Matt Yglesias

The Permanent Revolution

I thought it was funny that Jessica Valenti telling Deborah Solomon she doesn’t like the label “third-wave feminist” ended up with an article being headlined “Fourth-Wave Feminism.” Such are the wages of the editing process.

But I think Valenti’s point was pretty clearly that it doesn’t make a ton of sense to try to slice things up into a series of waves. The interesting thing, I would say, is that for the past 40 years or so we’ve been in something like a feminist permanent revolution. On the one hand, the abstract idea that men and women should be treated equally in a manner that goes beyond formal legal equality, is now rarely contested by anyone. Yet at the same time, many of the practical implications of this idea remain extremely controversial. So we’ve seen, are seeing, and will continue to see many fronts of conflict animated by this incredibly far-reaching idea. I suppose my grandchildren will think it was weird that there used to be sex-segregated bathrooms everywhere. At the moment, that’s not much of a mainstream political issue, but I don’t think that really implicates any novel questions of principle.

Nordics Lead on Global Gender Gap; U.S. is 31st

Ariel Boone brings us the World Economic Forum’s 2009 Gender Gap Review. It’s even got rankings. We’re 31st out of 134:

The tippy top is crammed with Nordic countries, but we turn out to do worse on this metric than our fellow Anglophones.

Family Stability Matters, Not Clear That Marriage Does

I got some pushback on yesterday’s post about Nordic family structure, well summed-up by RS who wrote “unmarried biological parents in northern Europe are more likely to stay together to raise the kid than married parents in the US. Jencks, Ellwood, and more recently Cherlin have written about this.”

Swedish dad in Södermalm (my photo available under cc license)

I don’t disagree with this. I just think it’s important to remember who’s who, what’s what, and where’s where in this argument. In the United States context you often hear it said that what we need to do to help kids is encourage their parents to be married. I think the experience of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway pretty clearly debunks that. On the other hand, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway don’t at all debunk the idea that having both of your biological parents heavily involved in your life is extremely helpful. But the issue isn’t marriage or non-marriage, it’s family dissolution. Non-married couples can stay together, and married couples can break up.

What’s more, it is worth looking at the cases of the UK and Iceland. Both of these countries really do have more one-parent households than the United States and still achieve substantially lower child poverty rates and more social mobility. I’m happy to dismiss Iceland as a bit of an odd case—and tiny anyway—but that doesn’t apply to the United Kingdom. The key thing there, frankly, is that the Blair and Brown governments decided that child poverty is a scandal and they were going to do something about it. And whatever other failings they had, they succeeded in reducing child poverty by a large margin. CAP’s Half in Ten project aimed at reducing child poverty by 50 percent in ten years is, in part, inspired by these Blair/Brown successes and shows you can do a great deal of good without reengineering people’s relationships. Unfortunately, what we’re seeing right now in the United States is a recession whose impact outpaces the anti-poverty efforts of the Obama administration.

Women Share of CBC Membership Higher than Congress as a Whole

Tweeting about this post of mine, Dayo Olopade asked “Where are the black women in politics?”

This is probably too literal an answer, but they’re where you usually find influential African-American politicians—the United States House of Representatives. There are 74 women in the House of Representatives of whom 12 are African-American. That makes women about 30 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus, higher than their overall representation in the House which is about 17 percent. The black women in congress are all Democrats, and the Democrats have a higher women’s share in the caucus, but even so the Democratic caucus as a whole is only 22 percent female. Since most of the people who vote for Democrats are women, this is a pretty ridiculously low ratio, but the fact of the matter is that the African-American community seems to be blazing the trail in the direction of somewhat-less-inequality.

The world’s largest share of women parliamentarians is found in Sweden where men help take care of children and there’s a robust political tradition of “feminist natalism.” In the United States, voters show no inclination to discriminate against women who run for office but women are much less likely to be recruited to run.

Passports for Kuwaiti Women

I saw on the Abu Aardvark twitter feed early this morning that Kuwait women have won the right to travel and obtain a passport without the consent of their husband. That’s obviously appropriate on its own terms, but I was interested to further learn that this wasn’t a royal decree but a ruling of the country’s constitutional court. Indeed, in recent years Kuwait seems to have evolved in a more democratic direction in recent years than I’d realized:

It is the latest gain for women in the oil-rich Gulf state which has made a number of strides towards gender equity in recent years.

The presence of female MPs followed the granting of equal political rights in 2005.

I don’t exactly know how to characterize Kuwait’s political system. It’s a kind of old-school constitutional monarchy in which there’s a meaningful role for elections and parliament but the royal family also exercises meaningful governing authority. I’m also led to believe that Kuwait has significant human rights problems in terms of the treatment of migrant domestic workers and criminal penalties for “imitating the appearance of the opposite sex” by wearing inappropriate clothing. But presumably all that is just part of Human Rights Watch’s well-known anti-Israel bias and can be safely ignored.

Pandas!

Caitlin Flanagan on Twilight:

One of the signal differences between adolescent girls and boys is that while a boy quickly puts away childish things in his race to initiate a sexual life for himself, a girl will continue to cherish, almost to fetishize, the tokens of her little-girlhood. She wants to be both places at once—in the safety of girl land, with the pandas and jump ropes, and in the arms of a lover, whose sole desire is to take her completely.

Ho hum. A photo of the stuffed pandas in my bedroom:

The bigger one is General Tso, the smaller one is Magdalen, so names because I bought it at a shop near Magdalen College, Oxford back in 2002.

Today’s Pay Gap Factoid

CAP, in partnership with Maria Shriver, has a giant report out called “The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything” about the role of women in the modern economy. There’s tons of stuff in there, but I thought I would just pull out this factoid from Heather Boushey’s chapter in the volume.

In broad terms, this is about what you would expect. The change over time has been really large and that’s worth keeping in mind. It’s also interesting that older mothers and mothers with college degrees earn substantially more relative to their husbands than do younger or less-educated mothers. There’s something of a move afoot to try to convince women that they need to reverse the recent trend toward delaying marriage and motherhood, but the statistics seem to indicate that this would be not-so-wise.

The Daddy Factor

Something you see a fair amount of in Sweden that’s pretty rare in the United States is men out on the streets walking around sans mom with babies in the middle of a weekday (see also this guy and this guy):

Sweden is one of the most feminism-influenced countries on earth. It has the world’s highest share of women in parliament (basically half) and what shows up in that kind of statistic is also visible on the streets. Sweden has both a high female labor force participation rate, and a total fertility rate that’s high by developed world standards. The way that happens seems to be in part that men do closer to their fair share of caregiving for children.

This kind of social phenomenon is reenforced by public policy. Sweden has a generous (albeit somewhat complicated) parental leave system that’s structured to encourage men to take part in it.

Admiral Mullen Backs Female Submariners

One of the major fields of military service from which women are still excluded is working on America’s fleet of submarines. But via Robert Farley it seems that chief of staff Admiral Mike Mullen thinks we should change that. Why aren’t women allowed on subs in the first place?

Opponents of lifting the ban have argued for decades that space is at a premium on submarines. To accommodate privacy needs of females, including separate berthing and “heads” or toilet/shower facilities, would be “prohibitively expensive,” Navy has argued. Watch duty, bunk management, extra supplies and incidents of fraternization and harassment would complicate submarine life, according to one study done for the Navy in 1994.

This seems, at best, like an argument for single-sex submarines not for keeping women off submarines altogether. In general, my understanding is that women, being smaller, are actually generally better-suited for submarine work than are men. In Australia, where women do serve on submarines, the main practical problem that seems to have arisen is male submarine commanders making inappropriate remarks to the press leading to minor political scandal.

Population and Climate Change

Lydia DePillis has a depressing item about the role access to contraceptives is playing (or, rather, not playing) in efforts to forestall catastrophic climate change:

Earlier this week, Thomas Wire of the London School of Economics published a study concluding that improved family planning is one of the most effective methods of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions we’ve got. This is something that sustainable-growth advocates have realized for a long time, but the actual numbers are startling: Reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies out there—calculated on the basis of “unmet need,” or women who want contraception but currently don’t have access —is roughly five times as cost-effective as deploying low-carbon technologies like wind, solar, and carbon sequestration. (Treehugger has a good summary.)

So, today, David Fahrenthold of The Washington Post asked around Washington to see what nonprofit and government types thought about this bit of research. As it turns out, the environmental establishment wanted nothing to do with it.

Of course this should be pretty obvious. Efficiency—just not using energy—is the cleanest source of energy at all. And nobody uses less energy than a person who doesn’t even exist. That’s not to say we should be engaging in coercive limits on people’s ability to have children, that would be a cure that’s far worse than the disease. But the evidence is pretty clear that in societies where women are empowered and have access to contraception, that on average they want modest-sized families. And what this study is talking about is specifically what could be accomplished by closing the gap between the level of contraception that people want to have and the level of contraception they’re actually able to maintain. There are dozens of good reasons to think closing that gap would be beneficial, the impact on the environment is one of them, and there’s no reason people should refuse to say that.

Times Change

(Wikimedia)

To some extent there’s just a divergence in values underlying the kind of people who think political pundits should write fussy columns fretting about the age at which people get married and the kind of people who think that’s bizarre. But one thing that I find really striking about conservative interest in the increasing age of marriage is their total lack of interest in actually exploring this subject beyond a token factoid:

This is the period of life in which society’s most important social commitments take shape — commitments that produce stability, happiness and children. But the facts of life for 20-somethings are challenging. Puberty — mainly because of improved health — comes steadily sooner. Sexual activity kicks off earlier. But the average age at which people marry has grown later; it is now about 26 for women, 28 for men.

One thing I’ve noted about this before is that age at first marriage is something that varies quite a bit historically and socially. I haven’t researched this hyper-rigorously, but thanks to some quick Googling I see that in European Sexualities: 1400-1800, Katherine Crawford reports “In Florence, average age at first marriage was over 30 for men and below 18 for women. Figures for Spanish communities are similar.”

I also found this chart in a Census Bureau PowerPoint presentation that seems relevant:

It looks, in other words, like the big shift came not in the dread sixties or in recent times. Instead, there was a large structural shift in the mid-70s and 80s. What does that prove? I don’t know. But that’s the same period during which a lot of elements of our society and economy shifted.

In her essay “Teenage Pregnancy in England: A Historical Perspective” Hera Cook writes that starting in the 16th century in northwestern Europe “the image of women marrying in their teens with a high premium placed on virginity applied only to the aristocracy . . . [t]he average age of marriage was high by world standards, 24 years for women and 26 years for men, and 10-20% of the population did not marry.” She cites the need to save up money in order to start a new household before marrying as the cause of delayed marriage. Non-married couples were very eager not to get pregnant and lacked reliable means of contraception so “in their teens and early twenties, many men and women engaged in erotic play or petting, including kissing, embracing and hand/genital contact.” Then “age at marriage fell and birth rates rose in the decades around 1800, largely as a result of the introduction of wage labor.”

Long story short, this stuff changes all the time. And it usually changes for real reasons. Given flat wages and a rising skill premium—and declining wages for men—delayed marriage seems inevitable. Would it be better for people to live their lives in a way that completely ignores economic reality? Does Gerson want to try to re-order the economy in order to better fit his ideal of when people should get married? There’s probably a column topic in here somewhere.

Why Social Networking

What do people do with social networking sites?

The biggest discovery: pictures. “People just love to look at pictures,” says Piskorski. “That’s the killer app of all online social networks. Seventy percent of all actions are related to viewing pictures or viewing other people’s profiles.” [...]

Piskorski has also found deep gender differences in the use of sites. The biggest usage categories are men looking at women they don’t know, followed by men looking at women they do know. Women look at other women they know. Overall, women receive two-thirds of all page views.

This is because on the savanna it was very important for men to be familiar with what strange women looked like in case of a chance encounter while out hunting for gazelle.

Women’s Turnout Plunges in Afghan Election

Before the voting began in Afghanistan, people were concerned that women’s rights would likely be substantially infringed and it looks like those fears were warranted:

Five years ago, with the country at peace, traditional taboos easing and Western donors pushing for women to participate in democracy, millions of Afghan women eagerly registered and then voted for a presidential candidate. In a few districts, female turnout was even higher than male turnout.

But on Aug. 20, when Afghans again went to the polls to choose a president, that heady season of political emancipation seemed long gone. This time, election monitors and women’s activists said, a combination of fear, tradition, apathy and poor planning conspired to deprive many Afghan women of rights they had only recently begun to exercise.

As I said before it’s not clear how many practical alternatives there really are or were to acquiescing in this situation. Mostly it illustrates the fact that no matter what resources we deploy in Afghanistan, our ability to create the kind of society we would like to see is pretty limited.

She Should Run

Women are severely underrepresented in political office in the United States. And, interestingly, the best available evidence indicates that women who secure a major party nomination for elective office don’t face any unique disadvantages. Instead, we have few women in elected office because they don’t run as often largely because of structural barriers and also simply because party leaders are disinclined to recruit women to run.

Part of the solution is the She Should Run campaign (via Nicholas Beaudrot) run by the Women’s Campaign Forum. The idea is to suggest a woman who you think the WCF should ask to run. It’s a good idea.

Slouching Toward Employment Parity

Catherine Rampell offers this informative chart that I read as demonstrating that for all the talk of a “mancession” and such, we’re primarily looking at long-term shifts in the gender composition of the labor market:

By all accounts I’ve heard, future job growth is predicted to be disproportionately concentrated in the health and education sectors. If so, either the traditional tendency of those sectors to disproportionately employ women or else traditional ideas about gender roles within a family will have to shift.

Against The “Alpha Male”

Cliché about “alpha males” and so forth are so deeply ingrained in our culture that I had no idea what they specifically referred to. Apparently, though, it refers to research on hierarchical behavior in wolf packs, research that was done in the 1960s and popularized in part through David Mech’s book The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species.

And in this fascinating video (via Jim Henley) Mech explains why that research is outdated and people should drop the idea:

As Jim says, “this is how science is supposed to work but doesn’t, necessarily. Open-mindedness, readiness to renounce superceded views.”

Do Women Make Better Managers?

A bunch of people asked to discuss the issue by The New York Times answer in the affirmative only to have their logic assailed by Gabriel Arana at the American Prospect:

When discussing gender differences, this line of argumentation is common: Take what you think to be a social phenomenon and invent a biological or evolutionary backstory. It is by no means established that women are better communicators than men. And as a linguist, I can tell you that in no way are women’s brains more “networked” for language. Yet the author takes these precepts as a given. She goes on to cite a single study to substantiate her claim, even though the finding has been summarily discredited in the scientific community.

Arguments such as Pinker’s are not scientific confirmation of gender difference; more often, they are simply a reflection of our prejudices. The fact that one has many exceptions to these gender stereotypes — emotional men and strong women — should give pause. These counterexamples show that these traits are not an immutable feature of “man” or “woman”-hood, but are in a large part socially ingrained. I am not saying that no gender differences exist (some, like muscle mass, are easily observable), but it’s tough to tease apart which social behaviors are learned and those for which we have a biological predisposition.

Fair enough. That said, in my experience women are better managers than men. And I think there’s a sound theoretical basis for expecting that to be the case. Back in the 1950s, African-American baseball players were on average much better than white players. Not, it seems, because blacks are “better at baseball” than whites, but because the nature of the integration process was that African-Americans had to clear a higher bar to make it into big leagues at all.

All kinds of things, from outright bigotry to loaded social expectations and family arrangements to somewhat reduced social pressure to “succeed” militate against women making it to high-level managerial roles. But by the same token, those women who do succeed and defy the odds would tend to be unusually talented. You know a group has achieved equality when it starts producing people who are below-average but succeed anyway.

Politico’s Anonymous Sources Slam Barbara Boxer’s “Abrasive Personal Style”

Just Another Shrill Harpy (Wikimedia)

I used to think that US Senate Barbara Boxer was an experienced legislator with a solid progressive record on the issues. But then I read this Politico article in which various anonymous people criticize her “abrasive personal style” and “outspoken partisan liberal” demeanor. Big trouble! And then I got to thinking, I recall having read similar critiques of Judge Sonia Sotomayor. And Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate and now as Secretary of State has been subjected to similar criticism. Nancy Pelosi, too.

You’ve really got to wonder what the deal is with the Democratic Party that every woman who comes forward into a position of power and influence is a shrill, castrating harridan. I mean, what are Democrats thinking? What poor judgment! Doesn’t everyone know that politics is a business in which the only people who get ahead are soft-spoken sweethearts like Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer? Somehow male politicians have managed to figure this out. What’s stopping the women?

Island Wall Entertainment Unveils iHymen

Because the world is a very strange place, someone decided that the world needs a “purity ring” application for iPhone. Jessica Valenti says “I know I shouldn’t be surprised that there’s a iPhone “purity ring” application – after all, I’m all too familiar with the various ways virginity fetish reveals itself in American culture. But this still managed to skeeve me.” I will, however, cop to some level of surprise that this is actually a British application:

For just 59p, consumers can download an application that allows them to take a purity pledge and then display a silver ring on their phone to prove their commitment to abstinence. [...]

The company’s director, Henry Bennett, said: “We’re not charging for the idea. We’re just covering our costs. It’s all about reaching a new market. If you wanted to buy a purity ring, you could spend as much as £100.”

I suppose the fact that you could spend as much as £100 on a purity ring isn’t really any crazier than the underlying idea behind the purity ring. But still.

White House Pay Gap

Via Dana Goldstein, Ariel Boone earns a link by doing the work to put this chart together illustrating the earnings gap between men and women in the Obama White House. Total employment is split almost 50-50 between men and women, but the women are disproportionately concentrated in the lowest-level positions:

This is pretty much the same pattern you see everywhere, so not incredibly shocking. On the other hand, partisan politics has a distinct gender skew; about half of people are women, but well more than half of Democrats are women and in general women have more progressive views than men. Failing to locate talented women and promote them to positions of office and authority leaves progressives drawing from a relatively small talent pool given that numerically our “side” is preponderantly female.

NARAL President Nancy Keenan on Abortion and Health Reform

Yesterday came the news that the Senate Finance Committee might include language preventing Exchange-participating insurers from offering coverage for abortions in pursuit of Republican support for overall health care reform. It strikes me as a strange tactical idea because the two Republicans most likely to support reform, Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine are both pro-choice, and that’s all the Republicans you need. But this trial balloon highlights the fact that health care reform is full of angles related to reproductive rights. Dana Goldstein has an enlightening interview with NARAL President Nancy Keenan on this subject in which she warns that “that many, many women could lose the coverage they presently have.”

How Many People Belong in the Labor Market?

Brad DeLong offers the following chart to illustrate the severity of our economic woes:

Now one thing you will notice here is that today’s employment-population ratio is actually higher than it was at the peaks of pre-1980s business cycles. The difference-maker is feminism, which substantially increased women’s labor force participation. But while I think it’s fair to say that the United States of 40 years ago was suffering from a major social justice problem related to women’s unequal access to labor market opportunities, it’s not at all clear that we were actually facing an objective labor shortage.

Maybe instead of settling into a long-run equilibrium where overall labor force participation is way higher than it was in the late 1960s we ought to be headed for an equilibrium in which women’s labor force participation is way higher but overall participation is only slightly higher. More stay-at-home dads, in other words.

Now to be clear, what we’re seeing today is the result of an economic collapse. And it’s a collapse that’s disproportionately led to men losing their jobs, because the hardest-hit sectors have been male-dominated ones. But that’s not the same as a voluntary shift toward more stay-at-home fathers. Still, looking at the chart it’s hard for me not to wonder about the future. Will recovery, when it comes, really ever entail returning to the employment-population ratios we saw in the late 1990s?

Women, Risk, and Finance

Courtney Martin at Feministing writes about research indicating that women are better investors than men:

A 2005 study from the Center for Financial Research at the University of Cologne documented differences between male and female fund managers: Women managers tended to take less extreme risk and to adopt more measured investment styles (which perform well over time). And according to research published in 2002 in the International Journal of Bank Marketing, women tend to make investment-related decisions with a detailed, comprehensive approach, while men are more likely to simplify data and make decisions based on an overall schema.

I always get nervous when scientists or sociologists start making wide-sweeping gender claims, but I’m also not scientifically sophisticated enough to evaluate whether these studies are valid.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot for months, and I don’t really think there’s any reason for feminists to be bashful about this line of research. It’s pretty well-established across a variety of domains that women are better assessors of risk than men. Men are more likely to be involved in car accidents, men are more likely to be involved in crime, etc. I believe there is a line of research that attributes these different behaviors to inherent biological differences, but whether or not one wants to believe that (I think it’s pretty easy to imagine an alternate story about socialization into macho cultural norms) the pattern itself is pretty clear, and it appears to extend into the realms of finance and investing. The fact that finance is so male-dominated despite indications that men are, on average, going to be worse at it is pretty intriguing prima facie evidence of discriminatory environment that’s contributed to very serious global economic problems.

Justice, Gender, and the Financial Crisis

In response to a question I asked, Dana Goldstein and Ann Friedman offer up a very interesting discussion of gender, finance, and the financial crisis:

One thing they mention is this study showing that women are, on average, better investors than men. What’s more, my understanding is that there’s actually quite a lot of research demonstrating that women are, on average, better at risk-assessment. For example, women are much less likely to get into car accidents and nobody has any plausible theory of what compensating benefits men are receiving in exchange for our riskier driving.

It’s interesting to consider this, and then consider how male-dominated finance is, and then ponder what that tells us. It probably tells us something about a sexist culture and institutionalized gender discrimination on Wall Street. But it probably also tells us something about inefficiency in the whole market segment.

Historical Variation in Age at First Marriage

Read Jessica Valenti on media’s latest effort to get women to panic about their marriage prospects. Let me just say that the entire trend toward delayed marriage needs to be put in better context than this:

The average age of American men marrying for the first time is now 28. That’s up five full years since 1970 and the oldest average since the Census Bureau started keeping track. If men weren’t pulling women along with them on this upward swing, I wouldn’t be complaining. But women are now taking that first plunge into matrimony at an older age as well. The age gap between spouses is narrowing: Marrying men and women were separated by an average of more than four years in 1890 and about 2.5 years in 1960. Now that figure stands at less than two years. I used to think that only young men — and a minority at that — lamented marriage as the death of youth, freedom and their ability to do as they pleased. Now this idea is attracting women, too.

These trends are very real. But people ought to understand that there’s a huge amount of variation from time to time and place to place in this. It’s just a kind of knee-jerk prejudice to assume that conditions prevailing in 1960 in the United States are “normal” and that today’s situation is abnormal.

Here, for example, is a table from Hamano Kiyoshi’s “Marriage Patterns and the Demographic System of Late Tokugawa Japan”

In the sai system, a baby is born at age one and reaches age two a year later. In other words, in 19th century Shibuki the average age at first marriage for men was 29.5 years (higher than in the contemporary US) and for women was 23.7 (lower than in the contemporary US) and the gap was higher than the Census Bureau has ever recorded for the US. In Wrighton & Levine’s Poverty and Piety in an English Village they write “The relative precocity of marriage in Terling becomes more evident when it is compared with another village—Shepshed, Leceicerstershire. In that midland community during the 17th century, the mean age at first marriage was 29.4 for men and 28.1 for their brides.”

Nowadays, the average age at first marriage for women is substantially higher in Scandinavia, Spain, and France than in the United States.

Social customs vary, in other words, and they’ve always varied over time and from place to place. People have a large bias toward the status quo, so if customs today are different from customs a generation ago that seems alarming. But “traditional” age at first marriage only arose in the west in the 19th century. For about two hundred years before that, it was falling, and the current situation in the United States resembles what Gregory Clark describes in 17th century England.