Entries associated with the tag "Women":

It's not easy being a traditionalist conservative. First, you assert that your views about gays and women are timeless truths. Then, you change them.

According to the Pew Research Center's March 22 survey on trends in political values and core attitudes, 1987-2007, the average Republican is now more tolerant of gays and of women in what the pollsters call "non-traditional" roles than the average Democrat was in 1987. This trend is particularly amusing when it comes to religious edicts. "In 1987, 73% of white evangelical Protestants agreed that school boards should have the right to fire homosexual teachers. Today, just 42% do so. And in 1987, 60% of white evangelicals believed that AIDS might be a punishment for immoral sexual behavior; today just 38% believe this."

Of course, popular opinion isn't self-executing, especially when the true believers are better organized.

Full report (PDF). (Naturally, the MSM are more interested in short-term party identification, but there's plenty of wonky goodness to go around.)

Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed interviews Cornell profs Stephen J. Ceci (developmental psychology) and Wendy M. Williams (human development), coeditors of Why Aren't More Women in Science?: Top Researchers Debate the Evidence. The background, of course, is the controversy over Harvard president Larry Summers's suggestion that biology might play some part in women's underrepresentation in science.

Ceci and Williams: "For us, the worrisome aspect of the debate was not so much its substance as its tone. Defenders of Summer's remarks were vilified and dismissed. This does not serve the purpose of science -- it led to muzzling of the scholarly debate, with one side effectively silenced by the other. When we first sent out invitations to contribute essays to our book, we were saddened by the stories of some scholars who felt that they could not contribute because their views were scorned, and had resulted in personal attacks against them on their campuses.  If you read between the lines of several of the essays, you will detect this theme even among those who did contribute essays."

BTW, the editors' own position is nuanced. They write, "The story is complex and not apt to be reducible to single factors."

The unstoppable urban legend that women talk three times as much as men made for a good laugh line on Wait Wait . . . Don't Tell Me! on Saturday morning. The following day, the Boston Globe's Brainiac blog explained that it's a lie:

"None of the authors of these claims actually seems to have counted, and none cites anyone who seems to have counted either." 

Writing at History News Network, historian Margaret Lowe (Looking Good: College Women and Body Image, 1875-1930) reminds us that white female college students a century ago saw weight gain as healthy:

"Instead of anxiety, when they gained weight and wrote home about it, they expressed satisfaction and even delight.  To rebuff critics such as Dr. Edward Clarke, who argued that 'a girl could study and learn but she could not do all this and retain uninjured health . . .' they used detailed accounts of weight gain to signify their healthy adjustment to college life."

(There's more to her book, and a good review of it at H-Net.)

"My husband and I took turns attending the [scientific research conference] and playing with our daughter. When I was in mom mode, I became invisible to colleagues passing in the street of the small town in which the conference was held. When I was alone, everyone waved or stopped to chat. The difference was really striking, especially since my husband was visible whether he was with or without our daughter."

So writes the pseudonymous blogger at Scientist + Professor + Woman = Me. (And BTW, she makes a good case for pseudonymous blogging -- would you want to be that frank with your name attached? Especially when the world's full of well-educated professional guys who won't believe her?)

Fortunately, some men are also pointing out that the cultural and institutional climate of science can be hostile to women. Sean Carroll has a good post and a better discussion up at Cosmic Variance, focusing mainly on physics. Rob Knop contributes a useful taxonomy of problematic men (ranging from the minority of actual creeps down to the keep-your-head-down clueless). Meanwhile Knop's full blog post on the subject at Galactic Interactions has been taken down by order of his department chair (really! check it out!), whose writ hopefully reaches no farther.

In a more angry vein, a while back the definitely nonpseudonymous Zuska offered a darker take on what's supposed to be a feel-good story about a Fermilab physicist who faced all-but-insurmountable catch-22 problems with picking up her career after taking five years off to start a family.

None of these folks quotes Catharine MacKinnon, but they could: the field is organized so as to be perfectly fair, so long as you are either a man with a stay-at-home wife, or a woman who can impersonate one. 

Women who decide to stay home with the kids or wear high heels often get into the same kind of trouble as black people who want to live in all-black neighborhoods. Some folks see them as voluntarily oppressing themselves when they choose to do what their male or white oppressors would want them to do.

Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon explains it so even I can understand: "'Choice feminism' is a derogatory word that feminists use to describe it when a woman wants her patriarchally approved compliant behavior to be declared perfectly independent of social influence, even when it is obviously not. . . . The most common form of it is, 'Feminism is about having choices and therefore my decision to submit to my husband/get breast implants/totter around on high heels and giggle is beyond analysis.' We’ve all invoked choice feminism out of misplaced guilt about our personal unwillingness to analyze our own choices."

Of course, her partisanship is showing. It's one thing to ask whether those who make conventional choices have really thought it through. It's bogus to answer the question for them, as Marcotte does, and state that no woman ever seriously analyzed her choices and then chose the "conventional" way.

For women in this bind, the pressure is mostly social, not legal. For black people it can have more drastic consequences. In Chicago, the ongoing Gautreaux case forbids the Chicago Housing Authority from building any new dwelling in ghetto areas unless it builds a corresponding dwelling in a nonblack area. Since the agency barely has the money to build anything, this will make it very difficult to build even a small amount of replacement housing in, say, the former Robert Taylor Homes neighborhood.

Gautreaux was brought 40 years ago on behalf of CHA residents to bring about integration, and some of that has been accomplished. Meanwhile, today's public-housing residents often want to continue living in their public-housing neighborhoods, even if they are segregated--and act accordingly. At the Henry Horner Homes, 75 percent of residents chose to stay in renovated quarters rather than move away. (Details in chapters eight and nine of the new book Where Are Poor People to Live?  The only online summary I have found is very brief. This 2000 commentary by David Ranney and Pat Wright is also relevant.)

But Gautreaux's doughty lead attorney, Alexander Polikoff, has the same attitude toward these residents' choices as Marcotte has toward women who stay home with their kids: they don't really mean it; generations of oppression have distorted their own desires. In Polikoff's view, "The risks of homelessness for some displaced families is not a reason to rebuild our high-rise enclaves." And his view counts for a great deal--since the court case continues, he basically holds veto power over where replacement housing gets built (outside of Horner, Cabrini, and ABLA, where deals of various kinds have already been cut).

Polikoff and Marcotte come off as condescending, but they're not all wrong. Having been taught to fear and obey does affect your mind--and there's a real-world price to pay for being an uppity woman, or the lucky black person who gets to integrate Hebron.

"How do people become pro-lifers?" asks Fred Barnes in the New Standard. Through personal experience, he answers. The five "people" whose experiences he describes are Ronald Reagan, Henry Hyde, Ramesh Ponnuru, Wesley Smith, and himself.

If this is a joke, Barnes keeps a perfect deadpan.

Pro-lifers have to deal with the suspicion that their stance is a Trojan horse to keep women barefoot and pregnant. This suspicion is not quieted when a right-wing journalist uses the word "people" to mean "men," can't be bothered to tell the experiences of any pro-life women, and is unembarrassed by it all. (Several right-wing blogs have already linked to and quoted his article as gospel.)

Barnes undermines his cause in a deeper way, too. Intelligent conservatives are endlessly (and often rightfully) annoyed by the way liberals identify a Bad Thing and jump to the conclusion that the government should regulate or outlaw that Bad Thing. (Are Wal-Mart workers poorly paid? Raise their wages by law.) Whether or not the conclusion is true, it's often reached by evading questions like, will the law or regulation cost more than it's worth, or even accomplish its goal at all?

Barnes and his male examples mirror this do-gooder illogic. They learn that abortion is bad, or at least icky, and promptly conclude that we must pass laws against it. Bill Clinton's campaign slogan--"safe, legal, and rare"--looks more profound every day.

Poetic justice would require Barnes to write about castration using only female sources. But that wouldn't be as revealing as watching him build his giant horse.

(Hat tip to Feministing.) 

As someone who's never personally traveled more than a few miles outside U.S. borders, I'm endlessly fascinated with others' endless fascination with Europe.

There's Good Europe, where social programs still work and (the old parts of) cities are still designed with pedestrians in mind.

Then there's Bad Europe, where there's lots of unemployment and they can't figure out what to do with the new immigrants.

Depending on your point of view, there's the Good/Bad Europe that often declines to play along with our current imperial adventure. 

The other day I learned of a Bad Europe in which academics have almost as much trouble with the notion that women are people as the folks at Jim Bob University. This, from a female science prof recently returned from a year's sabbatical at an unnamed university in an unnamed major city in an unnamed European country:

"When asked what my position was back in the U.S., I would reply that I was a professor. Sometimes I would be corrected, as if I were confused, and I was told that I may have a Ph.D., but in Europe that didn't mean I was a professor. * NOTE: I am deep into my 40s and had 'Professor X' on the nameplate on my office door *

"Another typical response to the news that I was a professor was the statement 'There must be a lot of professors in the U.S. It is not such an important position as it is here.' No of course not--how could it be if they let women be professors? There is an element of truth to the statement that professors are less 'important' in the U.S. than in Europe in terms of the academic culture, but no one ever told my husband that professors must be less important in the U.S. upon hearing that he's a professor, and it happened to me a number of times.

"And then there were the endless official government and university forms to fill out. These all assumed that my husband was filling them out, and there was always a space labeled 'wife' just for me."

And that's not all. Read the whole thing.

Which Europe did you visit? 

In my ongoing quest to intensify the battle of the sexes and/or genders, a few juicy online discussions popped up on the radar Tuesday:

• Over at feministing, Jessica riffs on a Guardian story and asks what one should call pro-feminist men. One commenter observes that men who actually call themselves "feminists" are, in her experience, "generally the worst of the worst--not only misogynist pigs, but because they consider themselves enlightened, completely uneducatable." Sounds right to me.

• And at Terra Sigillata, Abel Pharmboy asks whether it would be a good idea for the Hooters franchise near a regular breast-cancer research symposium to do a benefit therefor? (He says it's already done at the corporate level.) I'm already in enough trouble here, so I won't even try to quote from the many astute and amusing comments.

• Hey, maybe battle of the sexes isn't enough: How about . . . Sharia women-only beach in Italy?  (Article from the Guardian, discussion from feministing once again.) There are more comments than even I can read, but one early commenter has this: "I'm not a Muslim woman, and I'd go to a beach like this . . . if only to avoid obnoxious frat boy types."

Well-off and white people get more sleep than nonrich and nonwhite people, according to a recent University of Chicago study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

The study didn’t address the reasons why--its main finding was that people in general sleep less than they think--but Diane Lauderdale, an associate professor of health studies, speculated that people who make more money may have fewer worries or more control over their sleep environment. That bored one blogger, who wrote, “I can't believe money--taxpayer money, probably--was spent on a study like this. Is it just me or does this seem like a no-brainer?”

She missed the odd part. The study also found that, on average, women sleep more than men. Scorecard: white women 6.7 hours, white men 6.1, black women 5.9, black men 5.1.

If privileges like wealth and whiteness confer the additional privilege of more sleep, what happens to the privilege of maleness when we hit the sack? Or, in Chicago terms, where’s mine?

Sociologist Eric Klinenberg uncovered a similar oddity in his 2002 book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. Short version from my Reader review (July 26, 2002):

“Not all of the vulnerable people are the usual suspects, and not all of the usual suspects are vulnerable. Yes, blacks died half again as often as whites [during Chicago’s 1995 killer heat wave]. But Latinos--comparably poor and downtrodden--died much less often than either . . . . Most surprisingly, men died at almost three times the rate of women--19 men per 100,000, compared to just 7 women per 100,000. This is a dramatically greater difference than that between racial and ethnic groups . . . .

“According to the usual left-liberal analysis, the victims of incipient social breakdown are supposed to be women and people of color, not just men and blacks. The heat wave does indeed reveal some social faultlines, but not quite the ones you might expect.”

Has anyone taken a probe to this anomaly? Heck, does anyone even have a good guess as to what’s going on here?