I’ve often thought that in politics, the signature of honesty is not lack of dishonesty – an impossibility in party politics – but a certain discomfort with the the lies you have to tell. I’m giving Joe the benefit of the doubt on this one. And good on you Penny for your dignity in the midst of indignity.
Women’s morality differs from men’s. Feminist philosopher Carol Gilligan argues women are motivated more by care than duty, and inclined more to emphasise responsibilities than rights. They seek reconciliation through the exercise of compassion and negotiation rather than demanding "justice", through force if necessary.
While the idea has widespread appeal, empirical research has failed to find large differences in the way men and women think about morality. Psychologist Janet Shibley Hyde argues that a "consequence of his overinflated claim of gender differences is that it reifies the stereotype of women as caring and nurturant and men as lacking in nurturance" (pdf). Research suggests that women who violate the stereoptype of being caring nurturant can find themselves penalised in the workplace.
American psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that there is much more to morality than concerns about care and justice. He lists five sets of moral intuitions: Harm/care, Fairness/reciprocity, Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity (pdf). According to Haidt and his colleagues, some of the biggest differences in how people think about moral issues are between liberals and conservatives rather than between men and women.
(Hat tip: Mindy at Hoyden About Town).
Women are "working fewer hours, in lower-paid industries and in lower-status jobs" than men, writes Jessica Irvine. Despite decades of feminism, women are still doing most of the unpaid cooking, cleaning and caring for children. They are still struggling to break into senior, highly paid jobs. In the Australian Financial Review Alan Mitchell suggested a way of dealing with the problem … but it’s not a solution most feminists or egalitarians will like.
As Irvine observes, there are two arguments for increasing women’s participation in paid work. The first is an argument for social justice. Society relies on women to bear children and it’s not fair that doing so makes it more difficult for those who are qualified to compete for high paid, high status work. And it is certainly not fair that women without children still find it more difficult to get ahead at work.
The second argument is economic. "Economists at Goldman Sachs estimate closing the gap between male and female participation rates would boost Australia’s annual economic production by 13 per cent", writes Irvine. This would "help cool inflation pressure, meaning lower interest rates than otherwise."
A 2009 report by Tim Toohey, David Colosimo and Andrew Boak at Goldman Sachs JBWere argues that women are source of highly educated labour just waiting to be unlocked. As Andrew Norton notes notes, women with university qualifications are far less likely to work full-time than men even when they don’t have children.
But according to Toohey, Colosimo, and Boak, another problem is that women with higher degrees tend to focus on just two industries: health care and social assistance, and education and training. Australia could achieve a significant boost to output if women could be persuaded to look beyond these two fields. By moving into traditionally male dominated fields, women would not only help to address skill shortages but would also improve their productivity.
In the Australian Financial Review (paywalled), Alan Mitchell argues that one way to encourage highly educated women to take on senior, highly paid jobs and work more hours is to allow more unskilled workers to migrate to Australia.
Do women behave more reciprocally than men? Gender differences in real effort dictator games
Heinz, Matthias, Rau, Holger A., and Juranek, SteffenAbstract:
We analyze dictator allocation decisions in an experiment where the recipients have to earn the pot to be divided with a real-effort task. As the recipients move before the dictators, their effort decisions resemble the first move in a trust game. Depending on the recipients’ performance, the size of the pot is either high or low. We compare this real-effort treatment to a baseline treatment where the pot is a windfall gain and where a lottery determines the pot size. In the baseline treatment, reciprocity cannot play a role. We find that female dictators show reciprocity and decrease their taking-rates significantly in the real-effort treatment. This treatment effect is larger when female dictators make a decision on recipients who successfully generated a large pot compared to the case where the recipients performed poorly. By contrast, there is no treatment effect with male dictators, who generally exhibit more sefish behaviour.
Disappointed Troppo readers everywhere have gradually come to a realisation – upon which I came clean on in a recent thread. Troppo is really an ‘eyeballs’ play as we say in the trade and things haven’t been this good for eyeballs since Tim Blair sent some brownshirts our way a long while ago. Anyway, it turns out that economic development has a surprisingly robust relationship with penis size. As this paper shows. Discuss with relation to any rocks you would like to get off. Baseless accusations are encouraged – though participants are reminded about our point of difference here at Club Pony – they’re not compusory.
Forced board changes: Evidence from Norway (pdf). By: Nygaard, Knut (Dept. of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration)
The recently introduced gender quota on Norwegian corporate boards dramatically increased the share of female directors. This reform offers a natural experiment to investigate changes in corporate governance from forced increases in gender diver- sity, and whether these changes in turn impact firm performance. I find that investors anticipate the new directors to be more effective in firms with less information asymmetry between insiders of the firm and outsiders. Firms with low information asymmetry experience positive and significant cumulative abnormal returns (CAR) at the introduction of the quota, whereas firms with high information asymmetry show negative but insignificant CAR.
We examine how multitasking affects performance and check whether women are indeed better at multitasking. Subjects in our experiment perform two different tasks according to three treatments: one where they perform the tasks sequentially, one where they are forced to multitask, and one where they can freely organize their work. Subjects who are forced to multitask perform significantly worse than those forced to work sequentially. Surprisingly, subjects who can freely organize their own schedule also perform significantly worse. Finally, our results do not support the stereotype that women are better at multitasking. Women suffer as much as men when forced to multitask and are actually less inclined to multitask when being free to choose.
By: Thomas Buser (University of Amsterdam)
Noemi Peter (University of Amsterdam)
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dgr:uvatin:20110044&r=exp