(INDEPENDENT) 19 June 2008:

…well, not quite. In Ireland these days there’s still a gender imbalance in how much of it is done by women and how much is done by men. Women are working on average nearly forty minutes more each day than men (this is including both paid work and work in the home).

Compare that to the cousins over the Irish Sea, the British, where total work is the same for each sex.

In both countries women do more of the houosehold work, men more of the paid outside the home. But in the total amount done the Irish are currently about where the Brits were thirty years ago, which sounds about right. While Ireland has advanced greatly economically in recent years, socially it’s still a conservative place. Divorce was only legalized a few years ago and abortion is still illegal. That there’s still no gender parity in working hours shouldn’t be all that much of a surprise.

(JERUSALEM POST) 18 June 2008:

Brandeis University has released results that are concerninig Jewish leaders. Among the Non-Orthodox Jews, the men are becoming more distanced from the religion than their female contemporaries. The worry comes from the well known point that only those minorities closely identified with their religion are successful in passing that religion (and possibly sense of being a part of that minority) on to their children.

It has to be said though, there’s something a little odd about the concern. For the definition of a Jew in the next generation is one who is born to a female Jew of this generation: the status of the father, their religion, makes no difference in law or custom to the Jewishness of the child. So we’d rather expect the women to be more closely connected with both the religious and cultural aspects, wouldn’t we?

(SCIENCE DAILY) 13 June 2008:

There are some remarkable figures from the UK on the number of people who have body piercings: Fully 10 percent of the adult population have one somewhere other than on their ears.

It isn’t that much of a surprise to find that there are more women than men with such piercings, nor that the most popular site is the belly button.

What will come as more of a surprise is that twice the number of men than women have piercings on their genitals. Something which, given that 25 percent of all piercings experience complications and 1 percent require hospital admission, is still a bit shocking.

Odd lot the British.

(NATIONAL POST) 7 June 2008:

In the ongoing debate about gender equality, the words seem to keep changing their meanings. We all agree with the basic thought of equality, but what does that in itself actually mean?

One meaning is equality of opportunity: that men and women (and those not sure either way) are equal before the law and get the same chances at the joys and opportunities that life has to offer. Another is equality of outcome, the argument that men and women should be the same. That latter rather ignores (often for socio-political reasons) the fact that people might make different decisions about what they want from life and thus end up in different places, despite having the same opportunities.

That much we have known for some decades, but the language is changing again in order to obscure an argument already debated. Equality of opportunity is now defined as “formal equality” and of outcome as “substantive equality.”

Once everyone has worked out that this is in fact the same old argument obviously they’ll have to change the names again.

(THE HERALD SUN) 9 May 2008:

There are a number of different ways of measuring the gender pay gap: are people getting equal pay for the same jobs, for example. Is there a difference between the average hourly wage for men and women? Is there a difference between the average weekly or monthly wage? Each different measure of calculation will give you a different answer.

The standard Australian method is to look at weekly wages and the female average is $690 a week, the male $1060. Clearly there is a pay gap, but why?

Well, could it be that the average male work week is 38.5 hours and the average female 29?

(INDUSTRY STANDARD) 1 May 2008:

No, sorry, not about the sexual possibilities of Facebook, rather, about how the genders seem to differ in their uses of the various social networking sites.  It seems that on average men have more “friends” on such sites than women do. This may be a surprise to those who normally think that womens’ social networks are wider than mens’.  However, when we look at the median numbers, rather than mean, then we see what we would expect: women do indeed have more social contacts. The mean is rather distorted by the fact that are a few men with very high numbers (over 10,000) friends on such networks: and as no one at all has that many friends, they’re using the sites for business, not simple social contact.

(CHICAGO TRIBUNE) 20 March 2008:

In what might not be the greatest surprise of all time, a survey of 14,000 Americans showed that men and women have quite different eating habits.

Men were more likely to eat steaks and frozen pizzas while women more likely to eat yogurt and their five a day of fruit and vegetables. Men were also more likely to eat foods with a high risk of infection, like runny eggs and undercooked meat, but there’s a good evolutionary argument for that: the diseases carried can be very dangerous to any child in utero so we’re disposed to be descended from women without the taste for such.

One thing that was indeed a surprise was that women are more likely to eat alfalfa sprouts. The surprise being that anyone at all is willing to admit to such a taste.

(VEDIOR) 3 March 2008:

Recent research by the International Trade Union Confederation shows that the gender pay gap is a global phenomenon. In those 63 countries that actually keep accurate records, women earn an average 16 percent less than men. Further, the pay gap is larger the higher the level of education.

This shows one of two things might be true: Either the pay gap is not the creation of some structural unfairness in an individual society, or that all societies have the same structural unfairness.

What makes the findings somewhat bizarre is that in Bahrain, women are paid 40 percent more than men. A very odd finding for a highly patriarchal society.

(SCIENCE DAILY) 13 February 2008:

There’s a clear gender differentiation in the number who suffer from depression: many more women than men do. At various times explanations have ranged from the oppression of the patriarchy to the point that women have to put up with men.

Now researchers have shown that the reason is most likely due to the hormone serotonin, a chemical in the brain. Women have many fewer receptors for this in their brains than men do: there is also a difference in the protein that transports it, meaning that we can not only explain why more women become depressed but also why they can react very differently to treatments, those treatments being based upon the actions of that protein.

(THE TIMES) 10 February 2008:

The glass ceiling is notorious: women simply are not present at the highest levels of business or politics in anything like equal numbers. What is it that stops them from getting there?

Conventional wisdom dictates that there’s always been deliberate sex discrimination: women have been stopped from taking those top jobs. But is that true now?

It would appear that at least part of the current reason is that women are turning down the jobs and promotions they are being offered. No, not all, but enough to make the numbers reaching the top gender unequal. One startling number is that one in three women with an MBA works part time, only one in twenty of male MBAs.

All of this only goes to show women’s greater intelligence of course: there’s vastly more to a life well lived than what you did in the office.