I find this very funny indeed, very funny. Outraged feminist gets sick of the way men act and says that, because men, when free to do so, tend to chase younger women, therefore:

I hypothesized that true happiness could only be achieved in a world devoid of men. I considered writing my non-existent voting members of Congress to propose legislation requiring that all men be sterilized once their wives enter menopause.

The major (as far as I’m aware, the only used) method of sterilisation for men is a vasectomy: something that removes fertility but not the sex drive and thus, one would assume, not the desire to chase whatever sort of women it is that men do indeed desire to chase. Her reasoning was as follows:

Just think of yourself, perhaps, faced with this:

The two men – both fathers, one at the beginning of middle age, one farther along, both married to smart, high-achieving women – were fantasizing about the kinds of women they’d go out with if they were single. You may or may not be surprised to learn that they both figured the women would be babes. You may or may not be surprised to learn that they both said they’d be younger. A lot younger. And childless.

The suggestion from me that men like themselves might actually prefer to date contemporaries, women who’d lived, matured, grown wiser and more human with the experience of parenting, and, at the very least, could recall the 1980s, was met with nothing but outraged looks and half-chewed-donut silence.

This simple and obvious fact about male sexuality so enraged her:

I spent the following days nursing a sputtering sort of rage. The conversation marked the end of an illusion, you see. I’d thought that in our little bubble, a bubble, it should be said, that was defined not by class or money or education, but rather by goodness and decency and values and realness (even I am laughing now), the men were somehow different from the men Out There who dated women multiple decades younger than themselves, prized them for their looks and their fecundity and fell in love with the magical rejuvenating mirrors they found in the women’s adoring young eyes.

Yes, she’s angry with the results of evolution. That men chase women younger than they is a simple fact: we’re descended from those who did and the behaviour is hard wired into us. For female fertility fails at a younger age than does male fertility. And that is simply it.

Judith Warner appears to have forgotten (or perhaps never heard of) the point that the universe is not here to reinforce your prejudices.

We’ve all been told it so many times we might even begin to think that it’s true. Women do more work than men, right?

Because men don’t pick up their end of the domestic work load, women do most of that, and thus women work longer hours than men do.

Yes, we have been told it a lot: the only unfortunate thing about it is that it isn’t in fact true.

In their paper on ‘total work’, Dan Hamermesh and coauthors add up market and household work, and point out that in rich countries on four continents, there is no difference — men and women do the same amount of total work.

I’ve seen the UK statistics for that figure and it’s certainly bourne out there: men and women have (to within a few minutes a day) exadtly the same workloads. The difference is that more of men’s is market (or paid) work, more of women’s domestic (or unpaid).

Now, we can still compain about this, insist that even this is inequitable, if we should so wish. But we do always need to start from the reality in front of us: men and women do the same amount of work, on average.

An excellent blog from the other side of the world. Very much worth a read. In this particular post the mother of an autistic lad has been reading Simon Baron Cohen and then relfects that there’s a great deal of similarity between his theoretical descriptions and their personality types.

One thing though:

Another concern about buying into Mr. Baron Cohen’s hypothesis is that if the cause is purely due to genes, then this means other children of the same parents will be autistic too, which is not necessarily the case. Yes, there is a higher chance of them being autistic too but it is definitely not definite. Alhamdulillah, my 19 month old Alisha seems neurotypical to me, talking and playing in accordance with the milestones of typical children.

That’s not quite how genetics works. Take something that we know is absolutely genetically determined, like cystic fibrosis. Even if both parents are carriers the chance of any individual child actually having cystic fibrosis is one in four.

Think of it this way. There’s one specific variation of a gene which leads to cystic fibrosis. And you get a pair of genes, one from each parent, for each gene. To have the actual disease, rather than simply be a carrier, both copies of the gene must be the cystic fibrosis types. OK, now, the parents are both carriers but not suffering from the disease. So their copies of the genes are gene (cf) and gene (not cf). Yes? And you inherit one copy of each gene from each parent, yes?

So the possible combinations in any child are gene (cf) gene (cf), gene (cf) gene (not cf), gene (not cf) gene (cf) and gene (not cf) gene (not cf).

Four possible combinations and only one means that the child suffers from cystic fibrosis (where it is gene (cf) gene (cf)), two that it is a carrier and one that it is entirely free of it.

This is true of any recessive gene.

Now, we’re also pretty sure that there is no one gene for autism, rather, that there’s a combination that cause it. That reduces the chances again: say that it’s two genes and everything is the same as before. Instead of there being four possible genetic combinations, there will be 8, and the chance of any one child being autistic will be one in 8. If there’s three then the number goes up again…to 24, and thus a one in 24 chance.

Actually, you can try and run this back the other way. We know that if one child is autistic then the chances of a second being so rise from those of the general population. But if we can work out how much higher, then we might be able to see how many genes are interacting.

You’ve just got to love The Guardian. They’ve got a long complaint here about maternal profiling. That is, the way in which companies try to find out whether women have children, are likely to have children, before they make the decision as to whether to hire them or not.

The unlikely new face of radical women’s activism in the US? Meet Kiki Peppard, a 53-year-old switchboard operator and grandmother from Pennsylvania who claims she is one of millions of victims of “maternal profiling”. Defined as “employment discrimination against a woman who has, or will have, children”, feminist groups say that maternal profiling has reached epidemic proportions - and is getting worse. In essence, it involves employers building up information on a woman’s age, marital status and family commitments to determine whether to hire her, how much to pay her and how much responsibility to give her. Is she likely to have children and need maternity pay? Will she want to work shorter hours?

It’s extremely difficult to say that this woman, or any other who has been subject to maternal profiling, is a “victim”. Well, unless you mean a victim of well meaning but counter-productive intervention into the labor market.

In the UK, asking questions in a job interview about a woman’s maternal status would leave an employer open to a sex discrimination case, yet there is a great deal of evidence that such profiling goes on unspoken. And it is a practice that affects not just mothers, but all women of childbearing age. Whether or not you intend to have children, the possibility that you might, could well be enough to put off a potential employer.

That is all true but it simply makes all women victims in that second sense.

Last year, a survey by the new Equality and Human Rights Commission, headed by Trevor Phillips, found that 70% of recruitment agencies had been asked to avoid hiring women who were pregnant or likely to get pregnant. The commission also found that mothers face more discrimination in the workplace than any other group. Those with children under 11 were 45% less likely to be employed than men, with that figure rising to 49% among single mothers.

As is all of that, however illegal it might be.

A YouGov poll of 1,000 UK directors, also conducted in 2007, revealed that 21% knew of instances where their company had avoided hiring women of child-bearing age - 19% admitted to making this decision themselves. In the same poll, more than two-thirds of senior executives said that the bureaucracy surrounding parental leave posed a “serious threat” to their companies. And in 2004 an extraordinary survey by HR information provider Cromer found that eight in 10 human resources managers would “think twice” before hiring a newly married woman in her 20s.

Set aside, for a moment, what “ought to be” and look at what is actually happening. Companies are going out of their way not to hire women who either might have children already or have them in the future. They’re going so far out of their way that they are straying, in the UK at least, into illegality to do so. But why?

The explanations they give don’t have anything to do with the patriarchal society, with taste discrimination or anything like that. They believe that hiring women with or about to have children will cost them money. They are thus acting rationally in trying to avoid that loss: preferring, instead, to hire people with lower costs.

So what is causing these higher costs to employers? Well, it seems pretty obvious that it is the requirements to pay for maternity leave, to keep the job open if the woman wants to return, the need for more flexible working hours so she can take care of her caring responsibilities and so on. That, at least, is what the companies themselves say they think. Now, you might think that it is right that a company should have to bear these costs, you might not. But it seems impossible to escape the point that these are costs and as such the companies are trying to avoid them as they rationally will.

Now as far as creating victims, no, I’m no suggesting that companies themselves are victims here. But also that those subjected to maternal profiling are not victims either. The victims here are all women of childbearing age whether they want to have children or not, when maternal profiling is not allowed.

Think again about what we have here. We have some costs which (at our level of technology, at least) cannot for biological reasons simply be wished away. If employers are able to exclude those who will burden them with these costs, breeders current and future, then all those, men and women, who do not carry said risk will be treated equally.

But if it is illegal for companies to try and discriminate so, then all women of child bearing age will be (to a lesser degree) discriminated against. Thus, in the UK findings, companies are less likely to hire women (whether they intend to have children or not) at all, and those they do hire will be offered worse terms than men.

And thus the victimhood: at least part of the gender pay gap is because of the costs that some women impose upon employers via such things as maternity pay and the rights to flexible working etc. If employers are not able to pick and choose amongst those who may or may not impose said costs, then they’ll even them out across all women.

I’ve said before that there isn’t in fact a gender pay gap: there’s a childcare pay gap. This is just another example of how that comes about. One perhaps provocative prediction: if we abolished all maternity laws, we’d see a drop in the pay gap.

That’s the claim, that Albert Einstein was autistic, that he had a (clearly,) high functioning form of the condition.

Many leading figures in the fields of science, politics and the arts have achieved success because they had autism, a leading psychiatrist has claimed.

Michael Fitzgerald, Professor of Psychiatry at Trinity College, Dublin, argued the characteristics linked to autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) were the same as those associated with creative genius.

This certainly could be true, for the extreme systemizing which is the mark of autism would certainly help in scientific endeavours: indeed, there are not quite jokes that the Math Faculty at Cambridge University was built for the autistic, given that so many were likely to go there.

Prof Fitzgerald cited Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, George Orwell, H G Wells and Ludwig Wittgenstein as examples of famous and brilliant individuals who showed signs of ASDs including Asperger syndrome.

Beethoven, Mozart, Hans Christian Andersen and Immanuel Kant have also received post mortem diagnoses of Asperger’s.

Speaking at a Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Academic Psychiatry conference in London, Prof Fitzgerald said argued the link between ASD’s, creativity and genius were caused by common genetic causes.

“Psychiatric disorders can also have positive dimensions. I’m arguing the genes for autism/Asperger’s, and creativity are essentially the same.

“We don’t know which genes they are yet or how many there are, but we are talking about multiple genes of small effect. Every case is unique because people have varying numbers of the genes involved.

“These produce people who are highly focused, don’t fit into the school system, and who often have poor social relationships and eye contact. They can be quite paranoid and oppositional, and usually highly moral and ethical.

“They can persist with a topic for 20-30 years without being distracted by what other people think. And they can produce in one lifetime the work of three or four other people.”

The description of the people can certainly be true but I would worry a little about the genes part. The statement that the genes for autism (which we think is caused by the influence of testosterone upon the fetal brain) are the same as those for creativity looks like a remarkably strong one and as we all know, strong claims require strong evidence.

The claim that some who have been creative were autistic, even if you could prove it, is not that strong evidence. You would also need to show that there were no (or few) creative people who were not autistic and that’s something the Professor has not even addressed. Given that he’s failed that part of the argument, not just failed to prove it, he’s failed to address it, I think we’ll take all of this with a pinch of salt.

That’s not to say that Einstein wasn’t autistic though: just that even if he was we’ve not shown the link between the genes for autism and those for creativity.

I thought this was really amusing. A long piece on the way in which men and women seem to listen to music in different ways.

Earlier this week, the co-ordinator of the BBC’s popular music coverage across TV and radio, Lesley Douglas, ventured an opinion on this very subject. Appearing on Radio 4’s Feedback programme to defend recent changes to BBC 6 Music, she explained that many of the changes, such as the addition of more “personality” DJs, were instigated to entice female listeners. There was, she argued, “no reason why women shouldn’t love music as much as men” and further explained: “What was true is that for its first five years the audience [for 6 Music] was very, very male biased. For a station that has music at its heart, it is only right to make it more open to female listeners. It’s partly how you talk about music. For women, there tends to be a more emotional reaction to music. Men tend to be more interested in the intellectual side: the tracks, where albums have been made, that sort of thing.”

That’s really rather a sexist way of looking at things: all men do this, all women do that? Fortunately, the author of the piece takes matters a step futher:

Broadly speaking, I suspect that women and men do respond to music a little differently. Naturally there are millions of exceptions: I know plenty of women who are obsessive collectors of vinyl, and I once dated a man who owned only three albums, two of which were by Jewel. But, by and large, men more often adhere to the High Fidelity model of music appreciation: completist and competitive, as if you score more league table points for knowing the greatest amount of trivia about a band and owning all of its releases - even the Japan-only 7in singles and the flexidiscs. Women, on the other hand, are perfectly at ease with the idea of falling madly in love with one song, and never feeling the need to vacuum up the artist’s entire back catalogue.

It’s that millions of exceptions part that needs explaining really. Yes, men do tend to one side, women tend to the other, but there are enough who don’t conform to the haplotype stereotype to make us very unsure about whether it is actually true. But think of those two descriptions of reactions to music. “Completist” is very similar to the idea we call here systemizing. That womens’ reaction is not far away from empathizing. And this gives us the conceptual tool to understand th different reactions and the variations from it. Just as with the results of our EQSQ personality tests, based as they are on Simon Baron Cohen’s ideas.

There’s a continuum of brain types, from that completist of systemizing type to the empathizing. Men tend to be at the first end and women at the second, but there are some 17% of women at the more usual male end and vice versa.

If we are to cautiously agree that women are more at ease with discussing emotions, and therefore more comfortable with the idea of embracing their emotional response to music, then it is logical to assume that the songs which aim for the emotional jugular might appeal more to women than to men. How else to explain James Blunt? This is not to say that men do not have an emotional response to music, rather that the emotion is expressed differently. In Nick Coleman’s excellent article about how his partial hearing loss has affected his relationship with music, published in G2 yesterday, he wrote that he had always heard music three-dimensionally, architecturally: “I think music was the structure in which I learned to contain and then examine emotion.” I would further suggest that the framework of music appreciation, the lists and the cataloguing, the trivia and the multiple copies of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, gives men another kind of structure through which to examine their emotions.

It does all rather fall into place when you put it into the context of the EQSQ theories, doesn’t it? Even to the point of a man thinking about music three-dimensionally, a known characteristic of the male type (or systemizing) brain being better spatial awareness and manipulation.

A nice little outlining here of some of the possible reasons for the gender pay gap. I won’t excerpt from it, just suggest you read it in full. There’s also some extensive quoting from Tim Harfod’s new book, The Logic of Life, something which is worth reading in full.

The general argument is that there are logical reasons why the pay gap exists. But do remember, just because people are acting rationally doesn’t mean that we have to like the outcome, and if we don’t we can always change the incentives to make that rational behaviour give us the result we want.

Via Arnold, this paper.

Most economists are unaware of the evidence that certain personality traits are more malleable than cognitive ability over the life cycle and are more sensitive to investment by parents and to other sources of environmental influences at later ages than are cognitive traits. Social policy designed to remediate deficits in achievement can be effective by operating outside of purely cognitive channels.

Now that’s coming from a Nobel Laureate so it might be worth our paying some attention to the point. To explain it a little first.

Cognitive traits are things like IQ: in short, how well you think (that’s a horrible simplification of IQ but good enough for us here and now). Personality traits are much more like the sorts of things measured by our EQSQ personality tests. How systemising are you, how empathic, how well do you relate to the feelings of others and so on.

So what is being said (apart from the point that economists don’t pay enough attention to this) is that it’s extremely difficult to increase someone’s actual intelligence. Easy enough to increase their knowledge, but that’s a very different thing. But things like how well you understand systems or people are not simply set in stone like raw intelligence. There’s a combination there of both innate talent and also learnt behaviour. So, as it can be learnt, it can (although with effort) be taught.

This has two further meanings. The first is that you don’t have to think of the results of our tests as being set in stone. You can, if you should be so minded, see where you think you are weak and thus work on that side of your personality so as to strengthen it.

The second is that it makes the work that Simon Baron Cohen is doing with autistic children more hopeful. Autism is, in one manner, described as an almost complete lack of empathy, not a disregard for but an incomprehension of the feelings of others. If personality traits can be taught, so can empathy and, if this description of autism is correct then so can that condition. “Cured” would almost certainly be too strong a word but ameliorated is good news enough, isn’t it?

As we go through the numbers about the gender pay gap, something I’ve promised to do here, we need to make a distinction between two different types of discrimination.

The first is what is usually referred to as “taste discrimination”. This certainly was very common but we really rather hope that it’s extinct now. What we mean by “taste discrimination” is direct discrimination: a company doesn’t hire blacks because they don’t like blacks. Or women get paid less simply because the boss insists that women should be paid less (this lasted a lot longer under the cover of “men get paid more because they have families to support”). Not only is this form of discrimination now illegal (almost all of the time, at least) it’s also to an economist irrational -if you refuse to hire a good black or female worker just because they are black or female then your competitor down the road gets those good employees cheaper and drives you out of business (the corollary of this is that what actually improves the wages and status of workers is many employers competing for their labor).

The second type of discrimination is “statistical discrimination”. It’s discussed in Tim Harford’s new book and Bryan Caplan has a good discussion of it here. While the original discussion was about race it does extend to our questions about the gender pay gap.

For example, many (most?) women want to have children. This puts those who do not, or who value their career above being at home with their children, at a disadvantage. For employers will rationally discriminate against women (that is, statistically) because any random woman applying for a job is likely to want to take time out to have and raise her children. Thus the employer will offer women as a class worse working conditions: perhaps lower pay (although that’s very difficult nowadays), or less training, or fewer promotions. Because that employer knows that she’s likely to lose that employee for some years of her working life.

That, in turn, means that women will on average have lower wages than men and thus make it more likely, if a family has a choice, that it is indeed the woman who raises the children rather than the man being a house husband… because he’s likely to be getting higher wages than she is. The two thus reinforce each other.

But our woman who doesn’t want to drop out of the rat race also gets clobbered by the same problems: she’s likely to be overlooked for promotions, paid less, trained less well. Quite how we get out of this isn’t really certain at this point. Caplan has a very inventive idea though:

Example: Some young women are 100% focused on their careers, and don’t want kids. Most young women, however, do want kids, and intend to strike a balance between work and family. That balance often involves receiving expensive job training from a firm, then quiting before the firm can recoup its expenses.

Under current law, an employer isn’t even allowed to ask about a female applicant’s child-bearing plans. If you wanted to blow up the glass ceiling, though, you should not only allow employers to ask; you should allow them to offer deals like “We’ll hire you, but your health insurance doesn’t cover pregnancy.” The career woman would be happy to sign, reassuring the employer.

How will that help women? It won’t! On average, it’s a wash: It will help career-minded women, and hurt the rest. And if you want to judge female workers on the basis of individual productivity, that is exactly what should happen.

We could go further: we would be able to remove some of the motivation for the gender pay gap by removing some of the general rights that surround pregnancy and child rearing. For example, there is a connection between long maternity leaves and women’s careers: we can see that in countries with long such times out of the workforce, women have greater difficulty in breaking the glass ceiling.

Quite whether we want to do that is another matter, but that’s the sort of question we’re going to try and work through over the next month or two.

Just a quick note for the blogger over at The Education Maze.

Yes indeed, Simon Baron Cohen has produced an Autism Quotient test. He’s also produced something called the EQSQ personality test, a version of which we host here.

The connection between the two is this. Baron Cohen’s theory rests upon the idea that there is a spectrum of brain types. From those who are very much empathizers to those who are extremely systematic. To accord with stereotypical language we call these “female” and “male” brain types. Be sure to note that being male does not mean possession of the male brain type, nor female, female. There’s about 17% of the population who cross over in either direction. Sex (or more accurately, haplotype) gives a probability of brain type, but not a certainty.

The connection between this and the AQ test is that Baron Cohen then goes on to describe autism as an extreme type of that male brain: one that is excessively systemizing.

If you do go on to take the EQSQ tests, remember that the actual numbers aren’t the important thing: it’s the difference you get, the difference between the two numbers.