Month: November 2012

Jeb Lund discusses the coming out of Puerto Rican featherweight Orlando Cruz:

In an interview in the Guardian days before [Cruz's fight with Mexican Jorge Pazos], Cruz acknowledged the still violent attitude toward homosexuals he encounters at home. "I am proud to be Puerto Rican, just like I am proud to be a gay man," he said. "But I was sad and angry a long time because there are two doors to death over this one issue. There is suicidal death—when a gay man cannot stand being unaccepted and takes his own life. And there is homophobic murder."

In the lead-up to the fight, boxing message boards filled up for days with the kind of offhandedly vile homophobia that has made the word "faggot" a default internet pronoun. There were also supportive tweets from dozens of countries—including unlikely places like Afghanistan—and congratulations from Cruz’s Olympic teammates, including superstar boxer Miguel Cotto. In the post-fight press conference, Pazos waves away any concern that he fought and lost to a gay man. "I fought an Olympian," he says. "I fought Orlando Cruz."

A recent report (pdf) from the American Association of University Women shows a 7% pay advantage for men after controlling for GPA, college major, occupation and other factors. Nancy Folbre has more:

[The study] shows that, on average, the female college graduates in the sample earn only about 82 percent of what the male college graduates earn, largely because they chose different college majors or decided to work for nonprofit organizations. As the study notes, women might make different choices if they knew just how costly their preferences turn out to be. One serious consequence is that young women devote a larger share of their earnings to repayment of their college loans, even though they borrowed about the same amount…. In sum, while young women are more likely than young men to graduate from college, their diplomas don’t generate equally rich rewards.

Meanwhile, Philip Cohen is surprised by a 2011 BLS report showing that "since 1999, every one of these countries [Italy, Germany, Canada, Sweden, UK, Netherlands] has seen an increase in women’s labor force participation except the United States and Japan." Cohen concludes:

I think the pattern in this figure belies the "natural rate" [of labor participation] idea. Canada and the Netherlands, for example, plowed right through the U.S. peak level. To me this looks more like there are institutional constraints that place a context-specific ceiling on women’s employment — constraints such as inadequate access to childcare, inordinate time-demands on professional workers, and the unequal distribution of unpaid work obligations.

Recent Dish on the pay gap here.