This is an interesting question posed by the Freakonomics blog. Well, that’s where I saw it, although there are other very influential people looking at the same thing, like the Nobel Laureate, Gary Becker.

When we say Education Gender Gap, we’re not talking about the occupational segregation which goes on, more girls (and women) doing arts than men and more men doing the hard sciences than women. No, rather, we’re trying to work out why girls and women seem to do better at every stage of the educational process than boys and men. High school drop out rates are lower for girls, the enrollment at college is higher for women, graduation rates from college are higher for women. So why?

The underperformance of boys has contributed to a striking reversal of the gender gap in higher education over the last fifty years. Women now decisively outnumber men on the nation’s college campuses, and they graduate at a higher rate than men do. Becker thinks the reduced pressure on women to marry and have children young, matched with the increased pressure on them to compete in the labor force, partly explains why women have closed the gender gap. But why have they hurtled past men in college enrollment and graduation? What else accounts for the new gender gap, and what should be done to address it?

My answer would be rather different.

Firstly, the economic arguments about children and marriage make sense, but I don’t think it’s about pressure. It’s more to do with incentives to invest. As and when the likely life course of a woman was, as it was only a little more than a generation ago, to marry and pump out the babies, returning to the workforce only part time for perhaps 20 or more years, the incentive to improve the human capital, to gain an extended higher education, wasn’t all that strong.

Now the incentives have changed. Firstly, the gap between finishing education and any possible child birth is longer, raising the value of the return on that education. Secondly families are a lot smaller, meaning fewer years out of the workforce and finally, it’s a great deal more common to continue with a career, even if only part time, while having young children than it used to be.

All of these things raise the return on education to women and thus, quite rationally, they’re investing in more of it. Sorta like the Freakonomics explanations of why black women seems to be more educated than black men.

However, I think there’s also a second matter at play here. This is more to do with the previous attempts to alter the education system to close the previous education gender gap, the one when it was so grossly in favour of men.

Now I can’t lay claim to a detailed knowledge of the American education system of 30 or 40 years ago, only to the UK one. But over that period of time there has been a marked (umm, sorry) change from what I would term a masculine approach to testing to a more feminised one. A great deal less emphasis is now put onto exam results and a great deal more onto project work, coursework.

In my day (that’s it, I’m finally a curmudgeon!) any class based work, any projects, any homework or essays, none of thse were counted towards final grades. Only work done under exam conditions was counted. Now I do recall the complaints about this, that this discriminated in favour of boys: something to do with the competetive edge perhaps. But quite consciously there was, in UK circles at least, a move towards methods of grading which played to the strengths of the girls. More coursework, more projects which counted towards those final grades.

Given that I have no proof of any of this I simply put it forward as a postulate rather than insist that it be true in every particular. One reason that girls are doing better in education than they were is that the method of grading performance in the education system was deliberately changed so that they would.

Now, I realise that this refers to Scotland, a small nation far away, buit I think it’s a very interesting little statistic to show quite how much the world is changing. From Martin Kelly’s blog we get to this news article:

Take your share of responsibility for upholding the rule of law, the Advocate General for Scotland urged 59 new solicitors admitted to the profession by the Law Society of Scotland last week.

Congratulating the 45 women and 14 men at a ceremony in Parliament House, Edinburgh, Lord Davidson of Glen Clova said: “A career in the profession of law puts you firmly in the role of upholding the rule of law. Personal expediency and political advantage can provide strong motives to disregard the process of law.”

Just to fill you in, a solicitor is sort of an office based lawyer., Those who do trial work are barristers, although that distinction is blurring.

Now one of the things that has been said for many decades is that women were deliberately excluded from some professions: and indeed, for many decades, they were. Now we’re seeing the way in which some professions are changing to become majority female ones.

This has a further impact on one of our favourite subjects around here, the gender pay gap. One reason that it still persists, given that men and women doing the same job are indeed now paid the same, is that men and women tend to do different jobs. It might just be that now women are flooding into the higher paid professions that we’ll see the gender gap reduce. We might still have gender segregation, of course, but if it’s purely from choice rather than through women being denied such choices, who is to say that there’s something wrong with that?

Hannah Poling is an extremely unfortunate child who suffers from a genetic disease. But what’s much worse is that the anri-vaccinationists are going to use Hannah Poling as proof that vaccines cause autism: as a result, it’s entirely possible that thousands of other children, without such genetic problems, will become ill, some of them may well die.

Anthony Cox says this story reminds him of Martian cats and I see the parallels. Respectful Insolence has a long post on the subject showing why the anti-vaccinationists’ arguments are wrong.

To put it simply, Hannah Poling has an extremely rare genetic defect which means that any infection, any fever, can cause in her some of the visible signs of autism. And yes, a fever is a possible (even common) reaction to having been vaccinated. So it’s entirely possible that Hannah Poling’s symptoms are indeed a result of her vaccination. This is why her case has been settled and why she is getting compensation from the fund that does indeed compensate those affected by vaccinations. (Please note that no one has ever said that vaccinations are entirely and 100% safe. Rather, that the risks of having them are tiny compared to the risks of not having them and, yes, there is indeed a government fund to compensate those tiny handful who do indeed suffer adverse reactions.)

But to go from this, someone with a specific, known and very rare genetic abnormality, to stating that vaccines cause autism is simply incorrect. Worse, it’s dangerous.

The reason for the rise in autism in recent decades is not vaccinations, it’s not the MMR vaccination (the UK version of the scare), it’s not mercury in vaccines (the US scare), it’s a combination of greater assortative mating and the greater reporting of the condition of autism and the widening of the diagnosis, from classic autism to autism spectrum.

Hannah Poling’s problems are indeed a tragedy, but why anyone would want to pick on this story as a way of reducing the number vaccinated, so that other children might die needlessly in the future, escapes me.

This will only be interesting to Brits of a certain age, but was Enoch Powell autistic?

Well, not so much autistic, but on the autistic spectrum:

The truth is that Powell was so relentless in his pursuit of logic that he was either genuinely mystified or superciliously contemptuous of anyone who could not understand that, of course, he was not a racist. Therefore, he never felt any need to elaborate on the meaning of his speech. This - together with his aloofness and ‘unclubbability’ - all lends credibility to the assertion that Powell was afflicted by a form of Asperger’s Syndrome that rendered him incapable of appreciating the concerns of others, in particular about whether his words might have offered a cloak of respectability with which tattooed White Power knuckle-draggers might now justify their ‘Paki-bashing’.

I’d not thought of it this way before but yes, I can see the logic here. He did follow a logical train of thought to the extreme, he really was almost blind to what others might think of the conclusions he reached.

Of course, he also came from a generation where Asperger’s had never even been heard of, so it’s a little difficult to go back and diagnose him now. Still food for thought, eh?

This is really rather surprising, a left wing organisation like the Trades Union Congress, being reported in a left wing newspaper, The Guardian, actually makes a sensible statement about the gender pay gap.

The difference between men’s and women’s pay more than trebles when women reach their 30s, TUC research revealed today. It found women leaving school at 16 and going into a full-time job earn 9.7% more than their male contemporaries. But from the age of 18 - and throughout the rest of their working lives - they earn less than men.

In their 20s, the pay gap for full-timers is a modest 3.3%, but in their 30s women take home 11.2% less than the men. And in their 40s - the peak age for discrimination - the gap rises to 22.8%. The TUC said the undervaluing of women in the workplace was partly due to a “motherhood penalty”.

All of that is true, my only quibble with it would be that they say “partly” due to a motherhood penalty while I would say mostly if not completely. However, they then go and spoil their copybook by saying this:

The hourly earnings of women working part-time were 23.4% less than the male rate in their 20s, 41.2% in their 40s.

As we saw here recently, this simply isn’t true.

But I think I should reserve my greatest scorn for this particular piece of nonsense.

The long hours and intensity of senior positions deterred mothers from seeking promotions for which they were qualified.

If you’re not prepared to do the hours required, nor deal with the intensity, then you’re not in fact qualifed to do a job that requires either or both of those things, are you? But there is merit in the piece as a whole: it’s another brick in our wall of evidence showing that there really isn’t a gender pay gap, there’s a motherhood pay gap.

Quite what we might do about it is another matter, but only if we identify the causes properly will we ever be able to resolve the situation: indeed, only if we identify the problem properly will we be able to decide whether we want to or not.

This rather surprised me, the answer to this question.

In which of these countries are the hourly earnings of women closest to those of men?

A. Japan
B.France
C. Czech Republic
D. United States

Well?

France.

Hmm, you know, I’m really not sure about that at all. Very much note sure.

Among large members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, France has the lowest gender pay gap, at 12 percent. Only New Zealand, Belgium, Poland, and Greece report lower differences in the pay received by men and women.

In the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, the pay gap stands at 14, 15, and 20 percent, respectively.

In Japan, women earn 32 percent less than men, a gap far above the OECD average of 18 percent. The Czech Republic’s pay gap is 19 percent, while in the United States the figure is 22 percent.

I’m going to have to go and look those figures up. I’m reasonably certain that there’s an error of composition there. That they’re not in fact measuring th same things (for example, measuring pay by the hour or by hte week will giv very different numbers, as women tend to do fewer hours of paid work than men do).

Let me report back to you on this.

OK, a quick find on my own site. The Swedish number appears to be monthly pay, the UK to be hourly. Very different things indeed.

A very funny little blog post about having dinner cooked by one’s brother who happens to both have Asperger’s and be extremely clumsy.

Welcome to Spaghetti Dmitri.

There’s a lot of nonsense talked about how large the gender pay gap is in the UK. Worth, perhaps, simply laying out the figures in full.

They come from the Office of National Statistics, here. We’re using hourly pay, gross, because those are the numbers that the Equal Opportunities Commission, and thus everyone else, use. We calculate from mean wages as well, so all of the following are means.

Male: £ 14.29

Female: £ 11.24

The pay gap is thus 22%. Ah, but, there are many more women who work part time than men and part timers get less per hour than full timers (it costs more to employ part timers). So that’s not really accurate.

Male full time: £ 14.50

Female full time: £ 11.98.

The full time pay gap is thus 17% and that is the number that is generally reported.

The problem with these numbers comes when people attempt to calculate the part time gender pay gap. We need the following:

Male part time: £ 10.47

Female part time: £9.14.

So, the gender pay gap amongst part timers is 13%.

However, the number normally reported is in the high 30’s%, perhaps even 40%. How can this be so?

The difference in pay between female full time and female part time is 24%. That between male full and part 28%. So men lose more than women by working part time. But clearly there’s something that means that part timers, of either sex, earn less than full timers.

So, again, where does this 40% or so number come from, the one that is regularly bandied about in the press?

Well, what actually happened was that the original calculators of the number, the Equal Opportunities Commission, specifically and deliberately decided to compare female part time wages to male full time.

That is indeed, with this year’s figures, 37%. The thing is though, they told everyone, upfront, that this was how they were doing their calculation. No, really, they did. They said they were calculating the difference between part time pay for women and full time pay for men. Quite why I’m not sure….well, actually I am sure. They wanted to squeeze the largest number they could from the dataset.

Unfortunately, everyone else who uses this number seems to forget (or not know) the origin. It gets reported as “if women work part time they earn 37% less than men” and that really isn’t correct. At best it’s a malignant manipulation of statistics to make a political point, as worst it’s outright lying.

There is indeed a gender pay gap. There is also a part time pay gap. But unless we’re all willing to identify them accurately, we’ll never then be able to go on to identify the reasons for such gaps. And if we can’t do that then we’ll never be able to decide what, if anything, to do about them, will we?

Just to repeat. The gender pay gap is 22%. The full time gender pay gap is 17%. The part time pay gap for women is 24% and the part time pay gap for men is 28%. It’s only the final, the part time paygap for women plus the gender pay gap itself, which gets us to the 37% number.

But it’s that last, the largest, which is the one always quoted. I wonder why?

Oh dear me, this might be one of the worst ideas for a piece of social engineering that I’ve ever seen:

Women now earn 57 percent of bachelors degrees and 59 percent of masters degrees. According to the Survey of Earned Doctorates, 2006 was the fifth year in a row in which the majority of research Ph.D.’s awarded to U.S. citizens went to women. Women earn more Ph.D.’s than men in the humanities, social sciences, edu­cation, and life sciences. Women now serve as presidents of Harvard, MIT, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and other leading research universities.

But elsewhere, the figures are different. Women comprise just 19 percent of tenure-track profes­sors in math, 11 percent in physics, 10 percent in computer science, and 10 percent in electrical engi­neering. And the pipeline does not promise statistical parity any time soon: women are now earning 24 percent of the Ph.D.’s in the phys­ical sciences—way up from the 4 percent of the 1960s, but still far behind the rate they are winning doctorates in other fields. “The change is glacial,” says Debra Rolison, a physical chemist at the Naval Research Laboratory.

Rolison, who describes herself as an “uppity woman,” has a solution. A popular anti-gender bias lec­turer, she gives talks with titles like “Isn’t a Millennium of Affirmative Action for White Men Sufficient?” She wants to apply Title IX to sci­ence education.

Title IX is that part of the gender equality legislation which insists that, say, women’s sports at college level should be equally funded to men’s sports at that same college. The problem, as noted, comes from the fact that men and women do not have an equal appetite for sport: you usually find rather more men wishing to play than women.

And that’s exactly what is wrong, in a much more serious manner, about trying to apply such rules to science education for men and women. And the reason is to be found in the work of Simon Baron Cohen, the scientist behind our EQSQ personality tests.

Aptitude for the hard sciences is distributed along a spectrum (it’s very closely associated with the systemizing part of the tests). As it happens, men are more likely to have that aptitude than women are. Now note, please, that this does not mean that there are no women with such talents: I have a female friend who is a tenure track assistant professor in maths, just as trivial anecdotal example. It does however mean that here are fewer women than men with the requisite innate talent set to deal with these subjects. And the imbalance in numbers is going to be greater the higher up the academic tree you go, given mens’ greater variability around the norm (although be careful here, this is what got Larry Summers into so much trouble at Harvard, saying that this was so).

By all means remove any barriers, encourage those with the right skill and talent sets to succeed in such fields to enter them and to persevere: but the insistence on equality of outcome is absurd, for numerical equivalence, for we don’t have an equal distribution of the necessary talents in the first place.

Oh, good grief. We’ve just managed to get the various vaccines cause autism scares back into their boxes and along comes another one.

You’ll recall that there has been a long running argument that thimerosal, a mercury containing compound used as a preservative in vaccines (look, here’s John McCain stating it’s true!) causes autism. We know this isn’t true because various different countries phased out the use of thimerosal at different times: and the autism rate, the trend, has stayed the same in every one of them.

Over in the UK a slightly different argument was made about autism being caused by the measles part of the MMR vaccine: this has similarly been shown to be bunk. So now that both of these have been shown to be untrue, we can get back to inoculating all kids and thus avoid an epidemic of any of these diseases: after all, that’s what we have vaccines for, to stop kids dying from highly unpleasant diseases.

However, it looks like we’ve got another scare coming:

The vaccine ProQuad is a combination vaccine which protects against measles, mumps and rubella and chicken pox. It’s become popular because alternatives require at least two injections. ProQuad only requires one, and thus it’s a bit more pleasant for kids than being stuck twice with a needle. However, federally funded studies have found that those who get the injection face about double the chances of having a fever with mild convulsions within the twelve days after the injection as those who receive the traditional multi-injection vaccine. This agreed with a company study which found similar risk.

Now the difference here is that the observed effect does seem to be real, it’s not just something cooked up in a fevered imagination. However, we now have the question of, while it’s real, is it significant? And the answer there has to be no. The risks of fever are about one in 2000 and there are no reports of death or serious injury as a result. That’s a whole lot better than the 1-5 per 100 death rate in measles epidemics (in advanced countries: in the poor world it’s five times that) alone, to say nothing of the other three diseases.

What I really don’t understand is why these people are so anti-vaccine? Is it ignorance, or actually a hatred of humanity?