Yet another report, this one from the Center for Work-Life Policy in New York, telling us something really rather different from what they think they’re telling us. This is like on, “Oh, gosh, there’s Sexism! Eeek!” report:

A time warp of 1970s sexist attitudes is driving women in their late thirties from careers in science and technology and undermining key sectors of the economy, according to an international study.

Researchers claim to have discovered a “hidden brain drain” as women opt out when facing a choice between family life and pushing for promotion at work.

The majority choose their children and alternative careers instead of struggling with the hurdles of a macho “lab coat culture” with long hours, old boys’ networks and the risk of sexual harassment.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an economist at the Center for Work-Life Policy in New York and the lead author of the study, said the research had revealed a world with values seemingly stuck in the 1970s.

She said: “It has been a bit like a time warp. This predatory or condescending culture [towards women] was more common across the workplace 20 to 30 years ago but has somehow survived in an engineering, science and technology context.

“It is the hidden brain drain. We have this amazing, talented pool of women who have left the industry. It is highly destructive to our society and economy.”

The thing is, they haven’t found some outpost of 1970s sexism, there’s nothing “macho” going on here (really, the geeks, macho? Sure you’re not all getting confused with the jocks there?). What they’ve found is that it is very difficult to balance both the climbing to the top of the career tree and having and raising children.

That’s it, tout court. One of their examples:

Nancy Lane, a cell biologist at Cambridge University, recalled the conflict she felt between work and her two children. “I felt forced to make agonising trade-offs, asking myself, ‘Do you abandon an experiment or abandon a needy child?’ ” she said. “I found myself deliberately choosing questions that allowed me to run experiments in a five-day week.”

See, it’s not the employers, it’s not the society, it’s not anything other than the intrinsic demands of doing science at the highest levels.

And women get a choice: do they want to pursue that science or are they more interested in other parts of life, like their children and their family? The absence of such a choice would be something to bemoan: but given that the choice exists, it seem very strange indeed to complain about the choices which are being taken.

Essentially, all that this research has uncovered is that women tend to carry the greatest burden of child care and that carrying this burden means that they might need to make compromises in other areas of life.

Wow! Surprising finding, eh? People have to make choices?

This really rather amused me:

About 19% of men admitted they were potential gold-diggers and would tie the knot with someone in order to benefit from their wealth and luxury lifestyle, compared with only 11% of women.

There’s so many little things to unravel: you mean that my plans for making a huge pot of money by the time I’m 60 won’t actually be worth it? That I won’t be able to get that youthful babe?

Slightly more seriously I really don’t find this at all surprising. Men are always told that we are the less emotional gender: certainly, that we seem to be ready for sex without requiring the same levels of emotional intimacy that the distaff side claim to. So give that whole non-empathic side of the male psyche, the idea that more of us would put money ahead of love doesn’t surprise.

Further, I’ve read a few historical novels in my time. No, I don’t mean bodice rippers written now but set in the past, rather, novels that were written in the past. A standard plot device is of the man (often but not always a cad) looking for an heiress, any heiress, to marry. Good grief, Jane Austen’s work is famous enough and at least one of the novels turns that convention on its head: the girls cannot marry as they have no dowry to take into the marriage with them.

But to return to flippancy about the survey. What we’ve really found is that there’s a different attitude towards the truth between the sexes (again, something that’s not examctly news). 89% of women will lie in surveys, while only 81% of men will.

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?

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?

No, this is really quite a clever idea: very much killing two birds with one stone type of clever thinking. So let us take two of our current societal problems.

The first is the Mommy Track and that way that it feeds through into the gender pay gap. We know from previous looks at this that when (if, but the problem applies in a less serious form to those who might in the future) women take a career break to have and possibly to raise children, it’s very difficult for them to get that career back afterwards. Part of it is simply less experience than those who didn’t take the break, part of it is the continuing desire for greater flexibility (and possibly shorter hours) that having children creates. There was most certainly also direct discrimination in earlier decades: how much of this remains appears nowadays to be more of a polticial question than an empirical one.

But as we know, it is this motherhood gap which is responsible (again in larger or smaller part to taste) for the difference in average wages between men and women. There’s also research showing that women who do take part time jobs, in order to have the flexibility they desire, don’t work at the same high-powered level they did before they took the break and had children: so there’s education and training, human capital in the jargon, going unused, something which makes us all poorer.

OK, that’s problem one. Problem two is that we can clearly see that regulation of financial markets and the banking system has been wanting. It’s not so much the external regulation which is wanting though: at least, not in my rather free market opinion. It’s the internal regulation, of the banks and finance houses themselves: it’s entirely obvious that all too many managements didn’t understand what it was that their own employees were doing.

So, Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism makes the suggestion that the banks create a Mommy Track all of their own. Not like the standard one, not at all. Rather, as a way to make the best use of those valuable skills, as a way to use all of that expensively trained human capital, while those mothers desire to have perhaps part time or at least not the brutal 70 hour banking work weeks.

Offer the mothers the chance to be the internal regulators while they are raising their small children. This keeps them in the marketplace, keeps their contacts and knowledge fresh, while allowing them to raise the next generation. It also provides a pool of experienced labor to do that oh so needed regulating: and as an added extra bonus it’ll, in banking at least, help to close the gender pay gap.

Women who’ve performed well in the City or the Street often find it impossible to work out part-time positions when they want to have children, except in those rare admin jobs that require substantive knowledge. You can get good women on the cheap with well-designed mommie track roles. Regulators should sit up and take notice.

An excellent and seriously good idea: not that this means anyone will take any notice, of course, even if they should.

Here’s an interesting little thing. In fast moving markets, it seems to be those with the most testosterone who actually make the money from trading.

Money doesn’t make the world go round: it’s testosterone. The more that traders have, the richer they’ll become - up to a point.

John Coates, who used to manage a trading floor at Deutsche Bank on Wall Street but is now at the Judge Business School at Cambridge University, and Professor Joe Herbert, a neuroscientist, set out to study the brains of City traders to discover what makes them tick.

They measured levels of testosterone and cortisol (a stress hormone) in 17 traders at a City of London bank for eight consecutive business days. They found that those traders with higher testosterone levels in the morning were most likely to make money on the day’s trading. One trader hit a six-day “winning streak” during which he made more than double his daily profit. During that time his testosterone levels went up 74%.

Now no, this isn’t an unalloyed good: too much testosterone leads to too much risk taking and that’s a great way to lose money in markets. There’s also the point made that it isn’t just a higher starting point of testosterone levels that causes it. There’s also a feedback, in that success increases those levels.

However, as far as we are interested here, it tells us something useful about employment in the financial industry. While overall it may indeed be an equal opportunities world, it might not be in every nook and cranny of it. If surging testosterone levels are what lead to trading success (as opposed to purely being results of it) then we might find that women don’t get an even break here, for biological rather than merely societal reasons.

I’ve rather been waiting for this shoe to drop.

Now, yes, we know that women were indeed discriminated against in the past, unfairly so. I’m certainly of the opinion that much of this discrimination, if not all of it, is now behind us. What we have left is the points that men and women are not the same…equal, but not the same.

On the one side we have the obvious facts of biology: it doesn’t matter how much time a man takes off as paternity leave, he’s still not going to give birth. On the other we have the subject of our EQSQ personality tests, that certain other attributes are not distributed equally across the sexes. We expect to find more men (but not exclusively men) at the systemizing end of the spectrum, more women (and again, not exclusively women) at the empathizing end.

That latter can explain some of the occupational segregation we see across the job market. That former is a little bit more difficult to deal with. As (via this blog) the BBC reports:

Writing in the British Medical Journal, Dr Brian McKinstry said female doctors were more likely to work part-time, leading to staffing problems.

Women, who now outnumber men in medical schools, were also less likely to take part in training or research, he said.

Well, as the opponents say, there’s an easy way to deal with staffing problems: change the rotas so as to accommodate part time working. However, there are other problems:

But she said women doctors were still under-represented in some specialities, such as surgery, and at senior levels in the profession.

The best candidates needed to be chosen for medical school whatever their sex but flexible hours, on-site child care and part-time training options were needed to ensure women doctors had equal opportunities in their career, she said.

Now that last, part time training, makes me a little nervous. We’ve all seen the TV doctor shows, House, Gray’s Anatomy and so on. Yes, part time training would indeed make things easier for those women who would like to combine children and a career. However, is this actually possible?

In a specialty such as surgery it takes nearly 20 years of 60 hour weeks of training (starting with pre-med all the way though medical school, then the various training posts before you’re fully qualified as an independent surgeon) to actually get finally qualified. Yes, the rewards can be worth it, $400,000 a year and up as an income. But here’s also a natural life to a surgeon: dexterity, eyesight, even physical strength are necessary, so few are going to continue “on the floor” as it were past, say, 60 or so.

So we actually have a career where 20 years is being spent in training for a 20 year working life. If we move to part time training, then we have to do one of two things.

1) Reduce the length of the working life. At some point this becomes silly: is there any point in 30 years of training for a 10 year working life?

2) Reduce the amount of training itself.Now, it might be that currently surgeons train too much. It might not be too….but I’m not sure that anyone would like the argument stated that baldly. That to give women an equal chance of becoming surgeons while also being able to have children we’re going to have to dumb down the profession.

No, I don’t know what the answer is either: but it is something of a problem. There really are professions out there where years and years of long hours are the current route to being a full professional. How do we, how can we, if we already accept that those years of intense preparation are necessary, combine this with the career breaks and part time work that women with children both need and want?

Anyone got any ideas?

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?

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.

There’s good news and bad news in this recent decision by the UK government about advice on careers to school pupils.

The way apprenticeships split on traditional gender lines is apparent from official figures which show only 3% of apprentices on childcare courses and 8% on hairdressing courses are men. In engineering 3% of apprentices are women, and in construction only 1% are women.

The aim is that this gender imbalance be corrected by making sure that the advice given to the pupils is sex (or if you prefer, gender) blind.

Schools will be ordered to offer impartial careers guidance to pupils amid concerns that teachers’ “sexist” attitudes are promoting hairdressing courses to girls and construction apprenticeships to boys.

And that second is the bad bit. For as we know from our EQSQ personality tests and the results that Simon Baron Cohen has got from his research, the aptitude for the different jobs and careers is not distributed equally across genders (or sexes, if you prefer). The numbers of men taking the traditionally female training (and vice versa) are certainly lower than the numbers we would expect have the aptitude for the different jobs, but the insistence on gender blind counselling makes me think that they want to move to something more like an equal split of the sexes on each course.

And as we know, that’s not right either. We find that some 17% of women have the systemising type brain (and would therefore be suited to an engineering type job) and similarly some 17% of men have the empathising and thus might be suited to the child-care ones.

I suppose that my real complaint is that they seem not to have heard of Baron Cohen’s research at all: instead of being gender blind, the counselling should first attempt to work out the brain type of each individual and then direct the advice appropriately. But then that’s trying to insist that government be sensible and up to date: always a losing proposition, that one.