Obama and all the single ladies

Was talking to a neighbor the other day and she complained about how many political phone calls she had been getting ahead of the NC primary.  I told her I suspected that she was part of a coveted demographic (single women).  Anyway, made me think of this really interesting chart from Gallup.  Presumably, at this point, everyone is well familiar with the gender gap.  But did  you realize how much Democrats support among women varies by marital status?  Short version: all the single ladies love Obama.  Pretty interesting chart:

Also pretty intriguing how “divorced” seems to so perfectly split the difference between single and married.   Gallup points out that certainly some of what you are seeing here is about age, but it’s not age alone:

These differences are partly a function of single women’s younger average age — young Americans of both genders are more likely than their elders to approve of the president. That’s not the whole story, however, as single women within each age category are more likely than married women to say they approve. That may be because marriage is associated with a number of factors that predict the more conservative values associated with the Republican Party, including higher religiosity.

The gender gap in presidential approval is widest among Americans at higher income and education levels. Among the least-educated Americans, for example, men and women are similarly likely to approve of Obama, while there are substantial gender gaps among college graduates and those with postgraduate education. Almost two-thirds of women with postgraduate education (64%) approved of Obama’s job performance in April, compared with 53% of men, putting the former on par with single women as one of the president’s most supportive demographic groups.

Also got me thinking that most media reports of “soccer moms” “security moms” etc., tend to focus on married white women, who are surely an even more conservative group than the all women breakdown here.   I could just look up the numbers right now if I wasn’t trying to blog with Sarah crawling on me, but suffice it to say, married white women are a pretty Republican-friendly group.

Attachment parenting

Wow– when I first saw this photo of the new Time magazine, I figured that this had to be the European edition, as it would never fly for more prudish American tastes.  Apparently I’m wrong.  Now, this is one attention-getting cover:

Anyway, Slate’s Hannah Rosin has a really interesting take on attachment parenting to go with it:

I have rehearsed my objections to the breastfeeding cult at great length in the past, in my Atlantic story, “The Case Against Breast-Feeding,” and more broadly against attachment parenting in a recent Slate discussion of Elisabeth Badinter’s book, The Conflict.  There is the very basic objection that it is virtually impossible to do what the advocates say is best for your baby and have a job, which the vast majority of American mothers have these days. In the Time magazine story, which is largely a profile of attachment guru William Sears, he answers this objection by arguing that attachment parenting is perfect for working mothers because as soon as they get home they can instantly rebond with their babies by strapping them up in a sling and then sleeping with them the whole night. Voila! Instant maternal bliss!

But this leads to my second and more profound problem with it. Attachment parenting demands not just certain actions you take with your baby but also certain emotional states to accompany those actions. So, it’s not just enough to breast-feed but one has to experience “breast-feeding induced maternal nirvana.” And it’s not enough to snuggle you have to snuggle enough to achieve a spiritual high. As Badinter has said, once women were just expected to tolerate their babies, Betty Draper style, but now they are expected to experience “jouissance,” loosely translated as “orgasm.” And this is what makes the movement truly oppressive.

I love my kids and certainly like to spend time with them and am all for breastfeeding, but I do think attachment parenting is a bit over the top.  That said, if this is how you want to parent, more power to you.

You go, Hillary!

I think this (i.e., what Hillary says here) is awesome:

On a stop in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Clinton appeared with no makeup, natural hair, and glasses – and she made no apologies.

Published pictures from the trip have sparked a flurry of articles opinions about her looks. Comments have ranged from Clinton looks “like a schoolgirl” to she looks “tired and withdrawn.”

Clinton, responding to the controversy on CNN, said, “I feel so relieved to be at the stage I’m at in my life right now, Jill, because if I want to wear my glasses, I’m wearing my glasses. If I – you know, want to pull my hair back, I’m pulling my hair back. And, you know, at some point, it’s just not – it’s just not something that deserves a whole lot of time and attention. If others want to worry about it, I’ll let them do the worrying for a change.”

What’s not awesome is that there’s a flurry of media activity/controversy about the matter.  The media obsession with the physicial appearance of female politicians, relative to male politicians, remains one of the most pervasive and problematic biases that women in politics face.  Good for Hillary for standing up to it.

Gender wage gap. Yet again.

Kevin Drum had a post the other day in response to Bob Somersby’s frustration with Rachel Maddow refusing to back down on misleading her viewers on the gender wage gap.  First, some Somersby:

Overall, when you aggregate everybody working, women get paid 77 cents for every dollar that men get paid. For the same work, dudes get paid more.

True believers often think it: If they just keep repeating a claim, that will make the claim accurate. In this case, Maddow kept saying that men get paid more “for the same work.” And she used the statistic from Meet the Press, the statistic that launched this dispute:

“Women get paid 77 cents for every dollar that men get paid. For the same work, dudes get paid more.”

Those claims may still be technically accurate—but they’re grossly misleading. Consider what happened when Maddow ended her monologue and let an expert speak…

Hartmann told Maddow she had the far better part of Sunday’s argument. Then, she quickly began to show that this claim isn’t accurate.

Duh! “Of course, these numbers from the…Census Bureau are not really talking about discrimination,” Hartmann said, referring to the “77 cents” figure which Maddow had now been reciting for two straight days. Having thrown that statistic under the bus, Hartmann cited a GAO study.

This study did attempt to measure discrimination, Hartmann said. And what did that GAO study find? According to Hartmann, the study said this:

“Even when you put everything you can possibly think of in the regression equations, the statistical analyses to try to make that gap go away, you can’t explain at least 20 percent of it.”

But twenty percent of “that gap” is only 5.6 cents. (That’s 23 cents divided by five.) According to Hartmann, the GAO study said that women are discriminated against to the tune of 5.6 cents on the dollar. Maddow had been saying the discrimination factor was 23 cents for the prior two days.

Alright, enough of all that.  As you know, I generally love me some Drum, but I think he really got it wrong here:

But this argument sort of misses the point. It’s true that some of the gap goes away when you account for the fact that women tend to work in different jobs than men and take more time off to have children. But that’s all part of the point. When all’s said and done, women are punished financially in three different ways: because “women’s jobs” have historically paid less than jobs dominated by men; because women are expected to take time off when they have children, which reduces their seniority; and because even when they’re in the same job with the same amount of experience, they get paid less than men. All of these things are part of the pay gap. Whether you call all three of them “discrimination” is more a matter of taste than anything else.

Now Drum is, in a way, exactly right about this.  What he does not seem to appreciate is that– in my experience– the vast majority of the purveyors of this statistics would have you believe (as would Maddow) that this statistic means that women are getting paid 77% as much for exactly the same work.  And that’s so not true.  Every semester when I go through this with my classes– this false interpretation is exactly what most of my students think.  I do not object at all to trying to shrink this gap, but it is so much more than just flat-out wage discrimination, as Maddow would have you believe.  We are talking about undertaking fundamental changes in how society understands the roles of men, women, work, and caring for children.  And I’m all for that, but please, let’s be honest in what we’re talking about on this issue.

For those really into this issue, I recommend the summary sections of this excellent analysis prepared for the Department of Labor.

Gender, shaving, and ambivalence

Enjoyed this essay in the Guardian about women and the shaving of body hair:

As this annual onslaught on a woman’s right to hide her shameful, sub-beautiful physicality marches nearer, many of you will be wondering: what will I do with my body hair? How will I achieve environmentally devastating deforestation of my legs? How best to kill my underarm kittens? How to convince the curlies partying on my inner thighs to get back in my knickers and stay there?

I have an answer to all your epilatory woes. Stop shaving. Granted, this method of dealing with body hair is new and unorthodox – likely you are worried about undesirable side-effects. But fear not: I have conducted an 18-month experiment in body hair on your behalf and will now answer the questions people most commonly proffer when confronted with my prodigious manes of untamed womanhood.

It’s mostly in the form of a fun Q&A, to wit:

Don’t small children run when they see you, fearing you will lure them to your gingerbread house?

A scene from my life:

Small child: Why do you have hair under your arms?

Me: Because when girls and boys grow up into women and men they grow hair under their arms.

Small child: My mum doesn’t have hair under her arms.

Me: She shaves it off.

Small child: She doesn’t.

Me: She does. Ask her.

Small child: Mum, do you?

Mother of small child: Yes.

Small child: Why?

Exactly, small child. Exactly…

Remember that you are doing the necessary and important work of challenging stupid, arbitrary, gendered bullshit. And when you get to feminist heaven, Judith Butler and Simone de Beauvoir will be waiting with bubbly wine, a corn-fed organic roast chicken, Bikini Kill and the entire cast of Monty Python. Do you want to miss that party?

The ambivalence in the title?  The feminist in me: you go girl!  The American born and raised male who has been thoroughly socialized to prefer women without leg and underarm air: ewww.  Then again, I’d be quite fine with everybody shaving underarm hair– it’s just a bacteria trap.

Gender wage gap. Again.

This is getting ridiculous.  So, HuffPo links to this piece saying that Republican pundit Alex Castellanos was caught out lying about this gap on the Maddow show when CNN took an impartial look.  Umm, not actually so.  Notice that not all that subtle conflation of distinct statistics:

CNN ran a package on the subject, and said that Castellanos’ claims that men make more money because they work more hours per week, and work in professions that pay higher wages, was inconsistent with data from the Census Bureau. Sylvester quoted a report that stated, “In 2010, the earnings of women who worked full time, year-round were 77 percent of that for men working full time, year-round, not statistically different from the 2009 ratio.”

Um, hello. Working “full-time, year round” is not the same as working the same hours.  Castellanos in response links to this WSJ piece that nicely breaks things down.  To wit:

One stubborn fact of the labor market argues against the idea. That is the gender-hours gap, close cousin of the gender-wage gap. Most people have heard that full-time working American women earn only 77 cents for every dollar earned by men. Yet these numbers don’t take into account the actual number of hours worked. And it turns out that women work fewer hours than men.

The Labor Department defines full-time as 35 hours a week or more, and the “or more” is far more likely to refer to male workers than to female ones. According to the department, almost 55% of workers logging more than 35 hours a week are men. In 2007, 25% of men working full-time jobs had workweeks of 41 or more hours, compared with 14% of female full-time workers. In other words, the famous gender-wage gap is to a considerable degree a gender-hours gap.

The main reason that women spend less time at work than men—and that women are unlikely to be the richer sex—is obvious: children. Today, childless 20-something women do earn more than their male peers. But most are likely to cut back their hours after they have kids, giving men the hours, and income, advantage.

My response to this is: good for women!  Too many men work to hard and shortchange their families.  Women have their priorities in the right place.  I could sure as hell be in an occupational position making more money, but I would not then have the time to spend taking care of the four crazy nuts (okay three, Sarah’s not very nutty.  Yet.)  Now look, I’m not going to deny for a second that there isn’t very real gender discrimination in the workplace, but this $.77 way over-states and serves to take the focus away from the real issues– different working patterns and different societal expectations for men and women– to focus on a bogeyman issue of flat out wage discrimination for the same work.  I don’t doubt that happens some, but nowhere near the 23% level.  Men get paid more because they work more hours in more lucrative jobs.  That’s going to get you 95% of the way or so there.  Should we worry about the other 5%?  Yes, actually.  But let’s be honest about it.

The real war on women

It’s not the Republican Party, it the routine and vicious institutionalized misogyny throughout the Middle East.  Mona Eltahawy writes a powerful essay on the matter in Foreign Policy.   A sampling:

But let’s put aside what the United States does or doesn’t do to women. Name me an Arab country, and I’ll recite a litany of abuses fueled by a toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend. When more than 90 percent of ever-married women in Egypt — including my mother and all but one of her six sisters — have had their genitals cut in the name of modesty, then surely we must all blaspheme. When Egyptian women are subjected to humiliating “virginity tests” merely for speaking out, it’s no time for silence. When an article in the Egyptian criminal code says that if a woman has been beaten by her husband “with good intentions” no punitive damages can be obtained, then to hell with political correctness. And what, pray tell, are “good intentions”? They are legally deemed to include any beating that is “not severe” or “directed at the face.” What all this means is that when it comes to the status of women in the Middle East, it’s not better than you think. It’s much, much worse…

Not a single Arab country ranks in the top 100 in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, putting the region as a whole solidly at the planet’s rock bottom. Poor or rich, we all hate our women. Neighbors Saudi Arabia and Yemen, for instance, might be eons apart when it comes to GDP, but only four places separate them on the index, with the kingdom at 131 and Yemen coming in at 135 out of 135 countries…

It’s easy to see why the lowest-ranked country is Yemen, where 55 percent of women are illiterate, 79 percent do not participate in the labor force, and just one woman serves in the 301-person parliament. Horrific news reports about 12-year-old girls dying in childbirth do little to stem the tide of child marriage there. Instead, demonstrations in support of child marriage outstrip those against it, fueled by clerical declarations that opponents of state-sanctioned pedophilia are apostates because the Prophet Mohammed, according to them, married his second wife, Aisha, when she was a child.

Yowza.  And there’s plenty more of such cataloging in this essay.  My favorite part falls under her “So what is to be done?” conclusion:

First we stop pretending. Call out the hate for what it is. Resist cultural relativism and know that even in countries undergoing revolutions and uprisings, women will remain the cheapest bargaining chips. You — the outside world — will be told that it’s our “culture” and “religion” to do X, Y, or Z to women. Understand that whoever deemed it as such was never a woman.

Well, alright, then.  This is the part where I’ll come out and say that seeing a woman in a headscarf generally just angers me when I see it.  Sure, it may very well be her own individual choice, but to me that headscarf (and that’s only 1/10 the anger I feel at seeing a woman in an actual veil) is the symbol of a culture that brutally and systematically abrogates the rights and dignity of women.   In that sense, it’s not okay.  Again, for the individual woman I understand that she may be in a social/cultural/family position where she really does not have a lot of choice short of a radical break with her family and culture.  That said, I refuse to accept that a culture that insists that women’s sexuality is something dirty and corrupting to both women and men deserves my respect.  Now, if the status of women throughout all the head-scarf wearing cultures was not as abysmal as Eltahawy catalogs, I might feel differently.  Until then, no cultural relativism for me.

Female voter myths

This week’s “5 myths” in the Post is myths about women voters.  As usual, some of them don’t seem very myth-y to me, i.e., does anybody really think that we can look at female voters as a single, homogenous bloc?  I did like myth #3, though, as this seems particularly pervasive in a lot of journalistic accounts:

3. Women vote based on “women’s issues,” such as abortion rights and contraception.

A recent poll of voters in swing states showed that women’s top priorities are health care, gas prices, unemployment and the deficit — in that order — with “government policies toward contraception” coming in last. (Women are, however, much more likely than men to rate government policy on birth control as important — 55 percent to 35 percent in the same USA Today-Gallup poll.)

Even on abortion rights, women are nearly as divided as the country as a whole, which broke 49 percent to 45 percent in favor of abortion rights in Gallup polling last year. And though 50 percent of women identify as pro-choice and 44 percent as pro-life, age and party affiliation are far better predictors than gender of views on abortion.

Yep.  Every class I teach, I like to start out with a very basic True/False quiz on the first day to try and show my students that they might actually be wrong about a variety of things they think they already know.   The question that they probably most persistently get wrong is “women are substantially more likely than men to think abortion should be legal.”  Nope.  There are some interesting differences in how men and women see politics (and, in fact, women do care more about abortion– on both sides of the issue), but by and large, women are voting on the same sorts of things as men.

Don’t give back the ring!

Found this piece about engagement rings in the Atlantic a couple weeks ago to be quite interesting.  Take away point: don’t give back the engagement ring.  The whole reason you have it is so that the intended groom won’t renege:

Once upon a time, diamond rings weren’t just gifts. They were, frankly, virginity insurance.

A now-obsolete law called the “Breach of Promise to Marry” once allowed women to sue men for breaking off an engagement. Back then, there was a high premium on women being virgins when they married — or at least when they got engaged. Surveys from the 1940s show that roughly half of engaged couples reported being intimate before the big day. If the groom-to-be walked out after he and the bride-to-be had sex, that left her in a precarious position. From a social angle, she had been permanently “damaged.” From an economic angle, she had lost her market value. So Breach of Promise to Marry was born…

Let’s think like an economist. An engaged couple aren’t all that different from a borrower and a lender. The woman is lending her hand in marriage to the man, who promises to tie the knot at a later date. In the days of Breach of Promise, the woman would do this on an unsecured basis — that is, the man didn’t have to pledge any collateral — because the law provided her something akin to bankruptcy protection. Put simply, if the man didn’t fulfill his obligation to marry, the woman had legal recourse. This calculus changed once the law changed. Suddenly, women wanted an upfront financial assurance from their men. Basically, collateral. That way, if the couple never made it down the aisle, she’d at least be left with something. And that something was almost always small and shiny. The diamond ring was insurance.

So, should a jilted bride give back the engagement ring? Today, the answer is often yes. But back when rings first came into vogue, part of the point was that she wouldn’t. It was a security against a default on the engagement. The good news is that this seems so alien to us today. Women have their own careers. They earn more degrees. And, for the younger generation, they out-earn men. More importantly, the stigma against premarital sex has disappeared. A broken engagement isn’t a lasting financial disaster for a woman like it was before. The diamond engagement ring has itself undergone a transformation. It’s no longer a security. It’s just about signaling nowadays. It’s anachronistic. But don’t try telling your girlfriend that.

I think this is one of those anecdote/factoids I’ll be sharing with many an engaged person in the future.

Feminism and how to lie with statistics

1) Women are discriminated against in the work place.  2) I don’t like it.  3) But people have to stop lying with statistics.  (From Momsrising)

Today is not just Tax Day. It is also Equal Pay Day – the day that symbolizes how far into 2012 women must work to earn what men already earned in 2011.

That’s right. Women have to work for 16.5 months to earn what men make in 12 months. Even though it is 2012 and even though the Equal Pay Act was passed almost 50 years ago, the sad reality is that across industries, women are still not getting equal pay for equal work.

Yes, it’s 2012, but Wisconsin State Senator Glenn Grothman offered this justification for his bill repealing the state’s fair pay law:

“You could argue that money is more important for men. I think a guy in their first job, maybe because they expect to be a breadwinner someday, may be a little more money-conscious.“

WHAT??? State Sen. Glenn Grothman seems to think that money just isn’t that important to women and mothers! And sadly he isn’t alone in this dated, inaccurate thinking since the fair pay legislation in WI was actually repealed.

Did I wake up in the 50s? No. I did not. It’s 2012 and State Sen. Grothman said this in a time when women, for the first time in history, now comprise half of the entire paid labor force, yet still make only 77 cents to every dollar earned by men.  That lost money is more critical than ever since more and more women are now the primary or co-breadwinners for their families.  Money, most certainly is not “more important for men” as he says.

I’ve said it before I’ll say it again– this statistic is the median wage for a wage-earning female as opposed to the median-wage for the wage-earning male.  The truth is that a lot more men are doctors and women are nurses.  Men are more likely to be attorneys; women paralegals.  Men in construction; women as office help.  The list goes on.  Maybe that’s discrimination, but this oft-repeated statistic is just hugely misleading of the actual situation.  Also, the presumably trogolodytic State Senator is onto something.  Men actually do work harder than equivalently-placed women.  They sacrifice family life to do so.  It’s a choice I personally reject, but it does actually lead to higher earnings.   I’m pretty sure that there’s evidence men start working more when they become a parent; definitely not the case for women.

Listen, there’s very real discrimination in the workplace– primarily against mothers– and there’s a very real cultural impact of how society seeks to constrain the career choices of men and women, but I’m just tired of people pretending as if it’s a simple matter of wage discrimination.  This is a very complicated issue and I don’t think basically lying with statistics gets us any closer to solving it.

Has Ann Romney actually worked a day in her life or not?

This dust-up over “Ann Romney has never worked a day in her life” is just everything that’s wrong with political coverage.  The Romney campaign takes false umbrage at what an adviser to an adviser to Obama and largely unknown CNN political pundit says (which was entirely accurate) and we get breathless front-page coverage:

The so-called war on women escalated Thursday onto a new front, after a Democratic strategist and cable-television pundit declared that Ann Romney, the stay-at-home, mother-of-five wife of the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, had “never worked a day in her life.” This time, however, Republicans were on the offensive. And after weeks of hammering Romney and the Republicans on gender-related issues, including contraception coverage and equal pay for women, President Obama’s forces were thrown on defense. Taking to the social media Web site Twitter, where the gaffe had grown into a firestorm, top Obama campaign officials scrambled to distance themselves from the comments on CNN by Hilary Rosen, a political and public relations consultant who is a business associate of former White House communications director Anita Dunn.

Weiglel’s post basically points out how absurd this all is.  Now, was this a stupid thing (or at least a stupid way to put it) for Rosen?  Of course.  Unfortunately, the Post article doesn’t even give the full context of her remarks, but I find Rosen’s own defense to be entirely legitimate:

Rosen made several attempts to defend her comments on Twitter, saying that she admired Ann Romney but was trying to point out that the candidate’s wife — often cited by Mitt Romney as his sounding board on women’s concerns — has not experienced the economic struggles that many working mothers face.

I think that’s very true.  I totally support stay-at-home moms if that’s their choice.  Kim was one for years and now she’s a work-at-home mom.  But insofar as Ann Romney is supposedly a liaison to women (because Mitt can’t handle it), she simply has not faced the difficulties that working moms face and that certainly shape their experience of the economy and how politics impacts their lives.

Romney’s women problem

I didn’t see an actual article on it, but one of my students in class yesterday said that they read that the Romney campaign plans to unleash Ann Romney to solve Mitt’s problem with women voters (i.e., some gender gap is expected, the huge gap Romney faces is not good (from his perspective– I’m quite happy with it).  I’m not convinced that contraception or “The Republican War on Women” is at work here, but I do wonder if enough middle-of-the road women just have a vague sense that the Republican party is not looking out for their best interests.  I wonder if Romney’s advisers are actually stupid enough to think Ann can simply solve this “women problem.”  I suspect they are smarter than that.  But, if so, what is the campaign gaining by suggesting this strategy that seems laughable on its face.  Anyway,  I really enjoyed Ruth Marcus’ column on the matter today:

Outsourcing the job to his wife isn’t going to solve Mitt Romney’s problem with women voters.

That, though, does seem to be the candidate’s first instinct. Romney, when asked last week about the gender gap, twice said he wished his wife could take the question.

“My wife has the occasion, as you know, to campaign on her own and also with me,” Romney told newspaper editors, “and she reports to me regularly that the issue women care about most is the economy.”

Note to candidate: Women aren’t a foreign country. You don’t need an interpreter to talk to them. Even if you’re not fluent in their language, they might appreciate if you gave it a try.

As if to emphasize their candidate’s unfamiliarity with the territory of gender, the Romney campaign then released a fuzzy-wuzzy video, titled “Family” and starring, of course, Ann Romney, reminiscing over grainy film and vintage snapshots.

“I hate to say it but often I had more than five sons,” Ann recalls. “I had six sons, and he would be as mischievous and as naughty as the other boys. He’d come home and” — here Romney makes the sound of a building blowing up — “everything would just explode again.”

Somehow I doubt that Ann Romney, circa 1982, having finally managed to get her five boys under control, was all that happy about their father coming home only to “get them all riled up again.” Somehow I doubt that beleaguered moms, circa 2012, listen to her story and think, “Oh, Mitt is so much more fun than I thought.” Rather, I suspect, they wonder whether he should have been doing more to lend a hand.

Yep!  Not exactly clear how stuff like this is going to win over women voters.  Now, a tanking European economy that drags us down with it?  That will win over women voters.