How Older Parents Are Wrecking The World

It's that time of the year again when we talk about too old parents having children.  I'm annoyed by this piece in the New Republic, even though it might make many good medical points.  My annoyance is based on four factors:

First, the article is a vast exaggeration of what's going on.  A vast exaggeration.  Take the title:

How Older Parenthood Will Upend American Society The scary consequences of the grayest generation.

We have the upending of the society!  We have the scary consequences!  And yet there's this:

That women become mothers later than they used to will surprise no one. All you have to do is study the faces of the women pushing baby strollers, especially on the streets of coastal cities or their suburban counterparts. American first-time mothers have aged about four years since 1970—as of 2010, they were 25.4 as opposed to 21.5. That average, of course, obscures a lot of regional, ethnic, and educational variation. The average new mother from Massachusetts, for instance, was 28; the Mississippian was 22.9. The Asian American first-time mother was 29.1; the African American 23.1. A college-educated woman had a better than one-in-three chance of having her first child at 30 or older; the odds that a woman with less education would wait that long were no better than one in ten.

Bolds are mine.  What that paragraph supports is not the upending of the American society.

Second, the story is written from an upper-class point of view and largely reflects the concerns of those who must choose between further education and having children early.  Delaying childbearing for those reasons is NOT the largest global reason for the reduced fertility rates in many countries. It may be a consequence of wanting a smaller family size, but worldwide fertility rates are not dropping because women everywhere are delaying childbirth for careers!

Third, the story conflates fertility rates and late births in a way which leaves me feeling that the author wants everybody to have lots of children, and that the way to do that is to begin at menarche or so, given that the body then is less likely to have accumulated toxins or mutations or whatever might make the children of older parents more likely to have problems.

Indeed, the story tries to press all the panic buttons together!  Though I must give it kudos for pressing them on men, too.  Usually these articles only press women's panic buttons (We women always do everything wrong:  If we are black, we have children too young and without husbands.  If we are white, we don't have enough children or too late, at least if we are not poor.  If we are white and poor,  we also have children too often without husbands and so on.  I'm going to stop reading this crap.)

Fourth, this article contains something which I've noticed before in these kinds of articles.  Here's an example.  It's a subtle one, following some time after an assertion that feminists really are celebrating older parenting everywhere!

If you’re a doctor, you see clearly what is to be done, and you’re sure it will be. “People are going to change their reproductive habits,” said Alan S. Brown, a professor of psychiatry and epidemiology at the Columbia University medical school and the editor of an important anthology on the origins of schizophrenia. They will simply have to “procreate earlier,” he replied. As for men worried about the effects of age on children, they will “bank sperm and freeze it.”

Bolds are mine.

What's irritating about this?  It pays no attention to people's life circumstances, the absence of paid maternity leave, the difficulty of establishing a family in one's early twenties, the absence of protections for women who take a maternity leave from work and wish to return to the same position in their career paths, the absence of support for daycare and so on.  And note that the people who have to "procreate earlier" are really not all people, because some can bank sperm and freeze it, assuming they can afford that.

I've read similar opinions in earlier old-mother articles, and they always give orders like that, pretty much.   Sorta shape-up-or-ship-out.

At the next step in the article the author gives us the usual good advice about what's needed for that earlier procreation to happen.  That advice (of which the first paragraph is aimed at only the educated upper classes, by the way) will be ignored, as it has been, for decades:

Demographers and sociologists agree about what those policies are. The main obstacle to be overcome is the unequal division of the opportunity cost of babies. When women enjoy the same access to education and professional advancement as men but face penalties for reproducing, then, unsurprisingly, they don’t.

...

More immediately effective are policies in place in many countries in Western Europe (France, Italy, Sweden) that help women and men juggle work and child rearing. These include subsidized child care, generous parental leaves, and laws that guarantee parents’ jobs when they go back to work. Programs that let parents stay in the workforce instead of dropping out allow them to earn more over the course of their lifetimes.

Compare that to the medical advice that "people" will just have to procreate earlier.

OK.  After picking through all that, the piece has good points about the fact that having children late in life carries larger risks than having them early.  To what extent epigenetic studies about mice or rats directly translate into humans is unclear, however, and the article would have much benefited from placing the numbers it quotes into a proper framework.

It's not terribly informative to tell us that some condition becomes more likely with parental age if we are not told what percentage of all children the condition applies to and, thus, what the actual increased risk might be.  Given that most people still have children relatively young, the societal upending the post predicts doesn't seem called for.  At least I wanted to know exactly what percentage of American men and women have their first child after the age of, say, forty.

Just to remind you again, the average maternal age at first birth in the US is 24.5 years, not forty years.  Thus, to write about the scary consequences of the graying generation is like telling us that the sky is falling.  But that treatment is good for clicks, advertising income and the survival of a struggling newspaper, right?
 

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On Whether the US Should Intervene in Syria

It is a very sad day when the best piece on this was written by a humor site, the Onion.  That piece is sarcasm of a very dark kind and says nothing much about the human suffering.  But trying to decide on the basis of human suffering is equally impossible, unless one has the ability to predict the  total future casualties (as well as their split into innocent bystanders and willing participants) under each option.

I'm not well informed about the situation in Syria but it seems to me that none of the sides in the civil war are on the side of ordinary democracy for the majority of Syrian people.  It looks like a religious-cum-political-cum-economic power struggle between fairly small groups.

What's truly awful about these situations that the "innocent bystanders" are always the least powerful and often the ones the next power-brokers will oppress.

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On Depression And Gender

A new study (seems to be based on a doctoral thesis by one of the authors) suggests that depression rates among men may have been underestimated because of the symptom list that is commonly used.  In other words, perhaps, as the authors argue, depression is as common in men as in women (or even more common in men).  But perhaps not.


The problem I have with the study (which I quickly read) is that I didn't spot the part where the lists of symptoms are nailed down as defining depression.  Something like people feeling better after getting medication for depression or other therapy for depression, something which links all the various symptom lists to the same illness.


I may have missed that part.  But in general the measurement of mental/ and emotional illnesses can be tricky.

Still, the study findings are interesting.  For example, when the authors used a combined scale which included both traditional (sorta female-coded items) and new "masculine" items, women and men tended to score about the same.  In addition to that, it wasn't necessarily just the men who seemed to score higher on the "masculine" items but a significant number of women, too:

The second scale, the GIDS, included traditional depression items as well as the alternative, male-type items from the MSS. The MSS appeared to identify depression in a group of men who disclosed more externalizing symptoms. However, we know that men’s experiences of depression are not uniform. For some men, these alternative symptoms would be enough to assess depression, while others would experience the more traditional symptoms of depression. Given that a significant number of women also met our depression case criteria using the MSS indicates that both women and men would benefit from a scale that contains an array of symptoms that better reflect the heterogeneity of the depression experience.

If the authors' new scales indeed measure depression better in many men (and many women), then their use will be an improvement, always assuming that effective treatment exists.  More people can be helped.

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A Breastfeeding Joke And Slightly Related Comments

This is the joke:

I think it is funny, anyway.

More seriously, and because I read some theoretical literature in the last few days, the treatment of breastfeeding in the media is fascinating.  There is a push for more breastfeeding and there is also increased acceptance of public breastfeeding.  But the need for both of those is because of how female breasts have been coded in the recent past (and still are):  As sexual titillants.  If there isn't such a word (titillant) it should exist.

But I also think that the same person could be for breastfeeding and against public breastfeeding, if that person believes in the women-in-the-private-sphere-only argument.  Being able to take your baby out with you without considering the feeding rhythm gives women more freedom.

Which links, a bit wobblily (another word that doesn't exist?), to my observation comparing Finland and the US.  At least where I live in the US the presence of children is a bit ghost-like.  The streets are sorta empty of them and glimpses of families are nowhere as common as in Finland.  And the number of young dads as the only adults with their children out doing things is much, much higher there than here.

I have some ideas about what drives these differences, and it isn't different birth rates.  Americans are much more afraid of what might happen to unsupervised children playing with other children outside, and Finns have paternity leave which serves to increase the bonding between fathers and children.  I also think the societal values are somewhat different in the two countries.

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Blog Spam

I spend a few minutes every day on spam.  It's like having to sweep the same corner of the living-room every day, for some weird reason.

And now I'm getting curious about the spam industry.  For example, I didn't use to get much spam until this last spring.  Now it's continuous, even though Disqus' spam program catches most of it so you never see it.

But what fascinates me right now is where the spam goes.  On this blog it goes to the post about "Get Lucky at 35,000 Feet."  Why the spammers pick older posts is obvious.  But why certain older posts?

I get that the work posting spam is poorly paid and I'm not yelling at the people doing it.  But perhaps something could be done about the algorithms which make spam profitable for firms.

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On The Concept of Privilege As A Tool in Social Justice Movements

Contents include rape and sexual harassment.



I've written about this before, but there's more I want to say about it, partly brought up by this quote from a post about the new supposedly feminist website called Bustle:

Based on his statements and interviews, it seems fair to say that Goldberg has, at best, a rudimentary understanding of the concept of feminism — while it's a broad and controversial term for sure, most people who have bothered to read up on the subject seem to agree that part of being a 21st-century feminist includes embracing intersectionality, questioning stereotypes, being aware of your privilege, and letting women speak for themselves.

Bolds are mine.

Being aware of your privilege is fine, and it as an excellent tool for introspection, for understanding what I don't have any lived-in experience about, for understanding that the world can treat other people quite differently, and for placing oneself at the beginning of some debate (do I know something worth sharing here?  do I make assumptions about what others know that are incorrect?)

But what about using the concept in other ways?  That's where I think the concept of privilege fails as a tool.  It's too blunt, too prone to being used as a shut-up in conversations, too prone for being used as a check on the ideological purity of someone to be in the room (which also turns lack of privilege into a certain type of odd privilege).  To give you an example, to tell someone his or her privilege is showing is a statement which both conveys certain information and argues that the person has committed a faux pas of a type, that the person probably should shut up and leave the conversation.

That doesn't matter, perhaps, except in the sense that one catches more flies with honey than with vinegar, though it does tend to stop any further attempts to increase mutual understanding.

 What matters much more is when privilege is used as an actual tool of theoretical analysis.

The reason for that, in my opinion, is that the concept of privilege is so stretching, so meaningless, so capable of inversions that we don't get anywhere by using it.  The bigger worry, by far, is the idea of starting to add up privileges, to decide who is the least privileged, and then to use that impossible summing to make conclusions about what one should do in a particular situation, whose position one should focus on, whose worries one should evaluate. 

That's partly because some things listed as privileges can depend on one's choice, partly, because many aspects of privilege focus the study of a societal problem on the relative position of different individuals with respect to that problem, and such focus then tends to blind us to the larger problem and concentrate on individuals and their lives rather than the wider problem.  But the different types of privileges are not commensurate and so trying to sum them up introduces pure subjectivity into the analysis.

To give you a more concrete example of some of the problems, I have urban East Coast "privilege".  But if I move to a bubolic area, because of my own choice, I lose that "privilege?"   I can now participate in discussions as a representative of rural people?  That doesn't make the best approach to the very real problems of the rural poor or the very real problems of how to provide, say, adequate media coverage of sparsely populated areas or how to make sure that feminism or other such movements aren't just bicoastal ones.  In a sense the concept of "privilege" is both too general, vague and too narrow, individualistic.

Here's what I really want to stress:  My criticism of the concept of "privilege" is not an argument for implying that one's race, gender, ethnicity and so on wouldn't place people into different boxes, with different access to the good things in life and with different levels of bad things happening to us.  It's crucial to be clear about that.  But when we lump all the different aspects of these and other concerns (social class, religion, sexual preference, gender identity, health etc.) together and throw them into one box marked "privilege" we don't really get very far in our analyses.

That's because different types of "privilege" have different underlying reasons, and a proper study of those reasons is imperative, in my view.  One way of doing that study is by looking at one particular question (say, race) first in isolation and then in how it interacts with other important questions (gender, income, etc.)  If we don't do that disaggregated analysis, we are stuck with a concept of "privilege" which tells us very little about what to do to make things better.

To apply all this to a particular problem, consider the recent media coverage of gang rapes and sexual harassment and the like in India.  Let's begin with a piece published at the CNN.com about the experiences of an American exchange student in India.   The story is an outpouring of pain and grief with very little analysis (which isn't necessarily required of such stories).  But it also equates the sexual harassment the writer had to undergo with the whole country of India in a way which might be essentializing, implying that India is somehow ineradicably a misogynist place which foreign women should avoid.

A companion piece at the CNN.com site provided a different narrative of the possible experiences of another exchange student on the same trip.  The author of that stressed the kindness and humanity of the Indian men she met and the fact that one shouldn't label a whole society based on what some individuals in it do.

Here's where the concept of privilege enters all this:  A post on Ms Magazine site discusses these two essays from the point of view of a professor of gender studies. The post makes a complicated argument:

So RoseChasm is not incorrect to feel hunted, but her words unfortunately line up with global power grids. She depicts India as irredeemably patriarchal, with no nod to the long history of Indian feminists protesting against sexual violence in public spaces, homes and by police and military. By default, the U.S. gets seen as a haven of gender equity. We forget that U.S. campuses have four times the number of sexual assaults that off-campus sites do, that domestic violence kills in record numbers and that the U.S. military commits rapes in huge numbers with little impunity. RoseChasm’s testimony may be a terrified survivor’s account, but it reinforces ideas of places like India as primitive frontiers, desensitizing us to violence launched against other countries with the alibi of culture.
RoseChasm wants to be invisible, neutral, “just a person” in India, but the very fact of her presence on a study abroad trip underlines a one-sided privilege: Students on such programs can travel to others’ lives, gawk at them and pretend to live their lives for a brief moment, with little recognition that people may be looking or talking back, sometimes in violent ways. For women on these trips, this becomes a violent, gendered difference from men in their programs, to be sure, but for all it’s a reminder that global inequalities often provoke vicious backlash. And RoseChasm’s U.S. privilege doesn’t protect her from the everyday violence Indian women negotiate. A return to the U.S. provides no protection from gendered violence, either—it only compounds the complete lack of safe havens for women.

The bolds are mine.

My beef isn't with the author, Srimati Basu, pointing out the global power grids or the fact that American tourists in India are privileged in many ways over the general Indian population.  My beef has to do with the idea that the modern concept of privilege benefits the analysis here.  The older one, based on income, education and social class, might have been more useful.

Basu's two points in that context are contradictory.  She both argues that the US and India are not that different* when it comes to gendered violence AND that the author of the initial essay, RoseChasm, is privileged** because she can move from one of these countries to the other, whereas Indian women cannot do so.   But if that is so, then Basu herself, say, is privileged when it comes to the US, compared to poor American women.  Basu can leave the country, they cannot.

That's nit-picking, sure, and a bit stupid.   My point may become clearer when we introduce to this discussion the most recent gang-rape case from India:

Out on an assignment, the photojournalist was raped in a deserted textile mill in central Mumbai on Thursday evening after the five accused assaulted and tied her male colleague.
Twenty police teams, including 10 from the crime branch, are tracking their three other accomplices, all of whom have been identified and are aged between 18 and 20.
On Friday afternoon, the police had arrested Chand Abdul Sattar who lives at Dhobi Ghat, close to the mill. The accused later confessed to the crime.
"We have arrested one of the suspects who has named the others involved in the incident. The suspect has also confessed to the crime," Mumbai police commissioner Satyapal Singh had said in a press conference on Friday.
The five men, all school dropouts, were jobless and visited the mill often. Two even have robbery cases registered against them.

If we apply the privilege concept to this story, it might be necessary to point out that the victim comes across as probably of a higher social class than the perpetrators, who are school dropouts and unemployed.  From this it's not a terribly big step to discussing which rapes are in some sense more understandable than other rapes and so on.   I don't want to go there.

This is what I see as a big problem with the simultaneous discussion of different types of privileges and attempts to compare them or to add them up or to subtract from them.  I don't see how that approach would diminish any of the underlying problems.  The tools for fighting poverty and global inequalities are different from the tools for fighting rape, in general, and I don't think that conflating the two increases our analytical abilities.  This doesn't mean that an understanding of the variables which make rape more likely on the perpetrators' part isn't useful.  But that's something different altogether.

To conclude, I want to reiterate that this post is about the concept of privilege as an analytical tool, not an argument for the absence of what the concept attempts to capture,  and certainly not an argument against using it as a device for introspection.
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* The discussion of gender violence in different countries often concludes with the argument that gender violence exists everywhere.  This is correct, of course.  But it's still important to study different cultures, the way they handle rape and sexual harassment, whether the authorities take them seriously or not, whether the victim-blaming and shame associated with being a victim is identical and so on.  It's also important to try to get good international figures of actual rapes and to understand the reasons for any differences that are found.  Those reasons include several possibilities:  For example, women have different "rights" to go out alone or unattended by a male relative, and how the society views those "rights" determines the incidence of rapes in complicated ways.  Then the rate at which women report rapes can differ because of the cultural incentives or disincentives for doing so.  And so on.  To give one extra flavor of the complications in this, it's possible that a country which experiences an upsurge of attention aimed at rapes (such as India) may, in fact, be improving its actual hidden statistics if those rapes in the past went unreported and even hidden.

Such international comparisons should avoid the kind of approach that Basu warns us about.  But the comparisons are necessary for both learning what works in the prevention of gender violence and for measuring improvements.

**That RoseCharm tells us she suffers from PTSD and was admitted to a psychiatric ward for some time and is now on mental disability leave from college further complicates the analysis if we use being able-bodied or able-minded as yet another form of privilege.

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What Some Treatments of Chelsea Manning Teach Us About Views On Women

On CNN Newsroom:

CNN host Fredricka Whitfield continued to incorrectly refer to Chelsea Manning as a male as one of her guests suggested that providing Manning with hormone therapy while in prison would be "beyond insanity."

During the August 24 edition of CNN Newsroom, Whitfield invited civil rights attorney Avery Friedman and criminal defense attorney Richard Herman to discuss the possibility of providing Manning - previously known as Bradley Manning - with medical treatment for her gender dysphoria while she serves her sentence in an all-male military prison for leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks.

Herman, who is a regular CNN legal commentator, railed against the possibility of providing Manning with adequate medical care, calling the idea "beyond insanity" and suggesting that Manning could get "good practice" presenting as a female in prison: 

HERMAN: It's absurd. Sometimes we have to step back and say, "you know, some of these cases we cover, this is beyond insanity." There's no way that taxpayers are going to pay a hundred thousand dollars for a gender transformation for this guy while he's in prison. If he wants to be Chelsea, he can practice all he wants at Fort Leavenworth, because those guys are there for a long time. So he can get good practice and when he gets out, he can have the operation or whatever, and he can pay for it.

Bolds are mine.  I wonder what on earth Herman might have meant by that comment.

No, I don't.  The implication is that the role of women is to get raped and that a male prison is a good place to practice for that role, given the high rates of prison rape.

Meanwhile, in Finland, the chief editor of a newspaper called  Kaleva cut a joke on the topic of transgender Manning:

Tietovuotaja Bradley Manning haluaa muuttua naiseksi. Se ei ole ihme. Laverteluhan on aina ollut ämmämäistä".

My translation:

The information leaker Bradley Manning wants to turn into a woman.  That's no wonder.  Blabbing/tale-telling has always been what chicks/hags do.

When questioned about it, editor Mantila defended his joke as summarizing everything important really well.  He also didn't get what the fuss was about and pointed out that his newspaper has been among the most liberal when it comes to sexual minorities.  Nobody should be wrapped in cotton wool, he also stated, not even sexual minorities.

I went and read the comments to the story about Mantila's beautiful and hairy foot in his mouth, and most didn't think his joke was that good.  But one person there linked to a Daily Mail article which argued that women do so speak more than men.*

The placement of transgender individuals into a scheme of theoretical analysis about gender can be very difficult.  But one way of approaching this might be to look at it in the context of enforcing rigid gender norms, including the impossibility of leaping over the border between male and female sexes.

 If we apply this tool, the above two examples seem to demonstrate the idea that Manning is moving from the better sex to the worse sex, one which is sorta made for passive reception of sexual advantages but which also talks nonstop.
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*The article from last February, which I missed, is about testing boy and girl rats.  The boy rats are more vocal than the girl rats and get more attention from the mommy rats.  There's a difference in a protein P2 between the boy and girl rats (boy rats have more of it), and when the researchers switched the relative amount of P2 in the boy and girl rat brains, the girls became more vocal and got more mommy attention. 

The researchers then argued that in a small sample of human children (5 girls, 5 boys) the girls had more of P2 than the boys.  But they never measured how vocal those girls and boys were.  Yet the popularization argued that "Women Really Do Talk More Than Men."

There are all sorts of problems with that, of course, because the study didn't show any difference in how vocal the children were and even the initial study didn't compare adult rats with each other.  A sample size of ten can be a bit tricky, for all sorts of good reasons, too.  For a nice discussion of the issues, go here.

But do see the leap the commentator took:  We move from the idea that women tell more tales, blab more to the idea that women just speak more.  The latter is now somehow associated with the idea that women would leak more information than men.

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Speed Blogging, Monday 8/26/2013. On Anniversaries, Women in the Obama Administration and The Question of Religious Freedom

Or word salad.  Not coleslaw, but the kind of salad where you have goat cheese lumps, too, among lettuce leaves a bit too big to swallow without knife-work.

First, Saturday was the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, today is the 93rd anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment (women's right to vote).  So we are a very very young country when it comes to civil rights.  Worth keeping in mind. 

Second, the Koch brothers have decided not to buy the Tribune papers.  This is good news.  Or as much good news as we are likely to get for a while so you should revel in it.

Third, has the Obama administration a good record of hiring women or not?  That may depend, as wise people say, but the weasel-word of "diversity" doesn't suffice as a defense:

“The president’s commitment to diversity is second to none, and his track record speaks to it,” Alyssa Mastromonaco, the deputy chief of staff, said in an e-mail message. “This is a man who has appointed women as national security adviser, as White House counsel, as budget director and to lead the task of implementing our single most important domestic policy accomplishment,” namely Mr. Obama’s health care law. “This president has single-handedly increased the diversity of our courts, and he will continue to select from a field of highly qualified and diverse candidates for all federal posts.”

For those who don't know of my dislike of the term "diversity," a short explanation:  You can have diversity with a government which has one white woman, one black man, one Asian-American man and umpteen zillion old white guys.  "Diversity" is not the same thing as a representative government*, in short, and it's a representative government that I think we want.  "Diversity" could provide that, of course, but it also offers a loop-hole for those who don't want a representative government etc..

Fourth, I find the concept of religious rights or religious freedom interesting because it can clash with other types of rights, given that religious rights only crop up in a society with more than one flavor (or perhaps intensity) of religion.  One crucial question is naturally to what extent religious rights infringe on the rights of those who don't share the same religion.  This article addresses some of those issues. 

But very few articles analyze how women's rights and religious rights may conflict on a much deeper level, if the religion specifies women's roles as inferior and secondary and if survival after death is taught to depend on the internalization of those teachings.  That puts the believing woman into an impossible Catch-22 position when it comes to choosing between her religion and her human worth. 

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*Representative in terms of population group sizes, with certain basic guarantees and possibly positive discrimination to reassure that group such as Native Americans have representation, too.

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Random Writing Post. Can Be Ignored.

This is necessary because I took two days off from the computer and its simulacrum of the real world.  But that's a post for a different day when the gears in my brain are better oiled.  I'm feeling more and more that I pretend-live on the net and that my real life isn't saved and set aside for that, to be enjoyed later.  Must consider.

In any case, the last two days I spent at the seaside.  Wonderful view of the Mother Ocean, making me feel tiny tiny and unimportant, yet quite safe.  The world is OK, even if the human race disappears which might be an improvement, from the ocean's point of view.

I watched a family of groundhogs and they came by to check me out.  An interesting inter-species moment.  A worried look from the groundhog (waddling quickly past after turning its head to gawk at me), a worried look from me until I figured out what animal this was and that it most likely wasn't rabid but just sorta tame.  Or it had tamed me or whatever.

To return to the topic of that first paragraph:  I took the weekend off because of how my return from the Finnish vacation struck me:  The Internet (Twitter, blogs, articles and so on) pulled me hither and pushed me yonder and made my brain feel like I had been twirled around for an hour.  I would follow a thread of thought and find it disintegrate into hundreds of strands which would then get entangled with each other and produce a knot impossible to tease apart.  I would try to follow some other thread of thought and end up with the same dilemma.  Where is my place here?  Do I have any useful function left?

I don't know, and neither does the groundhog.  Though it likes lawnmowers which make its dinner easier to reach.

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The Bunny Rabbit Theory of Male Advantage And Other Wild Stories

This has been a fun week in the sorta-essentialist camp of gender stories. 

Sit back and relax, because you are going to be fed lots of very serious theory about why women have the roles they do and why men have the roles they do, at least traditionally speaking.  Very Serious Theory, Coming After Decades of Study.

First, here's the reason why most programmers are men in the US:

Now, I'm sure there is sexism, probably a lot of sexism. But I also think there's something about programming that makes many women not want to do it. Here's a theory why that might be. 

Programming is a very modal activity. To be any good at it you have to focus. And be very patient. I imagine it's a lot like sitting in a blind waiting for a rabbit to show up so you can grab it and bring it home for dinner. 

There is specialization in our species. It seems pretty clear that programming as it exists today is a mostly male thing. Which also raises the obvious question that perhaps we can make it so that it can better-use the abilities of the other half of our species?

To give the author, Dave Winer, credit, he decided to strike out that theory part.  But I still like that "theory!"  It's a lot like the theories I might get about, say,  opera (on which I know nothing) after a mug or two of divine mead, while chatting to my demon opera friends.  It shares with them the lack of information, the lack of any deep thinking and a certain lack of respect towards the possibly-more-knowledgeable audience.

Beautiful. 

It's also based on evolutionary psychology, the idea that squatting silently, waiting for the bunny to put its shy head out of the hole, is what prehistoric guys did, all day long, most days.  Or at least long enough to develop an advantage over the kinds of guys who did other stuff, so that the programmer guys passed their genes on more than the non-programmer guys.  And the programmer genes were passed on only in the male line and so on.

It's a possible theory, naturally, given our inability to learn anything about the life of ancient bunny rabbits or their enemies.

But it skips merrily over various other more proximal causes, including the fact that computers, in general, have become coded more male fairly recently.  It also skips over the fact that things such as sitting silently knitting etc. have some similarities to programming, too.

And it does the usual thing where something like a connection between hunting and being male can be used in any which way, depending on what one wishes to support.  So that usually hunting is assumed to be more vigorous, more ranging, more amenable to teach guys map-reading and three-dimensional mental rotation etc.  But it can also be turned upside down like in this example, to explain why guys are better able to concentrate and sit quietly.

That's why I call this beautiful.  Though it makes me wonder why I bother studying any of this crap at all.

A second pretty story just came out at Slate.  It's  an answer offered  to this question:

Why Did Almost All Societies Believe that Women Were Inferior to Men?

The answer argues:

All modern societies evolved out of agrarian societies. Before the Industrial Revolution, the male endurance value and physical strength translated directly to political power. Men fought in wars, hunted beasts, erected buildings, and plowed fields PRECISELY because they possessed the physical stamina to do so at a far greater degree than females.

I'm a HUGE fan of saying, "History does not occur in a vacuum." Which is a fancy way of saying, "S*** throughout human history happens for VERY good reasons." Back before the Industrial Revolution, human fertility was the highest premium factor in existence. People lived to have babies, and babies were the most important thing men and women brought into the world. The female role in reproduction—shall we say—involves a lot more time, effort, and pain (and before recently, a hell of a lot of death). Every moment women spent pregnant (which was a LOT of time) was time that she would have been taken away from power-playing.

Bolds are mine, to point out the obvious contradiction between the question and the answer.

In any case, that the article doesn't really answer the question.  It's perfectly possible to imagine an early society where the ability of women to make babies (what with human fertility being the "highest premium factor") would have been worshipped to such an extent that they would have been given a lot of power in the society.  In short, it's not the presumed gender roles that explain why women would be regarded as inferior.

Those presumed gender roles in the article are probably also incorrect, because they simplify women's role into just some sort of queen-bee-egg-laying-activity. 

Women not only cooked, wove and made pottery but also  farmed, cultivated gardens, probably domesticated some animals and so on.  Or at least there's a good case to argue that this was the case.  And pregnancy doesn't turn a woman comatose in such a way that she cannot play power games.  Neither does breast-feeding or any of the other stuff related to bringing up children.

It's also hard to state how common pregnancy was in the prehistoric world.  The author of the piece I discuss, Dan Holliday, assumes that women were pregnant essentially most of their reproductive lives.  But some studies of more recent nomadic tribes suggest that the number of children born per woman isn't that high, given prolonged breast-feeding, say.

It could be that the calculus changed with agriculture, but that's an assumption, not actual evidence.  One study from the medieval Paris found that the average number of children among lower class families wasn't that high then, mostly because the poorer people got married at older ages. -- I'm not arguing that data so old can be used for evidence.  But the point I wish to make is that we can't just assume some meta-trends in history without questioning their veracity.

My guess is that the piece is really about pointing out that it's not current men's fault what happened in the past and, in any case, women then liked it well enough. Or at least those who didn't like it didn't get their voices heard very easily (with the possible exception of a few rare examples such as the Wife of Bath in Canterbury Tales).  And of course it isn't current men's fault what happened in the distant past, just as it isn't my fault, either.  Or yours.

But that's no excuse for off-the-cuff stories about the meta-history of gender.

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Speed Blogging Thursday, August 22 20013. On Heroism, Internet Hate, What I Don't Write About And Why.

This is a great story about a woman who prevented a massacre.  I think that took real courage and skill, all without a gun.

More on the question of hate on the Internets:  Huffington Post is to stop anonymous commenting because of the trolling.  Not sure how that can be guaranteed, but in any case my problems with comments are not their anonymity but the emotional use of comments to express nothing but hate.

A somewhat different take on Internet hate, when it comes to hating on women, is given by this article.

It talks about the possible extra fee on women who would participate and also hints at one possible desire behind some of the trolling:  To get certain types of women to shut up, pretty much.

In my opinion the scarcity of women editors on Wikipedia may be linked to something similar, by the way, because the system allows for concentrated attacks on any posts, and groups of editors may pick posts put up by female editors for those attacks.  So women need to not only edit but also defend their work  more stringently.  That would be an extra user fee.   But that's speculation right now, based on some anecdotal stories I've heard.

In Massachusetts, a rapist is playing games in the family court.

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There are many extremely important stories I don't write about at all.  My silence doesn't mean that the stories are of no interest to me, just that I have nothing worthwhile to say about them that others wouldn't cover much better.

Sadly, many of those stories, such as climate change and the nuclear catastrophe in Japan appear not to be amenable to political and/or technical solutions.  Or at least the will to do something decisive enough is not there, even if the knowledge of what to do might be.  And often that knowledge is absent, too.  The same applies to some extent to Syria and Egypt and what is going on in those countries.  I can't think of any short-term solutions to the pain and suffering, given the history and current power structures.

Then there are stories like this one *(warning:  the link in the linked story leads to  sick stuff on prison sexual abuse).  Mostly I avoid linking to stories which seem to be created as click-magnets: the more extreme the arguments, the better.  But in this case many of the arguments sound similar to arguments made about women and rape and noting the similarities can be useful.

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*Note added later:  The Daily Beast is doing post-publication editing on this piece, so it's no longer the same as what I read.

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Speed Blogging 8/21/2013. Or How We Work: The Death of the Forty-Hour Workweek, Flex-Time not for Single Women and the Gender Wage Gap Among Kids

This sad story deserves much more than a note in a speed list.  I've written a little before about the slow death of the forty-hour week, the way working much, much longer is regarded as ethical and important and AOK, the way we ignore the fall of productivity with fatigue and the fact that nobody working like that really can be said to have a family. 

That all this is "voluntary" (though perhaps the Roman gladiators also volunteered) and trickling down from the top income classes makes the analysis trickier but not impossible.  An odd sort of capitalist work ethic. 

Two studies (neither of which I have read) suggest that women are less likely to be given flex-time at work than men, and that this applies especially to young single women.  Why that might be the case (if the studies are done well) is worth thinking about.  The linked article suggests a few reasons.

On the gender wage gap among little children.  Once again, I have not checked the studies the article mentions, but the results seem intuitive:  Traditional boys' jobs pay more than traditional girls' jobs (and that is a bit surprising, given that babysitting might be the most important of these jobs in some deeper sense and it's a traditional girls' job).   I think market analysis breaks down here (as it mostly does, outside real marketplaces).

Soraya points out that girls' traditional jobs are hidden inside the house, boys' traditional jobs are outside.  To that I'd like to add that the girls' traditional jobs actually take many more weekly hours, because dusting, folding, doing the dishes, sweeping etc. must be done quite frequently, at least when compared to cutting the grass and taking the trash out (among the traditional boys' jobs).

If I had to make a guess about what's going on I'd add to the obvious reasons (gender roles, duh) the fact that the jobs were much more equal on a traditional farm with animals and many outside chores, only some of which (such as feeding the chickens?) were allocated to girls.  The shift from farms to other occupations meant that the boys' jobs shrunk but the girls' jobs didn't, at least not to the same extent.

And just for fun:  On being an introvert.

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Added later:  This post should not be interpreted as an overall review of "how we work."  It doesn't cover what's happening in the lowest-paid jobs in this country or the lack of proper vacations or the increasing shift towards more and more employer rights and fewer and fewer worker rights.  The title is just a short-hand cover for some of the things that caught my eye in the last day or so.

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Oh Boy! This Is Fun. The Catch-22 Of Being Janet Yellen.

This new WaPo article on why Janet Yellen is probably not the president's choice for the next chair of the Federal Reserve is fantastic!  It's hilarious!  It's a perfect example of the Catch-22 that Yellen must struggle under.

Take the argument that Yellen is not a team player and what's needed for the chair of the Federal Reserve is a team player:

Yellen has a perfectly solid relationship with Bernanke, as best as I can tell, but she’s more of her own thinker within the institution. She has spent her time as vice chairwoman urging Bernanke and her other fellow policymakers to shift policy to try to do more to combat unemployment, and thinking through ways to do just that. She even had one economist who functioned for a time as something of a de facto chief of staff, Andrew Levin. And people dealing with her within the Fed have viewed her not so much as Bernanke’s emissary but as her own intellectual force within the organization.

So what does that have to do with how Obama’s advisers might view her? They are big on the team player concept, people diving in together to sort through the hard and messy challenges they face.

Mmm.  By inference, then, Larry Summers, the apparent candidate for the chair, IS a team player.  But if you dig back in the murky archives of time, you come across comments like these:

What has all this to do with Larry Summers as a potential Secretary of the Treasury in the Obama administration? It depends on how much of the job involves what are usually called “people skills,” the skills that bring men and women of diverse views together in a spirit of optimism and co-operation (two words Obama has often invoked). A cabinet secretary must interact with other secretaries, with the White House staff, with the vice president, with congressional committees, with leaders of industry, with the representatives of other sovereign states and with the media.
It is not a question of intelligence and competence -– everyone agrees that Summers is very smart and very accomplished as an economist; it is a question of tact, patience, poise, self-restraint, deference, courtesy and other interpersonal virtues. Little that he did as president of Harvard suggests that Summers possesses these virtues.

And like these:

In the first world, you're going to read a lot of stories about how Larry Summers was a meanie who rendered the economic team dysfunctional and impeded the Obama administration's efforts to revive the economy. In the other, you're going to read a lot of stories about how the famously prickly Larry Summers managed to keep his ego in check and leverage his considerable brilliance to help the Obama administration save the American economy. 

So Janet Yellen is looking in from the outside, as the WaPo article states, while Summers is inside, manically participating in everything!  Which reminds me of the role of the outsider in all sorts of groups.

But never mind, what the situation truly needs is a person who doesn't prepare, who isn't meticulous but who just jumps in:

A second, and related, reason that Yellen’s leadership style isn’t a great mesh with the Obamaites is also one of her strengths. She is always meticulously prepared, a careful and systematic thinker who chooses her words carefully. In a Fed policy committee meeting or a gathering of international central bankers, she typically scripts herself in advance and reads those prepared comments.
She is methodical, not manic. And the prevailing style of the White House insiders advising on the decision leans a bit more toward manic. Geithner, for example, jumps from meeting to meeting, from hearing to phone call, without so much as a set of talking points to work from. The question is how Yellin’s cautious approach would work when she is dealing with the full panoply of issues that a Fed chair must grapple with.

But if Yellen was manic, unprepared and willing to jump about like a rabbit, what would her flaws be then?

That's why I see all this as a Catch-22 case for poor Janet.  She is damned if she does, damned if she doesn't, and that's because both of these arguments can be built to be whatever they need to be afterwards, once the choice already is for Larry Summers. 

Just find whatever he has and she does not,  as the thing that is needed!  Hence we come up with the argument that it's bad to be prepared and meticulous, while running the Federal Reserve!  Or that it's bad to be independent, in a position for which independence is usually a desired characteristic.

Atrios titles his post on this topic as "Bros B4 Hoes," and that's one possible take on the topic.  It's not the only possible one, because a similar outcome could be reached when one camp defends its homeboy against the homeboy of the other camp.  Still, given the general reputation of Summers, defending him against Yellen also produces a kind of Catch-22 when it comes to questions of gender.

A general note:  This post is not about which candidate actually might be better at the job.  It's about the conversations we have about them.

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What To Read Today

This post on Harriet Tubman and what happened recently about her memory.

This article on building a new racial justice movement.

The ghost rapes of Bolivia.  On sexual abuse among a Mennonite community in Bolivia.  For me the crucial point of this is that when the system of justice is based on the rule of the fathers it will not serve the victims.

For more on the impact of justice systems, in Malawi.

Does lead in gasoline affect violent crime rates?  It's a hypothesis worth studying in more detail.

Head Start programs as the proverbial sacrifice of sequestration-mandated cuts.

And a story about a woman inventor.

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What Did You Read On The Beach?

Or what are you planning to read if you haven't had your vacation yet?  Perhaps I should ask some of you what you would read if you ever had time off for it.  Sigh.

This is supposed to be a jolly and light-footed post.  That could describe most of my summer reading, except that it doesn't.  For instance, I read the Detective Novel With The Most Miserable Atmosphere Evah, which is Henning Manckell's  The Troubled Man.  If your most fervent desire in life is to get terminally depressed over looming  old age (and it will loom for all of us lucky enough), have a nice long wallow in that book.

While still on the Nordic gloomy side, Camilla Läckberg's The Stonecutter is a little less depressive.  It's also a good mystery.

I also re-read Martial's Epigrams.  It's hard to tell if his thinking was advanced for 80 C.E. or so.  That was an era when Romans had slaves and had the right to treat them as they wished.  Women's rights were severely limited and social class differences were huge.

But there are aspects of his writings which sound utterly modern to me.  That's not the case with the somewhat later New Testament, for instance.  I'm not sure what that might mean if anything.

At places Martial's more obscene epigrams sound like lot of the stuff on today's  Internet, by the way.

I also read a few history books, including a book about women during Renaissance and stuff about World War II.

The hotchpotch aspect of this list is because I didn't choose these books or buy them but read whatever happened to be available wherever I happened to be at some particular need-to-read time.

The stilted writing is because I seem to have aimed at the proverbial what-I-did-during-my-summer-vacation children's essay.

So.

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Crushed By the Costs of Daycare. And Who Is To Pay Them?

The title of a post on the New York Times Opinionator blog.  It's a good post, pointing out the great difficulty of finding and affording good-quality daycare.  It even talks about how this is a greater problem for poorer families.

But as Joan Walsh points out on the twitter, the story screws up by viewing daycare costs as something that one must deduct from the mother's salary in two-parent households.

Well, it's not really the story which screws that one up, it's us, the society, when we view the dilemma as having two solutions which are 1)  a stay-at-home-mother or 2) daycare.  Because these are the only visible options, the costs of daycare obviously should be compared to the mother's potential salary.

That makes some narrow logical sense if the mother earns less than the father.  But in at least one of the cases in the post the father earns less.  Yet even there the focus is on the mother:

Child care is a towering expense for parents like Carla Bellamy, a professor of anthropology at Baruch College in Manhattan who holds a Ph.D. from Columbia, earns $74,000 a year and lives with her husband and their two children, a newborn and a 4-year-old. Her husband is a composer and the executive director of a music organization. Only 9 percent of women in the work force make $75,000 or more, so Professor Bellamy is relatively privileged.
But even with a combined household income of $110,000, she and her husband struggle to afford day care. (It was a story I heard echoed when I spoke with other female professors, who sometimes took sick days even when they were healthy so they could stay home and not have to pay for baby sitters.) “Our entire disposable income goes to child care,” Professor Bellamy, 41, says. “It’s not a tragic story, but is tiring and tiresome. I have a career, I work really hard, and yet I get no break.”

Note that Mr. Bellamy's husband seems to earn about half of what she does, based on these figures.

And no, I'm not suggesting that Mr. Bellamy should clearly become a stay-at-home-father or anything of the sort, just pointing out that as long as we see daycare as one of the many so-called women's problems the solutions are going to be sought in that same narrow field.

Incidentally, even in the case where the lower-earning spouse is considering staying at home as the option to daycare, its costs should not just be deducted from her or his hypothetical paycheck when the financial consequences are judged.

This is because the decision to take time off from the labor force will have further financial repercussions.  The partner who takes the time off will earn less later and will end up with a smaller retirement income.  Thus, even in such narrow calculations the costs of daycare should be assessed within those lifetime consequences.

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Lettuce Prey

A fun religious post for you all!  I once considered Lettuce Prey as my Internet handle but decided against it.  Here it can stand for one of the many interesting religious transformations which exist when it comes to the beliefs some hold.

Take pastor Steven  L Anderson of the Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona.  The principles of his church are listed on the church website and include:

We believe that the King James Bible is the word of God without error. 

We believe that life begins at conception (fertilization) and reject all forms of abortion including surgical abortion, "morning-after" pills, IVF (In Vitro Fertilization), birth control pills, and all other processes that end life after conception.

We believe that homosexuality is a sin and an abomination which God punishes with the death penalty.
We oppose worldliness, modernism, formalism, and liberalism.

Sounds like a fun place.  I love the first of the rules, about the King James Bible being God's word without error, given that it is a translation (of other translations, probably).   The church also believes that God punishes homosexuality with a death penalty and that birth control pills are abortifacients and so on.

But none of that is why I write about our nice pastor Anderson.  The reason for that has to do with his advice on how to bring up daughters in his creed,  to keep them virginal until marriage.  The solution is to lock them up, pretty much.  Or, as Anderson states, after telling his congregation that he will teach his sons to avoid fornication:

I say I’ll teach that unto my sons and you say, well, aren’t you gonna teach that to your daughters? 

I’m gonna tell you this: It’s not gonna be humanly possible for anyone to commit fornication with my daughters. [Laughter] And you know what? You’re laughing but I’m not kidding… You say, what about when they go get a job? Well, they’re not going to get a job. Why would my daughters go get a job? What do they need a job for? You know what, I’m gonna pay for them, I’m gonna pay their bills. And you know what? When I’m done paying for them, their husband’s gonna pay for them. 

And I hope that he doesn’t fail in his responsibility to provide and send them off to work or something, but you know what, at that point, it’s none of my business. At that point, it’s not my responsibility. But you know what? When I pass off my daughters unto their husband, I’m gonna be able to guarantee that they’re a virgin because I’m gonna make it to where it’s not even humanly possible. Because I’m not gonna have them out gallivanting around town. I’m not gonna have them going off to work, and going out with all these people…

The bolding is in the original.

But the really thrilling sentence is the one which begins the third paragraph in that quote:

And I hope that he doesn’t fail in his responsibility to provide and send them off to work or something, but you know what, at that point, it’s none of my business.

It's a perfect circle.  First daddy decided about his daughters and then the hubby decides about his wife.  Reminds me of some other extreme types of right-wing religions. 

First daddy will decide how the daughters are brought up (dependent, perhaps without marketable skills) and then hubby will decide how the wife lives (perhaps he makes her go out to work, should he choose to do so). And considering that having just one breadwinner can be very difficult in the US, pastor Anderson's views are also more likely to place his daughters in tougher financial circumstances.

The justification for all this is in pastor Anderson's choices about how to interpret the Bible.  The King James version is God's word without error, but pastor Anderson's views also matter.  Because the Bible doesn't actually say that women should be housewives, but Anderson decides that it does:

And you say, well why the double standard? Um, ’cause everything in the Bible’s a double standard?! ‘Cause I’m not a feminist?! ‘Cause men and women are different? ‘Cause my sons are gonna be taught to be independent. My daughters are gonna be taught not to be independent. [Fake crying noises] My sons are gonna be taught to go out and work hard and make a living! My daughters are gonna be taught to be a homemaker, okay? You don’t like that? Well, whatever, that’s what the Bible teaches…

Bolds are in the original.

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A Different Angle to the Role of Newspaper Comments on the Net

Than in my previous post, both because I put that one out while quite ill and because this article is interesting.  It doesn't change my basic opinions on the issue (which is that moderating is a necessity, for tone and hatred), but it adds an important nuance to it.  Here's what Tim Dunlop writes at Comment Is Free, after condemning abusive comments and e-mails in general:

To put it plainly, I have nothing but contempt for those who engage in this sort of behaviour, and am happy to see them pursued and exposed. But I am also a fan of online discussion more generally, whether it be on social media, on blogs, or in the comments section under stories in the mainstream media. 

Such interactions have significantly changed the nature of the media environment, giving voice to sections of the community who have never before been able to contribute. These developments are not the democratic panacea cyber utopians sometimes pretend they are, but they are a vast improvement over the top-down media models of the past, where the audience was relegated to the role of passive consumer. We need to be careful not to let this abuse discourage us from pursuing online interactions in a way that enhances democratic participation.

Dunlop then points out that worrying about trolls can be used to squash access by those the editors don't like and that attempts to get rid of Internet anonymity are misguided:

It is very easy for those with the institutional backing of, say, a political party, a trade union or a newspaper to demand that everyone use their own name when entering online discussions, but it isn’t that simple. Without that sort of institutional support, and without the experience of involvement in public discussion, many ordinary people feel vulnerable – anonymity is the one tool they have to level the power differential.

The key terms in Dunlop's text are "enhances democratic participation."  It's not clear to me what he means by this, about trolling:

The word once had quite a specialised meaning limited to a particular sort of disruptive behaviour, but it has now become a catch-all term to describe any behaviour that some journalists and editors deem inappropriate. Their responses to what they call “trolling” often seem less about combating abuse than reasserting their role as gatekeeper, to restore to themselves the right to decide who gets to speak in public and who doesn’t. It is what US academic Susan Herbst calls “the strategic use of civility”.

I'm going to assume that he means moderating comments threads.  That might not be what Dunlop means by the gate-keeping activity.  Still, because I want to talk about moderating anyway I'll go with that:

I've surfed the net long enough to deserve Surfer Pension, and I'm pretty certain that not-moderated comment threads can, over time, lead to the very opposite of "enhanced democratic participation."   I can think of examples where people with the opposite political views set up home in the comments thread of a political publication (the Nation, a few years ago, for one case) and consequently made posting there a gantlet run for most other people.

I can also think of examples where the comments on some site have degenerated into anyone's worst nightmare, possibly through the process of some people essentially bullying all who cannot take extreme hatred or prejudice etc. away from the site.

Then there's the hate group aspect of commenting:  A call seems to go out for commentators of a particular flavor to discuss certain articles, and when those commentators use the language of hate those who belong to the hated group have a higher commenting fee to pay to participate:  They must be willing to take verbal abuse.  The way women are often treated* in the comments of a feminist article, say, is a good example of this.  And to have a higher entrance fee for some commentators may not be terribly democracy-enhancing.

Thus, while I agree that comments can have a democracy-enhancing effect, that effect will not be present when the discussion is not moderated.  The parable to that might be to remove all rules about how to carry out elections and to tell people just to run for the ballot boxes, elbow each other away, and tuck as many ballot tickets as possible in the boxes.  No other rules.  If you wish, you  can keep others from getting to the ballot boxes, too, and you can gang together to accomplish that.

Maybe that is too strong.  But my point is that anarchy is not the same as democracy.  And yes, I understand that moderating and other forms of regulation can work to stifle real democracy.   So does not moderating at all.

That's why I think moderating for hate is crucial.  And yeah, I get how difficult that could be, without stifling the argument embedded in that hate.  But if certain types of hateful comments are banned the participants might learn how to make their point in a more civil manner.   You think?


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*I get called interesting things in comments threads, by the way.  I think "a foaming c**t" is the most fun (sadly, not true, though I think having that ability would be great). 

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On What Internet Comments Might Achieve in Science Stories

As per one study:

A new obstacle to scientific literacy may be emerging, according to a paper in the journal Science by two University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers.
The new study reports that not only are just 12% of Americans turning to newspaper and magazine websites for science news, but when they do they may be influenced as much by the comments at the end of the story as they are by the report itself.
In an experiment mentioned in the Science paper and soon to be published elsewhere in greater detail, about 2,000 people were asked to read a balanced news report about nanotechnology followed by a group of invented comments. All saw the same report but some read a group of comments that were uncivil, including name-calling. Others saw more civil comments.
"Disturbingly, readers' interpretations of potential risks associated with the technology described in the news article differed significantly depending only on the tone of the manipulated reader comments posted with the story," wrote authors Dominique Brossard and Dietram A. Scheufele.
"In other words, just the tone of the comments . . . can significantly alter how audiences think about the technology itself."

I haven't looked at the study itself.  But if its results hold something similar might apply to other topics than science.  For example, angry MRA comments on anything that is written on women.  Or pick your topic, pretty much, because angry comments are the flavor of the day on the many and varied Internets.

So the deeper question (assuming, once again, that the above study is OK in execution) is what the benefits of having non-moderated comments are supposed to be.

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From The Duh Files: Women who use ‘pull out’ birth control method at greater risk of unintended pregnancy

The link is here.  The "duh" doesn't mean that the topic isn't worth studying, by the way.  What if the study had found the reverse?  Then it would be plastered over everything! 

Thus, if we are going to want all research properly discussed, it's really important to also cover the studies which support the null hypothesis (a fancy way of saying that the new treatment was no better, that nothing exciting was established and so on).

So I'm glad to see the results, however "duh" they are, published in the popular media.

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Today's Weird Dream

This is one of the costs that come from writing on the topics I do, I guess:  My unconsciousness giving me this dream instead of one ones about flying airplanes just above people's heads:

I'm standing as accused in a court.  I'm not quite sure what the jury consists of, but perhaps of angels or of devils.  I'm asked this question:

If you could give the world five minutes of complete peace by relinquishing both your life and any hope of a life-after-death,  would you do it?  Four minutes?  Three minutes?....

Probably should add that this was  a fever dream.  Sorta how prophets are created?

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Speed Blogging August 13, 2013. From Moscow Olympics via Iran, Internet Harassment to Left-Handedness.

I promise that not all my future posts will be of this sort. 

First, the question about Moscow Olympics and the Russian anti-gay laws.  There's much to be said about all this, and better-informed people have done so.  The small bit I wanted to add is that different countries can indeed have different average public sentiments about human rights, the proper place of women or LGTB and different views about race and racism. 

I know that sounds obvious but the political treatment of those differences in the US can be quite tricky, what with religion and culture and economics entering the fray.  When do we refrain from criticizing the traditions or views of another culture or country and when do we criticize them?  What determines the difference?  I struggle with this myself. 

Second,  this is an informative article on the question of Internet harassment and its possible relationship to free speech, especially when the harassment is gender-based.

Third, Iran's new president, Hassan Rouhani,  nominates a female vice president, Elham Aminzadeh.  Assuming that the nomination will be approved, she will serve as the Vice President for Legal Affairs.  I don't know how meaningful this nomination is, as a gauge of Rouhani's view on women's proper place.

Fourth, this study about white Californians' reactions to various ways of determining who gets into college is interesting.  I haven't looked at the study in any detail, however.  But it's probably true that we humans are often good at thinking that fairness is the same as the likely success of people not unlike ourselves.  The wider point is, of course, that there is no one perfectly objective way of deciding who gets into college.   Meritocracy, completely untainted by any other consideration, is probably impossible, not to mention the difficulty of defining by what we mean by it.  And so on

Finally, today is the international day of the left-handed. 

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Speed Blogging, Monday August 12, 20013: On Media, Fracking, Gender and Death Panels.

Today's funny cartoon.  As you may note, I'm still frustrated about the collapsed anthill aspect of public debate.

But it's better than the alternative, which appears to be one future possibility:  A world where a few very rich men decide what we are to learn, what news we will get and what facts we will not obtain.  I hope that is a science-fiction nightmare and not the actual world in a few generations.  Let's keep it that way, please.

Fracking.  I don't know enough of it to write about its desirability in general (though I doubt mother nature likes it much), but this example highlights the blindness of free marketeers and the profit motive when it comes to externalities.  Things are interconnected.  We live in a giant web, and someone cannot just go and madly snip all threads in one corner, expecting nothing else to be affected.

Or put in other ways, those in power should use that round ball thing which serves to keep their ears apart for something more than that.  And no, it's not just a hatstand, either.

Cordelia Fine has put together some criticisms about the popular culture fad of viewing our brains as pink or blue.

Finally,  death panels.  For the innocent and serene among us, death panels (by Democrats)  are part of the mythology of the American political right, to be filed under the same heading as the arguments that Barack Obama is not a legitimate president because he supposedly was born abroad (Hawaii, though it's not abroad) or that Obama is a communist (rather than a politer version of most former Republican presidents) and so on.  The weird nightmarish ideas about what a country run by Democrats might look like.

The idea behind the death panels is a simple one:  The conservatives argue that the new healthcare system will have panels which decide who will die.  Paul Krugman wrote about a recent example of this argument.

The argument is deliciously muddled!  It's horrid to limit Medicaid spending!  But we MUST limit Medicaid spending.  The latter is what the Republicans usually do.  So they are for death panels, except when they are against them.

That whole idea deserves a much longer post, but the gist of it is that care will always be "rationed" by something, either by price or by more direct restrictions on access.  Every day the health care markets "ration" care, both because insurers refuse coverage for something or because the patients or their families no longer have enough funds to cover care out-of-pocket.  Inability to pay for care can also be a death panel.   Or at least an odd sort of triage.

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Speed Blogging August 9, 2013. On Acid Attacks, Climate Change, US Politics and the Financial Markets. Sorta.

Acid attacks tend to have female victims.  The numbers quoted in this article suggest that 75-80% of the victims are female. 

Why that is the case might be worth thinking about.  I'm not convinced with the argument made  by a surgeon in the article that the aim is to destroy someone's identity alone, because then it would have larger numbers of male victims.  My guess is that the aim is to destroy the public existence of the person or to destroy what the attacker feels is most important in women:  their looks.

Crooks and Liars writes about the seniors leaving the Republican Party.  Seems fascinating, though I have not looked into the data at all.  Also on their site, a story about the starved polar bear, perhaps as a cause of global climate change.  Warning:  the link leads to a picture.

This is a weird story about a Russian man writing in his own amendments to a credit card agreement.  It's kinda funny, except that you can guess who will ultimately pay the costs of it.   Or would pay the costs in the US.  I don't know if Russia is different, but the more we have rich oligarchies ruling the world the less likely it is that the members of those same oligarchies will bear the costs of much anything.  Says she, bitterly.

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Fox and Friends on Feminism As Unnecessary

In case you like a bitter laugh to complete your day:


In that video Stossel tells us that there is nothing that remains undone for feminism.  Indeed, the clip begins by showing girls playing princess, in a caring way, and boys turning triangles into guns to play war.

Now that we have shown clearly and decisively that the sexes ARE different, the rest of the piece argues why equality already exists.   And that we shouldn't try for it because the sexes ARE different.

We are fed a list of myths, some of which Stossel convincingly proves false by not having any economics training or any understanding about how labor markets work, some of which he proves false by determining that they are false based on the outcomes.  For an example of the latter, public schools discriminate against boys because fewer boys than girls go to college.  Yet a similar difference, women earning less, on average, is interpreted as not discriminatory at all.

In other words, different outcomes are sometimes quite fear and natural (women earning less) and sometimes discriminatory (boys not going to college as often).

Then there's the myth about Title IX.  Stossel argues that boys are keener to do college sports than girls and that this means we should abolish Title IX (which, by the way, bans sex discrimination in higher education in academics as well) but continue funding an activity which is not part of academics and only really liked by one gender.

As a conclusion, then, difference are natural when they seem to benefit men, unnatural when they seem to benefit women.  Got it?

I have written on much of Stossel's supposed myths list many times, on much higher level of analysis, so I won't repeat myself here.  But I'd like to pick just one of his comments for closer scrutiny:

Doocy and Stossel first attempted to tackle the gender pay gap. While admitting that it is true women are paid 77 cents for each dollar men make, Stossel claimed the discrepancy is because, "we don't work the same jobs." The reason, according to him, is that "women have their priorities in order. They often choose jobs that are less time-consuming, not so far away, and not as dangerous." He concluded that if a true pay gap existed, the market would have sorted it out.

On the market sorting the gap out:  He refers to one very simplistic economic theory there, and more realistic theories (which add uncertainty, lack of information, asymmetric information and possible co-worker and customer biases into the model as well as imperfect market conditions) do not prove that the market would have "sorted it out."  Note, also, that if markets sort stuff out so efficiently the collapse of the housing and financial markets should make Mr. Stossel eat his tie.

On women "choosing" jobs which are less time-consuming, not so far away, and not as dangerous:  First, this is not really "choice," in the sense of you choosing coffee and me choosing tea.  If women are responsible for childcare, laundry, cleaning and grocery shopping at home they will find working longer hours harder than otherwise completely identical men do.   Whether women tend to work closer to their homes is something I have never seen studied, but if that is the case the reason for it is also likely to be in the need to be able to pick up the kids from daycare and then get the food for the evening dinner and to pick up the dry-cleaning etc.

Also, the "choices" men and women make are not independent of each other.  A full-time breadwinner helps a stay-at-home spouse to stay at home, the latter helps the former to focus on career.  When both spouses work the division of household chores may not fall equally.  One solution to the disagreements this might cause is for the lower-paid spouse to cut back on her or his hours.

Second, dangerous jobs are not common enough to explain average earnings differences between men and women, and most of the highest-paying male-dominated jobs are not dangerous.  Some female-dominated jobs (prostitution) are very dangerous.

And how dangerous a job is often depends on one's gender.  Consider driving a taxi in a large urban area.  Women can do that job but are uncommon among taxi drivers.  I believe that this is mostly because a woman driving a taxicab late at night faces higher risks than a man.  Both can be robbed, mugged or killed but she can also be raped and abducted for that purpose, and she is much more likely to face sexual harassment from her customers.  In short, we need to view the concept of "danger" without gender-blinders on.

Third, studies do NOT show that once we DECIDE the gender differences in earning are just by choice, all differences vanish in a mildly sour-smelling puff of bad air.  The studies that come up with that conclusion do not control for all relevant variables, look at only some sub-groups, such as young adults and fail to deal with the problem that men and women being in different kinds of jobs, on average, does NOT PROVE that those different types of jobs were picked without any pressure or outside discrimination or the impact of traditional gender expectations and so on.  Indeed, the easiest way to discriminate against some member of a defined group is to keep that person in a job which cannot be easily compared with the jobs people of other groups hold.  For example, a bigot might not promote women or members of a minority etc, mostly because she or he truly believes that those workers are not as good or that they are more likely to quit or more likely to take time off.

It's much, much more complicated than Mr. Stossel wants us to believe.

It is still true that our job expectations are gendered.  Jobs which are coded as suitable for women tend to be lower-paying and sometimes (but not always or even usually) offer greater flexibility for childcare duties. 

There's a sense in which deciding on one's job on the basis of gendered expectations IS a choice.  If a young man believes or anticipates that he is going to be responsible for supporting a family financially one day, he is less likely to choose education which doesn't lead to well-paid jobs.  In reverse, if a young woman believes or anticipates that she is going to be responsible for all childcare one day, she might be less likely to choose education which leads to  well-paying but rigidly defined and time-intensive jobs.*  Once these early choices are made, they, in turn, will affect future choices.

I don't know.  I get hot-and-bothered on people telling untruths or telling their own opinions as truths.  Only us goddesses are allowed to do the latter and nobody is allowed to do the first.
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*There are also obvious rewards for both of the traditional paths.  Having a home-team to take care of everything else is great for an ambitious and career-directed person, having a full-time source of funding is great if it allows for a less hectic space, more time with one's children and perhaps even time for doing something one wants to do but can't get paid for.  At the same time, the negative consequences of these choices are real and painful. My interest in this is ultimately linked to the question which roles have which societal consequences, how the society changes or adapts or does not, and what this all means in fields such as misogynistic views about women's abilities to lead, the dependence of women on possibly dysfunctional family setups and also what fathers lose when their traditional roles in the family are to be the wallet or the guy with the whip.

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More Media Quicksand: The "Opt-Out Revolution" Cancelled?

This bit of quicksand has to do with my frustration with so much of the debate on various political issues including feminism.  The more sand someone brings into the debate in that blue or pink plastic pail, the more we all sink.

The point is that the debates don't increase clarity after a point and if they continue long enough they  increase confusion.  That's partly because people make emotional arguments while insisting that they are not emotional arguments.

That needs clarifying (Echidne sitting on the beach shifting sand).  I don't mean that emotional arguments don't have a place, that who-wins-and-who-loses isn't important.  All those are crucial aspects of many debates.  But the debates I follow are mostly tugs-of-war, not attempts to find out what happened and why, and often the fight is about whose emotions matter the most.  Because that depends on the eye of the beholder the discussions get nowhere very fast.  Or rather, people get angry.

OK.  That was a bit quicksandish, too.  My thinking on this isn't clear.  I just noticed that I seemed more informed during my vacation than after I started following the Twitter and the blogs more intensely, and that's because of all the side roads the debates take and the way powerful personalities or strong guilt buttons etc. are employed in them.

The example I have for today isn't strictly on these topics but it shares some similarities.  It's a New York Times article titled  "The Opt-Out Generation Wants Back In," by Judith Warner.

The article is interesting, discussing several individual cases of highly educated women who stayed at home with children during some periods of the last decade or so.  Warner's points are nuanced, and she dexterously steps around the usual bad-mother/good-mother setup the media so loves.  She also avoids the usual treatment of the husbands/fathers as the neutral bystanders in these types of stories and she also points out that the whole opt-out conversation was about pretty rich couples.

So I feel bad that reading the piece made me angry.  Which it did, and the reasons are dry-and-boring and immensely important.

Here's a sample of those reasons:

First, nobody has really shown me the data which proved that there ever WAS such an opt-out revolution.  Or rather, some women have always opted out.  Did that number greatly increase during the era when the term "opt-out revolution" was coined?

This matters.  False trend stories about women are the bread-and-butter of popular media, and this has been the case for decades.  The most common zombie trends (probably dead ones but shuffling out of the graves at regular intervals, slobbering bodily fluids all over the magazine and newspaper pages) are to do with a) Women Returning Home After Realizing The Horrible Error Of Working For Money,  b) Educated Women Not Being Able To Find Husbands and c) The Death of Feminism.

Even during my lifetime those three have cycled in pretty reliably.  By the way, the reverse stories never seem to be in fashion.  Thus, during the era when women's labor market participation rates dramatically increased the magazines and newspapers did not write about Women Leaving Home fires For Employment, After Realizing What An Error They Had Earlier Made.  The stories may have asked who was minding those home fires, of course.

So the first reason for my anger is that the trend of women dropping out of labor force smells so very bad to me, without good evidence, that I look for the zombie parade.

Second, and related to the first point, discussing three or four individual cases does not make a trend. ANYTHING can be made to look like a trend if all we use is anecdotal evidence.  I'm sure that I could find three women who prefer to wear their clothes inside-out, if I search hard enough.  I could probably find some anecdotal evidence for any faux trend you can name.

Third, even this article fails to light the background of these highly educated couples and their "choices."  It doesn't say much anything about the lack of paternal leave in the US, it's pretty silent about the idea that fathers could also stay at home if one parent is necessary and it stays mum about the general assumption that Women Are Responsible For Childcare.

That keeps the problem clearly and precisely in the women's camp.  It's women who have to balance work and family, it's women who "choose" something, and so on.  That the society chooses not to help at all is invisible.

Fourth, Warner notes that the discussion is always about high-flyers and often about educated white women in the US.  That's an important criticism.  But in a bizarre way I'm not sure if we want this discussion about all women.  How are poor women going to defend themselves from the bad-mother accusations because they can't stay at home?

Or in other terms:  This is a true problem but there are false solutions to fixing it.  The solutions that would work are federally funded parental leave, subsidized daycare and more father involvement on all levels.

Fifth, and related to the fourth point, all the zombie trends are about women who are almost in a position to grab real power.  That's why the trends are about educated women, about women who have well-paid husbands and so on.  If those women can be controlled then controlling other women is much, much easier.  It's women-and-power and who-minds-the-kids which are the real building blocks of the zombie stories, and the reason for the popularity of these stories is real anxiety about powerful women and about the power over fertility and the future generations.

I guess my anger has to do with a certain kind of belittling of these issues which the faux trend stories create.  They also direct the conversation into those familiar mommy war channels:  Am I a bad mother for "choosing" one thing over the other?  Is my whole life wasted or wrong?  And so on.

Then we get lots of anger and lots of defenses for one choice or the other, without any of the underlying problems changing. And lots of pieces about how all this is totally up to the individual woman.  Which it is, of course, in one sense, if we stay within the frames of the picture.  But if we step back and see the picture and its frames and then the wall it hangs on and then the room it's in, well, the crucial take-home messages change.
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I want to stress that I don't think of Warner's article as part of the parade of zombies.  She gets several important points, including the frustration of many of the men with the traditional gender division of labor.  But I want to stretch everything much more.

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