Month: October 2011

I don't often do this, but I'd like to retract something I wrote yesterday in the immediate rush of relief after Palin's exit from the race. It's been nagging at me all day. I wrote, contrasting Steve Jobs with Sarah Palin:

It's a fitting comparison: achievement versus resentment, creativity versus narcissism, hope versus fear. I know which one will get the bigger headlines tomorrow. And there is some comfort in knowing it will pain her.

I don't retract an ounce of my substantive comparison or my prediction which proved true. But there should be no comfort in the pain of others, even trivial spasms of irrelevance, and such a feeling is really beneath the standards of this blog. Palin is still a human being, and by my own account, an extremely damaged one. Once she has removed herself from power, wishing her pain of any kind is gratuitous, cruel and wrong. I apologize.

This email on the wage and education gap between men and women caused quite a stir. A reader writes:

Your earlier reader wrote:

Of course women with PhDs are likely to earn less than men with PhDs.  Women are overwhelmingly earning PhDs in liberal arts, while men earn more PhDs in hard science and business.  Hard sciences and business PhDs pay a lot more, for two simple reasons (and neither of them gender-related)

Your reader completely misses the fact that gender-related socialization starts *immediately.* There is plenty of research that supports the fact that boys are steered toward math and science even in elementary school. Girls "like" to read and write; boys "like to do math and science." This is purely socially constructed, not at all related to the biology of the students. It only makes sense that it would continue to play out throughout life, including college choices, and career choices.

Another reader digs into the literature:

There's no reason to perpetuate the it's-their-own-impoverishing-choices myth when defending unequal pay for women. What about this? A full report of the study can be downloaded here. Or just read this:

Women earned less than men in all 20 industries and 25 occupation groups surveyed by the Census Bureau in 2007 — even in fields in which their numbers are overwhelming. Female secretaries, for instance, earn just 83.4% as much as male ones. And those who pick male-dominated fields earn less than men too: female truck drivers, for instance, earn just 76.5% of the weekly pay of their male counterparts.

We women are really, really tired of being told that it's our own fault we're paid so little. We're even more tired of pointing to the research that shows persistent inequality, and having men dismiss it with a wave of the hand and whatever explanation suits them best. The reaction is so predictable and fighting it feels so pointless, every time the topic comes up – so most the time it's just like, why bother anymore? My favorite is always when a man tells me "I know for a fact every women in my organization is paid as much if not more than men of similar experience and rank." (Eerily similar to how my very white friends know for a fact that black people aren't discriminated against anymore in their town.) You know what? Maybe it IS a fact, in what you've seen of your little corner of the world. But your truth isn't the truth.

Another piles on:

REALLY? Women just happen to make these particular choices completely freely?

Your reader starts out with a comparison between hard science and liberal arts, completely eliding the biological sciences where women have earned more than 50% of advanced degrees for some time now and where there are plenty of career paths outside academia and plenty of grant money within for universities to compete over.

Then:

"For example, men are far more likely to: work in dangerous professions, work outdoors, commute long hours, work 50+ hours a week, travel at work’s behest, and enter fields that are less personally satisfying (e.g., accountant vs. kindergarten teacher)."

Who exactly do you think is freeing men from the other responsibilities of life (childcare primarily) so they can work 50+ hours a week and take on long commutes? It's notable that dangerous professions (firefighting, thw military, etc.) have been among the most hostile and sexist environments for women who do try to enter them. And who says being a kindergarten teacher is more satisfying than being an accountant?  I'd tend to think it depends on the person in question. Next:

"Further, many young women will choose a career path in college (when they are 19) in anticipation of balancing work and family demands that may not arise for a decade or more."

Where are women getting the idea that they should do this?  Not out of thin air – our society tells young women that it's entirely their responsibility to plan and accommodate their careers so they don't inconvenience their employers if/when they have kids. (Young women get way too many messages that they shouldn't inconvenience other people in general.)

The expectations on men don't help at all – in fact they're one of the biggest problems now.  Particularly for high-achieving men, there is an expectation that work will come first in their life, period.  For that to be a reality and for them to have a family (things never presented in opposition or as a "choice" when we're talking about men), that means somebody else does all of the accommodating. Guess who?  

Even at the high end, this New York Magazine article about older parents mentions that 75% of executive women have spouses who work full time; 75% of executive men have spouses who don't do paid work at all.  Which executives are able to give more focus to their jobs?

Look, I 100% agree with the guy about Sheryl Sandburg's talk – it's a great one and great advice, but the idea that there's no sexism in this situation is ridiculous.

A final reader:

Women straight out of MBA programs earn $4,700 on average less than their male counterparts and start lower on the business ladder, as well. That research study controlled for the factors your reader cites, namely his claim that women shoot lower because we just think about having babies. This may certainly be what some women are doing, but it doesn't affect the results of the study. 

Now for law degrees. From the National Law Journal (via Above the Law):

"The National Association of Women Lawyers concluded last year that female equity partners make an average $66,000 less a year than male equivalents." [my emphasis].

$66,000 dollars! That's an incredibly significant amount of money, especially over many years of not being able to build the same amount of wealth. The authors of this study also ruled out family responsibilities as a major factor in the gap, finding that straight up gender discrimination and bullying accounted for the majority of the disparity. 

I understand this argument began with Ph.D's. But looking at the original chart, women are earning over half the degrees in life sciences, which includes medical research, biotechnical fields, and agricultural sciences, not ivory tower material. It also includes social sciences, of which surely many are Psychology, also a practicing field not simply fit for academia.

I have a feeling the same imbalances would persist in these fields as in business and law. The reader may have a point about liberal arts degrees, but it is ridiculous and, frankly, insulting to claim that the wage gap isn't real and we are all simply bringing it on ourselves by being less ambitious. (And this isn't even getting into the historical reasons that teachers, librarians, and health workers make less. It couldn't possibly be that they have always been devalued because it's women's work, could it?)

Martin Lindstrom claims that neuroimaging shows that people have fallen in love with their phones. He writes that "the flurry of activation in the insular cortex of the brain … is associated with feelings of love and compassion." Tal Yarkoni explains the astonishing ignorance underpinning this argument:

I’d be pretty surprised, actually, if you could present any picture or sound to participants in an fMRI scanner and not elicit robust insula activity. Orienting and sustaining attention to salient things seems to be a big part of what the anterior insula is doing (whether or not that’s ultimately its ‘core’ function). So the most appropriate conclusion to draw from the fact that viewing iPhone pictures produces increased insula activity is something vague like “people are paying more attention to iPhones”, or “iPhones are particularly salient and interesting objects to humans living in 2011.” Not something like “no, really, you love your iPhone!”

Yarkoni follows up on the broader pushback from scientists here.

Extends to the armed forces. A new Pew survey indicates that one in three American veterans of the post-9/11 military believes that waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan was a mistake:

Just half of all post-9/11 veterans say that, given the costs and benefits to the U.S., the war in Afghanistan has been worth fighting. A smaller share (44%) says the war in Iraq has been worth it. Only one-third (34%) say both wars have been worth fighting, and a nearly identical share (33%) say neither has been worth the costs.

Meanwhile, almost two-thirds of the country wants troop levels in Afghanistan to be reduced immediately.

Why hasn't it replaced brick and mortar institutions? Yglesias blames a lack of self-modivation:

[Y]ou can find all the relevant textbooks, lectures, information, etc. online already. And yet the number of people who’ve self-taught calculus is tiny.

Kevin Drum nods:

Aside from the social virtues of a physical college campus, its real virtue is that it sets up a commitment structure: you feel obligated to go to class, and once you're in class you feel obligated to do the homework, etc. Even at that lots of students don't go to class and don't do the homework, but lots do. But if you're studying online, you have to self-motivate at a much higher level. And it's a level that, frankly, most of us just aren't capable of.

An Yglesias commenter complicates the debate:

I think you're wrong in saying that learning calculus will be "rewarded in the marketplace". What is rewarded is having a qualification in calculus. If you learn it yourself from a. book, or from an online not-for-credit course, then I don't think you'll get any extra money for having that knowledge.

Josh Barro finds Occupy Wall Street's "We Are The 99%" slogan insufferable:

The 99th percentile of Americans, by income, starts with households earning incomes of $593,000. The “We Are the 99 percent” branding puts somebody making $500,000 per year on the oppressed-and-downtrodden side of the wage divide. Indeed, “99 percent” is so expansive a designation that it includes most of the bankers working on Wall Street.

Old school toys set to music:

The King of Legoland from dunun on Vimeo.

Alyssa Rosenberg is repulsed by an upcoming zombie movie in which the dead reproduce by rape:

[I]t sounds like there’s strong potential for grossness-for-grossness’s sake here, a la the Human Centipede movies. You don’t actually need to have zombies rape women to get the message across the audience that zombies are gross and it would be better not to be one. I suppose along the same lines, The Walking Dead didn’t actually need to show a horse being ripped apart by a horde of zombies — one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen on television or in any medium — though that scene did provide a sense of vast, massing hunger. It may have been very difficult to watch, but it wasn’t artistically irredeemable.

She previously examined depictions of rape in the context of humor and more generally.

The state of the race:

Ezra can't believe Romney's lucky streak. Nor can Wiegel:

Romney has benefitted all year from remaining un-flashy and un-frontrunnerish as the media has flitted from Trump to Bachmann to Perry to Christie. This is actually Romney's ideal situation, with underfunded niche candidates fighting for the conservative vote, and his best-funded credible opponent cratering but still taking double digits.

Jonathan Bernstein refuses to tribute Romney's staying power to luck:

I still have no particular view of whether Romney or Perry will wind up the nominee. I do think that the current tendency to write off Perry is silly; he remains just as viable today as ever, and given Romney's still very real vulnerabilities, three's no reason (based at least on what's been reported) to think that the battle is close to done. And of course Romney is lucky that John McCain didn't elevate someone with his VP pick in '08 who would have known how to capitalize on it. But overall, Romney is where he is because he's run a very good campaign so far. In my experience, that's not luck.

Ken Ballen talks to NPR about his research for a new book:

Ballen interviewed 43 Saudi jihadist militants at [a Saudi deprogramming] facility, which offers psychological counseling and vocational training. Over time, Ballen says, he came to have a better understanding of how extremists see the world. "Within their belief system, what they're doing makes sense," he says. "They really believe … they're doing good in the world. They're fighting for good. They're doing the right thing. They see themselves as saintly. … And I think that's what we're missing in this entire war on terror."