I love this little newspaper story. It’s about women drivers: you know the stereotypes, women can’t drive and men won’t ask for directions?

Turns out that at least one of those points is correct: women really are bad drivers. But, umm, there’s a catch.

Men be warned: moaning to your wife while she is behind the wheel that women are terrible drivers will only make matters worse.

Research has found that women who are chided while driving are more than twice as likely to make mistakes as those who have no “constructive criticism” from their male passengers.

Even subtle admonishments, such as a man tutting while a woman carries out a manoeuvre, can lead to greater difficulties as the women get flustered or annoyed by the criticism.

Meanwhile, simply telling a woman that men make better drivers was enough to disturb their concentration and conform to the stereotype.

So it’s not in fact that women are worse drivers than men: it’s that men make women worse drivers by critiquing them.

No, not massively important, just thought it amusing for a Saturday afternoon: the day you are indeed likely to see man and woman in the same car, doing the weekly shopping chores.

Dr. Andrew Wakefield is up before the General Medical Council about his “research” into the link between the MMR vaccine and autism. That there is no link and that he falsified (at very best) his research is why he’s there and could possibly lose his licence to practise medicine.

Here’s a newspaper report of what is going on. Here’s an extremely angry doctor shouting at the way in which those reports are being composed. Here’s an even angrier doctor (NSFW, he uses bad words indeed).

And here’s the cause of the anger. Down towards the bottom of the post.

Wakefield published a paper that said there was a connection between the measles part of the MMR vaccine and autism. As a result, the vaccination rate dropped and several children are now dead and many more have been hospitalised.

Yet, and here’s the crucial point. Wakefield knew that his research was wrong. He knew that there was in fact (and it was a crucial part of his theory) no evidence of measles in these children at all.

He is almost certain to lose his licence.

Shame, couldn’t happen to a nicer chap.

Well, yes, I think we already knew that, didn’t we? Women are indeed more discriminating in their choices of bed partner than men are…..sorry, that’s not the point here?

Ahem, sorry. Sir Alan Sugar is a British businessman and there’s two things you might like to know about him. He hosts The Apprentice, the UK version of the TV show that Donald Trump runs in the US. The other is that back in the day, at the dawn of the PC computer age, he was one of the very few people ever to have out negotiated Bill Gates.

However, these two sterling qualities don’t mean that he’s always correct: but you should make up your own mind about this statement of his:

Women bosses are more likely than men to discriminate against female employees with children, Sir Alan Sugar has told The Times.

Sir Alan, executive chairman of Amstrad and Viglen, discussing the issue of working women and the provision of childcare, said: “Be under no illusion. There are women employers who are more ruthless than men. They are more conscious of not employing other women because they feel they’re not going to get the value of work out of them.”

It’s an interesting point but one that without actually doing the empirical research we cannot know the truth of. However, this thouches on something we have mentioned before.

He thought it right that women were asked about their plans to have children and how they expected to look after their children while at work. “I think it’s right for women to volunteer the information,” Sir Alan said. “Companies have no divine duty to help with childcare. Companies employ people. It’s the Government’s responsibility to provide childcare. You pay a person a salary and they cut their cloth accordingly.”

That is, maternal profiling.

Sir Alan, who fronts The Apprentice, which starts a new series on BBC One tonight, has been criticised for arguing that equality laws make it more difficult for women to find jobs.

Indeed, it’s an obvious and logical outcome of those equality laws, that they make women who do have children more expensive to employ and thus they are either paid less or find it more difficult to get a job.

There’s nothing very surprising about this, it’s a natural part of the way the world works: the only thing we can possibly be surprised about is the number of people who seem not to understand it.

That New York Times piece on parents who don’t vaccinate their children has sparked off something of a debate in the high level blogosphere.

Here’s Michelle Malkin defending her decision not to vaccinate herown children (with some vaccines that is).

Instapundit responds.

And a little older, but explaining why the autism/vaccine connection refuses to go away. Overlawyered and Respectful Insolence.

Of all of the various things being said this is the one that I wholeheartedly agree with (it’s an email to Malkin):

1) Vaccines that tend to benefit the patient with unproven or small benefit to the community, such as the cervical cancer vaccine and chickenpox.

2) Vaccines where the patient benefits but there is a great benefit for society, such as polio and measles vaccines.

If the illness is generally not serious, such as chickenpox, or unlikely to occur in a specific population, such as hepatitis B, then if you are confident that your child is low risk, I see no problem in withholding the vaccine. The cervical cancer vaccine has other moral and ethical considerations and since it is not proven to help society as a whole, I have no problem with withholding it from your child.

However, measles and polio (and smallpox in the past) are such horrible diseases, and the vaccines have made major impacts on the health of our country, that these vaccines should not be withheld except in special circumstances. Even a small unvaccinated subpopulation in a community could lead to outbreaks, as occurred in Iowa with mumps, when religious sects had not been vaccinated. For measles, rubella, polio, and a few others, I would agree with the Instapundit that withholding the vaccine from children (except in special circumstances) would be wrong.

Best Regards,

Harold Oster
Medina, MN

I agree, when we’re talking about the health of the individual child then the parents wishes should indeed be paramount. When we’re talking about the public health consequences of a possible epidemic, and the value of vaccination in preventing such, then those public health benefits trump the rights of the parents.

Yes, you do indeed have the right to decide what is right for your child. But no, you do not have the right to put others at risk.

There’s something called the Precautionary Principle that is much used in environmental circles. It means that we should not use a new technology, employ a new method of doing something, until we know that it is safe. Quite apart from the silliness of insisting upon complete safety, for everything has costs and benefits, it’s the nett we’re interested in, there are examples from the real world of the very heavy costs that can be incurred by following this principle.

For example, we’ve had for the last decade or so two groups, one on either side of the Atlantic, screaming about the possibility that vaccines can cause autism. On the US side it was the thought that the mercury used as a preservative that was doing it. On the UK, the idea that the MMR vaccine was doing it (a very good summary of the story is here). Now, if we were to use the precautionary principle in such a matter, we would have the situation where we are not entirely sure about the safety of vaccines. Thus we should stop using them.

As, indeed, some people did. And what happened then? Well, let Depleted Cranium tell part of the story:

I bet you know what I’m going to say next: Despite the efforts to eradicate the illness in developing nations, the most rich and comfortable of first world countries are seeing a resurgence of the disease which has not been seen since the 1960’s. This is due to parents who voluntarily avoid vaccinating their children, thus subjecting them to this and other diseases. It’s happening in the United States and the movement is growing fast, according to the New York Times. But the US is far behind other nations in terms of idiotic refusal for vaccines and subjection of children to preventable illness. Apparently Brittan is ahead of the US and the number one nation for rejection of vaccines: You guessed it, Germany. In Germany by age three more than 13% of children have not received a single vaccine by age three, resulting in thousands more cases of preventable measles.

Of course, there have been outbreaks due to this but most sickening is the return of the practice of the “measles party.” The measles party is a throwback to the times before vaccines when inoculation was accomplished by intentional exposure to the disease. As the name implies when a kid comes down with measles, all the criminally negligent yuppy moms with too much time on their hands get together to intentionally expose their kids to the virus.

Yup, measles is back. The UK recently had the first death of a child from it since 1992. You see,while there might be costs to the use of a vaccine (and there are, even though autism isn’t one of them), there are also costs to the non use of vaccines: like dead children.

And if you’d like to read someone who is seriously angry on the subject, try Megan:

Another infuriating article about the twee Bobo sociopaths who refuse to vaccinate their children. Knowing parasites upon the herd immunity of everyone else, they are increasingly creating clusters of unvaccinated kids who form disease reservoirs where previously eradicated illnesses like measles are making a comeback. Their precious darlings then go on to infect younger children who haven’t had their vaccinations, the immunocompromised, and adults whose immunity has waned.

No, vaccines don’t cause autism, but not having vaccines kills children. I hope those still promoting the anti-vaccine propaganda are proud of themselves.

As we all know around here, the most likely (or perhaps best supported so far) theory about autism is that it is an expression of the extreme male brain.

The basic thought is that there are two types of brain, the systemising (or male) and the empathic (or female). These two types really make up a continuum, with those descriptions being points upon it. (You can find out where you are on it by taking our EQSQ personality tests.) People are distributed along this continuum, with men more likely to be systemising, women to be empathic (please note, that doesn’t mean that women cannot be systemising, nor vice versa, it’s a matter of probabilities, not destiny).

OK, great: now, if we’ve got autism as an expression of the extreme male or systemising brain, do we have something at the other end of our spectrum? Is there something which is the expression of the extreme female, or empathic brain?

One idea that has just popped up:

Even after Baron-Cohen figured out the essence of autism as an extreme male brain, the nature of the other extreme, an extreme female brain, remained a puzzle, until Bernard Crespi and Christopher Badcock figured out what an extreme female brain might entail.

The female brain tends toward empathizing and mentalizing thinking, treating machines and objects as if they were other people. They attribute minds, thoughts, and feelings to inanimate objects. That, according to Crespi and Badcock, is the essence of paranoid schizophrenia. Paranoid schizophrenics hear voices where there are no people, and they attribute minds and thinking where none exist, such as when they believe other people are talking about or conspiring against them when they aren’t. Paranoid schizophrenics are hypermentalistic, and overinfer minds and emotions in other people, just as autistics are hypomentalistic, and underinfer minds and emotions in other people.

In their forthcoming article in the premier journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Crespi and Badcock present a very convincing case for paranoid schizophrenia as an extreme female brain. Now the whole picture appears to be complete. When your brain is “too male,” too systemizing, too mechanistic, you become autistic. When your brain is “too female,” too empathizing, too mentalistic, you become paranoid schizophrenic. If the extreme male brain of an autistic is “mindblind,” then you might suggest that the extreme female brain of a paranoid schizophrenia is “logicblind.”

Fascinating, and I have to say that the author is an academic at the university I got my degree from. Clearly, the place has got a great deal more interesting since I was there. I’ve been rather waiting for the other shoe to drop on this, to see if anyone does connect a disease to the extreme female brain.

I have to admit though I’ve got a feeling that this isn’t going to be readily accepted in feminist circles. For if we say that the extreme female brain is paranoid schizophrenic, then there is bound to be someone who starts screaming that this is demeaning to women: are you daring to state that women are all half-mad?

If you’d like to see what arguing against the MMR vaccine (or in the US, against the mercury preservatives) as a cause of autism can be like, have a look at this comments thread under a post by my friend,. the NHS Blog Doctor.

Just the same old tired points being served up again and again.

No, the MMR vaccine does not cause autism. Sorry, but it doesn’t.

This is an exceedingly interesting essay, a book review of a chapter of “Discrimination Against Caregivers?” by Erin Kelly. It breaks out the various pieces and parts about differing gender roles that lead to the gender pay gap and comes tohte same answer that I think most of us are now. That said pay gap is not about direct (or taste) discrimination, but about the way in which men and women choose to do different things with their lives.

But it’s also interesting in the way that the different influences are given a different weight than they might be by a less, say, feminist author. For example:

II. Theories Explaining the Economic Consequences of Caregiving

1. Human Capital Theory

This puts the responsibility of the consequences on the women: differential investment in occupational attainment results in differential economic returns. Women are more likely to leave the workforce; work fewer hours, invest less in education and training; expend less effort when working; and choose occupations or jobs that have lower penalties for working less and greater possibilities for part-time work, jobs that tend to be lower-paid. I am not persuaded by these theories, and Kelly cites a number of studies that refute the proposed explanations for economic differentiation.

Until that last sentence I would agree absolutely. A simple look at the world around us would show that these things do indeed happen. As this piece in The New Statesman says (a left leaning UK magazine):

It is important to be clear what the problem is. Is it bad news that women want to spend time with their children? Surely not, given the evidence for the importance of parental engagement in the early years of a child’s life. Are these women “forced” into part-time work, and now just grinning and bearing it? No - the overwhelming majority say they positively chose part-time work, and their job satisfaction is higher than that of mothers working full-time. Most men and women, according to the British Social Attitudes Survey, think that a conventional division of labour is the right one, with mothers taking on the bulk of responsibility for childcare.

Quite how one can be “unpersuaded”by such theories when they are clearly and obviously true as an explanation of at least part of the pay gap is beyond me.

Where I really disagree though is in th ideas for solving this “problem”. For the author seems to have missed something very important here.

Still, changing anti-discrimination law to address the economic marginalization of caregivers would achieve the following:

1. Recognize the marginalization of caregivers as inefficient and a legal liability

2. Re-evaluate the meaning of work and how work is rewarded

3. Ensure that caregivers are not economically penalized for taking advantage of family-friendly policies

4. Create enforcement mechanisms for ensuring meaningful compliance with the new redefined anti-discrimination law in the form of sanctions.

We’ve seen what happens when such anti-discrimination laws are put into place. For example, many European businesses will simply not hire young women presumed to be fertile, or likely to have a child. The costs of employing someone who does then take the extensive maternity leave on offer simply makes them too expensive. If we add to the possible expense of hiring women, by stating that caregivers should be given extra (and expensive) rights, then we’re simply paving the way for businesses to employ fewer of them, or for offering lower wages to those that they do hire.

Quite how this is going to narrow the gender (or caregivers’) pay gap I can’t really see.

It looks like we have a final verdict in the hypothesis that the MMR vaccine is what causes autism. No, it doesn’t.

As background, over in the UK there have been anti-vaccination campaigners just as there are in the US. However, instead of concentrating upon the use of mercury as a preservative in vaccines, they thought it was the measles part of the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine that was going the damage.This contention has now been shown to be false:

A new study has found no evidence to support the idea that the MMR vaccine damages the intestine and in turn causes autism.

Researchers examined the so-called “leaky gut” theory, which suggests that vaccines such as MMR can damage the wall of the intestine.

This causes digestive problems which lead to the production of peptides, which can damage the brain and possibly cause autism, according to the theory.

The study, from researchers at Great Ormond Street Hospital, Guy’s and St Thomas’s Hospital in London, and the University of Edinburgh, found that children with autism do not produce higher levels of peptides, detectable in their urine.

So, once again, we need to put that idea to bed. The MMR vaccine does not cause autism: which leaves us with, as the best explanation out there, Simon Baron Cohen’s postulations about the rise in assortative mating, the inheritance of systemising and empathising brain types and autism as a form of extreme systemising brain.

An interesting aside: it was the more educated parents who stopped using the MMR vaccine on their children during the scare. This isn’t hugely surprising. It would only be the more educated parents who took note of the news in the newspapers about it anyway.

I’m not trying to be fouly elitist or anything, but it’s the more educated who pay attention to just about anything at all, isn’t it, the world around?

But what is also interesting is that it was those self-same more educated parents who used the vaccine more when the scare was pronounced to be just that, a scare.

Entirely rational behaviour I would say: there’s a risk out there, don’t take it until you know it’s safe.

I thought this was an excellent little article.

We’ve seen plenty of wives in this position in recent years. But it’s hard to imagine that political husbands are haunted by the nightmare that it might happen to them.

Perhaps that’s because they know their wives have lower expectations of spousal adoration than their male peers, or because unfaithful women tend to have affairs with equal or higher-status men, who have an equal or higher stake in discretion.

If a female political leader did get caught in a sex scandal, having her husband stand silently by the podium while she sought forgiveness would probably make matters worse. Many Americans would conclude that she was a castrating witch married to a wimp.

We do indeed seem to have something of a double standard here. I’ll also admit that I really don’t know why Eliot Spitzer’s wife didn’t simply slam the door of the family home on him and tell him to get lost. But, well, not my life to run, is it?

It’s also true that infidelity itself is thought of rather differently these days. It’s not all that long ago (yesterday in some countries, and tomorrow as well) that infidelity by men was almost normal. infidelity by married women being regarded as something much more serious (although sex in an age without effective contraception explains at least some of this).

This though is the meat of the piece for me:

This double standard can be seen in business as well as politics. Outright discrimination on the basis of gender has been all but eliminated in the workplace. But women still face discrimination on the basis of family status. Today, unmarried and childless women earn just about as much as men, and in several American cities women in their 20s earn more, on average, than their male peers.

Yet, once spouses and children enter the picture, the gap between men and women again widens. Married men have an earnings advantage over unmarried men. Married women, however, have no such advantage over their single counterparts, and women with children face substantial penalties.

In 2005, Cornell researchers Shelley Correll and Stephen Bernard created 600 fictitious resumes for midlevel marketing positions. Half mentioned relocating with their families and indicated participation in a school board; the other half simply mentioned relocating, with no reference to family. Women who did not mention family ties were almost twice as likely to be deemed hirable.

And when applicants with discernible family ties were selected, men with children were offered a salary of, on average, $6,000 more than childless men, while women with children were offered $11,000 less than the childless women.

I’ve long been proposing the contentionthat we don’t in fact have a gender pay gap. We have a child care pay gap, one which for a number of reasons (you can argue for societal expectations or for biological determinisim, doesn’t affect my main point) is carried almost exclusively by women.

Now, whether we want to do something about it or not is one matter: but only if we correctly identify the problem, accurately divine the causes, will we in fact be able to do so.

If we should so wish, that is.