Only in Texas?

The Google doesn't have a lot about this story, so you may wish to take that into account in judging it.  But the outline is this:

In 2009 a man, Ezekiel Gilbert,  contacts a woman working as an escort, Lenora Ivie Frago,  via Craigslist,  and gives her $150, in expectation of sexual services which are not forthcoming.  Rather, the escort leaves the man's house with the money.

He shoots her, paralyzing her. Ms Frago  dies several months later from the consequences of the shooting.   The case goes to court, and the jury acquits the man in her shooting death:

The verdict came after almost 11 hours of deliberations that stretched over two days. The trial began May 17 but had a long hiatus after a juror unexpectedly had to leave town for a funeral.
During closing arguments Tuesday, Gilbert's defense team conceded the shooting did occur but said the intent wasn't to kill. Gilbert's actions were justified, they argued, because he was trying to retrieve stolen property: the $150 he paid Frago. It became theft when she refused to have sex with him or give the money back, they said.
Gilbert testified earlier Tuesday that he had found Frago's escort ad on Craigslist and believed sex was included in her $150 fee. But instead, Frago walked around his apartment and after about 20 minutes left, saying she had to give the money to her driver, he said.
That driver, the defense contended, was Frago's pimp and her partner in the theft scheme.
The Texas law that allows people to use deadly force to recover property during a nighttime theft was put in place for “law-abiding” citizens, prosecutors Matt Lovell and Jessica Schulze countered. It's not intended for someone trying to force another person into an illegal act such as prostitution, they argued.

Can this really be true?  If it is, why is a transaction that is illegal in Texas (selling sex) given this type of property rights protection?  If I hired someone to kill another person in Texas, and the hired killer ran off with my money without doing the agreed-upon murder, could I then kill him or her and not get punished for it at all?  Or is it the case that Mr Gilbert will get a separate punishment for being a john?  Is that even illegal in Texas?  (I'm too lazy to research it.)

Then there's the sum of money which is deemed adequate to cause someone's death, 150 dollars.  Is that the worth of a life?

The story is hard to believe.  I'm also concerned about the jury thinking that being an escort automatically means selling sexual services, when that is not written down anywhere at all.  My concern is because similar one-sided interpretations could spread to all sorts of exchanges, and juries appear to be ready to favor the "buyer's" interpretation here.

Let's flip this over.  Suppose that Ms Frago had had sex with Mr Gilbert and Mr Gilbert then refused to pay her.  Would she have been within her rights in Texas if she had then killed Mr Gilbert?  As far as I can tell, that should be the case.  But I very much doubt the jury would have acquitted her.
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Via Gawker 

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Stuff To Read, June 5, 2013

Or speed-blogging, if you wish.

First,  the Republican-led Wisconsin legislators don't like the idea that journalism students learn investigative journalism:

At the conclusion of a marathon overnight session, Wisconsin legislators early this morning added a provision to the state budget that would expel the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, a nonprofit investigative journalism institute, from its offices at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The measure also prohibits university employees “from doing any work related to the Center for Investigative Journalism as part of their duties as a UW employee.”
With the budget now cleared by the Joint Finance Committee and poised for final approval soon, journalists and educators are scrambling to preserve what is widely regarded as a successful collaborative model that both trains emerging reporters and produces high-quality investigations.

There may be more valid reasons for the move.  But investigative journalism is part of our world's total immunity system.  It gives us early warning about dangerous social and political diseases.

Second, the International Monetary Fund now admits that it may have sorta miscalculated when it placed its hand-made stockbroker shoe on the necks of the Greek people:

The International Monetary Fund is to admit that it has made serious mistakes in the handling of the sovereign debt crisis in Greece, according to internal reports due to be published later on Wednesday.
Documents presented to the Fund's board last Friday will reveal that the Washington-based organisation underestimated the damage austerity would cause to the eurozone country, which has required two bailouts in the past three years.

I hope this won't end up as one of those mistakes-were-made-now-let's-move-on debacles which never change anything.

Third, the Smithsonian Magazine has a story on the color pink as denoting girliness and all things icky.  It mentions the relatively late onset of the craziness that is pink, pink and a little purple for girls.  This is the part I especially liked:

Another important factor has been the rise of consumerism among children in recent decades. According to child development experts, children are just becoming conscious of their gender between ages 3 and 4, and they do not realize it’s permanent until age 6 or 7. At the same time, however, they are the subjects of sophisticated and pervasive advertising that tends to reinforce social conventions. “So they think, for example, that what makes someone female is having long hair and a dress,’’ says Paoletti. “They are so interested—and they are so adamant in their likes and dislikes.”

The more I've read about gender-awareness in early childhood, the more I think that this theory is correct:

It's not that girls innately prefer pink to other colors.  It's that girls and boys, possibly due to innate reasons, really want to know what it means to be a girl or a boy, and until they realize the genders are not dependent on stuff such as what one wears or what one plays with, children will gender-police themselves.

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On Sexual Assaults in the US Military

A topic on which Powerful People (US Senators) are pontificating right now:

Sometimes one picture really does tell more than a thousand words (unless they are my words, natch.)

I have followed the events, including the worrisome news that the men responsible for programs aimed at reducing sexual assaults  themselves got caught acting like foxes in charge of the chicken coop:

Last week, the Pentagon said the U.S. Naval Academy is investigating allegations that three football team members sexually assaulted a female midshipman at an off-campus house more than a year ago. A lawyer for the woman says she was "ostracized" on campus after she reported it.

In recent weeks, a soldier at the U.S. Military Academy was charged with secretly photographing women, including in a bathroom. The Air Force officer who led the service's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response unit was arrested on charges of groping a woman. And the manager of the Army's sexual assault response program at Fort Campbell, Ky., was relieved of his post after his arrest in a domestic dispute with his ex-wife.

I have also heard that the Senators are not going to hear from many (any?) female victims of sexual assault at these hearings, though that could be incorrect.

The reason I haven't written more about the case is that to say something worthwhile requires the kind of data I can't access. 

A few examples:  The reported cases of sexual assault have gone up:

The Pentagon estimated in a recent report that as many as 26,000 military members may have been sexually assaulted last year, up from an estimated 19,000 assaults in 2011, based on an anonymous survey of military personnel. While the number of sexual assaults that members of the military actually reported rose 6 percent to 3,374 in 2012, thousands of victims were still unwilling to come forward despite new oversight and assistance programs aimed at curbing the crimes, the report said.

Do we know how much of this increase may be because there's more encouragement to report than in the past and how much is due to an actual increase in the number of sexual assaults?

Then there's the question about who should have the authority to investigate and decide on sexual assaults.  Right now that authority is vested in the complaint-maker's superior officers.  There are several reasons why that is not a good idea, and perhaps some reasons why it might be a good idea:

Dempsey and the service chiefs warned against making the dramatic changes called for in Gillibrand's legislation. Removing commanders from the military justice process, Dempsey said, would undercut their ability to preserve good order and discipline in their units.

"We cannot simply legislate our way out of this problem," said Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army's chief of staff. "Without equivocation, I believe maintaining the central role of commander in our military justice system is absolutely critical to any solution."

But Gillibrand defended her proposal, which has garnered 18 co-sponsors in two weeks. She said victims of sexual assault are reluctant to report the crimes to their commanders because they fear their allegations will be dismissed and they might face retaliation. Aggressive reforms in the military's legal code are needed to force cultural changes, she said.
"You have lost the trust of the men and women who rely on you," Gillibrand said. "They're afraid to report. They think their careers will be over. They fear retaliation. They fear being blamed. That is our biggest challenge right there."

To judge this would really benefit from finding out how often those who commit sexual assaults are in a superior organizational position to those who become the objects of the assault.  If that is frequently the case, then giving all the powers to the superior officer pretty much guarantees that no complaint will be taken seriously.

Let's finish this post with some hilarity.  Well, the healthiest take on this is that it is ludicrous:

Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) on Tuesday suggested that the “hormone level created by nature” was to blame for rapes in the military and that all pregnant servicewomen should be investigated to make sure their condition was the result of consensual sex.
At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on sexual assaults within the military, Chambliss opined that the Pentagon’s decision to allow women in combat roles was only going to make the problem worse.
The Georgia Republican recalled that “several years ago when we had the first females go out on an aircraft carrier, when they returned to port, a significant percentage of those females were pregnant.”

It's a wonderful tangled knot of both victim blaming (though men, too, are among the victims of sexual assault in the military) and of excusing assaults as just-hormones-gone-wild. I love it when a wingnut remains consistently illogical. 

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Get Lucky at 35 000 feet

That's the new (late April) Virgin Airlines promotion campaign.  Sir Richard Branson explains how it works  in a video.  The idea is that a passenger can send drinks, snacks or meals to someone else on the plane, with perhaps a message which says "your seat or mine?"  Branson states that the chances of deplaning with someone new are at least 50% after this.

Mmm.  What a great campaign if you want to fly in an enclosed singles bar with no escape hatches.  If, on the other hand, you just want to get to your destination and deplane only with those people you began with, can you turn this whole thing off?  So that you don't get unwanted approaches of any kind?

The campaign doesn't tell us, which suggests to me that if you don't wish to be approached this way you should probably fly with some other airline.

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Speed Blogging: On Suicides Among Baby Boomers, On Employed Mothers As the Cause Of All Ills and on The Riots in Turkey

Speed-Blogging, like speed-dating, right?  Short and sweet posts on several topics.

1.  On the increased suicide rates of baby boomers in the US.  This WaPo article  asks why the rates have gone up so much, but underplays or omits the most obvious reason for the increased rates:

The collapse of the housing markets and the bad recession of recent years.  If someone in late middle age loses the value in his or her dwelling and then loses a job as well, the stress is much, much higher than for someone who is younger.  There's simply not the time to make up those losses before retirement and getting a new job is harder the older you are.

2.  On Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant (R) stating that women in the labor market is the cause for the US education problems.  I quote:

Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant (R) said Tuesday that America’s educational troubles began when women began working outside the home in large numbers.
Bryant was participating in a Washington Post Live event focused on the importance of ensuring that children read well by the end of third grade. In response to a question about how America became “so mediocre” in regard to educational outcomes, he said:
I think both parents started working. The mom got in the work place.
Bryant immediately recognized how controversial his remark would be and said he knew  he would start to get e-mails. He then expanded on his answer, saying that “both parents are so pressured” in families today. He also noted that America seemed to be losing ground internationally in regards to educational outcomes because other nations began to invest more in their own school systems and make progress.

My bolds.

Now that gave me the first belly laugh of the day!  The reason, of course, is that Finland currently leads the education competitions on this planet,  and employment of women is sorta pretty common and uncontroversial there.  Has been for a long time, actually (Hi mom!  Love you a lot!).

I get why Bryant would say something so inane.  It's because his party doesn't want to spend any money on education at all, so blaming something or someone outside the formal system of education is the obvious alternative.  But at least pick something which international statistics support, please.

Though there IS an odd shadow truth in what he says, in the following sense:  When most jobs were not really available for women in the US, smart women often had to choose to be teachers, one of the handful of socially acceptable jobs for educated women.  So in the past the talent pool for teaching was large and the pay didn't have to be that high to get good teachers.  That changed when opportunities for women in the labor market increased.  Now you have to compensate teachers properly, and Bryant doesn't want to.

3.  On the Turkish Riots:  

This article gives a good  background about the riots.  Turkey has very divided voters, by the way.  Those rioting belong to the more secular middle classes.  Whether their discontents apply more generally is something I don't know.

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Today's Evolutionary Psychology Post

It began (via a tweet from Martha Bridegam)  with a now-deleted  nasty fat-shaming  tweet by a professor of evolutionary psychology, though Jay Rosen saved the tweet.

You can follow the discussion about that on Twitter.  The tweeter,  Geoffrey Miller apologized for the tweet.

Miller is also tweeting an enormous bunch of interesting and weird stuff about presumed sex differences in competitiveness, how women become more musically creative when they think of long-term mating (how on earth do you measure something like that????) and how men run so much faster and throw so much better than women and so on.

There's a meeting of evo-psychologists and all this is what they do.  Naturally.

But among those tweets was a link to a 2011 post at Psychology Today, the bargain basement of all psychologyish leftovers, and I read it.

It's about monogamy, and how come we are no longer polygynous (one man with several women)*.  I will quote the explanation we are given, which is based on the idea that monogamous groups can grow larger than polygynous groups so they win all those violent battles for world dominance:

Why can monogamous groups grow larger? Because men want wives, and if you need a lot of men on your team, you must offer them something that they want. In monogamous groups, unlike polygynous ones, high status males cannot hoard large numbers of women for themselves. The more equal distribution of women in monogamous groups means that more men can acquire wives, and fewer men have to leave the group to search for wives elsewhere. And the larger the group, the more men there are to fight in battles and to pay taxes for the funding of wars. Socially imposed monogamy, therefore, emerged in the West as a reciprocal arrangement in which elite males allowed lower-ranking males to marry, in exchange for their military service and tax contributions.

All bolds are mine.  They are used to highlight the fact that this author, Michael E. Price, has a basic theory which assumes that high status males decided on everything and that wives were sorta bought and sold to get the services of the lower-ranking males.

To see what I mean, let's write that same quote with one word changed.  Woman=Beer:

Why can monogamous groups grow larger? Because men want beer, and if you need a lot of men on your team, you must offer them something that they want. In monogamous groups, unlike polygynous ones, high status males cannot hoard many barrels of beer for themselves. The more equal distribution of beer in monogamous groups means that more men can acquire beer and fewer men have to leave the group to search for beer elsewhere. And the larger the group, the more men there are to fight in battles and to pay taxes for the funding of wars. Socially imposed monogamy, therefore, emerged in the West as a reciprocal arrangement in which elite males allowed lower-ranking males to drink more beer,  in exchange for their military service and tax contributions.

Now, that's a possible theory, sure.  But what it really hinges on is the assumption that the only people with any real power in those groups were the high status men and that the women in the group did not respond in any way to the incentives the system provided.   They acted like beer barrels.

There are alternative stories about the role of polygamy in the human past.  Although it is true that the institution of polygyny has existed in many societies and the institution of polyandry is known to have existed in relatively few, the really important question is the numbers of actual monogamous vs. polygynous marriages in any one society.  What I mean by that is this:  Even a society which is formally counted as polygynous may have had very few marriages of that type in any one time period and many more monogamous marriages.

If this is the case, it is incorrect to state that humans were predominantly polygynous in the past, as Price suggests:

To answer that, we should examine the types of small-scale societies in which nearly all of our evolution has occurred. When we do so, we find that these hunter gatherer and tribal societies have, throughout the world, historically practiced polygamy. Although most men in these societies strive for polygamy, however, only a minority can achieve it, because maintaining a large family requires an often prohibitively high degree of wealth and status. Further, because it is generally difficult to store and hoard wealth in small-scale societies, even men who do achieve polygamy can usually afford no more than two or three wives. It wasn't until the emergence of large-scale agricultural civilization, a few thousand years ago, that wealth-hoarding became possible and powerful men began accumulating large harems of hundreds or thousands of women. This pattern occurred in similar ways all over the world, as Laura Betzig describes in Despotism and Differential Reproduction. So once the ecological constraints on polygamy were lifted, high status men began accumulating many more wives than they had in small-scale societies.

Bolds are mine.

This quote is confusing to interpret.  First, note that Price's evidence seems to be that polygyny was rare in the distant past.  Then quite recently "powerful men began accumulating large harems of hundreds of thousands of women", and Price interprets this to mean that the ecological constraints were removed.

But if polygyny actually was rare earlier, what caused the presumed evolutionary adaptation in all men to want many wives?  I guess we could pedal back to the story about sperm-is-cheap and the idea that men are more promiscuous by nature. That is not the same thing as supporting multiple wives, however, assuming that the wives had to be supported and were not actually additional labor resources.

And the ecological constraints of the presumed Environment of Evolutionary Adaptations (EEA, the hypothetical place and time in which human gender adaptations are assumed to have been fixed in evolutionary psychology) surely were part of the environment which affected those adaptations?

This matters quite a bit.  The usual assumption is that evolutionary adaptations were fixed when humans lived in small nomadic hunter-gatherer groups.  It is more difficult to explain how polygyny of the support-all-your-wives type Price assumes could have been profitable.  Note, also, that nomadic hunter-gatherer groups in the recent past have been found to be fairly egalitarian, which makes the concept of polygyny as an evolutionary adaptation for high-status men problematic.

Whatever the case might be, Price argues that humans were predominantly polygynous on grounds which have nothing to do with the question whether the numerical majority of humans were in polygynous or monogamous marriages.  Which is an odd argument, in my view.

Those large harems of hundreds of thousands of wives, by the way, were extremely rare.  I'm willing to bet all my chocolate reserves on the assertion that marriages were overwhelmingly monogamous even when one Sultan or pharaoh had humongous harems.

What's the point of this post?  To demonstrate the hidden parts of the theory used here, in particular the assumption that societies were utterly hierarchical in the sense of being ruled by high-status men, even though the groups in the EEA are more likely to have been fairly egalitarian.  And perhaps also to note alternative explanations for the rarity of polygyny among humans.  Those do exist.

For instance,  decreased sexual dimorphism in humans is one offered explanation.  In other animals, large size differences between males and females (with the former being larger) usually denote polygyny, small or nonexistent size differences usually denote monogamy.  Some argue that human females and males have evolved to become closer in size and that this could explain  the increase in monogamy.  What the benefits of this might have been are discussed in the linked article.

A theory off the top of my hat concerns genetic diversity.  Extremely polygynous societies might have doomed themselves to extinction because of lack of such diversity.  This is most likely not such a great theory, but I'm thinking of the impact of over-breeding with one male as the sire  in a few dog breeds in the US.  If that male carries genetic weaknesses, they are spread widely and rapidly.

Finally, from an economic point of view (or perhaps a demographic point of view), societies with extreme polygyny are inherently unstable.  What's to be done with all those spare men who can never find a mate?  They could be kicked out of the group as appears to be done in the old polygynous Mormon sect, but that would only work in a system where neighboring groups weren't equally polygynous.

None of my amateur theories are intended to be regarded as real explanations.  I list them, because they are not considered in the original post at all.
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*Strictly speaking, the post discusses a moderate form of polygyny where some men have many wives, some are monogamously partnered and some have no partner.

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The Challenge: Prove that Gender Discrimination in Labor Markets Exists

SleeZee Lyers in the comments to my earlier post on the gender gap in wages asks this question:

Regarding hidden discrimination, I would think that in the 50 years since the Equal Pay Act of 1963, that if such hidden sex associated wage discrimination as you hypothesize existed, that you would be able to find testimony to that effect from retired managers, retired executives, retired HR employees.
Surely someone must know and be ready to talk!

...

Occam's Razor isn't the be all and end all, but given a choice of personal choice / no discrimination or discrimination hidden by thousands for 50 years, I'd say the burden is on you to demonstrate that discimation.

This post is my answer to that Occam's Razor argument, though I wish to preface it with the fact that I believe the earnings differences reflect many reasons:  Choice based on societal expectations about what is appropriate for women and men,  gendered differences in family responsibilities, gendered preferences (whether innate or societally molded or both) and discrimination of various types.  Thus, there is no reason to go for just one explanation, such as choice.

To return to the main point:  That the burden is on me to demonstrate that gender discrimination exists in the labor markets:

First, there are fields of studies which do exactly that.  The audit studies are one group.  These consist of using trained actors, in this case men and women, to go out and apply for jobs in some industry.  The actors are coached to say all the same things and they are provided with equally good resumes.  The studies usually randomize the order in which they visit the firms and do other stuff to guarantee that the results make sense.  The studies then measure call-back rates and other measures to see whether the female and male job applicants, otherwise the same, are treated the same. 

The classic study in this field is a 1990s study about server job applications in Philadelphia restaurants. It demonstrates some discrimination against female applicants to server jobs at that time and in that place.

The other important example of studies which have demonstrated the impact of gender discrimination is the classical orchestra study.  Musicians audit to get employed by orchestras.  A simple change in auditing rule:  introducing a screen so that the evaluators cannot observe the appearance of a musician but only his or her musical talent increased the probability that a female musician would be hired by an orchestra.

A further group of studies which can be used to study possible discrimination in hiring are the correspondence studies where various evaluators are asked to judge an application.  Some evaluators get the application with a female name, others get the exactly same application with a male name.  Given that the actual application is the same for both names,  in the absence of any discrimination we would expect the average evaluations of the candidates to be the same.

This is sometimes the case in such studies, but not always.  A recent study in this field shows that science faculty evaluated fictional female applicants to a laboratory manager position more severely than the fictional male applicant.  In other words, being called "John" rather than "Jane" caused the same application to be treated less harshly and also resulted in higher estimated salary offer.

Both male and female evaluators treated "Jane" worse than "John," by the way.  Thus, what these studies find is probably a societal and unconscious gender bias, not some kind of explicit discrimination by either men or women.  Other studies in this field have also found that female evaluators are usually no less discriminatory than male evaluators.

Correspondence studies about gender do not always show discrimination just against women in gender studies.  What seems to matter here is whether a job is regarded as somehow "belonging" to men or somehow "belonging to women."  Women are judged more harshly in traditionally male-dominated occupations (such as science and in writing plays), men are judged more harshly (in at least some studies) in traditionally female-dominated occupations (such as secretarial work). 

Most of this appears to be something the evaluators are unaware of.  In other words, they are not explicitly singling out applicants with female or male names. 

But note that whatever the causes for this might be, the likely effect this tendency has is to keep occupations more gender-segregated:  Men are more likely to be hired in traditionally male occupations and more likely to be offered a higher starting salary, whereas the reverse applies to women in traditionally female occupations.  That the latter occupations pay much less is, however, important to remember in this context, because the benefits the applicants accrue from being treated as "typical" for their occupations are smaller for women than for men, on average.

Second, the existence of discrimination can also be measured from court cases which decide for the plaintiff in gender discrimination cases.  Such cases have appeared in the years since the 1960s and are too numerous to list here.  A few examples:  The AT&T case, the Price-Waterhouse v. Hopkins case and the Lily Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire&Rubber Co case.

It is more difficult to study the existence of any possible gender discrimination in long-term labor contracts, because we cannot force actors to keep on acting roles over time and because it is much harder to control for individual differences in skills etc. under that setting.  The multiple regression techniques which studies us are a way around that.  If we could establish and measure all the variables which are non-discriminatory but which affect earnings, we could create studies where whatever gender difference we have been unable to account for after controlling for all those other variables would clearly be due to men and women being treated differently just on the basis of their gender.  But in reality there are always variables we don't have data about.  This means that the unexplained residual even in good studies could be an overestimate of discrimination.

At the same time, some of the variables which are included in the "neutral" category could themselves have a partially discriminatory background.  For instance, in my earlier post I noted that if women don't get promoted into certain jobs then the fact that they are not in that job category terribly often might not be a "neutral" part of the explanation.  That would require that occupations are simply chosen in the same way by both men and women.

This post is most likely a partial one.  It probably should include a discussion of the different concepts of discrimination (including institutional discrimination etc.), but I think I have written enough for the time being.

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