Vivre la Difference

Interesting news from the Friendly Giant to the North (as PJ O’Rourke once called Canada) about the increases in earnings coming from having more education. OK, so the figures are in that strange currency, the Loonie (yes, really what they call the Canadian Dollar) and we already knew the basics of the story, that getting educated pays off. But it’s good to see the actual figures:

Young men with a bachelor’s degree, for example, had median earnings of $50,506 while those with graduate degrees had even higher median earnings at $54,686.

It isn’t, of course, just young men who benefit:

For example, the median earnings of women aged 45 to 54 with a university degree surpassed those with no high school diploma by more than $33,000. In fact, just having that high school diploma earned women some $9,000 more, on average.

Women too: and something that is even more important is that it’s not just colllege degrees which create this rise in income:

Those with a registered trade or apprenticeship were earning nearly $40,000 — some $2,600 more than those who had a high school diploma and some $8,000 more than those who didn’t even have that.

Education, whatever the level, whatever the path, increases lifetime earnings.

Interesting, no?

Here’s something you might think it was unlikely you would ever see:

‘Not tonight, Joséphine.’ Napoleon Bonaparte’s lacklustre response to the bedtime blandishments of his wife is being repeated every evening in bedrooms across the country. Men are simply going off sex, according to the UK’s largest firm of relationship counsellors.

Relate, which provides counselling, sex therapy and relationship education, said there had been a 40 per cent increase in male clients admitting that, despite being physically able to have sex, they can’t be bothered.

No, it’s not because they can’t have sex, it’s because they’re not really worried about it. Even more, it’s not because they don’t want to have sex with their wives (a regrettable state of affairs to be sure, but not one that has been all that unusual in history) but would like to do so with women perhaps unobtainable. No, it’s just the whole idea of sex simply isn’t all that fascinating any more.

Who would have thought of that happening?

Various possible explanations are offered and the one I find funniest is the idea that as women know more about what they want these days, or perhaps it’s rather that they’re a great deal more vocal in letting on what they want, thus men find it all too much of a strain. That makes us sound even more wimpish than just not being interested really.

However, there is one explanation which we can reject entirely:

Professor Cary Cooper, president of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy, agreed. ‘Men have less social support and, as a generalisation, are less emotionally intelligent than women and have not traditionally been encouraged to share their feelings,’ he said.

Cooper, who is professor of organisational psychology and health at Lancaster University, also blamed Britain’s culture of long working hours. ‘Britain’s work culture has gone from 9 to 5 to extremely long hours, which makes for a very stressful life,’ he said. ‘Stress can be cumulative, which means eventually people can find it impossible to switch off and relax.’

I agree, as a thesis, it sounds plausible. The stresses and strains of modern life, long working hours culture, yadda, yadda.

The only unfortunate thing is, male working hours have been declining for at least a century, both paid work outside the home and unpaid work in it. So the stress associated with work has also been declining: so sad, isn’t it, when a beautiful theory gets destroyed by an inconvenient fact?

Here’s an interesting little thing about the differences between the sexes. Women’s voices sound sexier when they’re at their most fertile part of the cycle.

Researchers found that the female voice altered according to the time of the month.

They recorded women counting from one to 10 at different stages of the menstrual cycle, then played the voices back at random to a group of students.

Both men and women judged the voices to be most attractive when they were recorded at periods of peak fertility and less attractive during non-fertile periods.

This ties in with various things that we’ve already discussed here: for example, the way that female singers’ voices change over their cycle as well.

And, of course, the way in which lapdancers‘ earnings seem also to change with their position on that same cycle.

All of these findings are pointing to very much the same finding. That while the basic and outward signs of oestrus in human beings are no longer visible, in the same way that the bright red bottom of a baboon in heat (or the yowling of a domestic cat when she is) are, the more subtle signs are still there.

And the explanations of all of this are well understood too. Humans (and to a lesser extent, other apes and monkeys) are slightly odd in that they mate when not necessarily fertile. We’re also a long lived pair bonding species, something else which sets us apart. There’s thus an advantage to the female side to keeping the knowledge of when she is fertile private: it aids in both beating off the unwanted attentions of those she has not bonded with but also keeps her mate guessing about when she is fertile. This is important knowledge in the battle of the sexes.

However, it’’s such important knowledge in that battle that the ploy is not going to go unanswered: males are going to try to work out the fertility or not, the point in the cycle, from other more subtle clues. And some of them, at least, are going to work it out and many of us will be descended from those who did, thus providing a genetic strengthening of such a talent down the generations.

This is an interesting little right brain test. So interesting in fact that I still haven’t found the man after about 15 minutes of looking at the picture.

Have a look here for the picture and the rules.

To be honest with you, I’m not even sure that there is a man in the picture: either that or I have no right side brain at all.

Anyone mind if I stick with our own EQSQ personality tests? They are at least based on science: and I can do them too, which always helps.

Well, yes, of course, all of us are in favour of part time politicians: they do so much less damage than the full time kind. But Holland seems to have gone a stage further with the idea of allowing people to be such:

A nurse and part-time pop singer has fulfilled her dream of becoming an MP by taking a seat in parliament on maternity cover.

Under a new provision in a country that is known for its liberalism and progressive social laws, Sabine Uitslag will serve as an MP for the Dutch ruling Christian Democrat party (CDA). She will be a stand-in for Mirjam Sterk.

Ms Uitslag, 35, will spend four months in Parliament until the maternity leave of Ms Sterk has finished. It is the first test of an arrangement that both women believe should become the norm across the European Union.

The reason that this works is the slightly odd electoral system that they have in Holland. Instead of being elected for a district the election covers the whole country. You stand as a member for a particular part and you get a number on that party list. If your party only gets a few votes across the country then only the top three or four on the list will get elected: if the party gets a lot, then perhaps the first 40 or 50 on the list will. Ms. Uitslag was in fact number 50 on her party’s list and the top 49 actually got elected. So she’s the top one who didn’t, if you follow me.

So the part time politician thing isn’t all that odd: if one of the people who did get elected were to die, or be so ill they could not continue, then the same thing would happen. The next one on the list would then take their seat.

Still, it’s an interesting way to deal with maternity leave, don’t you think?

Yes, we’ve all heard the line, there’s lies, damned lies and then statistics. The power of it as an observation about the world is that by picking and choosing the numbers you quote you can prove just about anything that you want: which is why when people present us with carefully chosen numbers we need to be so wary.

For example, in the US the gender pay gap is normally stated as women earning 79 cents (or whatever the number is) for every dollar earned by men. Now while it’s true, it’s not actually very informative. For, for example, do men and women work the same number of hours? No, they don’t, not on average, they tend to have shorter work weeks and in common with their sisters around the world they also tend to take more time off for illness.

No, of course that is not all of that 21 cent gap, but it is some of it, which is why that particular statistic isn’t really all that useful to us in deciding firstly, whether this is a problem we want to do something about and secondly, what we might do.

One such number that caught my eye this week was from an MEP (a Member of the Euuropen Parliament and thus one of those with power in Europe):

And how has it come to be that the UK has the largest gender pay gap in the European Union?

Now I expect politicians to be ill informed but that’s ludicrous. As the figures from her own organisation show, the UK’s gender pay gap is actually below average for the European countries, a very far cry from being the worst.

So what is happening? She’s quoting from these other figures, which do indeed seem to show the UK has the largest gender pay gap in Europe. How can we have both a below average and the largest gap in the same country at the same time?

The answer is in which actual figures are being looked at. The first figures are made up of only people who are working full time (the numbers accord very well with those you can work out by looking at average hourly pay).

The second set of figures come from looking at all of those in work. Which, as you might imagine, includes those who work part time.

And this is where the problem comes in. Those who work part time get paid less per hour than those who work full time. This is true in every country, it’s true of both men and women. Work part time and you’ll get less per hour than your full time contemporaries.

Add this together with the fact that we have a very different structure of employment in the UK than they do in other European countries and that’s where the difference comes from. For the UK has many more women working part time than the others. This is normally though of as something beneficial: those women who want to can find part time work which allows them to have and raise their children, rather than being forced into either full time work or none. But when you look at the average pay rates of men and women you’ll then be including both the effect of the gender pay gap and the part time pay gap.

Which is what allows a politician to say that a country which has a below average pay gap actually has the largest one.

See, you can prove anything with statistics.