One of those often asked questions is why there aren’t more women in politics. Do the voters discriminate, for example? Do the parties themselves discriminate? Or are there other, simpler, reasons for the lack of women helping to run the country?

It would appear that there are actually.

When women run for office, they win as often as men do.

So, if that is true then the problem must be in the number who put themselves forward to run for office. And that leads us to many of the same asnwers that we find when considering the gender pay gap. Women put themselves forward less often just as they ask for pay rises less often than men. They’re also advised or mentored to do so less often than men.

However, I do think there’s another reason, one that reflects very well upon women. Strip away all that rubbish about helping to run the Republic, wanting to do the best by one’s fellow citizens, and look at what politics actually is. It’s self-aggrandisement, pure and simple. A reach for power over others….and those two are things that men suffer from a great deal more than women do.

For all the complaints we hear about the structural inequality of our patriarchal society, it is true that equality continues to advance.

Now to understand this you’ll need to grasp something about the British legal system. Firstly, that it’sactually teo systems, one for England and Wales and another for Scotland. Secondly, that we have two different types of lawyers. While the differences are slightly fading away, there’s still a distinction made between solicitors and barristers. Solicitors are the people that do the office work. Wills, property transfers, all that sort of stuff. They also do the office work of preparing a case for a trial. Then they hand over to the barristers who do the actual getting up on their hind legs and talking in court bit.

Slightly odd I agree, but it does allow people to specialise.

Now, for solicitors the intake has been majority female for well over a decade now.  For barristers not so much. Actually, they’re called advocates in Scotland but it’s the same thing, the talking in court bit.

…the Faculty of Advocates passes a significant milestone next week with the arrival, for the first time, of as many female trainees as male ones.

Over the previous 20 years, the ratio of “intrants” starting their nine-month training at the Bar has generally been three or four males to every female. One year in the early 1990s, the intake was 19 men and one woman.

The percentage of women joining more recently has varied between 35 and 40 per cent. This autumn’s intake, however, is a near 50-50 split.

It may take some time for the equality in numbers to filter through to the top. The Scottish Bar is small, with 462 practising members of whom 110 - or 23 per cent - are women. Amongst the 96 silks, or QCs, the percentage of women is only 16 per cent.

(Just to add more detail, silks are the senior lawyers.)

Now this reflects on of my favourite contentions. It’s no good looking at the earnings of all women, or the number of women at the top of a prfession, or even the number of women in total in a career or profession. For we know that in years gone by there was indeed discrimination against women. When we try to work out what needs to be done about equality we need to look at it all by age cohort.

Are wages for women in their 20s the same as mens’? Actually, umm, yes, they are. Are there roughly equal numbers of men and women entering the traditionally highly paid professions? As above, yes, there are.

So it would seem that, at least in part, we’ve already done the heavy lifting required to make access to professional careers equal. We now have to simply wait for the current generation to work their way through the system and we’ll have solved it all, yes?

Well, no, not quite. For we’ve still got this career break for motherhood thing to contend with.

But it is still true to say that equality advances: in many, if not most areas of life, we have at least got to the equality of opportunity stage for both men and women. Perhaps not yet perfect but better than it was, no?

This is a really interesting paper about the management gender gap. Instead of trying to work it all out from first principles they’ve gone looking (rather like Levitt in Freakonomics) for a data set that will let them test different possible explanations for why there are more men in top management than there are women.

Women are under-represented in top management positions on both sides of the Atlantic. The academic literature suggests a number of explanations for this underrepresentation, including self-selection, investment in family and child bearing, lower female human capital investment, or gender discrimination.

OK, that’s a pretty good reading of the usual expanations. Their postulate is that:

A new strand of research considers another hypothesis – that the sexes perform differently under competitive pressures, even if these differences do not exist in non-competitive settings.

Now that makes sense to me to begin with: I’ve seen often enough (and complained about it) that girls do better when education is based around coursework, boys when it is all about exams. Indeed, that’s been hte justification for the swing from purely judging grades on competitive examinations to coursework over recent decades. So we all pretty much agree that it works at the lower levels of education.

The authors of the paper look at the entrance exams to one of the extremely competitive French graduate schools (fewer than 10% of applicants get in, but those who do rise to the very top of French society).

A gender gap in entrance exams

On average, men perform slightly better than women in both the written and oral exams despite evidence the female candidates are ‘better’ in the sense that:

• in the same cohort of candidates, the females performed significantly better than men in the national baccalauréat exam two years prior to the sitting of the HEC admission exam; and
• among the sub-sample of candidates admitted to the school, females outperform the males during the first year of their core curriculum classes at HEC.

Male performance has greater variance

The male performance distribution has greater variance – in the top quartile of examinees, men outperform women, while their written exam scores in the lowest quartile are worse than women. Female candidates’ performance is more concentrated around the median. Since only a small fraction of the initial candidates are admitted to the school, men are more likely to be admitted than women, even though roughly equal numbers of men and women apply.

Now that is interesting, don’t you think? We’ve got that higher male variance thing which is what got Larry Summers into so much trouble at Harvard. And we’ve got the point that in competitive exams, men do better than women. That is, better than their performance in non-competitive tests.

Given that getting into top management is much more like a competitive exam than it is like a non-competitive one (there can be only one CEO for example) we might indeed have our explanation for why there are more men than women in those sorts of jobs.

If you’re a fan of evolutionary psychology you might want to extend this a little too. Most women who are physically capable of having children and want them have, over the history of the species, done so. This isn’t true of men at all. Indeed, it’s said that 40% of men who’ve ever lived had no offspring. So, in evolutionary terms, men are indeed in a much more competitive environment than women are.

Which leads rather to a reductio ad absurdam. The reason there’s more men in higher management is because, well, they’re men.

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?

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.

You may or may not know of Gordon Ramsey: an excellent chef (Anthony Bourdin rates him as one of the best in the world and that’s good enough for me), a reality TV star in shows from his own kitchens and, well, he’s also remarkably foul mouthed. What’s really rather a surprise given his reputation is that he’s extremely supportive of women aiming to become top chefs themselves, indeed he employs at least one at one of his offshoot restaurants.

However, that’s not the point that struck me so much about this article. Rather, it’s from one of those women who has become a top chef in her own right:

Men and women tend to cook in different ways. Women are intuitive and men are analytical. Look at a lot of Michelin-star cooking in London and the food is all neat, structured and precise, and compare that to someone like Sally (Clarke) or River Cafe. It’s a different type of food: It’s more about flavor than form. It’s a more organic feel, more natural. More people now realize the importance of good food and that it shouldn’t be so expensive. I’m hoping that will give more openings to women. But there comes a time when some women want to make a choice and have children. In the restaurant world, that’s hard. It’s not like being a writer or something. Unless you own a restaurant, you can’t necessarily take your toddlers into work.

The hours in the restaurant trade, especially for those aiming for the top, are punishing. It wouldn’t be unusual for a head chef to be there at 8 am to check the deliveries in and still be there at 11 at night checking the last desserts as they go out to the tables. That schedule five and six days a week. It certainly does rather limit the family life options for women, there’s no doubt about that.

But the part I found really fascinating was the way in which the female chef points to there being a male/female difference in cooking styles. Men are more analytical (Aha! think of systemisers in our EQSQ personality tests) and women more intuitive (think empathisers here) in the ways that they cook.

Now, I will admit that it’s some decades since my stint in commercial kitchens and also that I’m rather an unreconstructed male chauvinist, but there’s a reason that we used to call men chefs and women cooks.

Because men were more analytical and women more intuitive…..equally good in their own ways, but sufficiently different that we used different words to describe them. Sadly, people would shout at me if I were to try and make the same distinction today.

I have to admit to a certain confusion at the information here. You understand of course, that I’m English, and so view American society through a slightly distorted lens. I’ll tell you of my confusion later: the first part of this information set causes me no confusion at all.

Someone went out and surveyed the state of virginity or sexual experience amongst the undergraduates at Wellesley College (which I am pretty sure is still an all female college). They were able to find not one single virgin (although I do have to admit, that state or not of the hymen was self-reported rather than physically checked) in the Studio Art program. While 83% of the women in the mathematics program were indeed still virgins.

There are some departments which seem to deviate a little from what we might expect but the general pattern could have been culled from an examination of our EQSQ personality tests. Moving along the continuum, from those subjects which we would expect to be colonised by the empathic types, along to the hard sciences which we would expect to be full of the systemizers, we pretty much see that the virginity rate rises the more likely the students are to be systemizers.

Not too hard to understand: those at the systemizing end do indeed have greater problems with human relationships than those at the empathic end.

So I’m not confused by that part. But I am as I said above by another.

Now my exposure to American teenagehood is of course minimal, really only from the movies and TV (I have lived in the US, but at an age when if I were thought to be taking an interest in the sex lives of teenagers I would be at best run out of town on a rail) so it is of course a very partial view.

But certainly the impression I get is that all of that virginity thing is taken care of by the time people go to college, isn’t it? In fact, I’m under the definite impression that driving home from the Prom date is written into everyone’s personal organiser.

Isn’t it?

Saw this at Bloomberg and thought it worth a brief mention:

As they struggle to achieve parity with their male counterparts, women at the highest levels of Wall Street are catching up in one category — losing their jobs.

That might not actually be the type of equality that many women were searching for.

However, it is of course possible to take a more positive view of this. As you regular readers will know, I’ve got a background in economics and I’m very much one of those free market sorta guys. One thing that many over look (or choose to ignore) is that markets themselves are entirely amoral. The people within them might be immoral or moral, but the market exchange system itself is entirely amoral. It doesn’t care about your sex, gender, sexual preferences, color, place of birth or religion. It cares only about what you’ve got to offer and what you want in return for it.

There are some who aren’t all that convinced, who think that cultural attitudes still play too large a part:

There might be more women in such lofty positions if attitudes toward women on Wall Street changed, said Linda Bialecki, president of Bialecki Inc., a New York-based boutique executive search firm.

“Stereotypes embedded in our society are so pervasive, so accepted by men and women that it’s truly extraordinarily difficult to move beyond them,” Bialecki said. “As a definition of leadership, men can be assertive, aggressive and decisive. Those are not words that are positively ascribed to women.”

But the reality is that:

The market, as everyone has discovered, takes no prisoners

And that’s a good thing, for just as it doesn’t discriminate between hte sexes or races on the way down, when people are getting fired, not does it on the way up, when people are getting hired.

The people in the markets might discriminate, but the markets themselves do not.

No, no, I don’t mean he XX and XY coding which makes women and men what they are (nor the other 8 or so haplotypes extant which make the classifications really rather confusing). Rather, the difference in hte way in which mean and women code software.

Emma McGrattan, the senior vice-president of engineering for computer-database company Ingres–and one of Silicon Valley’s highest-ranking female programmers–insists that men and women write code differently. Women are more touchy-feely and considerate of those who will use the code later, she says. They’ll intersperse their code–those strings of instructions that result in nifty applications and programs–with helpful comments and directions, explaining why they wrote the lines the way they did and exactly how they did it.

The code becomes a type of “roadmap” for others who might want to alter it or add to it later, says McGrattan, a native of Ireland who has been with Ingres since 1992.

Men, on the other hand, have no such pretenses. Often, “they try to show how clever they are by writing very cryptic code,” she tells the Business Technology Blog. “They try to obfuscate things in the code,” and don’t leave clear directions for people using it later. McGrattan boasts that 70% to 80% of the time, she can look at a chunk of computer code and tell if it was written by a man or a woman.

OK, that’s a little broadbrush perhaps but the basic point she’s getting at seems valid to me. 15 years ago or so I was getting Russian programmers to write code for Californian companies. I was using some extraordinarily good people, those who could and would write their own compilers just for the fun of it. However, getting them to actually comment their code so that someone could then work out what each line was doing (so as to be able to repair or change it) was almost impossible. And that’s why the business failed in the end, for we never did manage to work out how to change that.

Looking back I wish I’d known then what I know now (well, yes, of course, everyone thinks that way, but I mean more than just the usual impossible hopes). For those EQSQ personality tests that you see up at the top there are based on Simon Baron Cohen’s ideas and it’s his ideas that help us to aid our understanding of these areas. That extreme male brain type which is so good at programming is also extremely bad at understanding what it is that other people require or understand. And that’s why so many programmers who are great at writing code don’t understand that you need to provide that map so that others can understand what you’ve done.

There’s something that doesn’t really quite make sense here about Natascha Kampusch.

For years television was her main form of entertainment and view of the world as she lived in an underground prison. Now the kidnap victim Natascha Kampusch is to become a TV talk show host herself - a career of which she dreamed during her incarceration.

Less than two years after her release, the 20-year old Austrian says she is now learning “the other side” of the media. On Sunday she will host the first in her chat show series, “Natascha Kampusch Meets …” on the private television channel Puls 4.

I mean, yes, she is famous, she’s certainly had a different life so far to almost everyone else. But, umm, are we entirely sure that the best training for chatting to people is to spend eight years in a cellar on your own?