younger women equally and not just the ones who are visible pregnant.

After writing that rant about the USAToday summary I read what the CDC  actually says:

An estimated 3.3 million women between the ages of 15 and 44 years are at risk of exposing their developing baby to alcohol because they are drinking, sexually active, and not using birth control to prevent pregnancy, according to the latest CDC Vital Signs report released today. The report also found that 3 in 4 women who want to get pregnant as soon as possible do not stop drinking alcohol when they stop using birth control.
Alcohol use during pregnancy, even within the first few weeks and before a woman knows she is pregnant, can cause lasting physical, behavioral, and intellectual disabilities that can last for a child’s lifetime. These disabilities are known as fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASDs). There is no known safe amount of alcohol – even beer or wine – that is safe for a woman to drink at any stage of pregnancy.

Bolds are mine.

That is not the same as the first sentence in the USAToday story.  I wish newspapers didn't promote shitty journalism.

2.  The CDC Recommendations.  On Statistics And Medical Studies.

 

But even more I wish that the people at CDC had a better understanding of statistics, more transparency about what  medical research actually shows and doesn't show.  I also wish that they had hired someone who would have edited the writing  in this sentence:

 An estimated 3.3 million women between the ages of 15 and 44 years are at risk of exposing their developing baby to alcohol because they are drinking, sexually active, and not using birth control to prevent pregnancy.

Those 3.3 million women don't all have "a developing baby".  They are potentially at risk for becoming pregnant.  Those two are very different things, and what is developing during any resulting pregnancy is not called a baby until it is born. 

For the statistical problems, consider this quote that was used in the USAToday article as well as in the original CDC report:

About half of all pregnancies in the United States are unplanned, and even if planned, most women won’t know they are pregnant for the first month or so, when they might still be drinking.

That half of all pregnancies in the United States are unplanned does NOT mean that every woman has a 50% chance of having an unintended pregnancy!  Yet all public health announcements aimed at fertile women seem to assume that the 50% frequency difference applies to every single fertile woman, even those who don't have heterosexual intercourse.

The actual situation is quite different, as this Guttmacher Institute graph shows:

I quote from the graph:  The two thirds of US women at risk of unintended pregnancy who practice contraception consistently and correctly account for only 5% of unintended pregnancies.


I suspect that the CDC researchers who wrote the recommendation did take that Guttmacher information into account, because the recommendation doesn't extend to women who use reliable contraception.  But the USAToday made a hash of it all and the CDC still parrots the statement without giving that sentence I bolded.

Even the more moderate statement from the CDC is not moderate when it comes to certain hidden assumptions about what various groups of women can be asked to sacrifice and for what types of reasons. To see why that is the case, let's talk about the medical evidence on fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS).

The Iowa Primaries. Lessons on Gender Politics and Gender in Politics.

Did you know that 2016 is the first year when a woman has won the Iowa caucus?


I learned in 2008 how extremely unpleasant it is to write about women in politics during the presidential campaigns when there's only one woman running and all the other candidates are men.  Almost everything I said was interpreted to apply to that one woman (and her policies), Hillary Clinton, and not to women in general.  And the very same thing is likely to happen this time, too. 

Those reactions are somewhat understandable, for a bizarre reason:  There are few women in US politics (80% of the US Congress is male, 44 of the 50 state governors are men).  But those few women get the limelight much more often than their sparse numbers would suggest.  Hillary Clinton, in particular, has lived in the limelight for a quarter century.  She is everywhere!  She hogs the limelight!  She leaves no air for any other female politician!*

She belongs to the political elite.  She is married to the political elite.  Her name recognition is global.  She has already spent eight years in the White House, albeit as the spouse of a president, a role which has always been completely open to women.  She has had a political career of her own.

The media and the Republicans have analyzed every move she makes, we all (if old enough) have assessed whether she should have left her womanizing husband or not.  We all (if old enough) have read enough about her incredible ambition, her incredible egotism and her incredible coldness.  We all (if old enough) can list several policies she has supported which we detest.  And of course some of us attribute to her even those policies of her husband she didn't work on.

All samples of size one create tremendous problems of interpretation.  Is Hillary treated the way she is because of her own personality or at least partly, because she is a woman in politics?  Would an otherwise identical man be treated the same way?  There is no way of knowing.  We need a bigger sample of women in politics to tease apart the effects of  a person's politics and personality from the effects of sexism, whether subconscious or overt.

That's my dilemma.  How do I interpret the way Hillary Clinton is treated from a wider feminist angle?  What are the lessons we can draw about the treatment of women from watching her experiences?

I'm not sure.  But there is one message which is becoming increasingly clear:

From Betty Friedan to Beyoncé. Or Making Waves in The Pond Of Feminist Thought.

"Betty Friedan to Beyoncé: Today’s generation embraces feminism on its own terms."  is an interesting recent piece in the Washington Post.  It belongs to the general genre of articles which analyze generational change in feminism, usually only within the United States, and almost always with a focus on young women.

This version is a nice one.  It asks several great questions, offers nuanced answers to many of them and also gives survey evidence on the beliefs and values of some in the "today's generation" of feminists.  Its treatment of the role of popular culture and the Internet in feminism is worth reading and so are the juxtapositions it makes between the second wave of the 1960s and 1970s and what is happening today.

So I enjoyed reading the piece.  Still, most of me finished that reading with a strong desire  to interrogate* bits and pieces it mentions, including the comments of many of the interviewed individuals, and to use the article as a springboard for diving into some deeper feminist waters.  To make more waves.  And that's what the rest of this post attempts.

Revolutionary Women: Get Your Brooms And Sweep! The Kitchen Floor, That Is.

Have you followed the Oregon protests by a group of anti-government activists?  The group, lead by Ammon Bundy, registers as right-wing and, at least to me, as pretty fundamentalist.  But revolution they want.

Today's rebellions have a right-wing and fundamentalist religious flavor.  They are also very, very, male-dominated.  The role of women in the Oregon group is described in one article:

SLIDESHOW: Much of the attention surrounding the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge has focused on the self-styled militiamen. But there are women occupiers, too. In the shadow of the the cowboy hats at the press briefings and the patrolmen styled with camouflage and rifles, women cook pots of chili, do laundry, and lead Bible study.

And

Many of the initial crew of women began drifting away by the end of week three, leaving Bass, Cooper and another woman who goes by “Mama Bear” to cook for a crowd of male militants that seems to increase daily. Where there were at first fewer than 20 militants at the refuge, there now seems to be closer to 50. Cooper and Bass look increasingly fatigued.
For her part, Bass feels like the occupation could end if law enforcement and government officials negotiate successfully. She doesn’t want to soften on the occupiers’ demands about federal lands or their view on clemency for the Hammonds. Still, she wishes she could convince the men leaders to get together and talk, calmly.
“But I’m a nobody,” she said. She said she will stay at the refuge as a cook, “for as long as it takes. We women, we are helpers,” said Bass. “That’s how we are created, and that’s what we do here.”

Both bolds are mine.

Compare the views Bass expresses to the views of the Western women who have joined ISIS/Daesh in Syria*.  Indeed, compare the overall views about women's proper places in the two extremist conservative revolutionary movements.  Those proper places for women are kitchens. 

Strictly speaking women, as women,  get nothing good from joining those movements, and in the case of Daesh they get all their freedoms removed.

Yet that is an acceptable bargain for many.  We have fundamentalist religious interpretations and years of educational brain-washing to thank for that.
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 * I'm asking you to compare the opinions of the female participants in these revolutionary movements, not the movements itself.  Daesh legally approves the use of  violence, rape, slavery and sadism, and I'm not trying to draw parallels between that and the fumbling efforts of the Oregon protesters.  Daesh also legally wants to eradicate all rights for women.  But the conservative view of what women are for (kitchen, bedroom, under male supervision) is shared by all conservative religious movements, all over this poor globe.

Is This Ageism?

I belong to several Internet groups on various issues.  Some of them allow job announcements and announcements about scholarships and prizes.  Many of those specify that the applicant must be young.

Now compare that common practice today to the 1960s custom of listing available jobs separately for men and women.

The differences are obvious, of course. 

There really aren't scholarships or jobs which require people to be older.  There are some which require educational qualifications or experience that would exclude, say, an eighteen-year-old, just because those qualifications take so long to acquire.  But in principle a qualified teenager could apply for those jobs.

That's not the case for a forty-year-old starting again (after, say, divorce and years of having been a stay-at-home parent) who would like to apply for one of those Jugend Arbeit posts.

Another difference is that the sex segregated job announcements of the 1960s reserved the best jobs for men and put a fence around those. 

The current age-segregated announcements offer one group of people (the young) jobs which we all assume the older applicants wouldn't want, because we tend to think that they are already far along a successful career path, earning much higher salaries than those the young are now offered.

But in reality many middle aged people have crashed careers, none or work in dead-end jobs.  Some have gone back to college and would now be qualified for jobs which define the desired applicant as someone at most three years from college graduation.  But they are not qualified for jobs which require one to be under twenty-five, say.

So is this practice ageist?  Interestingly, I haven't noticed progressive or feminists think so! 

I  think that we simply don't see anything odd in the fact that some jobs and awards are offered only to people in certain age categories, because the age categories that are selected appear obviously the ones where people still need help and support to get launched.  Still, requiring age as a qualification in this context rules out all applicants who are not young enough, but need a relaunch or the first launch of their careers or education.
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Picture from my archives.

Lightning Posts, 1/25/16: On the Politeness of an Armed Society, Zika Virus and Women, and Kansas Senate Dress Codes for Women

1.  From the "armed society is a polite society" files:  A good Samaritan was shot dead by an inebriated driver.  That horrible story points out some troubling aspects of the politeness that an armed society could create, such as simply avoiding all other people, just in case.  Including your own mother.

2.  The rapid spread of the Zika virus which can cause the child of a woman who was infected while pregnant to be born with microcephaly has led the government of El Salvador to recommend that Salvadorian women just not get pregnant until 2018.

Abortion is illegal in El Salvador, even in the case where the mother's life is at stake, and the linked NYT article argues that most pregnancies there are unplanned.  The Catholic Church is very strong and not especially fond of contraception.  But never mind!  At least the government cannot now be blamed when a wave of microcephalic babies are born.

The point, of course, is that it's the women to whom they are born who bear the brunt of both the blame and the burden of care and the suffering.  Gender politics link to other politics.

3.  We are still in Kansas, Dorothy (a silly reference to the Wizard of Oz):

A dress code imposed by a Kansas Senate committee chairman that prohibits women testifying on bills from wearing low-cut necklines and miniskirts is drawing bipartisan ridicule from female legislators.

Sen. Mitch Holmes' 11-point code of conduct does not include any restrictions on men, who he said needed no instruction on how to look professional, The Topeka Capital-Journal reported.

This is where I start salivating!  The whole wonderful topic of how to police women's dress, whether women should be covered or revealed, whether women who do the former are chaste and modest, while the women who do the latter are sluts and whores!  I so want to write a book about it but life is short. 

Historically, the dress of women has always been a burning political issue, and it still is a burning political and religious issue in Islam and among US fundamentalist Christians, and, it seems, among some Kansas Senators.

Historically, how women dress has always been used as an indicator of their sexual modesty and sexual availability or lack of it.  And historically, too (check the Bible), it has always been very important that women do not "cross-dress,"  because that makes the messages their clothes send much harder to interpret, beginning with the importance of being able to assign someone to a gender wherever men and women are treated differently.

But the last hundred years in the industrialized West have changed that policing.  The changes are still fluid and some final kind of assessment is impossible.  What I see are several different patterns emerging, including the pattern where men and women dress more alike and the pattern where women are allowed to dress more comfortably than in the past.

But I also see a very different pattern:  One, in which women are in some sense expected to dress in the very ways the conservative codes ban, to be viewed as desirable and admired, to be viewed as fashionable and "in."  All choices about our dress take place within cultures, and no choice is ultimately completely "free."  As I see it, the cultural signals about proper dress for women in the West are now many, often contradictory, and difficult to tease apart in their final impact*.


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*Take the bit in the above quote about men knowing how to look professional.  That's partly, because men have a rigid uniform for political work, women do not, and that leaves the question of professional dress for women wide open.

From one angle the expected male uniform in places of power is discrimination against men.  Why can't men dress as they wish in the Kansas Senate hearings?

But what if dressing as you "wish" (see the above discussion about what might drive our ideas) means that people will then use your clothes to judge your sluttiness or the desirability of your body?  What if some people would like you to bare a bit more leg before they are willing to listen to you (Fox News)?  What if people will respond to your choice of more relaxed clothing like this:

"It's one of those things that's hard to define," Holmes said. "Put it out there and let people know we're really looking for you to be addressing the issue rather than trying to distract or bring eyes to yourself." 

That quote from the article about dress codes for women crystallizes the problem for me:  Holmes uses the traditional angle in which women's dress is seen as having sexual implications, whether it is meant to do that or not.  But the topic is more complicated than that, and that's why I wrote that it would take a book.

   

When Feminist Ideals Clash With Other Political Ideals. The Cologne Events and the US Democratic Primaries.

What do people do when their political ideals clash?  What happens when one set of those ideals is about gender equality?

I've been researching the gender-political reactions to the Cologne mass sexual assaults by putting on my hazmat suit and then diving into the right-wing sites in Europe and the US, such as Breitbart.com.  After decontamination I returned to do the same with as many "mainstream" sources, left-wing sites and feminist sites and writers as I can find.  Then I detoxed. 

You may or may not get the fruits of all that research delivered to you on a pretty blogging plate, with a sprig of intellectual parsley to decorate it.  Much depends on how suicidal I am, because the world I've spent days in, to do that research, is a Bizarre World where the anti-feminists are suddenly the feminists and the feminists, well, they are suddenly in-general-concerned-but-there's-nothing-new-here people.*   Or silent. 

I have noticed that pattern before in cases where misogynistic acts are carried out by members of groups which in the West might be hated, reviled or oppressed on some other dimension than gender.

Ideals then clash and one ranks above the other:  To caricature,  right-wing anti-feminists can swallow a certain amount of pretend-feminism in order to be able to carry out anti-Muslim bigotry.  Feminists, on the other hand, can set aside concerns for women's rights** if those appear to clash with refugee rights or with anti-racism work, multi-culturalism or the work to fight against general bigotry towards Muslims.

Mmm.  I really should write about something more relaxing, such as how to endure multiple root canals without anesthesia.

I see something slightly similar happening with the Clinton-Sanders fights in the Democratic primary battles.  Commentators who believe in both women's equal representation in politics and progressive income redistribution or more economic equality must choose their candidate.  And that choice involves a clash of ideals.  The one that is ranked higher, at least in the short term,  will then have to be defended.  Some of the chosen defenses get very ugly.

When this happened in 2008, in the juxtaposition of race and gender,  I was unprepared and pushed into a state of mental and emotional dizziness which was both interesting and frightening.  This time I am prepared, but it's still disheartening to see the mud slung and the main reason why I have  not written on those primaries.

But the similarity of these two examples on the clash of ideals is instructive. The Cologne debates can be mined for people's deepest views on women, gender and the tasks of feminism.   They also helped me, at least, to understand why fast global progress on women's rights is as likely as a coffee cup giving birth to a puppy.

To draw lessons from the US presidential primary debates is more difficult, because Hillary Clinton is almost the only very powerful woman in the country.  A sample size of one doesn't let us draw conclusions about how other female candidates would be treated, because Clinton-the-person matters more than the fact that she is a woman and that this country has never had a female president, despite currently having more women than men in it.

So many see Hillary Clinton as divisive, hawkish, part of a family dynasty,  a low-cal alternative to the Republicans who desire to build a banana republic.

Clinton's alternative has strawberries, too!  Many truly detest her politics and her policies, and do not wish to support them, even if she is a woman and there has never been a female president in this country, despite its population currently tilting female.

At the same time, it's possible to see deep and unconscious forms of sexism working in some of the writings about her***.  She is an egomaniac, and ambitious politician, not someone we can connect with.

What are the other people wanting to run the most powerful country of the world?  Unambitious and retiring kind people who spend their days in soup kitchens or baking cookies for little children?  But they are men, so we don't require that they "connect" with the voters in quite the same way, and we don't really expect them to be sweet and gentle and unambitious****.  Gender expectations differ.

Then the usual warnings:  This post is not about whether Sanders is better or worse than Clinton and it is not about what the "true" feminist choice should be.  It is about the underbelly of our ideals, about the ring in which they come to box it out, and what happens in that particular situation and why.  We should be aware of those fights.  It doesn't matter which combatant wins our endorsement for that awareness to be valuable.
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* To clarify, sites which have permanent sections for feminism-bashing suddenly worry about European women's right to go out unmolested.  But that worry is only when the perpetrators of sexual assaults are Muslim or Africans, and more careful reading of the sites tells us that the worry is interpreted mythologically, as "Germany/Sweden/Finland/Austria getting raped" or as "virginal innocence being destroyed," or as "our women being molested."

The average comments thread to one of these pieces also accuses feminists for all types of things, including being the real culprits in allowing and supporting the flood of refugees and migrants to Europe and focusing only on the bashing of white Christian men.

On the other hand, many (if not most) feminist sites limited their coverage to pointing out that odd sudden right-wing concern about the sexual harassment of women but only when the culprits were mostly Muslim.

What should have been a small part of feminist takes on the Cologne mass sexual harassment became almost the whole story about Cologne, though reinforced by evidence that sexual harassment was already widespread in whatever the European country under discussion, so it wasn't something the refugees and migrants brought with them.

Which is completely correct.  But the harassment in Cologne, Helsinki, Hamburg and other cities was a novel type for Europe. It consisted of many men working together to surround one or few women and then sharing the tasks of keeping the victim contained, keeping potential helpers out and the actual groping, stripping and finger-penetration of the women.  This form of harassment may not have been unknown in Europe, but I certainly had only heard about it in the context of the Arab Spring demonstrations in Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt.

As I mentioned in the post, all this really requires a thorough article, based on the myriad links I've collected and translated.  Would you like to do it for me?  I promise to organize the funeral of your reputation in return.

The bad taste in my mouth from reading so much on the Cologne reactions has to do with the actual women who were the victims.  They seem to have slipped through the political cracks in this debate, becoming tools for one political set of ideals or another.

**  Though this should be qualified.  I learned, in my travels that I may not have understood how feminism might be defined.  One Finnish feminist states in an interview:

Kirjoitit kylttiin ”Tasa-arvo on kaikkien asia”. Miksi?
Kolmannen aallon feminismissä ei enää ajatella, että feminismin ensisijainen tavoite olisi parantaa pelkästään naisten asemaa. On hirveän paljon sukupuolittuneita ilmiöitä, jotka vaikuttavat miehiin, naisiin ja niihin, jotka eivät sovi kumpaankaan kategoriaan. Puhun kriittisesti esimerkiksi armeijasta ja miehiin kohdistuvasta väkivallasta. Tasa-arvo ei voi olla vain yhden ryhmän tehtävä.

My rough translation:

Q:  You wrote on your sign:  "Equality is everybody's business."  Why?
A:  Third wave feminists no longer think that the primary goal of feminism would be to only improve women's status.  There are awfully many "genderized" phenomena which affect men, women and those who fit neither category.  For instance, I speak critically about the military and about violence aimed at men.  Equality cannot be the task of only one group.

 That's slightly confusing, because she seems to both argue that other groups should work for some of the issues which negatively affect, say, men, but at the same time suggests that they are among the tasks of feminism.  But I append that quote because it is one example of the many ways in which the definition of feminism has widened.  When that widening includes anti-racism and pro-refugee work the clash of ideals may enter the picture.

***  Google "Hillary Clinton age," then "Bernie Sanders age," and note the difference.  Or note that articles of this type cannot be written about male candidates, because the US has never had a female president with a spouse who could be held responsible for how he reacted when she turned out to have had an affair with her subordinate.  Or who could be held responsible for the policies his wife carried out.

****  The very small number of women in American politics really makes it difficult to completely distinguish between gender expectations and reactions to Hillary Clinton's actual personality.  We need more women in politics, not only for the usual good reasons from the left, but also so that we get lots more clearly sexist writings in American politics!  I'm sick.

John Tierney And His Woman Trouble Through The Ages

INTRODUCTION


John Tierney is a right-wing libertarian science writer at the New York Times.  Wikipedia describes him as follows:

In 2005 and 2006, he was a columnist on the Times Op-Ed page, before which he wrote a column about New York, "The Big City", that ran in the New York Times Magazine and the Metro section from 1994 to 2002.
Tierney identifies himself as a libertarian and has become increasingly identified with libertarianism. His columns have been critical of rent stabilization, the war on drugs, Amtrak and compulsory recycling. His 1996 article "Recycling Is Garbage" broke the New York Times Magazine's hate mail record.^[2]
Joseph J. Romm has written that Tierney is one of the "influential but misinformed" skeptics who have helped prevent the U.S. from taking action on climate change. In his 2007 book, Hell and High Water, Romm cites, and claims to refute, what he calls Tierney's "misinformation".^[3]

Say hello to Mr. Tierney:

I read him a lot during his Op-Ed page years, less after those.  To me he presented a different angle from that reflected in the above quote:  He seemed to be a man who had never found an anti-uppity-woman study that didn't desperately need wider dissemination.

But it's always possible that I just happened to notice those columns by our John which worked against my beliefs, right?  It could have been that Tierney's writing over his career was much more balanced and impartial.

It could have been, but it wasn't.  Rather, Tierney used the space he was given to work against anything that just might allow women to be uppity.  The way he linked "science" to this was by lavish use of one sub-branch of evolutionary psychology, the kind I call EP or Evolutionary Psychology, the kind which is in favor in cocktail party debates about gender, the kind which ignores all cultural influences on human beings and which often results in JustSo stories about human evolution (1).

Over time, the percentage of Tierney's columns which were on the topic of what's-wrong-with-uppity women or on the topic of gender-equality-is-scientifically-proven-to-be-impossible is far too high to happen by accident, and neither is it  a random drawing from the gender studies which were published in any particular year (2).  No.  Johnnie just wanted to share with all the New York Times readers his views on women and so he picked those studies which support the same views.

Why would this matter?  After all, everybody knows that Tierney writes opinions, not facts.  He's like his brother-in-ideas, David Brooks, or like his sister-in-the-hatred-of-uppity-women, Maureen Dowd.  Just what the New York Times thinks us women might find fascinating on those kinds of opinions, right?

I wrote this post to answer those questions (which I asked myself, in a deep-and-heated political debate!):

First, it is salutary and enlightening to see what Tierney has written about us womenfolk over the last decade or so, in one place, in short lists, with the basic contents highlighted. History brought to life!  Facts gleaned from the dreck and pure noise of actual time passing, dinners, work, other articles and politics intervening!  Just pure Tierney, bright as transparent glass!  And it is great to see whom Tierney uses as experts on the "woman question."  People like Christina Hoff Sommers and Roy Baumeister.

Second, it shows you how the culture around us will affect us, will affect the information we hold, the ideas we agree with and our general beliefs about what others believe. Sometimes those cultural effects are orchestrated, and hearing the orchestra and who is conducting it (Tierney! New York Times paying for the performances!)  is an interesting and fun phenomenon. 

Third, putting together the work of one influential science writer in one influential place tells us something about the way various voices are given microphones at newspapers, something about the way "the balancing" of Democrats and Republicans and libertarians etc. in the stables of writers works out in practice, and what it's possible consequences might be.

I decided to write this post now for no particular current-events related reasons, but because I want to clean up my never-posted archives, to tidy up everything, to tie up all the loose ends, and while doing that I found research I had started into Tierney's career (3).  It seemed too good to waste, even though the research is not complete and doesn't pretend to reflect on the whole career of John Tierney (4).   So I'm tossing it out by first tossing it here.

Before we move to Tierney's work itself, I want to stress this:   

There's nothing wrong with Tierney covering certain opinions and studies which support those particular opinions.  What's wrong, in the context of opinion writing in science,  is ignoring other studies which don't support those opinions, over-using certain experts and not using others at all, and, in general, giving the impression that the studies one covers are somehow the consensus of all researchers in a particular field.     



TIERNEY BY THE YEAR OF PUBLICATION

On Neanderthals and Political Debates

That headline is quite likely to make you expect something different from this post than what it actually contains!  And that's part of its lesson.  Let's start:

I spotted this headline a few days ago and stashed it away as a potential source for delicious thinking:

You might have a peanut allergy because your ancestors had sex with Neanderthals

What's weird about that headline is pretty obvious:  The Neanderthal in that headline would also be your ancestor if the described sex was productive, and if it wasn't productive that ancient nookie cannot explain your peanut allergy.

So I began this post with what looks like hair-splitting.  But it isn't, really.  It can be a valuable lesson about how we introduce new information (the idea of a Neanderthal ancestry of some humans is a novel thesis) and how we interpret information in general.

People tend to have a certain prior structures (or strategies) of thinking and those can affect what we read from certain information.  In this example the prior structure is the assumption that the Neanderthals didn't pass their genes on to any currently existing human populations, that they were out-competed by the Cro-Magnons*, that they were a genetic dead end.  Besides, they were ugly, and "we" beat them!

Thus, a useful starting point is to assume that most readers of that headline see the Neanderthals as outsiders, not really in the ancestry chain, and to inject them into the conversation from that starting position, as if our "ancestors" had a bit of illegitimate exotic sex on the side.**

The political implications of this are enormous, my erudite readers, enormous!

Just spend some time reading how the right-wingers wrote about the Cologne mass sexual harassment and then how the left-wingers and feminists wrote or didn't write about it.  Granted, those particular knots have many more threads intertwined, but one important thread consists of the thought structures people have earlier built about and around the issues.

And by those I don't mean solely the basic value structures, but also personal experiences, the selective sieves we use to filter reality, the values of the groups we belong to and how those groups can give us both pleasurable praise or make us suffer from shunning, and, of course.  All those affect the information we see and how we go about interpreting it, and any new information will be interpreted within those thought structures we already have and the older information we have accepted into them.

None of that is new thinking, of course.  I'm sure that experts have proper names (or detestable acronyms) for the phenomena I grasp with here.  Still, it can be worthwhile to enter an old room through a new door, right?  
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* We are not supposed to use that term anymore.  But, honestly, the proposed alternative EEMH for European early modern humans is nowhere near as memorable.  Besides, I detest acronyms almost as much as I detest raisins.

**  Assuming, of course, that EEMHs and Neanderthals did interbreed in Europe or Asia.















 

The Old Canard Returns: Women's Lower Earnings Are All Because of Choice

Dana Loesch, a conservative television host on The Blaze tells us that women earn less ONLY because they "choose" to earn less, that there is no gender wage gap attributable to anything else, and that everybody knows this to be the truth.

I love her audacity and deplore her stupidity, the latter, because economists who actually study the question don't agree with her conclusions.  The world is complicated and the economics of the gender gap in earnings are even more so.

Does it ever annoy you that it's much easier to make soundbites which are not true than to present what is known, so far?  It annoys me, because I'd like to shoot a short soundbite back at our Dana.  Instead, links to relevant material must suffice:

This post provides links to several others for those who really want to get their teeth on the topic.   This post, as well as this one, have more on the idea of "choice" in this context.

Finally, this post talks about a study which the conservatives have widely used to draw the conclusion Loesch makes.  More on the topic here.

I get very angry at the usual conservative political lies about the earnings gap between men and women and also get somewhat angry at the lefty political interpretations of the gross earnings gap* as being completely due to discrimination against women.  The truth is somewhere in the middle.  But no way can we state that it's only feminine choices** which cause the average earnings of women to be lower than the average earnings of men.

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*  The gross gap hasn't been adjusted for anything.  It's the net gap, calculated after data is adjusted for non-discriminatory factors such as working hours (if the earnings data is not per hour), education and experience, that economists actually analyze when trying to measure the impact of discrimination on earnings.

In other words, not all of the observed average difference is attributable to differential treatment of women and men in the labor market.

**  As I write in one of the linked pieces, the meaning of "choice" matters here, too.  If the society expects women to be in charge of most child-rearing, shopping, cooking, cleaning and laundry then the options between which individuals choose are already affected by their gender.

Things get even more complicated when we acknowledge that the US labor markets are still largely based on the assumption that someone else than the worker takes care of those chores.

Conservatives toss the term "choice" into the conversation as if everybody was choosing from exactly the same menu for their lives.  But that's not the case, on average, and even less so for poorer workers whom the labor market treats with greater harshness and fewer perks.

Note, also, that there is trivial choice, such as choosing between drinks at dinner, and non-trivial choice.  The latter is the proper interpretation for the production of the next generation.  But most conservatives treat this topic as if having children is just an expensive hobby of no greater societal significance.  Odd, given how "family focused" many of their organizations are.

Teamwork in Economics Research: Who Gets Credit?

The ivory towers of academia are not a place to lounge on your laurels.  Rather, professors compete ferociously for the diminishing numbers of jobs with actual benefits and job security, i.e., tenured jobs.  And in that competition being female may work against you, at least according to a new study* which looks at how much credit researchers get for writing articles.

Publications are important, because of the publish-or-perish principle of tenure acquisition.  Heather Sarson's doctoral thesis looks at the impact of gender on how much credit someone in the economics field gets for her or his publications.  What she argues her study shows is this:  Women get less credit for co-authored articles than men, but roughly equal credit for articles they have written alone:

While women in the field publish as much as men, they are twice as likely to perish. And this higher rate for women being denied tenure persists even after accounting for differences in tenure rates across universities, the different subfields of economics that women work in, the quality of their publications and other influences that may have changed over time. 

But Ms. Sarsons discovered one group of female economists who enjoyed the same career success as men: those who work alone. Specifically, she says that “women who solo author everything have roughly the same chance of receiving tenure as a man.” So any gender differences must be because of the differential treatment of men and women who work collaboratively.

...

The career benefit from publishing a solo paper is about the same for women as it is for men. But unlike women, men also get just as much credit for collaborative research, and there is no statistical difference in the career prospects of authors of individually written papers and those of papers written as part of a research team.

Unfortunately for women, research done with a co-author counts far less. When women write with co-authors, the benefit to their career prospects is much less than half that accorded to men. This really matters, because most economic research is done with co-authors.

What's going on there?  To learn more, Sarsons looked at the possible impact of who you are writing those articles with, and found that what really hurt women was co-authoring only with men.  In those cases the women got essentially no credit  for the article.  Men, on the other hand, received approximately the same credit for co-authored articles independently of the gender of their co-authors.

Justin Wolfers, the author of the NYT piece on the study, suggests that whenever there is ambiguity about how to divide the credit for an article those who are to decide on that division tend to fall back on their (probably subconscious) biases.  He also notes that Sarsons carried out a parallel study in sociology and failed to find any gender effect.  That might be because in sociology the first author listed is the main author of the article, whereas in economics the authors are listed alphabetically.  The former practice gives some help in deciding how much credit to give to someone (more to the first author), the latter leaves that more open.

Finally, this quote from the NYT piece is interesting:

Many female economists have shared with me their experiences of research being taken less seriously simply because it was written by a woman. The great economic historian Deirdre McCloskey, a distinguished professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has a unique perspective on all of this, having spent the first half of her career as the male economist Donald McCloskey. Today, she reports that it is quite common for her colleagues not to acknowledge a point she has made until it is reinforced by another male economist. That rarely happened when she was Donald.

I was trying to think of alternative theories which would explain Sarsons' findings, such as asking whether the gender of one's co-authors gives a different signal about male and female authors.  Something along the lines that, on average, women in economics are at earlier stages in their careers than men, so perhaps women are more likely than men to co-author with more senior researchers, and senior researcher tend to get more credit.  But Sarsons tests that (p. 24) and finds it not to be the case.

Her findings have wider importance, if similar considerations affect how employers divide the credit for teamwork more generally.  Indeed, the findings may be stronger in areas where there is no choice whether to work in a team or go solo.

   

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*  This seems to be the working paper on the topic.   Sarsons writes:

While women who solo-author everything have roughly the same
chance of receiving tenure as a man, women who coauthor most of their work have a significantly lower probability of receiving tenure. The penalty is not explained by coauthor selection and is robust to controlling for productivity differences, tenure institution, year of tenure, and field of study.

 

To Clarify The Previous Post

This one.   My goal with that post was to criticize mayor Reker's advice to women.  I would criticize that sort of advice whether the suspected culprits are native-born Germans or immigrants or aliens from outer space.  That aspect doesn't matter for the criticisms, and it shouldn't make any difference in how the German law is applied, either.

How Not To Get Sexually Molested: Lessons From Henriette Reker, the Mayor of Cologne

After the events of Cologne, Hamburg, Stuttgart (and Düsseldorf) I wrote about yesterday,  the mayor of Cologne organized a crisis meeting.  Good things came out of it:

The crisis management team said prevention measures should include a code of conduct for young women and girls, and Mayor Reker said the existing code of conduct will be updated online.
The suggested code of conduct includes maintaining an arm’s length distance from strangers, to stick within your own group, to ask bystanders for help or to intervene as a witness, or to inform the police if you are the victim of such an assault.
In anticipation of large carnivals in the city centre in February, Mayor Reker promised an increased police presence. She warned young women about potential dangers of drunken events.

Mayor Reker also said a “better explanation” to asylum seekers was needed about the meaning of the annual carnivals.
“We need to prevent confusion about what constitutes happy behaviour and what is utterly separate from openness, especially in sexual behaviour," she said.

Bolds are mine.

I cannot stop laughing.  I imagine German women now walking about with their arms horizontally extended, making sure that any stranger stays out of the reach of their finger tips.  Especially fascinating to try to do this in a rush-hour subway car!  Well, in any crowded place, such as large cities tend to be.

Besides, a harasser is unlikely to honor your arm's length of private space*.  That's the definition of a harasser.

The Guardian reports that:

Journalists at the press conference said the mayor had reacted with surprise to the initial question and her struggle for an answer demonstrated the extent to which it had caught her off guard.

That is also laughable.  Women were the victims in Cologne,  and the mayor had not thought about them long enough to baste together something less inane about the "proposed code of conduct!"

Even the idea that women are to have a code of conduct makes me giggle.  Maybe this is just because of the English translation, but the association in my mind is to schoolgirls who are allowed out only under strictly defined conditions.

And of course all this veers very close to victim blaming, because the advice is such weak tea (almost pointless)** and so thoughtlessly prevented, and because Reker's advice to anyone who might consider molesting women seems to be the even more inane idea that those men don't know it's wrong!  They know it's wrong, they just want to do it.

The social media reaction to this "advice" was ridicule, and I agree that mayor Reker deserved that in this particular case.

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See this clarification to the post.


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*Unless you measure that arm's length with a sword or a machete.  But then you get into trouble with the police.

** That's because harassers don't care about your private space and because harassers working in teams can easily separate you from your friends.  Bystanders may not be present or may not intervene, and reporting the harassment to the police doesn't prevent it.   And of course you might be out alone, gasp, in which case your friends are imaginary. 

Meanwhile, in Cologne, Germany

(Posts beginning with "meanwhile" are about negative events which affect women somewhere in the world).

Note:  This post has been corrected.  Originally it stated that the number of those doing the assaulting equaled one thousand men.  That's because of the way many newspapers reported this, including here and the quote I used in this post.  The New York Times also reports several hundred attackers.   More clarity on the actual numbers will have to wait for the police investigations.

On New Year's Eve pairs or small groups of young men of Arabic or North African appearance assaulted women at Cologne's main railway station.  Similar groups attacked women in Hamburg and in Stuttgart:

Police in Germany are investigating an alarming series of sexual assaults on women trying to celebrate the New Year by large groups of single men “of Arab or North African appearance”.
Authorities in the city of Cologne are to hold a crisis meeting on Tuesday after police described a group of some 1,000 men who took over the area around the main station on New Year’s Eve.
Women were robbed, groped, and had their underwear torn from their bodies, while couples had fireworks thrown at them.
Police have received 90 criminal complaints, around a quarter of them for sexual assault, including one case of rape.
Police in Hamburg say there was a series of similar incidents in the city’s Reeperbahn red-light area. Witnesses described groups of five to 15 men of who “hunted” women in the streets.

...

“Some girls were chased like cattle,” a 17-year-old woman told Bild newspaper. “I’m stunned that such a thing is possible in Hamburg. It makes you scared to celebrate in the neighbourhood.

Why did it take until yesterday, January fourth,  for news about this violence to appear in newspapers?  The most likely reason is that German authorities (police) and/or media feared provoking anti-refugee sentiment,  given that most refugees in Germany are of "Arab or North African appearance."

But to make that choice of censoring automatically implies a second simultaneous choice:  What happened to those women in Cologne and Hamburg and Stuttgart is not worth reporting; some other cause is more important than the well-being of women. *

And ultimately that policy of censoring is self-defeating.  It breeds distrust of the official news media, it provides more support for the anti-immigrant parties, and it is quite likely to create the impression that any such crimes swept under the carpet are bigger and more common than they actually are**.

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*This is a real dilemma for those who support both women's rights and refugee rights, and I'm not belittling the importance of not provoking anti-refugee sentiment in Germany or elsewhere.  The vast majority of immigrants, migrants or refugees to Europe do not commit crimes, including crimes against women.

But it is naive to assume that Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans, say,  would have exactly the  same views about how women should behave and how women behaving in certain ways can be treated as the average German does.

Germany may be a patriarchal country, but Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan are vastly more so, and not planning for this difference in the education of refugees and migrants spells trouble.  As I've written before, people move with their values in their suitcases or backpacks, and an explicit unpacking of those patriarchal gender ideas is necessary.  Even when it is not sufficient, at least people are told what is against the law.

** For instance, the German police has stated that the most recent wave of refugees seems to have lower rates of crime than Germans on average.

(Now, should one trust that report?  See how the policy of censoring is a very very bad one.)