Quotulatiousness

February 10, 2012

This is why the “patriarchy” is an unlikely culprit

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:27

Henry Hill explains the key market mechanism that would undermine “the patriarchy”:

Let’s imagine we have ten businesses competing for the same market. If we are spectacularly ungenerous to the male sex (as to get into Harriet Harman’s brain we must surely be) let’s assume that nine of those businesses are run by real, conviction sexists who consciously exclude capable women on the grounds that they’re women. This leaves a vast talent pool available to the tenth business, which presumably can lap up these highly capable workers. If sexism was depressing their wages as well, then this business would have a significant competitive advantage over the competition.

How long would rival businesses really keep deliberately hiring inferior labour at inflated prices out of allegiance to the principle of sexism? It would only take one company in a competitive market to break the ranks of chauvinist solidarity for such arbitrary and costly employment practises to be rendered totally unaffordable.

There are all kinds of reasons for differing employment patterns between men and women, including different priorities, working hours, child-rearing and so forth that have firm bases in business sense. To ascribe these differences to an omnipresent, more-important-that-profit sexist conspiracy, one must believe the entire spectrum of business subscribes to the exclusion of women at the expense of their own industrial and economic interests. That they literally looked at the ‘profits’ David Cameron is waving in front of them and decided that, if the cost was employing women, £40bn wasn’t for them.

February 9, 2012

Boardroom quotas are a bad idea

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:05

James Delingpole on the British government’s half-baked notion to introduce quotas for female board members in business:

I love women. Women are great. I’ve married one, I’ve personally bred one and I’ve got lots who are my friends. And after years of close observation, here’s what I’ve concluded: chicks are definitely the superior species. They’re more intuitive, more versatile, more articulate, more competent. Plus, of course, they have breasts.

Given that all this is so, I really don’t understand why David Cameron feels he needs to impose quota systems on boardrooms. Not for the reasons he gives anyway. I could understand it if he said: “Look, I have no shame, no principles, no moral or ideological core in my blubbery, spineless, Heathite body. My Coalition government is run by Lib Dems, a marketing man and focus groups. And what they all tell me is: “Suck up to the female demographic.” So that’s why I’m saying this crap.”

But that’s not what Cameron has said in Stockholm. He’s actually trying to claim that he’s doing it for the good of British business.

    Government figures suggested that Britain’s slow progress was costing the economy more than £40 billion in lost potential each year, roughly equal to the defence budget.

Yeah right. I’m sure there are also “government figures” which suggest that green technologies will create millions of new jobs; “government figures” which suggest wind farms are a vital part of Britain’s energy package; “government figures” which suggest that a 50 per cent upper band tax rate is really healthy business.

Doesn’t make it so, though does it?

Update: Megan Moore says that the tokenism on display in Cameron’s comments “represents the ultimate triumph of style over substance”:

The first and most obvious objection to boardroom quotas is that they don’t actually work. A 2010 study by Amy Dittmar and Kenneth Ahern of the Ross Business School, University of Michigan, found that in Norway, a 10 percent increase in female board members in a company — enforced through a quota introduced in 2003 — caused the value of the company to drop. After all, if quality is no longer the sole criterion for choosing board members, it is highly likely the quality of the board will suffer.

You’d just as easily make a case for boards being required to match the ethnic, racial, religious, and sexual profile of the country: “Oh, sorry, due to the quotas we can’t invite you to join the board unless you’re Irish or Sikh and are either handicapped or left-handed. Bonus points if you’re transgendered.” Rather than emphasizing the needs of the organization — hiring someone who brings skills, talents, or connections that the organization can benefit from — this kind of social engineering only values people for their plumbing or their skin colour, or their sexual lifestyle.

February 8, 2012

You can’t blame declining rates of marriage on poverty

Filed under: Economics, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:33

Bryan Caplan explains:

I’m baffled by people who blame declining marriage rates on poverty. Why? Because being single is more expensive than being married. Picture two singles living separately. If they marry, they sharply cut their total housing costs. They cut the total cost of furniture, appliances, fuel, and health insurance. Even groceries get cheaper: think CostCo.

These savings are especially blatant when your income is low. Even the official poverty line acknowledges them. The Poverty Threshold for a household with one adult is $11,139; the Poverty Threshold for a household with two adults is $14,218. When two individuals at the poverty line maintain separate households, they’re effectively spending 2*$11,139-$14,218=$8,060 a year to stay single.

But wait, there’s more. Marriage doesn’t just cut expenses. It raises couples’ income. In the NLSY, married men earn about 40% more than comparable single men; married women earn about 10% less than comparable single women. From a couples’ point of view, that’s a big net bonus. And much of this bonus seems to be causal.

[. . .]

If being single is so expensive, why are the poor far less likely to get married and stay married? I’m sure you could come up with a stilted neoclassical explanation. But this is yet another case where behavioral economics and personality psychology have a better story. Namely: Some people are extremely impulsive and short-sighted. If you’re one of them, you tend to mess up your life in every way. You don’t invest in your career, and you don’t invest in your relationships. You take advantage of your boss and co-workers, and you take advantage of your romantic partners. You refuse to swallow your pride — to admit that the best job and the best spouse you can get, though far from ideal, are much better than nothing. Your behavior feels good at the time. But in the long-run people see you for what you are, and you end up poor and alone.

Tyler Cowen comments on the first part of Caplan’s post:

More plausibly it is the rise in female income (among other factors, including the rise of birth control, […]) which is behind the decline in marriage, but that doesn’t fit with traditional mood affiliation, which finds the rise in female income to be good (which it is), and the decline in marriage to be — neither good nor bad per se but not exactly worth celebrating. If you can blame capitalism and wage stagnation for the decline of the family among lower earners, so much the better for ideology but as a sociological proposition that is a very weak hypothesis (do you see convincing links to real sociological evidence, showing this to be the dominant factor? No) and as Caplan shows it doesn’t fit with the economics either.

February 5, 2012

I didn’t realize the President also inherited the droit de seigneur

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:30

After all this time, I doubt that anyone is particularly surprised by yet another revelation from the “Camelot” days of JFK’s presidency:

She always called him “Mr. President” — not Jack. He refused to kiss her on the lips when they made love. But Mimi Alford, a White House intern from New Jersey, was smitten nonetheless.

She was in the midst of an 18-month affair with the most powerful man in the world, sharing not only John F. Kennedy’s bed but also some of his darkest and most intimate moments.

In her explosive new tell-all, Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath, Alford, now a 69-year-old grandmother and retired New York City church administrator, sets the record straight in searingly candid detail. The book, out Wednesday was bought by The Post at a Manhattan bookstore.

February 1, 2012

The “Iron Lady” was not good for women

Filed under: Britain, Government, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:06

Barbara Kay on the “failings” of Margaret Thatcher (that is, not advancing the cause of women in a way that organized feminists would have preferred):

The “Iron Lady” is, of course, not only a sobriquet for Margaret Thatcher, but the title of the wonderful new Meryl Streep biopic about the former British PM. Bagnall’s predictable answer is that no, Thatcher was not good for women: “She did not pave the way for other women, as they had every right to expect her to, since she was one of them.”

Bagnall’s stated beefs are that Thatcher urged women to leave the workforce, and only nominated one woman to her cabinet. Well, so did unions of that era ask women to leave the workforce — to open up more jobs for men. And Thatcher’s appointments were based on who was good for Britain, not who was good for women.

Politically, Thatcher despised tokenism (“I owe nothing to women’s lib,” she once said), but it is true that personally she preferred men to women. This was made clear in the film by the non-judgmental tenderness the older widowed Thatcher lavishes on her negligent son (who rarely visited, but inconsiderately telephones her from South Africa at 3 a.m. English time) and the casual verbal cruelties Thatcher tosses at her attentive, under-appreciated daughter.

I think it’s Thatcher’s lack of fellow feeling for women that’s really bugging Bagnall and other feminists. How could Thatcher not like women if she was “one of them”?

I daresay it’s for the same reason most of us hold prejudices about the opposite sex. I don’t think most gender antipathy is rooted in doctrine; I think we drift toward doctrines that confirm our lived experiences. So in spite of (fictional) Thatcher’s protestations to the doctor attending her in her old age that she prefers “thoughts” to “feelings,” Thatcher’s bias toward men sprang directly from her lived experiences and the feelings they engendered (pun intended).

January 30, 2012

The battle of the stereotypes over the “Page 3 girls”

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:01

In spiked, Gabrielle Shiner explains that she doesn’t want or need the “Turn Your Back on Page 3” campaigners to pre-select what she’s allowed to see in the newspaper:

With the Leveson Inquiry currently insisting that the press bares all, campaign groups such as Turn Your Back on Page 3 have spotted an opportunity to force the tabloid’s topless ladies to cover themselves up. And all in the name of protecting girls like me from being terrorised by tits.

The campaign to get bare chests banned is certainly not short of grand claims. Apparently, Page 3 and its like perpetuate sexism by, ‘at best, encouraging and endorsing negative attitudes towards us and within us, and at worst, [encouraging and endorsing] acts of violence committed against us’. According to campaigners, the government therefore has a responsibility to satiate these campaigners’ appetite for paternalism, which they believe equates to ‘stamping out sexism once and for all’.

The Turn Your Back on Page 3 campaigners are right about one thing: an offensive misrepresentation of women exists in society. But it is this group of self-appointed saviours that has offended. The group parades itself as representative of women in order to justify forcing its views on the public. But if these supposed advocates of women’s rights were serious about liberties, they would not condone such bans.

And it is not just that the campaigners are unjustified in speaking on behalf of women — they have also misrepresented women and men. These campaigners present women as pitiful animals teeming with self-loathing. Men are depicted as uncontrollable beasts who are so mesmerised by the breasts on Page 3 that these images, at best, define their perception of women for evermore and, at worst, turn them to violence.

January 7, 2012

Booth babes = company with shitty products or zero new ideas

Filed under: Humour, Media, Randomness, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:15

A useful rant about the companies who depend on “booth babes” to draw attention at trade shows:

CES, like many industry conventions, will be thick with “booth babes” — women paid to stand around in revealing clothing in order to draw men to the booths and see terrible products. That’s regrettable. Not only because it is sexist, but also because it just makes your company look like a bunch of undersexed nimrods.

If the only way you can get people interested in your product is to have a scantily clad woman appear next to it for no apparent reason, your products are probably awful. And besides, it’s boring. It’s just boring. It’s been done so many times, for so many years, that my only reaction to seeing a booth bunny is to think, “Here is a company that is completely out of ideas.”

Look, technology industry CEOs, if you want to stick a butt in my face, I’d be way more impressed if you made it your own fat ass. Butter up that big white rump of yours and squeeze it into a little red thong. Strap those mantits into a cheetah bra that lets your pale hairy cleavage see the light of day. Do that, and I promise you that I’ll listen to your pitch. (Even if it’s a little awkward for both of us!) Better yet, get the whole pasty, overpaid, C-level crew into some sexy swimwear. People will talk. You’ll be the buzz.

Full disclosure: I’ve worked (on the technology side) at companies who spent nearly as much time and effort hiring and “costuming” their booth babes as they did on the actual marketing campaign for their products. I don’t currently work with firms who do this, thank goodness.

December 29, 2011

Girls from single-parent homes “more resilient” at school than boys

Filed under: Britain, Education, Health, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:55

An article in the Guardian summarizes a recent study’s findings:

Girls appear to be more resilient than boys in preventing problems at home from affecting their behaviour in school, according to a study which aims to explain the educational achievement gap between the genders.

The tendency for girls to perform better in the later years of school has become increasingly pronounced in the UK in the past two decades. In 2011 the percentage point gap between the proportion of girls gaining A* or A grades in GCSE subjects and that for boys hit a record 6.7, up from just 1.5 percentage points in 1989.

Educational researchers have sought to explain the difference through a variety of factors connected to both physiology and environment, including theorising that boys are inherently more resistant to a formal educational system.

But the new study, based on detailed data from 20,000 US children over a decade, found no particular evidence of school-based factors being significant. Instead, it discovered that boys raised outside a traditional two-parent family were more likely to display behavioural and self-control problems in school and were suspended more often. The data ended when the children were about 14, but suspensions are seen as a strong indicator of subsequent poorer educational performance.

This finding, if validated by other studies, implies that the gender gap will continue to widen as more children are being raised in single-parent households now than ever before. Girls’ increasing share of university entrance will continue to grow — although the system will still likely consider girls and young women “more vulnerable” and in need of more systemic support.

December 27, 2011

The plight of Japan’s “herbivore men”

Filed under: Japan, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:52

Think you had it tough as a teen? It’s not a good time to be a teenage boy in Japan:

It’s not easy being a young man in Japan today. Every few months sees the release of a new set of figures, stats and stories trumpeting the same meme: today’s Japanese men are unmanly — and worse, they don’t seem bothered by it.

Tagged in the domestic media over the past few years as hikikomori (socially withdrawn boys), soshoku danshi (grass-eating/herbivore men, uninterested in meat, fleshly sex and physical or workplace competition), or just generally feckless, Japan’s Y-chromosomed youth today elicit shrugs of “why?”, followed by heaving sighs of disappointment from their postwar elders and members of the opposite sex. With the country’s economy stagnant at best, its geopolitical foothold rapidly slipping into the crevice between China and the United States, and its northeast coastline still struggling with the aftermath of disaster and an ongoing nuclear crisis, the reaction to a failure of Japan’s men to take the reins, even symbolically, has evolved from whispers of curiosity to charges of incompetence.

[. . .]

Why the generational malaise and indifference to sex? Theories abound. The most provocative to me, a Japanese-American and longtime Tokyo resident, is that Japanese women have become stronger socially and economically at the very same time that Japanese men have become more mole-ish and fully absorbed in virtual worlds, satiated by the very technological wizardry their forebears foisted upon them, and even preferring it to reality. “I don’t like real women,” one bloke superciliously sniffed on Japan’s 2channel, the world’s largest and most active internet bulletin board site. “They’re too picky nowadays. I’d much rather have a virtual girlfriend.”

[. . .]

The phrase “herbivore men” was coined by a female Japanese journalist in 2006. By 2009, the Japanese male’s lack of ambition, sexually or otherwise, had become a media meme. With the latest reports in Japan, of men who can’t get it up for real women who won’t get married or have kids, the mutual gender-chill phenomenon has become mainstream. It may be the future, but is it really Japanese?

“Maybe we’re just advanced human beings,” says a Japanese friend of mine over dinner this week in Tokyo, who won’t let me use her real name. She is an attractive, 40-something editor at one of Japan’s premier fashion magazines, and she is still single. “Maybe,” she adds, “we’ve learned how to service ourselves.”

December 21, 2011

Barbara Kay: Spousal abuse is remarkably gender-balanced

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:18

Everyone knows the old myth about a spike in wife-beating after major sporting events (most frequently referenced is the Superbowl, but the same factoid is trotted out about every “big game”). Barbara Kay reveals the awkward truth that nearly half of all spousal abuse is by female partners:

One of first-wave feminism’s great achievements in the 1970s was to end the denial surrounding wife abuse in even the “best” homes. Resources for abused women proliferated. Traditional social, judicial and political attitudes toward violence against women were cleansed and reconstructed along feminist-designed lines.

But then a funny thing happened. The closet from which abuse victims were emerging had, everyone assumed, been filled with women. But honest researchers were surprised by the results of their own objective inquiries. They were all finding, independently, that intimate partner violence (IPV) is mostly bidirectional.

But by then the IPV domain was awash in heavily politicized stakeholders. Even peer-reviewed community-based studies providing politically incorrect conclusions were cut off at the pass, their researchers’ names passed over for task force appointments and the writing of training manuals for the judiciary. Neither were internal whistle-blowers suffered gladly. Erin Pizzey, who opened the first refuge for battered women in England in 1971, was “disappeared” from the feminist movement when she revealed what she learned in her own shelter: She committed a heresy by asking women about their own violence, and they told her.

[. . .]

(While the CDC survey does not reference Canadian data, our IPV statistics vary significantly from the U.S.’s in certain respects. “Minor” wife assault rates as measured on the commonly employed Conflict Tactics Scale are identical, but “severe violence” rates in Canada fall as the violence ratchets up. For “kicking” and “hitting,” Canadian rates were 80% of the American rate; for “beat up,” they were 25%; and for “threatened with or used a gun/knife,” they were only 17%.)

By now there is no excuse for the failure of governments at all levels to follow through on — or at least acknowledge — the settled science of bilateral violence. Yet just last week the Justice Institute of British Columbia issued a lengthy report on “Domestic Violence Prevention and Reduction,” and sure enough, it defines domestic violence as “intimate partner violence against women,” recommending only that government work “to bridge gaps in the services and systems designed to protect women and children.”

One area where the majority of abusers are female is child abuse: women are much more likely to batter their children than men.

December 20, 2011

QotD: Inside the world of Kim Jong-Il

Filed under: Asia, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:00

Kim Jong-il enjoyed the life of a spoiled playboy — fast cars, fast women, cellars of vintage French wines and a passion for Rambo and Daffy Duck videos. He was also said to take pleasure in caviar, Hennessy Cognac and his troupe of 2,000 dancing girls, recruited from the country’s high schools as teenagers to perform in “pleasure groups” in the dictator’s 32-odd villas and palaces — before being pensioned off at 25. Each pleasure group was composed of three teams: a “satisfaction team,” which performed sexual services; a “happiness team,” which provided massage; and a “dancing and singing team.” Visitors were treated to choreographed stripteases, though only Mr. Kim was allowed to avail himself of the other services.

Ian Vandaelle, “Inside the world of Kim Jong-il: The Glorious General and his ‘pleasure groups’”, National Post, 2011-12-20

December 18, 2011

The Feminist struggle against real women’s actual wants

Filed under: History, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:57

Jenny Turner in the London Review of Books has some insight into organized Feminism’s ongoing struggles:

It’s true that women, as a gender, have been systemically disadvantaged through history, but they aren’t the only ones: economic exploitation is also systemic and coercive, and so is race. And feminists need to engage with all of this, with class and race, land enclosure and industrialisation, colonialism and the slave trade, if only out of solidarity with the less privileged sisters. And yet, the strange thing is how often they haven’t: Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed votes for freedmen; Betty Friedan made the epoch-defining suggestion that middle-class American women should dump the housework on ‘full-time help’. There are so many examples of this sort that it would be funny if it weren’t such a waste.

Not that the white middle-class brigade like being on the same side as one another. There’s always a tension between all of us being sisterly, all equal under the sight of the patriarchal male oppressor, and the fact that we aren’t really sisters, or equal, or even friends. We despise one another for being posh and privileged, we loathe one another for being stupid oiks. We hate the tall poppies for being show-offs, we can’t bear the crabs in the bucket that pinch us back. All this produces the ineffable whiff so often sensed in feminist emanations, those anxious, jargon-filled, overpolite topnotes with their undertow of envy and rancour, that perpetual sharp-elbowed jostle for the moral high ground.

[. . .]

And so Women’s Liberation started trying to build a man-free, women-only tradition of its own. Thus consciousness-raising, or what was sometimes called the ‘rap group’, groups of women sitting around, analysing the frustrations of their lives according to their new feminist principles, gradually systematising their discoveries. And thus that brilliant slogan, from the New York Radical Women in 1969, that the personal is political, an insight so caustic it burned through generations of mystical nonsense — a woman’s place is in the home, she was obviously asking for it dressed like that. But it also corroded lots of useful boundaries and distinctions, between public life and personal burble, real questions and pop-quiz trivia, political demands and problems and individual whims. ‘Psychic hardpan’ was Didion’s name for this. A movement that started out wanting complete transformation of all relations was floundering, up against the banality of what so many women actually seemed to want.

Across the world, according to UK Feminista, women perform 66 per cent of the work and earn 10 per cent of the income. In the UK two-thirds of low-paid workers are women, and women working full-time earn 16 per cent less than men. All of this is no doubt true, but such statistics hide as much as they show. One example. In a piece in Prospect in 2006 the British economist Alison Wolf showed that the 16 per cent pay-gap masks a much harsher divide, between the younger professional women — around 13 per cent of the workforce — who have ‘careers’ and earn just as much as men, and the other 87 per cent who just have ‘jobs’, organised often around the needs of their families, and earn an awful lot less. Feminism overwhelmingly was and is a movement of that 13 per cent — mostly white, mostly middle-class, speaking from, of, to themselves within a reflecting bubble.

December 17, 2011

Megan McArdle: There is no “quick fix” for poor communities

Filed under: Economics, Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:23

If the “nudge” notion of government worked, it’d be pretty creepy:

If poor people did the stuff that middle class people do, it’s possible — maybe probable — that they wouldn’t be poor. But this is much harder than it sounds. As John Scalzi once memorably put it, “Being poor is having to live with choices you didn’t know you made when you were 14 years old.” Which often means, he might have added, spending your whole life doing the sort of jobs that middle class people sometimes do when they’re 14. It isn’t that people can’t get out of this: they do it quite frequently. But in order to do so, you need the will and the skill — and the luck — to execute perfectly. There is no margin for error in the lives of the working poor.

And some problems are collective problems. It’s all very well to say that poor women shouldn’t have kids unless they can find a solid man to help raise them. (And I agree that this is a superior strategy). But men with solid jobs are rather scarce in many poor communities, not least because we’ve imprisoned so many of them. What you’re asking poor women to do is actually, for most of them, to not have babies. This is an easy edict to deliver from a comfortable middle class home where you have all the kids you want. It probably sounds pretty shitty, however, to the poor women who you are blithely commanding to spend their lives alone.

[. . .]

What I am struggling to say is that however much those choices are now inflected by what went before — and the problems of other people in their families and communities — they are choices. We understand that the middle class girl I grew up with is driving her situation by behavior that is probably not very amenable to outside influence. Why do we assume that people who grew up poor are somehow more pliable simply because similar choices are influenced by decades of generational poverty?

As adults they are the products of everything that has happened to them, and everything that they have done, but they are also now exercising free will. If you assume you know the choice they should make, and that there is some reliable way to entice them to make it, you’re imagining away their humanity, and replacing it with an automaton.

Having higher wage jobs available would give people more money which would be a good thing, and it would solve the sort of problems that stem from a simple lack of money. But it would not turn them into different people.

Public policy can modestly improve the incentives and choice sets that poor people face — and it should do those things. But it cannot remake people into something more to the liking of bourgeois taxpayers. And it would actually be pretty creepy if it could.

November 23, 2011

BC Supreme Court upholds law against polygamy

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:34

I’m somewhat surprised that the court upheld the existing law: I’d expected them to strike it down as overbroad.

Polygamy remains a crime in Canada, B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Bauman ruled Wednesday. In his ruling, Bauman said the law violates the religious freedom of fundamentalist Mormons, but the harm against women and children outweighs that concern.

Bauman reserved judgment on the landmark case in April, after hearing 42 days of legal arguments during the unusual reference case, with opposing parties arguing the right to religious freedom and the risk of harm polygamy poses to women and children.

The constitutional issue was referred to the B.C. Supreme Court by the provincial government after polygamy charges laid against Bountiful, B.C., Mormon leaders Winston Blackmore and James Oler were stayed in 2009.

While this particular case involved Mormons, the majority of people whose marital arrangements would be affected are Muslims: there are an unknown (but growing) number of polygamous marriages among recent Muslim immigrants to Canada. If the existing law had been struck down, there would have been a scramble among regional and local government agencies to cope with the expected increase in demands for appropriate housing and support from newly legal multi-spouse families.

November 16, 2011

The gender wage gap won’t go away

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

Kay Hymowitz explains that even with the best will in the world, the wage gap — often referred to as the 75-cents-on-the-dollar phenomenon — between men and women will persist:

Let’s begin by unpacking that 75-cent statistic, which actually varies from 75 to about 81, depending on the year and the study. The figure is based on the average earnings of full-time, year-round workers, usually defined as those who work 35 hours a week or more.

But consider the mischief contained in that “or more.” It makes the full-time category embrace everyone from a clerk who arrives at her desk at 9 a.m. and leaves promptly at 4 p.m. to a trial lawyer who eats dinner four nights a week — and lunch on weekends — at his desk.

I assume, in this case, that the clerk is a woman and the lawyer a man for the simple reason that — and here is an average that proofers rarely mention — full-time men work more hours than full-time women do. In 2007, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 27 percent of male full-time workers had workweeks of 41 or more hours, compared with 15 percent of female full-time workers; just 4 percent of full-time men worked 35 to 39 hours a week, while 12 percent of women did. Since full-time men work more than full-time women do, it shouldn’t be surprising that the men, on average, earn more.

The other arena of mischief contained in the 75-cent statistic lies in the seemingly harmless term “occupation.” Everyone knows that a CEO makes more than a secretary and that a computer scientist makes more than a nurse. Most people wouldn’t be shocked to hear that secretaries and nurses are likely to be women, while CEOs and computer scientists are likely to be men. That explains much of the wage gap.

But proofers often make the claim that women earn less than men doing the exact same job. They can’t possibly know that. The Labor Department’s occupational categories can be so large that a woman could drive a truck through them. Among “physicians and surgeons,” for example, women make only 64.2 percent of what men make. Outrageous, right? Not if you consider that there are dozens of specialties in medicine: some, like cardiac surgery, require years of extra training, grueling hours, and life-and-death procedures; others, like pediatrics, are less demanding and consequently less highly rewarded. Only 16 percent of surgeons, but a full 50 percent of pediatricians, are women.

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