(THE GUARDIAN) 28 January 2008:

One of the age old questions is why the gender pay gap persists. One of the reasons may be apparent in the UK health service. A trend in the past 20 years: A majority of new doctors have been women. This group of first generation female docs is now rising to the top of the profession.

What is being found is that the female consultants treat 20% fewer patients than their male counterparts. It might be to do with working hours, with child care responsibilities, or it might be to do with methods of treatment. It could also have to do with the fact that female doctors actually take the time needed to fully consider the patient in front of them.

Unfortunately, whatever the case, some may use this as yet another excuse to pay female physicians less in the UK.

(MEN’S NEWS DAILY) 17 January 2008:

In Down and Out in London and Paris, George Orwell wrote of his time researching poverty in London and Paris. One of the points he makes about real poverty (that is, absolute poverty, not just relative) is that one of the things a man is starved for is female company.

According to Orwell, there are almost no female “tramps,” almost no women at all on the very lowest rungs of poverty. And as women will very rarely, if ever, “condescend” (as Orwell puts it) to men of a lower economic status than they are, those men who are homeless are left entirely wihout the company of the other sex.

Orwell had spent time in this sort of poverty and described this lack of female companionship as perhaps the most painful deprivation of all.

(NEW YORK POST) 14 January 2008:

There’s a general belief that men and women approach work and problem solving differently. Some men approach work with the ego, using prowess to define and advance their place in the hierarchy. Some women approach work and problem solving in a more communicative manner, as part of the team. This is rather “Men are from Mars, Women from Venus” and while the sterotypes are a useful generalization, they don’t in fact hold in each and every case.

One woman who has been a boss in both male and female dominated environments puts it rather differently. There are procrastinators and there are doers: and there are male and female versions of both.

(SEATTLE TIMES) 13 January 2008:

In the 70s and 80s there was something of a storming of the barricades, as those institutions previously male only (think Rotary, Lions, and Elks) either started to admit women or close down entirely. The pressure was partly societal, partly legal.

Then there was the movement to creating girls only events and happenings: the girls’ night out for example. The two trends have moved so far in opposite directions that all female groups now outnumber all male by something like 100:1. Given the way in which both sexes act differently (not necessarily better, just differently) when together and together but separately, it shouldn’t be all that much of a surprise that there is now a trend back to all male gatherings.

(LIVESCIENCE.COM) 18 December 2007:

Female monkeys may shout during sex to help their male partners climax, research now reveals.  Female monkeys often utter loud, distinctive calls before, during or after sex. Their exact function, if any, has remained heavily debated. To investigate the purpose behind these calls, scientists at the German Primate Center in Göttingen focused on Barbary macaques for two years in a nature reserve in Gibraltar.  The researchers found that females yelled during 86 percent of all sexual encounters. When females shouted, males ejaculated 59 percent of the time. However, when females did not holler, males ejaculated less than 2 percent of the time.

(SLATE) 10 November 2007:

Think it would be difficult to find discrimination in a coffee shop? After all, the money from men and women is worth the same so why would anyone discriminate against male or female customers? But it’s true, they do, women wait an average of 20 seconds longer for their drinks than men do.

Further, this effect vanishes if the serving staff are all female: so it seems to be the male staff doing the discriminating.

(Huffington Post) 8 November 2007:

It’s a commonly held belief that men are better athletes than women.

There are a few instances, however, where this doesn’t hold: fencing for example, or equestrian events. There’s also another couple of sports where it might be (as with Paula Radcliffe in the recent New York marathon) that pregnancy increases the subsequent performance of the woman.

Two reasons put forward are that pregnancy itself greatly boosts the blood volume and that as this shrinks post partum some of the beneficial effects of increased ability to absorb oxygen remains. The other is that in certain sports, like endurance swimming, subcutaneous body fat is a great boost: and as many women complain, pregnancy can certainly increase the presence of that.

Unfortunately, the population of world class female athletes who compete after childbirth is probably to small for us ever to be able to properly study this.

(FORBES) 31 October 2007:

We all know that there are cars considered to be big and manly: the larger pick up trucks, for example. We also know that there are those considered to be female: the convertible Bug, for example.

But it’s surprising to see how true this is in the numbers that actually buy them, 93% male for the F-350 and 65% female for the VW.

However, before designing cars with either sex exclusively in mind, consider the LaFemme of the 1950s. Pink upholstery with rosebuds and a matching purse, raincoat, and umbrella. A complete flop as the ladies simply weren’t interested in it and the men wouldn’t touch it with a stick. And if you alienate both those groups then the market’s really going to be pretty small.

(SCIENCE DAILY) 20 October 2007:

The stereotype of the acne sufferer is the spotty teenage boy, face alight with angry boils. The truth is, researchers have found both male and female teenagers suffer about equally (68 to 66 percent).

However, in older age groups, it is women who suffer more from acne than men. The researchers also found that acne can be linked to a woman’s menstrual cycle (not a surprise to many women), with sufferers getting more acne at certain times of the month and less if they were on Hormone Replacement Therapy.

All of which makes a certain amount of sense: the teenager’s acne is thought to be caused by the hormonal firestorm they’re going through and at older ages a woman’s cycle causes vastly more such turmoil than the relatively stable glandular system of men…and HRT soothes that.

(INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE) 5 October 2007:

A surprising finding has come out from research into the performance of fund managers. Investment vehicles run by either wholly male or wholly female management teams performed the same. However, funds run by mixed (ie  both men and women) teams underperformed by 1.22% a year. That’s a large number as over a lifetime it would lead to roughly a 50% difference in the returns from the fund.

It was previously believed that such diversity would increase, not reduce, performance: allowing other viewpoints and insights to be used. Perhaps these new results simply show that it pays to be focused?