Book covers and gender

Earlier this month HuffPo ran a fun feature on gendered book covers.  I.e., what if you took book covers that were marketed to men and flipped them to appeal to women– and vice versa.  A fun idea– here’s a few examples:

 

Pretty cool.  Anyway, I was reminded of this by a very interesting essay in Slate about likability in female characters.  Apparently, if you are a woman and write likable female characters, people take your work less seriously.   Personally, I just finished a great novel with a very likable male character (and a likable, but subsidiary, female character).  But, I also love novels with more complex, darker characters (Humbert Humbert, anyone).  The likability of the characters just strikes me as a strange way to judge the literary aspirations of fiction.

God help us

Latest “scandal“?  Obama had marines hold umbrellas over him and the Turkish Prime Minister during an outdoor news conference:

It was a lighthearted moment in the midst of a grim few days for the White House. But in a week of Benghazi e-mails, Justice Department subpoenas and Internal Revenue Service targeting, some of the administration’s critics saw another example of overreach.

“Obama breaches Marine umbrella protocol,” read the headline on one conservative blog.

Per Marine Corps uniform regulations, the men are not allowed to carry or use umbrellas while in uniform. Female Marines can carry “an all-black, plain standard, or collapsible umbrella at their option during inclement weather,” and only with service and dress uniforms…

“Obama expects our troops to hold damn umbrellas rather than go inside: It’s disrespectful, inconsiderate, classless,” tweeted Lou Dobbs.

“Mr. President, when it rains it pours, but most Americans hold their own umbrellas,” former Alaska governor Sarah Palin addedon Facebook.

The conservative Move America Forward PAC likened the umbrella-holding to what conservatives view as Obama’s weak response to September’s attack in Benghazi, Libya. A fundraising e-mail from the group read, “Rain: ‘Hold My Umbrella.’ Benghazi: ‘Stand Down.’ ”

Just pathetic.  But, wow, I love that little anecdote about the gender divide within Marine regulations.  I had no idea holding an umbrella was so un-manly.  From now on I’ll just come to class soaking wet on rainy days and feel secure in my manhood.

Teen pregnancy

With the recent discussion of abortion, contraception, etc., I’m reminded of a recent and really good Atlantic piece about the nature of teen pregnancy.  The sub-head gets right to it:

Handing out contraception will only make dents around the edges of the problem. Giving girls a reason not to get pregnant in the first place could go a long way towards solving it.

Basically, getting contraceptives to teenagers (i.e., the Plan B debate) is not the problem.  The problem is convincing at-risk teenagers (i.e., impoverished socio-economic background) that they want to use contraceptives– crazy as that may sound to us successfull, delay parenthood, blog-reading types:

If we really want to combat teen childbearing, we need to present girls at risk of becoming pregnant with an attractive alternative. It is not enough to offer them contraception and to explain to how to use it. We need to convince them that they want to use it; that they and their children will be better off if they wait to become mothers.  [emphasis mine]

Even more challenging: We need that message to be true. This is a much more difficult proposition, but all of the evidence suggests that this is what is required — interventions that change the life trajectory of girls on the path to teen motherhood.

Ummm, I’m pretty damn sure the message is true, though.  Plenty of good evidence on that fact.   That part is actually easy.  So, what do we need to do?

Why don’t these policies [ready access to contraception] have more of an impact? We believe it is because they do not address the fundamental forces that drive most teens to have children. They focus on the immediate precursors to pregnancy, and miss a lifetime of behaviors and decisions that build towards it…

An alternative view [alternative to blaming the teenage brain] — the one we favor — is that teen childbearing is a symptom of living a life full of obstacles. Facing limited education and job prospects, as well as a slim chance of finding a suitable man to marry, some low-income girls simply ask, “Why not have a baby now?” Ethnographic work on young, single mothers supports this theory. So does economic research showing that the financial and social problems teen mothers and their children experience are mostly driven by the mother’s socio-economic background, not her decision to have a baby early in life…

We want to attack the cause — the lack of opportunity so many girls face… In general, improving educational attainment for young women seems to work.

To really drive down rates of teen childbearing, we need young women at risk of becoming teen mothers to see a reason to delay motherhood. They need to believe that they have reason to invest in their futures, and they need a viable way to do so. That is where we need to focus our efforts.

Okay, now that is hard.  But certainly well worth doing.  And we need to very much pay attention to this line of research in how we think about addressing teen pregnancy.  Until then, I still say, more IUD‘s.

College as economic investment

Really nice piece by Dylan Matthews last week in Wonkblog about a report focusing on college as “Return on Investment.”  Yglesias made the important point that this analysis totally left off graduation rates.  A lot of universities have much lower graduation rates than others and investing in some college, but not a degree, is a really bad investment.  Anyway, not surprisingly, your major matters.  The good news is any major is not better than going to college:

And I’d like to say I’m very pleased to see Social Science among the higher-earning majors, but some of this seems suspect to me.  I.e., since when is Psychology not a social science?!  And how much of this is a feature of the fact that the higher-earning majors are dominated by men?   I’ve already written a lot about the pay gap here, so I’m not going to go back into it (clearly some very real discrimination, but a lot of this is the different choices women and men make about where they work and how much they work), but because of this fact, any field that has more men in it is going to, ceteris paribus, have higher earnings than a field with a lot of women.  Would be very curious to see how statistical control for gender might have affected this.

Naturally, I was curious to go to the PayScale data and check out the ROI for the universities that are and have been a part of my life. I’ve told a number of people that as much as I loved my time at Duke, no way is it worth the additional amount of money that it costs over a place like UNC or NCSU for a in-state student.  It’s worth more, but not that much more.   According to this data, though, I’m wrong.  As expensive as Duke is, over a lifetime of earnings, it more than pays for itself and comes in at 38, well above the NC state schools.  I was talking about this with my little little sister while at by big little sister’s law school graduation on Saturday:

(and here I am with big sister– also an attorney– big little sister, and little little sister).

And in the conversation what hit me was that there’s a huge  effect for selection bias here that is entirely uncontrolled.  An amazing amount of Duke undergraduates go onto careers in medicine and law (it’s a little ridiculous at the reunions).  Very few go into social work, teaching, etc.  I suspect that if you took this into account, things would like quite different.  I suspect that a lot of what’s going in in Duke’s great ROI is not that the Duke education (and networking) led to such a lucrative career, but 1) people who graduate from Duke are among the most intelligent, ambitious, and disciplined college graduates out there, and 2) they disproportionately choose to go into high paying careers.  Duke is great, but I suspect if you put all these same Duke graduates and sent them to East Carolina, you’d find that ECU had an absolutely unbelievable ROI.  But in reality, ECU (or UNC, NCSU) draw a very different set of undergraduates, on average.

In the end, this is a neat analysis and fun to think about, but one should be very careful in trying to draw too many meaningful conclusions about the relative value of an education at these various colleges.  Without a doubt, a college education is a great investment, but to say whether one college is truly a better investment than other– for any given student– is a much more fraught and questionable endeavor.

Dreams of TED

So, I had a dream the other night that I gave a TED talk.  I cannot remember what exactly the topic was (politics, I presume, but I do remember that it was awesome.  How’s that for a liberal intellectual fantasy.   I don’t watch all that many TED talks, but I really do love the NPR TED Radio hour which combines and distills several related talks and let’s me listen via podcast while I work out.  Anyway, I did watch all of this one by fashion model Cameron Russell about our perceptions of beauty– it’s pretty awesome.  What I really love is the part (starting about 5:30 in) where she describes her images as “not pictures of me; they are constructions.”  Worth watching the whole thing, but if not, definitely that minute in the middle.

Male babysitter

Enjoyed this essay in the Post earlier this week about society’s attitudes towards male babysitters.  I’ve got a lot of years to go before my kids are all grown (and with our age range, we could be lucky and have some grandkids before Sarah leaves the house), but I’ve thought about the fact that once the kids are all gone I’ll still want to be involved with kids.  They’re just so much fun.  But, sadly because they’re are a lot of bad men out there (even if they are a small minority), it certainly does lead to negative perceptions of the entire gender:

I wasn’t trying to be subversive when I hired a male babysitter this month. But it is apparently something that few parents would do.

Most are too spooked by Jerry Sandusky and the endless parade of other child molesters in the news. These creeps are almost always male, and they almost always find a way to work with kids. So parents aren’t being paranoid about the stranger danger that surround our kids. It’s a very real and totally frightening phenomenon.

Still, here’s what I’m wondering: Have our fears turned us into a bunch of sexists? …

When it comes to kids, we are pretty close to being a society that has demonized men. And this isn’t a totally unreasonable reaction. In one government study of sexual assaults on children, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 96 percent of the offenders they studied were male.

So, if you’re going to strap your child into that car seat even when you’re driving just a few blocks, why wouldn’t you look at that 96 percent statistic, remember what you saw on the evening news and say “no thank you” to a male babysitter? All it takes is one undetected pedophile to destroy a child’s life, right? …

I know the statistics. I spent nearly two decades at crime scenes and digging through documents in courts and social service agencies. I know what horrors men are statistically more likely to perpetrate…

Here is the real problem when we err on the side of statistics. By telling the millions of men that they cannot be trusted with children, we are reinforcing gender stereotypes at school, at home and at work.

If men can’t take care of kids, women have to do it. And that’s holding us back.

So tell me, would you hire a male babysitter?

Yes.  But, I posted this because I’m really intrigued by the larger point that this demonization of men is also bad for women.  But, there really are a lot more bad men out there.  Interesting conundrum.

Quick hits

Lots of interesting stuff I just don’t have the time to get to: 1) Belief in the “Second Coming” of Jesus significantly reduces support for government action to tackle climate change (necessary controls, of course). 2) My hometown of Cary, NC switched over to blinking yellow from solid green for a yield left turn in the past few years.  I don’t feel any safer, but supposedly I am.  Apparently, though, pedestrians are now more at risk. 3) A disproportionate number of the world’s best students are Americans.  Are averages are always getting pulled down due to our inequality and poverty, but at the top, we still rock. 4) Being told that a CFL light bulb is good for the planet makes conservatives less likely to buy it.  How depressing.  Kevin Drum with a nice take on how actually caring about the environment has become an extension of the culture wars. 5) Really enjoyed this piece on how to talk to your child about sexual assault, sexting, etc.  This part especially:

I understand that reluctance: I haven’t talked to my 13-year-old son about Steubenville or the other cases because parties and alcohol aren’t on his radar yet. I don’t want to rob him of his innocence. “I understand that feeling,” Wiseman said. “But that always means the moment of losing their innocence doesn’t happen with you, and they have to deal with it in the moment, and they’re completely unprepared for what to do.” She said I could wait until my son is 14, but probably not much beyond that.

Got it.  David’s 13.  I’m going to get on this. 6) Mother and daughter both injured in Boston marathon bombing.  Good story. 7) Great take on the morons in Congress trying to eliminate NSF social science funding.  Great conclusion:

I have no doubt that Messrs Duncan and Webster’s motivations in offering this bill are not venial or self-serving. I have every faith that they are motivated by a sincere devotion to ignorance, a value they both preach and practice.

8) Cool analysis of age and gender effects on the nature of status updates.  Handy graphical summary from Andrew Sullivan. 9) I think it is great that Bill Gates is funding efforts to make a more pleasurable condom and I agree with this author that the backlash is ridiculous.  It is a simple biological fact that condoms reduce sensation and a socio-cultural fact that many men refuse to use them as a result.  You may not like that last fact, but it’s a reality.  If there can be real progress on the first fact, it might make a real impact on the second.  And that would be great for public health in many places. 10) NPR series of stories on Buried in Grain from back in March.  I got most of these on the radio– they were great.

Why female politicians matter

One of the most persistent gender gaps in politics is the fact that women have less knowledge of and less interest in politics (and, yes, those two are closely related).  A big part of this is surely that, in many ways, politics is a “man’s world.”  One of my favorite studies is by my friend Lonna Atkeson and it shows that women in states with prominent state-wide female candidates are more politically engaged as a result.  From the abstract:

The hypothesis that visible and competitive women matter to female citizens is tested by examining the relationship between various political attitudes and behaviors and the presence (or absence) of a viable statewide female candidate. The models indicate that there is overwhelming support for the hypothesis that women citizens in states with competitive and visible female candidates increase their political engagement. These results suggest that descriptive representation matters in important ways.

I was definitely thinking about this as I looked at the gender breakdown of results from a semi-recent Pew News quiz I took recently (inspired by the Science quiz).  What struck me as that while there were the traditional gender gaps we would expect– women were typically 8-10 points less likely to correctly identify a number of male politicians (I won’t name them in case you want to take the quiz).  Meanwhile, one of the figures (okay, I’ll give you one right for free) was Elizabeth Warren.  41% correct for men; 44% for women.  I.e., there’s nothing inherent about women knowing less about politics.  Shake things up a little; give women some more role models, and this gap will really shrink.  Let’s have at it.  Now, if only we could get more women to run for office, but that’s a different story.

Relationships vs. ambition

I think a lot about the topic of ambition, especially when I was recently at a political science conference.  In looking around those I know in the discipline, easily the biggest difference between those who publish the most and are at the most prestigious universities versus those in a more humble position (I’ll put myself somewhere in the middle) is not intellect, but ambition.  I had a great serendipitous discussion while there with an OSU professor I used to work for and he reflected on the fact that he really had accomplished quite a lot, but that his current family situation was not the greatest and perhaps the two were related.  As for me, I’ve always felt that NCSU is a perfect place because it is a solid program where I have good students and plenty of respect in and out of the profession, but allows for a much more reasonable work-life balance, i.e., lots more time with those four crazy kids, than if I were just a few miles down the road at Duke or UNC.  Anyway, very interesting piece in the Atlantic recently about the trade-offs between ambition and relationships:

The conflict between career ambition and relationships lies at the heart of many of our current cultural debates, including the ones sparked by high-powered women like Sheryl Sandberg and Anne Marie Slaughter. Ambition drives people forward; relationships and community, by imposing limits, hold people back. Which is more important? Just the other week, Slate ran a symposium that addressed this question, asking, “Does an Early Marriage Kill Your Potential To Achieve More in Life?” Ambition is deeply entrenched into the American personae, as Yale’s William Casey King argues in Ambition, A History: From Vice to Virtue­ – but what are its costs? …

When I asked about the connection between ambition and personal relationships, Kammeyer-Mueller said that while the more ambitious appeared to be happier, that their happiness could come at the expense of personal relationships. “Do these ambitious people have worse relationships? Are they ethical and nice to the people around them? What would they do to get ahead? These are the questions the future research needs to answer.”

Existing research by psychologist Tim Kasser can help address this issue. Kasser, the author of The High Price of Materialism, has shown that the pursuit of materialistic values like money, possessions, and social status-the fruits of career successes-leads to lower well-being and more distress in individuals. It is also damaging to relationships: “My colleagues and I have found,” Kasser writes, “that when people believe materialistic values are important, they…have poorer interpersonal relationships [and] contribute less to the community.” Such people are also more likely to objectify others, using them as means to achieve their own goals.

So if the pursuit of career success comes at the expense of social bonds, then an individual’s well-being could suffer. That’s because community is strongly connected to well-being.

In a similar vein, I also really enjoyed this take on Sheryl Sandberg from journalist Elsa Walsh.  Here’s what I think is the key bit:

And third, I have to wonder if Sandberg does not realize that she is going to die someday. There is so little life and pleasure in her book outside of work. Even sex is framed as something that men will get more of if they pitch in and help their working wives.

Success, particularly the kind Sandberg calls for, requires ever more time at the office, ever more travel. It requires always being available, always a click away. Sandberg is almost giddy when she describes getting up at 5 a.m. to answer e-mails before her children wake up and getting back on her computer once they are asleep.

“Facebook is available 24/7 and for the most part, so am I,” she writes. “The days when I even think of unplugging for a weekend or a vacation are long gone.”

Imagine what that life looks like to a child. Imagine what it looks like to yourself when you are 80.

That is not how I want my daughter to live, and it is not how I want to live.

Boom.  Now, I don’t want to judge Sandberg, because if she is happy with her life, than more power to her.  But I think Walsh’s idea of balance sound more like happiness to your typical human being.  I’m pretty sure I could be a Harvard Professor instead of an NC State professor if I had truly dedicated myself to that goal.  But I have no desire to be up two hours before my kids are so I can answer emails.  Nor to simply see way less of them.  I’ll take the trade.

What is the most abundant gas in the atmosphere?

Wait, before you answer that, take the Pew Science and technology quiz.

And if you missed that one, don’t feel bad.  Chance would have given you a 1 in 4 probability of getting it right, but actually only 20% of respondents did.  And, of course, yours truly.  And my 13 year old son (did trip up my wife, though).  (My son missed the chemical reaction question).  Anyway, lots of fun stuff to chew on here.  I was most intrigued by the gender gap:

As the report points out, though, this gap pretty much disappears and/or reverses on health-oriented science questions.  Women seem to be better at practical real-world science; men the textbook stuff.  Obviously, the big question is how much gender socialization is driving women away on this score.  I’d also love to see how the gender gap fares with additional controls (remind me to download the full dataset when Pew releases it in a year– or maybe I could tell Siri to do that).

The only partisan differences they looked at is on what subject should be more emphasized in school.  Republicans love math; but science not so much:

I posted the link on FB and a lot of friends reported scores of 12 or 13.  I’ve got smart friends.  But I also wonder how many took the quiz and were embarrassed to report a score lower than 12.

Mama’s, don’t let your daughters grow up to be Representatives

So among the more interesting MPSA papers I wanted to listen to, but did not get the opportunity to attend was this Lawless and Fox paper on political ambition among college-aged females (Lawless and Fox have literally written the book on gender and political candidacy).  In short, by the time women are in college they already have substantially less interest in running for office than do men:

 

So, this pervasive gap is already set at the age of 21, well before children, marriage, etc., for most.  So, not the easiest to determine exactly the source, but part of the blame– parents:

 

Interesting indeed!  I have not read the whole report, yet, but I will as I am assigning it to my Fall Gender & Politics course.  I’ll report back with more then.

Gender, physical attractiveness, and political campaigns

Drum summarizes the latest depressing findings on the topic:

 Today, the Name It, Change It campaign released a survey conducted earlier this year on exactly this subject. In the survey, Jane Smith and Dan Jones are pitted against each other in a race for Congress. Both have similar backgrounds, and after reading their bios the survey respondents prefer Jane slightly, 49-48.

Then they read a second story. In one version of the story, there’s no physical description of either candidate, and Jane’s lead stays pretty much the same. In a second version, there’s a neutral description of Jane’s appearance. Suddenly she’s 5 points behind Dan. In a third version, there’s a positive description of her appearance. Now she’s 13 points behind Dan. A fourth version that contains a negative description has about the same effect.

In other words, any description hurts Jane. And any non-neutral description, even a positive one, just kills her. This is why even a complimentary comment like Obama’s is both inappropriate and damaging in a professional setting. It primes people to think of a woman’s appearance, and that’s apparently enough to keep them from thinking about her actual qualifications. You will be unsurprised to learn that this effect is strongest among men. The full report is here. (Via ThinkProgress.)

Yowza.  Those are just depressing results.  I’m definitely going to have to check out the full research and consider assigning it to my Gender & Politics class in the fall.

I do wonder about the written description, though.  In the real world, that’s not how we experience political candidates.  Why not just show photos of candidates of varying attractiveness (which you can pre-test beforehand)?  Reminds me of a finding years ago when my colleague Mike Cobb actually had some student do a project where they photoshop manipulated breast size of candidate photos.  And yup, large breasts made female candidates less electable.  Now, we all know that throughout all things in life, appearance matters– including for male politicians– but it is a real problem to have women judged on their appearance so much more so than men.