If you’re thinking about going to a liberal arts college you might want to be a little careful about going to UM at Amherst. Well, you might want to be careful if you decide you want to study economics while you’re there at least.

For one  of their professors has taken to the pages of the New York Times to tell us all about the gender pay gap. And managed to get parts of it quite spectacularly wrong. Take this for example:

A recent comparative analysis of 21 countries by two sociologists at the University of Washington, Becky Pettit and Jennifer Hook, reports that women’s labor-force participation tends to be lower in countries where their earnings relative to men are higher.

For instance, in Germany and Italy, a smaller percentage of women work for pay than in the United States, but those who are employed earn more, on average, relative to men.  Women who overcome the obstacles to employment there tend to be high earners.

The facts are true but the explanation is absurd.

Take the first part: where womens’ pay is higher than mens’ then fewer women work.

How does that make sense in any economic manner? People respond to incentives. If women are making more than men then more will go to work.

The clue is in the second part. Fewer women go to work….and that’s the first stage.  And it isn’t because women who “overcome the barriers” tend to be high achievers either. It’s because only high achievers go to work.

What we’re actually seeing here is simply a statistical artifact. In countries like Germany and Italy (this is actually very strong in Germany as a social force) women with young children simply do not work. It’s near unheard of.

The exception is women who have, before marriage and or children, joined one of the professions. Even Germans understand that if you’ve sweated blood for a decade to become a doctor or lawyer then you’re not going to give that up entirely because you’ve got a child or two.

However, if your jobs was simply a job rather than one of the professions then it’s considered entirely normal that you stop work when you have a child: and abnormal if you don’t.

All of which means that most of the women who are in hte labor force are women who are in hte professions.

As you will have noted, the professions pay more than most other jobs: thus we see that on average womens’ pay is higher than male. Not because women in every job get paid more than men. But because only the women in high paid jobs keep working after they’ve had children.

It’s nothing at all to do with high achievers persisting or anything else. It’s purely because we’re comparing women in professional jobs with all men: believe me, it isn’t true that a female lawyer or female doctor gets paid more in Germany than her male counterpart. It’s just that any doctor get more than a plumber.

All of which would make me wary of studying economics at a college where that profe4ssor teaches.

Strange as it may seem the US is often behind certain social trends: we always think of new things starting in California, spreading across  America and then the rest of the world. However, there are some social changes where this process is reversed. Much of this is, I think, to do with the greater religiosity of the US. Gay marriage is one example: it’s already legal, even commonplace, in most European countries.

Another is the huge change that has happened in single mothers.

Not that long ago, only a couple of decades, most single mothers were not, as the newspaper like to portray them, feckless teenagers and the like, rather, they were women who had had children while in a relationship and then the relationship broke down. Divorce and the like.

The analysis was based on the Government-backed British Social Attitudes survey of lifestyles.

It shows that in the 1980s the majority of single mothers had broken up with a partner after years of marriage or cohabitation. But by 2006, 57 per cent had never lived as part of a couple.

Both of these are of course changes from 50 and 60 years ago when the very few single mothers there were would have been those who were widowed and a small number who had had children out of wedlock.

The change that explains all three of them is that women have become, over the decades, economically free. It’s the move of women into the labor force that has caused this.

I don’t mean this in a bad way either, merely as explanation. In our grandparents’ time it simply was not possible….or was at least extremely difficult….for a woman to have and raise a child without a man around. Not because of societal pressure or people whispering about “bastards”. But simply because a woman on her own could not raise enough money by working to both keep her and the child and also pay for someone to look after the child while she was working.

Nowadays this is possible. It’s still not easy of course, but it is possible.

So, not all that long ago it was imperative for any woman who wanted to have a child to find and keep  man. Now it is not longer necessary. Thus many women are deciding that they’ll have the child without having to have the man around thank you very much.

We may or may not like the result but that’s what this is, simply an expression of womens’ new found economic freedom.

It comes to a pretty pass when a major newspaper like the New York Times allows a columnist to spout nonsense on hte subject of autism. Nicholas Kristof does exactly that in his column.

Autism was first identified in 1943 in an obscure medical journal. Since then it has become a frighteningly common affliction, with the Centers for Disease Control reporting recently that autism disorders now affect almost 1 percent of children. Over recent decades, other development disorders also appear to have proliferated, along with certain cancers in children and adults. Why? No one knows for certain.

This is simply rubbish, arrant nonsense.

Firstly, cancers have not increased: the first thing anyone ever learns about cancer incidence is that it is age related. The average age of the population has been going up as we all live longer. Thus there is more cancer: but, and this is the important point, age adjusted cancer rates are going down.

More specifically about autism, we know that in the early 1980s the definition of autism was changed. From purely what we now might call “classic autism” to the entire autism spectrum, including things like Asperger’s Syndrome.

We can also look at the results from one of the world’s major autism researchers. Simon Baron Cohen, whose work informs and underpins our own EQSQ personality tests. Here the argument is a little more subtle.

Autism has a genetic component (for example, in identical twins if one is autistic then there’s a 90% chance that the other will be: that’s a very strong indication of genetic causes, for the rate is very much lower among fraternal twins: showing that it is not about exposure in the womb). Baron-Cohen’s view is that there is a spectrum of brain types, from systemising to empathic (often called male and female) and autism is simply an extreme systemising brain type.

What has been happening in recent decades is assortive (assortative if you prefer) mating. Time was when we married those we met through families or friends. Now most of us marry through work. And the important point here is (and is the basis of our EQSQ tests) that certain brain types are suited to certain types of work: and certain types of work attract certain brain types both male and female by gender.

So, if autism is genetic, we marry through work, workplaces are often sorted by brain type, it doesn’t take a genius to see that we’ll have more systemising types marrying each other leading to more incidence of the extreme systemising brain type. That is, more cases of autism.

Yet Kristof wanders off to talk about chemical exposure in the womb:

An article in a forthcoming issue of a peer-reviewed medical journal,

Gosh, peer reviewed?

While his article is full of cautionary language,

Ah, so when his idea is being evaluated as science there’s lots of maybes, lots of backing and filling is there?

Dr. Landrigan told me that he is increasingly confident that autism and other ailments are, in part, the result of the impact of environmental chemicals on the brain as it is being formed.

And when he’s not being examined on his science but is just shooting the breeze he drops all those scientific cautions does he?

Well, my my, isn’t that a surprise.

The sadness is that this article will wing its way around the world and millions of parents will worry that they’ve caused their child’s autism by eating from plastic plates or something. And it simply isn’t true, we know this.

The incidence of autism in identical and fraternal twins is entirely different: thus it cannot be mainly to do with fetal exposure. It must be genetic.

Still, it will sell a few newspapers and that will make the New York Times happy.

Selling women: we all agree that’s a bad idea, yes? Slavery being one of those things which we agree is immoral, yes?

Well, that’s true, but it’s also true that selling women can be done by individual women of themselves. There are obvious examples of this prostitution being one of them. So should prostitution be illegal as well as it’s just another form of the sale of women? Many places say yes and only a few say no: in the US some counties in Nevada and I think Rhode Island as well in certain circumstances.

What about selling eggs for others to have children? Or surrogate pregnancy?

Now sometimes these are regarded as what economists term “repugnant transactions”, ones that must be banned by law. My own native UK makes paid egg donation and paid surrogate pregnancy illegal although prostitution is legal. The US is usually the other way around.

But the question really is, do we by banning these transactions make women better off? There’s a very good argument that no, we don’t: we make women worse off.

This Article examines three traditionally “taboo trades”: (1) the sale of sex, (2) compensated egg donation, and (3) commercial surrogacy. The article purposely invokes examples in which the compensated provision of goods or services (primarily or exclusively by women) is legal, but in which commodification is only partially achieved or is constrained in some way. I argue that incomplete commodification disadvantages female providers in these instances, by constraining their agency, earning power, and status. Moreover, anticommodification and coercion rhetoric is sometimes invoked in these settings by interest groups who, at best, have little interest in female empowerment and, at worst, have economic or political interests at odds with it.

The thing is, you see,you or I might think that one, two or all three of those things are repugnant and thus should not be allowed to happen. But there are certainly women who think otherwise (there are indeed prostitutes, women selling their eggs and women acting as surrogates during pregnancy).

And by our banning or restricting their rights to do these things without breaking the law we are limiting their options: and making the price they can get for them lower in many cases. We are imposing our version of morality upon them, to their cost.

Perhaps something we shouldn’t be doing then?

As Darwin portrayed our world there’s really only one definition of having “won” this game called life. That is to have had children who go on to have children and thus our genes go forward into the future.

There are other definitions by other people of course: although they tend to be remarkably similar in effect. Go forth and multiply might have a very different genesis than Darwin’s ideas but it does still lead success to being measured by having aided in further populating the world.

So it was interesting to see this story:

WHEN Yitta Schwartz died last month at 93, she left behind 15 children, more than 200 grandchildren and so many great- and great-great-grandchildren that, by her family’s count, she could claim perhaps 2,000 living descendants.

Now that, it has to be said, is winning that race on a grand scale, don’t you think?

All the more interesting is that it’s most unlikely that Ms. Schwartz would have agreed with the Darwinian ideas at all. for she was from an Orthodox Jewish sect, part of the Hasidic community called Satmar. They, like some of the Christian sects tend to take the Old Testament rather more literally than many others of us and thus see Genesis, rather than Darwin, as providing the reasoning behind us, our existence and our ways.

But that in itself I think is interesting: that there are many different religions around, all with quite different creation myths. Many of which are of course in direct opposition to Darwinian ideas. However, the outcome seems to be very much the same. Be fruitful and multiply gives us the same outcome as have children so that your genes continue. Those who have more children who go on to have more have won.

Perhaps this isn’t so strange though. Those religions which don’t have such definitions of success wouldn’t be around all that long. If, for example, the religious prescription was that one should be celibate and have no children at all then it would be difficult for the religion to last much more than a generation or two: converts always being more difficult to make than children who grow up as adherents.

As, in fact, happened to the Shakers.

This is a fascinating little paper, trying to look at what the titles of Harlequin Romances tell us about women. The basic assumptions are pretty simple really. Harlequin is the best selling publisher in the world (by a very long shot) and more romances are sold than of any other literary genre. And yes, the vast majority of such sales are to women.

It’s also true that Harlequin is much more market research orientated than any other publisher (well, perhaps Mills and Boon is a close second). They’ve done a great deal more work on what attracts readers than anyone else.

So, the basic question is, do the titles of Harlequin Romances tell us anything interesting about what attracts women? The answer being that yes, indeed they do.

Start with the basics of sex: not that all romances have sex in them, at least not graphically. But men and women do have different attitudes to that most pleasurable of activities:

Evolutionary psychology offers
insight into human universals, and suggests that women and men have sex-specific
mating dilemmas. That is, due to biological sex differences, women conceive children
whereas men do not. Across cultures, women tend to be the primary caregivers, although
men often provide paternal support (Bribiescas, 2006). Furthermore, women have notably
lower limits on the number of children that they can have, as compared to men. These
differences have led evolutionary psychologists to propose that women tend to seek
commitment from their mates, and prefer mates who have a propensity to accrue
resources (e.g., Buss, 1989) since they will need these resources while they tend to the
children. Therefore, we propose that a better interpretation for the success of Harlequin
romance novels is that the books are addressing women’s sex-specific, evolved, mating
interests. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed the titles of Harlequin romance novels.

That’s pretty much the whole hypothesis there. And it’s very difficult indeed to see any errors in the logic of it. We’re marketing something to women, we’re successful at it, we must be doing something that women like.

The researchers then take those basics of what women are likely to be interested in. Firstly, words to do with children (baby, mommy, father, paternity). Then that women are likely to be interested in the resources of their mates, so millionaire, billionaire, rich. Thirdly, to long term relationships, thus marriage, fiance and so on. Finally, looks are important to women although perhaps not as much as to men. So words like athletic, handsome and so on.

Having made the predictions, how do the results stand up? Pretty much perfectly actually. Harlequin Romances have all the words we would associate with those four ideas and other than words like “and ” and so on, very few others.

The true meaning of this study is of course that Harlequin have worked out what women want and have worked out how to provide it to them. What we’re doing is looking at what they’ve worked out.

This is a fascinating idea that there’s a link between masculinity and promiscuity…..erm, OK, well, no, not so fascinating in fact. We already assume that men are more promiscuous if they think they can get away with it. No, rather, the thought is that women who share some masculine characteristics are more promiscuous than those who do not have said:

We recruited two groups of women who differed in their number of lifetime sex partners in order to investigate several hypotheses related to female sociosexuality. Specifically, we explored whether women who engage in casual sex have low mate value, are especially likely to have come from stressful family environments, or are masculine in other respects besides their interest in casual sex. Women with many partners were not lower than other women on direct or indirect indicators of mate value. Nor were they more likely to recall adverse family environments during childhood. On several measures related to masculinity, women with many sex partners were elevated compared with other women.

Now no, we’re not saying that women who look like men have more sexual partners: that would be a most unkind way of interpreting this.

However, we can link this by analogy to our EQSQ personality tests. In those tests we say that there are brain types, different brain types, that run along a spectrum. Any individual can have any brain type but we tend to see more women at one end of the spectrum and more men at the other. We thus label those ends as male and female brain types.

We of course find some women who have that male brain type: and in certain sense we find that they act more like men than they do like women.

So here’s the analogy: there are other ways that human behavior lies on a spectrum. Certainly we’re all familiar with the way in which male and female sexual behavior tends to be (note the *tends* there) different. And in this experiment they’ve shown that females who tend to display male sexual behavior also tend to show other male characteristics. They don’t define exactly what they are unfortunately, so we can’t connect them with the male style behavior. But this is very similar in basic logic to what we’re saying with the EQSQ tests.

However, please do note one very important point. I’m not trying to link male or female brain type with male or female sexual behavior, nor other male characteristics. The linkage is purely in the logic.

I know, it’s so terribly depressing thinking of that true love thing, marry and live happily ever after, in terms of a market. But the more research that’s done into it the more marriage really does seem like a market. We know this colloquially as well: who hasn’t heard the phrase “She/He’s to good for you/her”? You just don’t have the price that that package is going to demand.

One interesting way of looking at higher education is that it is a signalling mechanism. Sure, you learn things while you’re there as well, but having a college degree, just as an example, is also evidence that you’re the sort of person who gets a college degree. Now, if we combine these two things together, that education is a form of signalling as well as an increase in human capital and the marriage market, what do we get?

This paper estimates the returns to career decisions in the marriage market and the returns to marital choices in the labor market. Theoretically, investments in the labor market could affect the chances of receiving a marriage offer, the type of offer, and the probability of getting divorced. …. The results show that labor market decisions are strongly influenced by their returns in the marriage market. If there were no returns to career choices in the marriage market, men would tend to work less, study less, and choose blue-collar jobs over white-collar jobs. These results suggest that the existing literature underestimates the true returns to human capital investments by ignoring their returns in the marriage market.

One of the reasons that men go and get an education is to show that they are both the type who go and get an education and also to show that they’ve got better prospects in hte job market. This makes them better marriage partners and thus increases either the chance that someone will say yes and or the quality of the person who does say yes.

So men don’t just go to college for the sex they can get there, as the previous post pointed out, but also so that the quality of person they have sex with in the long term is higher.

All of which must be a great comfort to professors and teachers slaving over essays and exams that have to be marked: knowing that what they’re teaching their charges matters less than that they are being taught and being seen to be taught: the end aim being to get laid. But then, it has to be said, that’s the end aim of an awful lot of human behavior.

There’s something that really has changed on the college campus in the US these days. College and dating just in’t like it used to be. In fact, this might be one of the first times in history that dating has been as it is now on some college campuses.

Traditionally, as we know, it’s men that propose and women that decide: this is as true of marriage as it is of going for a cofee. But what happens when there’s a gender imbalance? Until recently, the past few decades that is, colleges were majority male, so whatever happened outside in the wider society was still true on campus, if possibly in a more extreme form.

However, as we all know now, many campuses are majority female: for the majority of those going to college now are female and the majority of degrees awarded go to women. We can regard this as good, bad, irrelevant, whatever we wish: but it does have certain side effects. Such as on hte dating scene.

Now, given what we already think we know about male and female preferences over dating and sex, what would we think would happen if men became the rarer beasts, if men had the power over whether a date, a relationship, happened? Generally, we would expect there to be many more casual hookups, much less monogamy and fewer long term relationships. What does happen now that men are in the minority on campus and thus, being the scarce resource, have more power?

Yes, as we expected:

W. Keith Campbell, a psychology professor at the University of Georgia, which is 57 percent female, put it this way: “When men have the social power, they create a man’s ideal of relationships,” he said. Translation: more partners, more sex.

We can also look at this in relation to our last few blog posts: why families exist, why pair bonding exists: because children need to be cared for for so long. OK, contraception has changed some of that, but not all of it. We can observe what happens sexually in a society which is short of males. And while it might all be most pleasant for the young men it doesn’t produce that pair bonding which the children need.

All of which gives us another insight into why among humans, the male to female population ratio, in the absence of wars or such things as selective abortion, tends to be roughly 50:50 at those peak mating years.

One amusement:

“Since that is not her style, Ms. Deray said, she has still not had a long-term relationship in college. As a fashion merchandising major, she said, she can only hope the odds improve when she graduates and moves to New York.”

Given the popularity of the fashion industry among gays that might be the one sectoral career choice which is going to leave her even worse off.

I think we all know this, don’t we? That men will laugh at almost anything and do so immediately while women are much slower to get a joke and more selective as to what they find funny?

Or, another way of putting  it, from the male point of view, women are slow to get jokes.

The thing is this seems actually to be true, not simply a figment of the societal imagination. Using that greatly loved new technique, conducting experiments while people are hooked up to brian imaging machines, this has now shown to be true. Men laugh faster and at worse jokes. Women take longer to examine the joke, laugh less often and yet laugh more at a good joke than men do.

It’s also true that women use more of their brain to consider and interpret a joke than men do: leading to the possible joke that women’s brains are less efficient than mens’.

In slightly different research they’ve also showed that men and women can use humor in very different ways. Men often use it to establish dominance in a group, humor as an offensive weapon. Women tend to use it more as a method of group bonding: the assumption of superiority is aimed at those outside the group rather than inside it. Rather than asserting superiority within the group of the person making the joke, using the joke to assert the superiority of the in group against the outsiders.

Of course, this isn’t a hard and fast rule. No one who has observed the way that a group of teenage girls can use humor to pick on one of the group would think that: it’s a tendency, no more.

As an example of a female friendly joke we are given this:

Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist, is sitting in a cafe in Paris. “Can I get you something, Monsieur Sartre?” says the waitress.

“Coffee, please,” he says. “Sugar, but no cream.”

She leaves him to think, but returns a few moments later. “I’m sorry,” she says. “We have no cream. Should I make your coffee with no milk instead?”

Which I find very funny indeed which of course proves that I am fully in touch with my feminine side.