It looks like there’s a new book coming out by Susan Pinker called “The Sexual Paradox”. From this piece by Pinker itself it looks like there’s a great deal of similarity between her basic thinking and that of our own Simon Baron Cohen (the originator of our EQSQ personality tests, as you will know).

There are distinctive design elements in female brains that evolved to promote the survival of infants. An avalanche of hormones at childbirth and during nursing trigger behaviour and emotions that don’t vanish simply because the new mothers have to go to work.

Breastfeeding releases hormones and neurotransmitters that induce euphoria in mothers. Prolactin turns on breastfeeding in females and circulates any time feeding, nurturing or protecting is on the agenda. And oxytocin, “the elixir of contentment”, is evolution’s way of making proximity to infants and feeding them so attractive.

Regular intimate contact becomes a physiological imperative. After infusing her brain with the analgesic and pleasure-inducing effects of oxytocin every few hours when she nurses her baby, a mother is suddenly cut off from her supply when not breastfeeding. That’s why nursing mothers newly returned to full-time work can’t wait to get home to feed the baby again. HORMONES are the catalysts that set dynamic sex differences in motion. Based on studies in animals, scientists expect that certain regions of the brain are not just transformed by hormones early on but are also endowed with receptors that enable the hormones to continue to play a role throughout life.

It’s worth reading the whole thing as she’s giving proper background to something which Baron Cohen seems rather to assume: that the differences between male and female brains are caused both by hormones and the receptivity to said hormones. If you like, she’s explaining the mechanism by which it all happens.

On a slightly different note I thought this was fascinating:

In 2006, when investment analyst Carolyn Buck Luce and economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett tried to get to the bottom of the “hidden brain drain” of female talent by surveying 2,443 women with graduate or professional degrees, they discovered that one in three American women with MBAs chose not to work full-time – compared with one in 20 male MBAs – and that 38% of high-achieving women had turned down a promotion or had deliberately taken a position with lower pay.

As she says, this makes it look less like there is a glass ceiling, more like the lack of women at the very top of corporate and professional life is to do with choices made, rather than discrimination.

As indeed any well rounded man would tell you: there’s an awful lot of us as well who simply have no desire to try and climb the greasy pole: there’s so much to do in life which is a great deal more interesting.

Over the next few weeks (perhaps longer) as well as your regularly scheduled entertainment I’m going to be taking a close look at the gender pay gap. It is, after all, the major problem in the modern workplace.

Does it come from gender segregation, that men and women work in different jobs? Does it come from direct discrimination, women simply being paid less than men for the same job? Is it about career choices, career breaks to have or to raise children?

I’ll be looking at a number of different papers on the subject: but please be warned, the statistical analysis will be coming from UK numbers, not US. Simply because I know where to find those numbers. But given the similarities between the two societies, we should be able to find out points of interest from one to illuminate the other.

I might as well start by coming clean: I am sure that there was indeed direct discrimination in the past. I’m very much less convinced that there is (very much) such now. I already believe that it is differences in the choices made by men and women that causes the difference in pay.

But I will be following the evidence where it takes me and if we find that there is indeed direct discrimination then I shall be surprised, but I will report it.

An interesting experiment is reported on over at the Freakonomics blog. We can see in the society around us that men are vastly more competitive than women: certainly in their drive for money and status they are. But what we would really like to know is whether this is something innate to men and women or is it something constructed socially by our society? By looking at people from a patriarchal society and comparing their behavior with those from a matrilineal (as truly matriarchal societies are agreed not to exist now) we get an interesting result:

Our experimental results reveal interesting differences in competitiveness: in the patriarchal society women are less competitive than men, a result consistent with student data drawn from Western cultures. Yet, this result reverses in the matrilineal society, where we find that women are more competitive than men. Perhaps surprisingly, Khasi women are even slightly more competitive than Maasai men, but this difference is not statistically significant at conventional levels under any of our formal statistical tests.

So it might indeed be that the competetiveness of men is something inculcated by society: and then again perhaps not. For you don’t actually need all that many generations for genes to either sink out of a population or to become predominant in it. It might well be that Khasi women are more competetive than men elsewhere: but that doesn’t mean that in one generation we can teach men to be less so (nor women in our own society to be more so). It rather depends upon how long the Khasi have been a distinct genetic population.

This is one of those questions where, as they say, further research is required. If we could find some Khasi women who had moved to another society then we might ask whether they were still more competitive. Whether there are in fact any such that we can investigate is another matter.

We all know that there is a gender pay gap, of course. In the US women earn 71 cents to every dollar earned by men: in the UK the average wages for women are in fact 17% lower than they are for men. The big and interesting question is just why this is so.

Certainly in the past there was direct discrimination against women, both in the jobs they were allowed to do (especially after marriage) and in the pay they would receive even if doing the same job as a man. But how much of the gender pay gap is now explained by that and how much by more rational reasons?(Please note that just because there are rational reasons for something doesn’t mean we might not want to change the outcome. Just that how to change the outcome will be different dependent upon what the reasons are.)

An interesting little story from the UK:

Female consultants working in the NHS are 20 per cent less productive than their male counterparts, researchers claim today.

Various reasons are put forward: that women have greater family committments and so see fewer patients, that women, being (in general) more empathic spend longer with each patient, even that women spend more time on administration and teaching than men do. But to me the most interesting point is this:

The researchers used the HES data to chart the workloads of 7,236 male and 1,048 female consultants working in 10 of the most common medical specialities in hospitals in England during 2004-5.

After adjusting the figures for age and different specialities, it was found that women completed an average 626 “consultant episodes” (CEs) - periods of care under a consultant for a patient admitted to hospital - compared with 786 for the men, 20 per cent less.

Previous studies in the US and Canada, where doctors’ pay is related to the number of patients they see, have found reached similar conclusions.

UK consultants are paid a flat rate (and it is the same for men and women): yet we see the same outcome in the US and Canada where people are paid by how many patients they see. So there is, under two entirely different incentive and pay schemes, the same difference in productivity. And we do need to note here that productivity is the number of patients being seen: there is no hint even that the outcome for patients is different dependent upon who they see. It isn’t that women (or men for that matter) are providing better but less treatment: they’re just providing less.

Now of course it’s a huge leap from one specific profession to the generality of jobs in the economy: but it is productivity, the amount of work being done, that is normally what is being paid for. So if women are in fact producing less output, should it be any surprise that they are paid less?

There’s been much amusement recently about how well online dating does in matching people up. John Tierney of the New York Times conducted a little experiment with eHarmony. If he and his wife filled out the profile forms (accurately) would the special algorithm the site uses match them together? Unfortunately not, nope, no matter what tweaks and twiddles they made to their profiles, they couldn’t actually manage to get the site to match up people who were already married to each other.

Clearly, they have each married the wrong person and there is nothing for them to do except divorce and start again on their search.

No, of course, that would indeed be too much: it’s important to remember that all such personality tests (yes, including our own EQSQ ones) are there as guidance, as information to add to the decision making process. They do not, at least in the current state of play of our knowledge about humans and their compatibility, contain all of the information necessary. Whether it’s a dating algorithm or our own tests, take it all with a pinch of salt: yes, we might say that you might be suited to a career in nursing or something similarly empathic, or a more systemising occupation like engineering. But remember that we don’t have all of the information, we’re simply offering some part of the puzzle to you.

The Freakonomocs blog then picked up on Tierney’s experiment and added their own twist to the tale:

A recently divorced friend of mine just dipped her toes into the online dating world for the first time. She entered her information: lives in a large city, late thirties, divorced, well-educated, loves to dance, etc. Then she let the algorithm find her soul mate.

I’d love to say that it was like the old “Pina Colada” song by Rupert Holmes and the perfect match the system spit out was her ex-husband.

Nope, it was her boss.

Well, her boss might not be all that bad a match: certainly more of us now meet our partners at work than we used to so why not? Clearly, both he and she are in the same line of work, one might presume that they have similar interests and so on. So why not?

Or perhaps the algorithm had been reading this:

But one of the main reasons given by women for beginning an affair with their boss was, like anywhere else, the prospect of promotion and higher pay.

Who knows? Might work, mightn’t it?