This is a fascinating little insight into the interaction of autism and Homo Economicus.

First a little background explanation for you. “Homo Economicus” is the model that most economists have of what human beings are and how they act. Well, actually, that’s a little strong: it’s the simplification of a human being that economists use in their models. We’re all rational, we think things through before we do them, we calculate possible benefits and costs of our actions and so on. We’re also interested in maximising our utility: that is, we try to get the most of the things we desire.

Now there are problems with this idea and such problems are often used to deride the entire subject. From another side, there are many economists looking at when people don’t in fact act like this. That latter work is often referred to as behavioural economics.

Now, don’t forget, a model is exactly that, a model. It won’t include everything in it, it will always simplify. So to say that sometimes human beings don’t act as Homo Economicous isn’t enough for us to abandon the concept. We can see that people do, often enough, act that way for it to be a useful simplification to use at times. But we must be very careful to remember that we are indeed talking about a model, and abstraction of reality, rather than reality itself.

OK, so what has this got to do with autism?

Well, one of the things that behavioural economics has been able to uncover is that people hate losing money much more than they like getting it. This is not “rational” in the way that we normally mean it. It has a lot of implications for how people invest, how they play in stock markets and so on. However, here’s where autism comes in:

One group that does not value perceived losses differently than gains are individuals with autism, a disorder characterized by problems with social interaction. When tested, autistics often demonstrate strict logic when balancing gains and losses, but this seeming rationality may itself denote abnormal behavior. “Adhering to logical, rational principles of ideal economic choice may be biologically unnatural,” says Colin F. Camerer, a professor of behavioral economics at Caltech.

I find that a fascinating insight into where the rational human being model falls down. We know that autism is, to an extent, an ignorance of, an ignoring of, the emotions of others. So we might expect that those with autism would not get swept up in crowd behavior: such crowd behavior being one of the things that traditional economic models have a very hard time explaining.

So if those with autism do not get caught up in such emotional responses to profit and loss, are rational according to the classical theories, then the rest of us are not so rational. Which really leads to the thought that we must be very careful in economics where and when we assume that everybody is indeed rational. No, not a death knell to the concept, but a marker laid down to teach us to be careful.

OK, we need to take this research on when in their lives women are happiest with a few small pinches of salt, it is true. It was a survey done by a hair coloring company, it was indeed a survey not a study and it was of Englishwomen rather than across countries. That having been said though, we do indeed get a clear result: women are at their happiest when they are 28.

Researchers discovered women feel most confident and happy with their love life and body shape shortly before they reach 30.

It is also the period in their life when they enjoy the best sex – but the happiness is relatively shortlived.

Shortly before they reach 30 turns out to be 28:

“The age of 28 has been pinpointed as the time in a woman’s life their hair looks the best, body shape is at its peak and confidence is at an all-time high.

And as far as women’s happiness is concerned it is all downhill after that.

The reason for the downhill slope though, or rather the reasons enumerated, don’t seem all that strong to me though, I have to say. Fear of growing old? Going grey? Well, that last can be understood as the survey is coming from that hair color company but….

No, I think I’ve found something else entirely which explains it all a great deal better:

In 1961 the average age at first marriage in England and Wales was 25.6 years for men and 23.1 years for women; by 2000 this had risen to 30.5 and 28.2 years, respectively.

There it is folks, average happiness declines just at the average age of first marriage.

Our conclusion will have to be that this survey is telling us a great deal more about English men than it is about English women.

That’s the fascinating question that Professor Mark Perry tries to answer at his blog, Carpe Diem, by looking at the results from the SAT tests.

Have a look at the post here, for there’s no point in my reiterating his entire argument.

Thre’s no real (ie, statistically significant) difference between grade point averages in maths. There’s no difference in years spent studying maths. And yet, when we come to the SAT there is indeed a difference in the results achieved by boys and girls. As the Professor says:

Based on the statistical evidence, is there any other conclusion than this obvious one: In general and on average, male high school students in the U.S. are just plain better at math than female high school students? If there are other reasonable conclusions, please share them.

Well, actually, yes I think there are other reasonable conclusions. At least, ones which are reasonable to reach.

This is actually something of a long standing bug bear of mine: they way in which exam situations benefit boys over girls and the way in which continuous assessment benefits girls over boys.

I don’t think it’s all that outrageous a suggestion to point out that, on average, girls are more likely to do their homework, more likely to study, more likely to hand in an assignment than boys are. Similarly, it’s not too difficult to see that boys do better than girls in a stressed or time limited environment. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing here I think.

Allow me a slight diversion: thirty to forty years ago (when I was still being educated) there was much talk of how awful it was that there was a gender gap in educational achievement.  But it was boys doing better than girls at that time. The problem was identified as being that the English educational system at the time relied almost exclusively upon exam grades. There were no GPAs, no assessments and no class grades. Every two or three years the system forced you into an exam where you were tested upon what you had learned in those previous years. The entirety of a two year program on, say, history, would be judged on how well you performed in two, three hour, essay based exams.

That system was changed: now there is coursework, continuous assessment, grades and GPAs just as in the US system and: well, the most startling result is that we now have still a gender gap, but it is girls doing better than boys.

So my reading of the Professors results is just that, well, boys do better in exam conditions than girls do.

Men and women apparently have different reactions to color. This I must admit rather surprises me. Still, who could not like a newspaper piece that quotes our own title?

Men and women differ in many ways, as we know all too well. Viva la difference? Absolutely.

Well, quite, we should indeed celebrate nature in all her many glorious ways, which of course includes the ways in which men and women do differ. The bit that surprises me is what follows though:

One of the ways we differ is in our preference of color. For example, a study by Guilford and Smith in 1959 revealed that men were more tolerant toward achromatic (colorless) atmospheres than women. With that in mind, Guilford and Smith deduced that women might be more color-conscious.

Hmm, I’m not really sure. Yes, of course, I’ll take a scientists word over my own observations or prejudices but I’m really not all that sure that women are indeed naturally more color conscious than men.

Well, since those two researchers got the ball rolling, McInnis and Shearer picked it up in 1964 and found that blue-green was more a favorite of women than of men. They also discovered that 57 percent of men and 76 percent of women preferred cool colors. The bright-color preference ran a close race, with 51 percent of men choosing bright colors and 45 percent of women opting for the brights.

In a study in 1990 by Radcloff, it was found that more women have a favorite color than men.

No, I’m really not sure. The rest of that piece is about domestic color schemes, which don’t really concern us here.

OK, so women obvservably, in our society, prefer lighter colors and pastel shades. More of them have a favourite color. However, is this something to do with anything innate in having the XX chromosome combination? Or XY? Or is it something more to do with our society?

Of course, to actually test this we need to have a look at some other society and see what they do: unfortunately, I cannot find any so we’ll have to argue by analogy.

Consider the way that we use pink and blue as markers for, respectively, girls and boys. Is there anything innate about this? No, most certainly not, it’s entirely a construct of our current American (and to some extent, Western European) society. There is no such connection between those two colors and the sexes in other cultures, Asian, African or whatever. So we absolutely know that the pink/blue thing is not innate, it’s purely a cultural preference handed down through the society.

Now I would be hesitant to start arguing that women’s greater sensitivity to color, as argued above, is necessarily the same as this, purely cultural. I can think of reasons to argue that it is innate: women in hunter gatherer societies do the gathering which could mean that ability to spot a berry or fruit would be an advantage. But I think the preponderance of the evidence (OK, perhaps my prejudices perhaps) is that it is a cultural matter. Women, whether rightly or wrongly, are brought up to pay more attention to clothes, to colors, the the home and hearth. It’s not so much that they are more sensitive to color, but that they are more sensitised.

Of course, as always, anyone who actually knows the answer is encouraged to tell me where I’m wrong.

OK, investigating why men don’t like using condoms isn’t the greatest waste of money that a government has ever perpetrated upon its taxpayers. The current $100 billion to bail out a couple of car firms is still vying for that particular accolade.

But it does seem pretty absurd that they are indeed spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on finding out why men don’t like using condoms.

The federal government is spending $423,500 to find out why men don’t like to wear condoms,

I mean, any man who has actually been sexually active in a manner that requires the use of condoms would be able to point to the answer. Yes, sure, they help to protect against pregnancy, they help to protect against sexually transmitted diseases. But they also reduce sensitivity and thus the physical enjoyment of the act. Nothing very surprising about this nor something that really needs all that money explaining.

Oh well, it’s not as if the NIH doesn’t have a track record in the way that they spend your and my money:

But some questionable queries have come under close scrutiny, including a $400,000 study being conducted in bars in Buenos Aires to find out why gay men engage in risky sexual behavior while drunk; a $2.6 million study dedicated to teaching prostitutes in China to drink less while having sex on the job; and a $178,000 study to better understand why drug-abusing prostitutes in Thailand are at greater risk for HIV infection.

As I say, small sums when compared to the Chrylser and GM bailouts, but wouldn’t that money still be better fructifying in the pockets of the populace rather than being spent on asking questions we already know the answers to?

Yes, I know, we’d all much rather talk about what the gender pay gap is in the US….however, the statistics on this are not as easily available as they are on the same point in the US. However, despite this I think the figures will be instructive as the basis of the two economies (so called “Anglo Saxon capitalism”) is the same.

The first point is that the whole subject is horribly politicised. There’s actually been a Cabinet Minister (and she’s also the deputy leader of the ruling party) who has been going around and stating that the gender pay gap is around 23%.

The Government Equalities Office, which issued a press release in April with the 23% figure in it, said this provided the “fullest picture” of the gender pay gap.

As we’ve pointed out here almost ad nauseam, this is a very miselading number indeed. For this is to confuse those who work part time with those who work full time. And as is generally known, those who work part time receive less per hour worked than those who work full time. So to add together the gender pay gap and the part time pay gap is, at very best, being deliberately misleading. What happened next is something most unusual in British public life:

UK Statistics Authority chief Sir Michael Scholar said Ms Harman’s use of figures was potentially misleading.

She had said women were on average paid 23% less per hour than men but the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said the figure was actually 12.8%.

In the subtle language of British public life “potentially misleading” is the equivalent of snarling “you lying c*w”.

The importance of this is that of course, unless you measure something correctly in the first place then you’ll never be able to work out how to correct it….or even to decide whether correction is desirable or necessary. For when we take our properly measured gender pay gap of 12.8%, then take from that the known effects of havng children, maternity breaks and pay, lower educational achievement (this is still true of all women in the labour force. Yes, of those degrees being awarded now a majority go to women, but that’s not true of older age cohorts who are still in that labour force.) and so on, it appears that we don’t in fact have a gender pay gap at all.

Here’s another look at the same figures. Drawn from exactly the same raw data source as the Statistics Authority is using:

As you can see, there is a pay gap for all married women but there is none at all for single women. Similarly, that pay gap for married women is made up mostly of the pay gap for women who have children. My assumption about the smaller pay gap for married women with no children is that they might indeed have them in the future, or be looking to have them.

Looked at in this manner we simply don’t have a gender pay gap. What we have is a mothers with children pay gap as against everybody else.

Now, having analysed the problem correctly, we might be able to think of things we might want to do about it. Given that we’re not talking about discrimination causing the gap then action against discrimination isn’t going to work. It might be about child care, or it might be simpler just to make a cash payment to the mothers of children. Given average incomes in the UK of about £ 23,000 a year, 12% would be about £50 a week for the first child.  or around £30 a week each for two children.

That’s it, the gender pay gap is now done away with, it’s cured. Amazing what you can do if you bother to really analyse figures properly, isn’t it?

This piece about the gender gap in politics really rather surprises me. It might be because I’m more used to hte specifics of UK politics than I am American that it does surprise me.

There’s two things about it which surprise:

A new Gallup analysis of almost 150,000 interviews conducted from January through May of this year sheds new light on the substantial gender gap that exists in American politics today. Not only are women significantly more likely than men to identify as Democrats, and less likely to identify as independents, but — with only slight variation — this gap is evident across all ages, from 18 to 85, and within all major racial, ethnic, and marital-status segments of society.

The first is that democrats are a majority right across the country. I simply hadn’t known that at all, I’d thought that Republicans were. But then that’s just me showing my ignorance of US politics then, isn’t it? I was also surprised by the number who are registered as Independent. I had thought that this was a very small minority of people but once again I am wrong. They’re actually a the largest group amongst men and over a quarter of women. I guess that’s how Republicans sometimes manage to win elections, by wooing or winning over some of those Independents.

But the second major surprise to me was that the gender gap in favor of the Democrats remains even in hte higher age cohorts. This is very much unlike the way that politics splits in the UK. There, the Conservatives (roughly the Republicans) gain an increasing share of the female vote aas ages rise. Indeed, it’s been known for decades that the backbone of their support is amongst middle aged and older women. Labour (roughly, the Democrats) lose an increasing share of the female vote as ages rise.

I’m not quite sure why there should be such a disparity. For the UK experience is repeated across a lot of Europe, female voters tend to become more conservative as they age. Or at leasst, those female voters who are older tend to be more conservative, I’m not stating that it is ageing itself that cause the change.

My best guess is that it’s all to do with abortion. The fight for legal abortion in hte US has been  a highly partisan one. Sure, there are pro life Democrats and pro choice Republicans but you can certainly say that the preponderance in either party is Ds for choice, Rs for life.

This specific issue, of abortion, never became so politically partisan in the UK and other European countries. It really wasn’t a right/left issue and isn’t today.

Another point might be that in each European country abortion ha come about (there are still a few that ban it though) as a result of political agreement: laws have gone through the legislature. It hasn’t been, as it was in hte US, as a result of actions by the courts and thus something which hasn’t already had that thorough airing in the political arena.

That’s my best guess at it, that the higher support of women for the Democrats, in a huge difference with other similar political situations, is as a result of the way that America is still polarised on abortion in a way that most European countries simply are not.

Much is made of how sexist the world is today, how women are oppressed and men favoured in every manner. That there is indeed discrimination I’ll admit but given that today’s women, in the rich world at least, are the most privileged ever (and I’m happy to admit that men are similarly so) I think to argue that things are bad now, as opposed to not quite as good as they could be, is a bit of a stretch.

As an example, perhaps an object lesson, let’s have a look at what Muammar Gaddafi, the ruler of Libya, had to say on a recent visit to Rome:

European women are being forced to work like men, travel alone and sleep in hotels out of necessity rather than choice, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi lamented to an incredulous crowd of 1,000 Italian women on Friday.

This is “real sexism”, not the very light application of it that we get in the US these days.

“After the World War that killed many men, European women were forced to leave their homes to support their children,” said Gaddafi, known for his all-female bodyguard corps.

“So women were forced to do the work of men … And as long as women are forced to do the work of men, it means we have assaulted their nature.”

Hmm, women driving trains is an assault upon their essential femininity is it? I think you’ll find that’s the sort of sexism that went out of fashion in your grandfather’s age, at least in the US.

The strange thing is that Gaddafi is grossly out of step with the people of his own country as well, indeed with much of the Arab world. He’s only about 50 or 60 years behind the attitudes of Western Europe and the US, where and when such a statement would have been the conventional wisdom. But when you look into the Arab world, this is a dangerously liberal statement, one very much out of tune with prevalent social mores. In Saudi Arabia for example, no woman may work in the presence of any man who is not a relative. In fact, she may not even appear in public with any man who is not a relative.

That’s real and existing sexism.

Or at least most men prefer women…..or even, most men prefer real women.

The results of this survey don’t translate directly into American but I’ll come to that:

It is a finding that will quicken the hearts of size 14 women everywhere - gentlemen prefer Miss Average.

Men find the homely shape of the girl-next-door more appealing than the ‘perfect’ proportions of models and centrefolds, a study found.

Most attractive of all is Miss Average - a 5ft 4in female with a 30in waist and 40in hips who wears a size 14.

And here I am coming to that. A size 14 UK is a size 10 in the US. And yes, those are the average sizes in each country, that’s smack dab in the middle of the distribution.

The real question then is why are those who are well outside these sizes regarded as being incredibly attractive in the media?

Why are size zero models who, in real life look more like stick insects, regarded as the epitomy of fashion? I think the answer there is simply that that’s the body shape that looks good when photographed. The camera does indeed add pounds (as I was disconcerted to see when I was on TV recently as part of a political campaign. Porky or what?) and so these images of glamour are going to be modeled on those who will look good in the picture rather than reality.

But the second surprise is that those with the Playboy model figures were not regarded as being more attractive.  They should be, shouldn’t they? For after all, those magazines are indeed selling images of what they’re pretty sure every male regards as being highly attractive.

Here I think the answer is that most men have a pretty good idea of what is likely to be available to them, a pretty good sense of their own self worth. Yes, OK, these more voluptuous women are indeed highly sexually attractive. They might even be something to fantasise over. But they’re not going to be something available to the average man on the street. When asked seriously about what they find attractive men are much more likely to talk or describe (at least I think they are) not some unattainable dream but rather  a level of beauty which they think they can attract themselves.

Not, of course, that I would use this argument in describing my own wife but I’m pretty sure that this is indeed the truth for most men. We truly find attractive what we think we can get, not someone that we would always be worrying would trade us in given the better offers they’re bound to be getting.

Think of this not as an empirical study into the academic gender pay gap but as a logical one. Turning it from a logical way of thinking about the academic gender pay gap would require that we go out and sample the actual academic wages paid to men and women which is rather more than I’m going to do in a blog post. Although we might keep our eyes open for a study which actually does that.

Anyway, from the comments in this blog:

Organizations have utility preference functions.

If the organization’s customers (students, legislators, benefactors) value female representation in the academic ranks - then it’s natural for the organization to pay a premium for female academics.

Allow me to unpack that a little from the economic jargon. A utility preference function is really just a fancy way of saying “desires”. I might, in fact I do, have a utility preference function for bananas, cream, rock music and clean fingernails. What is really meant is how many of such do I want and what price am I willing to pay for them. In other words, how much do I desire them, how much do I want them.

Saying that an organisation has such desires isn’t controversial. It’s just the same as saying that there’s a corporate culture, a communal way of viewing such things. Those who aregue that companies, or colleges, discriminate against women are saying exactly the same thing, that there is indeed a corporate culture, after all.

Now I do think it’s true to say that within academia it is simply an assumption, an assertion even, that gender diversity is a good thing. It’s certainly not something that anyone is likely to question, at least not too loudly.

So, the end of our logical chain of reasoning here is that institutions do have utility preference functions and that within academia this includes a preference for female academics. Thus female academics should be paid more than male ones.

At this point we should go and get all empirical and find out whether this is true. A raw look at the numbers isn’t enough though. We need to go on to look at career breaks, qualifications, research output and so on….which is why it isn’t going to be me that undertakes the research. But it would be fascinating to see the results, wouldn’t it?

Of course, the obverse of this is that if female academics are not paid more than male then, well, the corporate culture does not value them over male. Which would be an odd finding, I have to say.