Vivre la Difference

There’s a great piece here at Huffington Post on occupational segregation. Not so much in the sense that I agree with the writer’s take on the subject, but rather at the data presented. Take a look. (I’ll not steal his charts from him.)

Women’s jobs happen to be mostly about care work: health care, childcare, and interpersonal relations - and they pay less than men’s jobs, which are blue-collar jobs or positions of authority, and pay more.

Leaving aside the pay part for a moment we around here would offer a reason for that concentration in the “caring industries”. As you know, we’re believers in the theory that people are placed upon a spectrum, from systemisers to empathisers: and we expect there to be more women at the empathising end of the spectrum than men and vice versa for systemisers.

So we’re absolutely not surprised that there are more women than men in the caring professions.

Moving back to the pay differences. An economist would simply point out that jobs which are more productive will pay higher wages. It might be that jobs in the caring professions are indeed less productive or, more likely to my mind, that they’re regarded as having other than monetary compensations.

I do think our Mr. Cohen here is playing a little fast and loose with the statistics though.

Some of these differences could reflect the cold hard facts of biology, women’s choices, strength differences, and so on: but nurse aides and truck drivers require the same amount of education and strength, and trick drivers earn 40% more - that’s almost 4 million workers in those two occupations alone.

The gold standard on jobs in the US and their pay rates and other statistics is the Bureau of Labour Statistics. Here’s their page on truck drivers and here’s the one on nurse aides.

You’ll note that the higher paid truck drivers are those doing the long distance jobs. These require a number of years experience, the possession of a licence and, more to the point, some fairly unpleasant side effects of the job: like being away from home for large parts of the year. If you look at the pay rates for people driving trucks on local deliveries, without those licence requirements and long distance travel, you’ll see that wage rates are just about the same as they are for nurse aides.

Indeed, when we look deeper, we see that median hourly for nurse aides is $10.67, and while long distance drivers get $16.85, local get $12.17 and drivers/sales people get $9.99.

I don’t think the pay statistics are saying quite what Mr. Cohen says they are saying. Do you?

OK, so we find once again that the male and female brains have (slightly) different structures.

Men and women show differences in behaviour because their brains are physically distinct organs, new research suggests. Male and female brains appear to be constructed from markedly different genetic blueprints.

The differences in the circuitry that wires them up and the chemicals that transmit messages inside them are so great as to point to the conclusion that there is not just one kind of human brain, but two, according to recent neurological studies.

OK, now that’s part of our own theory around here. We go on to point out that simply because soeone is XX that doesn’t mean that they’ll have a female brain, or that someone XY will have male. It’s a probability that the former and latter will, not a certainty. But this research leads to a much larger point:

Professor Jeff Mogil from McGill University, in Montreal, Canada, who has demonstrated major differences in pain processing in males and females, puts it even more forcefully. He is astonished that so many researchers have failed to include female animals in their studies. “It’s scandalous,” he said. “Women are the most common pain sufferers, and yet our model for basic pain research is the male rat.”

Looks like a number of female rats are in for a torrid time of it but that’s something we really ought to do, don’t you think, whatever PETA says about it.

Interesting research here suggesting that empathy is hard wired into the human mind.

Using functional MRI scans on normal kids aged 7 to 12, researchers found the parts of the children’s brains that were activated when shown pictures of people in pain, according to findings published in the current issue of Neuropsychologia.

Study author Jean Decety, a professor in the departments of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Chicago, reported that empathy appears to be “hard-wired” into the brains of normal children, as opposed to being solely the result of parental guidance or nurturing.

“Consistent with previous functional MRI studies of pain empathy with adults, the perception of other people in pain in children was associated with increased hemodymamic activity in the neural circuits involved in the processing of firsthand experience of pain…,” Decety wrote.

We might also mention the idea of mirror neurons as a part explanation of this concept.

Now around here of course we argue that while empathy (and systemising ability) are indeed common to all humans, the level of each varies person by person. Further, we expect to see men clustered at the systemising end of that spectrum, women at the emapthic end (although one individual can be anywhere, we’re talking probabilities here).

However, what sparks my interest here is that there’s really not all that much new under the sun. The father of economics as he’s often called, was Adam Smith. He’s associated these days with a rather dry form of free market loonery but that’s really not at all where he really comes from (I should add that I’m a Fellow of the Adam Smith Institute so I know whereof I speak.): he was a moral philospoher first and foremost.

For example:

To his credit, and ours, Smith thinks the species empathetic, morally disciplined, and reciprocal.

That’s not quite what we normally get from hte modern economics textbooks, is it? More:

Look at what he has to say about sympathy:

But whatever may be the cause of sympathy, or however it may be excited, nothing pleases us more than to observe in other men a fellow-feeling with all the emotions of our own breast; nor are we ever so much shocked as by the appearance of the contrary.

Wait a minute, this isn’t sympathy at all. It’s empathy. Smith argues, extensively, that the fundamental driving force behind moral actions is the drive to understand the people around us and walk in their shoes. Why doesn’t he use the word empathy? Well, it didn’t exist as a word in the English language until 1904, according to the OED.

So what’s the big takeaway from all this? Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations set generations of businesspeople down a path based on self-interest and an extreme disinterest in other people. But he himself believed quite strongly that our moral sensibilities, what we believe to be the better parts of ourselves, are derived from interest in other people.

Empathy is not an emblem of weakness or sensitivity, in Smith’s view. It’s a way to practice self-interest on the lives of other people. And since self-interest leads to prosperity, understanding the self-interests of the people around you leads to the creation of wealth more broadly. Empathy is the most important business strategy of all. Well said, Adam.

Empathy is both hard wired into the human brain and is also the most important business strategy of all?

Might be worth revising some of those modern textbooks on economics, don’t you think?

Women are more optimistic than men and enjoy life more as they age, suggests a new research that questioned nearly 9,800 people over the age of 50.

OK.

Almost all of this year’s Emmy-nominated actresses are 40-plus, with many in their 50s and some in their 60s.

Well, that explains that then, eh?

Hm, what’s that? There aren’t in fact 9,800 female nominees for the Emmies?

Sigh, back to the drawing board.

There’s an excellent journal out there which collects the reults of improbable research. This particular story doesn’t belong there at all: it belongs in one about believable research. Another way of putting this might be that the result is blindingly obvious to anyone who knows anything at all about sex.

So, using various cleverly constructed experiements the researchers tried to work out whether being flirted with by those apparently available made men and women react differently. The answer was yes.

Men who were flirted with seemed to have less connection with their own pre-existing relationship. They were less likely to forgive a transgression by their partner for example.

However, women, when flirted with, were more likely to forgive their man such mistakes: evidence that they became more committed to their relationship the more temptation was put in their path.

We can all make up a number of possible explanations for this behavior. The traditional evolutionary one, that men are more likely to be interested in spreading it around than women are. Or perhaps a slightly subtler version of the same thing: that men are indeed more likely to wander and the refusal to forgive trifling mistakes was a method of building up the excuse bank, the justifications for why he might be right to stray.

However, my own theory is a great deal less complex and accords much better with my own experience of the world. Men are easily pleased creatures so the risks of switching from one woman to another, from one sequential monogamous relationship to another are fairly low. Finding a decent man is however a rather more difficult prospect….this might be because of the quality of men in general or it might be because women are a little pickier, this makes no difference to the logic here….thus women once they’ve got someone Mr. Half-Right are reluctant to give him up for what they know the average quality of the others in the available pool is.

If you like, for men there are indeed many more fish in the sea while for women there’s only a few with the requisite piscine qualities and an awful lot of pond life floating around them.

Buried in this little historical piece is something that strikes me as really rather odd about three part harmonies.

First though the gist of the piece. The writer is talking about his own youth in Derry (Protestants might call it Londonderry) in Northern Ireland. The very strange thing is that while the economic set up would lead you to think that it would be a matriarchy, the actual set up was entirely different, a patriarchy.

It all revolved around the shirt factories (making them of Irish linen I assume) and there were thousands of well paid jobs for women: and almost none at all in the same town for men. No heavy industry in that part of Ireland at the time. Now when it’s women that hold the whip hand economically you expect the society itself to be matriarchal, at least to an extent. OK, maybe not very much of one, but you’d certainly expect a division of the household labor on a less than patriarchal basis. But this isn’t what happened at all. The women were doing all of the economically active work and also doing all of the household work and childcare even when long term unemployment for men was over 80%.

My assumption is that the larger culture (and in many ways that of Northern Ireland is still very different from the rest of the UK or the rest of Ireland for that matter) and the norms that it imposed were much stronger than the entirely local economic factors.

But back to the three part harmonies.

In the process I also noticed something unique about the women of Derry. When they sang along to the tunes on the radio they would naturally slip into three-part harmony.

Elsewhere in the world of the white man, groups of men or women who burst into song generally tend to sing the melody in unison. Only in Africa and in other countries populated by our darker brothers do people tend to sing three-part harmony during a knees-up.

There must be a thesis in there somewhere, along with the one about Irish traditional music having Moorish origins. Those’ll make the Ulster-Scots lobby sit up and pay attention.

(Note the phrase “darker brothers” there: yes, Northern Ireland really is still rather different.) I’d add that in the American experience this use of three part harmony is associated with Appalachia: but then that’s the area that was settled by what you call the Scots-Irish and what the author is calling the Ulster-Scots.

So I wonder (anyone know music better than I do?) whether this is actually true? Is it something confined to certain African traditions and to the Irish one?

more cat pictures

Snigger.

John Tierney’s column this week looks at that old question, why are there so few women in the hard sciences?

Well, long term readers of this blog will know that it’s because there are fewer female systemisers than there are male ones.

Pretty simple, really, isn’t it? However, that’s not, unfortunately, the end of the story:

This week I want to discuss a volatile topic: the relatively low numbers of women in some fields of science and engineering. As I explain in my Findings column, federal agencies have begun “Title IX compliance reviews” of some science departments — a novel step, because until now this anti-discrimination law has been enforced mainly for sports programs, not academic departments. Why, now that women students are approaching a 3-to-2 majority on campus and predominate in so many disciplines (including many science departments), is Washington singling out a few male-dominated departments in engineering and physical sciences?

The answer from advocates of this policy is that science must be “Titled Nined” for women to get “Beyond Bias and Barriers,” to borrow the title of the 2007 report from the National Academy of Sciences on women in science. The answer from their critics — call them the Anti-Title-Niners — is that this bias exists largely in the imagination of well-organized activists, and that women on average just aren’t as interested as men are in these disciplines. (Ritual caveat: Plenty of individual women are passionately interested and superbly talented in these fields. The issue here is the overall percentage of women drawn to these areas — the figure that’s routinely cited by the Title Niners as evidence that women are “underrepresented.”)

Yup, we’ve got a huge Federal bureaucracy swinging into action (umm, well, having meetings, spending our money doing so, but not actually doing anything for that is not the way of bureaucracies) over something that we already know the answer to.

There are fewer women scientists than male scientists because there are fewer women who want to be scientists than there are men who want to be. Further, fewer who have the innate talents and mindset to be them.

If only more people read this blog, eh?

So the Venezuelan competitor, Dayana Mendoza, became this year’s Miss Universe.

Apparently there is some pretense that the competition isn’t just about good looks so a question was asked and it was this answer, so we are told, that won the Miss Universe title for Miss Mendoza:

She clinched the title by answering that the difference between men and women is that “men think that the fastest way to go to a point is to go straight. Women know that the faster way to go to a point is to go to the curves”.

Eh? That makes no sense whatsoever.

Still, there is that old saying, beauty times brains is a constant, which might help to explain why the 22 year old green-eyed brunette is given to such nonsensical statements.

See? My case is proved.

For those of you as yet undecided about how to vote in the autumn, some advice from the Irish side of my family. Don’t sweat the big stuff about policies, about what Obama or McCain are promising, look at the fundamentals.

We, in Ireland, can’t figure out why people are even bothering to hold an
election in the United States .

On one side, you have a pants-wearing lawyer, married to a lawyer who
can’t keep his pants on, who just lost a long and heated primary
against a lawyer who goes to the wrong church who is married to yet another
lawyer who doesn’t even like the country her husband wants to run.

Now…On the other side, you have a nice old war hero, whose name starts
with the appropriate Mc terminology married to a good-looking younger
woman who owns a beer distributorship.

What in Lord’s name are you lads thinking over there in the colonies?

It’s not just an Irish way of looking at it, is it? It’s really rather a male way too.