Vivre la Difference

Well, in one way of coursemen are discriminated against, just as women are. In fact, all of us are discriminated against all the time: that’s just peopleusing their own mixtures of judgement and prejudice to decide things about us by our looks, accent, height, weight, whatever.

But in the more specific sense, are men now sexually discriminated against? There does seem to be some evidence that there is, as this quoted by Dr. Helen shows.

According to a 2006 survey commissioned by Kelly Services, a firm that finds temporary and permanent staff for companies, 34.8% of men said they believed they had experienced discrimination over the past five years at work compared with 33.3% of women. Similar findings were reported by University of Toronto sociology professor John Kervin. In a survey of business students at an Ontario college, Prof. Kervin found that just as many men as women — 21% each — felt their professors were biased against them because of their gender.

It’s the classic workplace discrimination scenario in reverse: All things being equal, if a man and woman are up for the same job, the woman has an unfair advantage, say men’s rights advocates. And they blame decades of affirmative action initiatives that have encouraged companies to promote women and minorities.

There’s a branch of socioligical thought which says that men cannot be discriminated against in this manner. It’s very closely allied with the idea that racial minorities cannot be racist themselves. Only those in the position of power in a society can be guilty of such discrimination. Thus minorities cannot be raciost (which will be huge news to those who have encountered such racism first hand) and men cannot be discriminated against in a patriarchy.

This particular strand of sociological thought is worth even less than most others in that benighted discipline of course. Discrimination is discrimination whether it is of the affirmative kind or not.

But if we’ve reached the point that just as many men are being discriminated against as women, might it not be time to call that whole policy of affirmative discrimination into question? If what we’re trying to do is wipe out such unfairness, it doesn’t seem very sensible to be adding to it ourselves, does it?

OK, so we find once again that the male and female brains have (slightly) different structures.

Men and women show differences in behaviour because their brains are physically distinct organs, new research suggests. Male and female brains appear to be constructed from markedly different genetic blueprints.

The differences in the circuitry that wires them up and the chemicals that transmit messages inside them are so great as to point to the conclusion that there is not just one kind of human brain, but two, according to recent neurological studies.

OK, now that’s part of our own theory around here. We go on to point out that simply because soeone is XX that doesn’t mean that they’ll have a female brain, or that someone XY will have male. It’s a probability that the former and latter will, not a certainty. But this research leads to a much larger point:

Professor Jeff Mogil from McGill University, in Montreal, Canada, who has demonstrated major differences in pain processing in males and females, puts it even more forcefully. He is astonished that so many researchers have failed to include female animals in their studies. “It’s scandalous,” he said. “Women are the most common pain sufferers, and yet our model for basic pain research is the male rat.”

Looks like a number of female rats are in for a torrid time of it but that’s something we really ought to do, don’t you think, whatever PETA says about it.

I think this is absolutely wonderful this piece of research. Firstly, think about how the researchers actually ggot their data. Given that tehy needed to collect samples from these people while they were on a restful holiday far from the madding crowd, the researchers clearly needed to stay at the vacation resort, far from the madding crowd, so that they could do so.

Tough job, eh, but somebody’s got to do it.

Then there was their result:

ABSTRACT. The authors collected saliva samples from 15 married couples and 13 women staying with a female companion (N = 43) during an 8-day stay at a spa resort in Nagano, Japan. To examine changes in endocrinological stress markers, the authors evaluated participants’ levels of salivary cortisol and chromogranin A (CgA) by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. By the eighth day, women staying with their husbands had significantly increased levels of cortisol and CgA. During the protocol, the authors observed no significant variation in levels of cortisol or CgA for either the women who were staying with same-sex companions or the male spouses. These findings suggest that the effects of long-term stays in a spa resort are more beneficial for married women staying with their husbands than for either married men or women staying with female companions.

So, going on vacation with your buddies doesn’t do anything and for men, going on vacation with their wives doesn’t do anything. But for wives, going on vacation with their husbands does benefit them.

That’s a weird weird result and I’m struggling to think what might be causing it. Maybe it’s that being relieved from the pressure of paid work doesn’t make much difference, but that being relieved from domestic work (and yes, Japan, where this was done, is a very rigidly divided society in terms of gender roles) does?

Anyone got any better theories?

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.

Sorry to have to disappoint people here but that book that Carrie reads from in the Sex and the City movie, “Love Letters From Great Men” does not in fact exist. Despite there being hundreds upon hundreds of people asking booksellers for it, no, there really is no book called “Love Letters From Great Men”.

Well, yet that is. The story has been all over the place in the past few days.

A consumer alert for the millions who have seen the feature film version of “Sex and the City”: There is no such book as “Love Letters From Great Men,” from which Carrie Bradshaw reads while in bed with her beloved Mr. Big.

Well, that’s from AP so I guess we have to take it as being true. Certainly, when the Christian Science Monitor (I find the philosophic ideas there a tad odd, I have to admit, but the newspaper is certainly first class) says them same I’m inclined to believe it.

They called the show “Sex and the City” but as those of us who used to watch it know, far more often it was about love – or the search for a close facsimile, anyway. So there’s nothing surprising about the fact that in the movie version we see Carrie sitting in bed reading a book called “Love Letters From Great Men” (and pondering tender words from lovers as diverse as Beethoven and Napoleon.)

What is kind of funny, however, is last week’s Associated Press story on the hundreds of queries retailers have received from readers looking for that book. Unfortunately, it doesn’t exist.

The news has even reached as far as Australia:

Fans of the new ‘Sex and the City’ movie have been flooding bookstores and online retailers in an attempt to track down the book ‘Love Letters From Great Men’ that Carrie Bradshaw is seen reading - the only problem is, it doesn’t exist.

The thing is, this is true now, yes. But I don’t think that this book not existing is going to last for very long. For some bright spark is bound to write one and get it out into hte market…..if hundreds or thousands of people are willing to buy something with that title, wouldn’t it be a sensible idea?

In fact, I have to admit that it sounds so sensible that I’m likely to start writing it tomorrow.

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?

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.

I’m afraid that this is one of the things that makes me really rather angry about those who would reject science. Those, that is, who keep insisting that there’s some problem with the current system of vaccinations. No, mercury in vaccines does not cause autism, no, the MMR vaccine does not cause autism. But not vaccinating children can indeed kill them:

A child has died from suspected diphtheria – the first fatality from the rare infection in Britain for 14 years, health chiefs disclosed yesterday.

The Health Protection Agency said diphtheria, which attacks the breathing system, was the “most likely” explanation for the death in London. The child had not been vaccinated.

The only reason the infection is indeed (thankfully) rare is that almost all children are indeed vaccinated against it. It’s fairly complex, three injection, one at two, one at three and one at four months. Then a booster before starting school and another between 16 and 18.

And the reason we go through all that effort is that it’s a great deal better than having to bury a child.

As more people reject the science, as more people fall for the woo woo stories about how children are damaged by vaccination then more children will die from these easily preventable diseases.

Grr.

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?