Title IX is the system by which sportsmoney at colleges across the country has to be allocated equally between the genders. Fair enough you might say, although it does indeed lead to problems. For example, you might not be all that surprised to find that it is usual for there to be more men interested in playing sports than there are women. But if the money has to be equally allocated then either there will be less per man playing, or the number of men must be artificially restricted.

That latter is what usually happens.

However, that’s not really a vitally important thing, the funding of college sport. However, the funding of sciences at colleges is of vital importance. And there are those who would extend Title IX to that arena: the funding of male and female students in the hard sciences should be equal.

Christina Hoff Summers has an excellent article here on what such and extension of Title IX is really all about and the possible effects.

I’ll not repeat her whole complex argument, just extract one part of it. The original claim is that the low number of women in the hard sciences, compared to men, is a result of bias, almost of oppression, of women. That claim rather failes for this very simple reason:

So, why are there so few women in the high echelons of academic math and in the physical sciences? In a recent survey of faculty attitudes on social issues, sociologists Neil Gross of Harvard and Solon Simmons of George Mason University asked 1,417 professors what accounts for the relative scarcity of female professors in math, science, and engineering. Just one percent of respondents attributed the scarcity to women’s lack of ability, 24% to sexist discrimination, and 74% to differences in what characteristically interests men and women. Many experts who study male-female differences provide strong support for that 74% majority. Readers can go to books like David Geary’s Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences (1998); Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modem Denial of Human Nature (2002), and Simon Baron-Cohen’s The Essential Difference: The Truth about the Male and Female Brain (2003) for arguments suggesting that biology plays a distinctive- but not exclusive-role in career choices.

Baron-Cohen is one of the world’s leading experts on autism, a disorder that affects far more males than females. Autistic persons tend to be socially disconnected and unaware of the emotional states of others, but they often exhibit obsessive fixation on objects and machines. Baron-Cohen suggests that autism may be the far end of the male norm-the “extreme male brain,” all systematizing and no empathizing. He believes that men are, “on average,” wired to be better systematizers and women to be better empathizers. It is a daring claim-but he has data to back it up, presenting a wide range of correlations between the level of fetal testosterone and behaviors in girls and boys from infancy into grade school. Despite two major waves of feminism, women still predominate-sometimes overwhelmingly-in empathy-centered fields such as early-childhood education, social work, veterinary medicine, and psychology, while men are overrepresented in the “systematizing” vocations such as car repair, oil drilling, and electrical engineering.

The research emphasizing the importance of biological differences in determining women’s and men’s career choices is not decisive, but it is serious and credible.

We around here are pretty much sold on Baron Cohen’s ideas, given that he wrote the basis of our EQSQ personality tests. But it isn’t just that of course. The idea that men and women are equally interested in hte same things simply cannot hold water for anyone who has actually bothered to go and talk to a few representative examples of their species. How ivory tower, how far out of touch with human society, do you actually have to be to think that everyone’s the same?

Not all that important, just though it was a nice phrase. The groups of the elderly, out for their evening stroll (passagiata) are known in Italy as the “cane brigades“.

The whole article is talking about the very low birthrates in parts of Europe. That part is true, unfortunately they get the cause very wrong.

The causes behind declining fertility rates are manifold, but the most obvious cause was the introduction of mass contraception in the mid-20th century.

It might be an obvious cause but it’s not actually an important one. Most academic studies say that the availability of contraception has, at most, a 10% share in the changes in fertility. Something which should be obvious with the use of a little bit of logic. For there are plenty of non-mechanical ways (perhaps not 100% effective but still pretty good) of preventing conception for a start. But more than that, before people use contraception there has to be the desire to use it.

That is, desired fertility (which those academic studies say is responsible for 90% of the changes in actual fertility) must change before contraception can have an effect. Now there are indeed arguments about what changes desired fertility but from my economist type viewpoint it is wealth. Wealth as properly measured, not simply cash in ones hand of course. Longer lifespans, more education, lower rates of child mortality, urbanisation, they all have an effect.

But it’s still very much true that the availability or not of contraception is very much a bit player in this. It the change in the desired number of children which makes the difference.

This might not be the most astonising research finding ever, you know?

Binge drinking (5+ alcoholic beverages at one time) is associated with risky sexual behaviors.

Really? Someone had to do a study to work this out?

Isn’t that why they invented happy hour?

“The link between binge drinking and risky sexual behavior is complex,” said Heidi E. Hutton, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as well as corresponding author for the study. “We wanted to examine one component of that relationship, whether binge drinking increased the risk of engaging in sexual behaviors and having STDs. We found gender differences in binge drinking among patients at an STD clinic, and also that binge drinking increased STD risk for women.”

Well, peoplewith a PhD are supposed to be clever but are we seriously suggesting that this result is “complex”?

People who drink too much have more sex with people they don’tknow, taking less care over contraception and the specific sexual activities than people who don’t drink too much?

This is “complex”?

“Binge drinking results in a decreased ability to make clear decisions,” noted Geetanjali Chander, assistant professor of medicine in the division of general internal medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, “and can enable individuals to engage in behaviors that they would not if sober.”

I’m beginning to think that this paper might be a spoof actually. Drunk people do things that sober ones would not?

But apparently not. Our tax dollars were spent to bring us this entirely unsurprising news.

It’s not exactly a world changing observation, to be sure, but it is an interesting one.

50 years ago, very few men could type. Almost all typing was done by women.

Now just about everybody types.

Inch by inch, we move toward gender equality in a host of ways. When we compare today’s workplace, for example, with the one portrayed on the TV drama “Mad Men,” depicting a New York advertising agency in the early 1960s, the contrast is striking. Men dominate the agency. They are the decision-makers and the bright creative types (only one woman has broken in so far). All of the other women at the agency (called “girls,” regardless of their age)? They type.

….

Today, boys all learn to type at an early age. In the era of computer technology, it’s unthinkable for them to dictate their words, or write them out in longhand, and expect an underling to input them into the computer. Men in every profession now want and need to use the technology that’s still mainly accessible through typing, and they spend hours sitting in front of keyboards in the workplace and in their homes. Everywhere there’s a computer hookup, there are men busily typing away.

Of course it’s a banality to point out that technology does indeed change the gender balance. When washing was still done with a mangle, when food preparation took hours each day then someone or other was going to be needed to run the house full time. Further, when most paid work required gross physical labour, it was going to be the man who went out and did that and the woman who worked the house.

We can look back on the past century or so and see that as that farm and blue collar labor became less and less important in the economy, as the household technologiesadvanced, this is what freed up the world of paid work for women.

Perhaps less of a banality is to wonder how much of the sea change in working and domestic life has in fact been caused by changes in attitudes and how much was always there, but is only now being enabled by technology. Maybe we always wanted to be (roughly) equal as we are, but just couldn’t be as we hadn’t invented the things that would enable us to be so?

Well, no, not quite, people don’t actually marry their parents. Rather, women marry people who look like their fathers while men marry people that look like their mother.

That’s the way the story is reported at least.

The report concludes that heterosexual men and women are more likely to select a mate whose faces are similar to their “opposite-sex” parent. The researchers state that this mate-selecting process is deeply entrenched in biological processes that have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years.

OK, I can understand the thinking there. After all, if you’ve reached fertile age then we’ve got reasonably good evidence that people who look like your parents are going to be able to raise people to fertile age. However, however, I’m not really entirely sure here.

That state in the abstract to their paper, “Our results support the sexual imprinting hypothesis which states that children shape a mental template of their opposite-sex parents and search for a partner who resembles that perceptual schema. The fact that only the facial metrics of opposite-sex parents showed resemblance to the partner’s face tends to rule out the role of familiarity in shaping mating preferences.”

They conclude, “Human couples who are similar in physical and psychological characteristics are more likely to remain together than dissimilar partners, possibly leading to an increase in fertility.

As I say, not entirely convinced. If this really were true then we’d never have across races (OK, not that there are such things as “races”, but human genetic groups) marriage and of course the thing that we do note in human societies is that when there is a mix of such groups then a great deal of inter-group marriage does take place.

So we’ve got two things. This paper, which says that people preferentially marry what is familiar (in both senses of the word) and our experience of the wider world which is that people often pursue the exotic.

It could just be that the place where the study was carried out (Hungary) just isn’t very racially diverse (as it isn’t) and that thus people are marrying people who look like their mother/father simply because most people around there do so look.

Marriage and infidelity go together like glove and hand so they say. For without the marriage (or at least the committment to a relationship) one cannot in fact breach the fidelity. The numbers might surprise though:

Recent studies reveal that 45-55% of married women and 50-60% of married men engage in extramarital sex at some time or another during their relationship. Do these infidelity statistics seem a bit startling? What these findings suggest is that approximately one half of all married men and women do seek intimacy outside of their committed relationships. But what does this really mean and why are the number of men and women having extramarital affairs so high?

This may come as a complete surprise, but most extramarital affairs are not about sex. What then,is the main factor that causes infidelity? One should pay attention to the reason most people find intimacy with someone outside of their marriage is because of their emotional needs are not being met. Yes, it is true in most cases of infidelity and about wanting to feel emotionally connected to someone.

Well, OK, I’m not sure I believe that in fact. Neither the numbers nor the reason. The only reason I linked to it was that I spotted this, the name of the press agency.

Prudent Press Agency

There’s still that teenage boy in me that sniggers about someone calling themselves “prudent” and then talking about people screwing around.

How nice to know that I’m still fully in touch with my inner child, eh?

Yes, look, I know that India is a little more uptoght about these things than many other countries but that headline really goes a tad too far.

Sex rather rocks for everybody: it’s designed to be that way, to ensure that there’s another generation to have it in their turn.

Sheesh!

A fascinating piece of research I think you’ll agree, a study of playmate college majors.

Yes, really. someone’s done it. Gone through the lists of Playboy playmates for the past few decades and, where possible, noted what was their major when they went to college.

You’ll need to click through here for the full results of the playmate college majors survey (yes, it’s OK, safe for work). But there’s something incredibly appropriate about this:

What is amazing is how there is not one, NOT ONE COMPUTER PROGRAMMER OR PRE-MED OR PHYSICS OR OR ACCOUNTING OR ENGINEERING MAJOR (bar Cindy Crawford who spent 1 quarter in chemical engineering, but never graduated). The majority of playmates pursue degrees in utter fluff, the biggest pulls being “psychology,” “acting/theater,” “journalism,” “communications,” “education,” “junior college,” and that weak pathetic worthless degree that tries to score some credibility as passing itself off as a “business major;” marketing.

Someone might want to tie this together with our recent information on the prevalance of virginity at college compiled by major perhaps?

In English English (my own affliction) we actually call those “fluffy” course “fluffy bunny” courses: something which seems all too appropriate when talking about Playboy really.

But I must admit that the thing that made me laugh like a drain was this comment about economics:

Ironically, and VERY SADLY, the best source for finding playmate majors was Wikipedia, and I did not see one, NOT ONE naked chick!

Only in economics can you conduct a study of playboy playmates and not see anything.

A couple of days ago I looked at the prevalence of assortative mating and used the example of academic couples to give some numbers.

One professor (married to another) has seen the same information and come up with a solution to the problem, if it is indeed a problem. Chris Blattman:

Thoughts from readers on how the academy could change? Here’s one I doubt is in the report: dating services for PhDs, so that they meet people other than their classmates.

Clever people these professors, no?

Something of an interesting result was presented recently: that polygamy makes men live longer. This sounds like a cue for the old joke really: having multiple wives doesn’t in fact make you live longer, it just makes it seem that way. However, there’s another thing wrong with the analysis.

A new study from a British university seems to suggest that men who are polygamists live longer than those with just one wife - 12% longer, in fact. But before we rush off to the wife market (or “Yates’s Wine Lodge”, as it is called over here), we should consider the possibility that the scientists have got things the wrong way around.

In societies where polygamy is common, it is the most fit, healthy and affluent men who have more than one wife. Women are disinclined to get themselves hitched to men who are likely to croak within a few years or months - they do that only in the West, where the laws of inheritance are somewhat different.

So it is not the case that having lots of wives enables men to live longer - they would have lived longer anyway, even without the profusion of ghastly wives whining at them all day long, telling them to put up shelves in the mud hut and stopping them smoking in the bedroom.

It is more accurate to think of these multiple wives instead as a sort of progressive tax on happiness, designed to spread the load of human misery.

Apologies for the somewhat misogynist tenor of that particular report: you wouldn’t be all that surprised to learn that this specific journalist, a certain Rod Liddle, has recently been though a somewhat tempestuous divorce? No, you wouldn’t would you….

But in his basic point he is of course correct. Causality runs the other way. In a polygamous society of course it is only the alpha males who get the multiple wives and we all know that alpha males live longer than betas anyway.