Club Troppo

Clive Hamilton writes:

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.

(Continued)

Do women behave more reciprocally than men? Gender differences in real effort dictator games
Heinz, Matthias, Rau, Holger A., and Juranek, Steffen

Abstract:

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

Here is an interesting Aust Parliamentary Library write up of the law of rape in Sweden (HT: Paul Barratt) with reference to the current legal peregrinations of one Julian Assange.

My inexpert take on the law of rape is that the ordeal to which women were subjected before the law was reformed in this area was outrageous. The basic line of attack was that if someone wasn’t the model of Victorian sexual rectitude (as it were) then they ‘asked for it’ or perhaps even ‘had it coming’. While this reflected a nasty aspect of legal culture, ultimately defence barristers were seeking to appeal to enough people in the jury to get their client – the accused – off.

The overarching problem however is the simple lack of evidence. There may be reasonable evidence that a rape has taken place, but if it was committed in private, there is not physical evidence of struggle (which itself may have other explanations such as consensual rough sex) it will often be possible to prove that a rape has taken place with reasonable likelihood, but not beyond reasonable doubt.

The write up reports Amnesty International thus:

A particular concern is the fact that most rape cases never come to trial at all. Only a small number of reported rapes result in a prosecution, with an even smaller number resulting in a conviction. Instead, most rape investigations are closed at an early stage, usually with the explanation that ‘it cannot be proven that a crime has been committed.

Well it is concerning. But isn’t this what one would expect given that the kind of men who are prepared to rape women are likely to lie and they didn’t?  Right now the report (pdf) says that “only 12% of crime victims who report rape get their case tried in a court of law, and that this means that, in practice, many perpetrators enjoy impunity.” That’s true. I have no idea whether 12 percent is the right number, but the report doesn’t seem to grapple with the question of the difficulty of getting evidence to meet the criminal standard of proof.

I think the idea put forward by Amnesty International seems fair enough. ”We therefore propose that a special monitoring commission be appointed to systematically analyse all closed rape investigations and identify shortcomings in preliminary investigations into rape”. However it would be worrying if it simply led to more cases coming before the courts without more convictions.  (If I had to guess I’d say that if you are raped and there’s no conviction it’s preferable that you are spared the trauma of the court case and the acquittal of the person who raped you, but I don’t know).  Anyway the monitoring commission seems predicated on the idea that 12 percent is too low, without saying why. (Perhaps some people who know this better can enlighten us as to what we know here.)

Then there’s this passage:

In Amnesty International Sweden’s view, the preventive work to combat and eradicate rape and sexual violence have been neglected and must be reinforced and developed. Stereotypical notions about female and male sexuality, about what is – and what is not – normal, and about women’s availability for sex are deeply rooted in society. Such notions and attitudes, which pave the way for gender-based violence against women, including rape, must
be countered and changed.

I don’t think it would make much sense to call for the eradication of murder or any other crime. Why call for the eradication of rape and sexual violence? Do we know that rape is the result of “notions . . . about women’s availability for sex [that are] are deeply rooted in society.” Maybe. It’s certainly useful to try to fight violence wherever one can. But I’d say with almost all people, and I’d hazard a guess with most rapists, they know that what they are doing is a deeply transgressive act.

Is the rate of burglary driven by deeply held societal notions about the availability of people’s houses for foraging for stuff criminals want?

This piece suggests that the UK may implement quotas to increase the representation of women on FTSE companies. I appreciate the sentiment. Even though it’s hard to find someone who will explicitly state that women are unsuited to positions of power, the corridors of power both in government and in the corporate world are still very much a sausagefest. For those who think that there is nothing in maleness that makes a better leader, the urge to force something through is strong since apparent watersheds in the past have done little – 30 years after Thatcher was elected where are the women in UK politics for example?. Childbirth and associated gender roles may play a part, but only so much.

There’s equity reasons to desire greater representation of women of course – it’s unfair that women may be barred from these positions based on characteristics that appear to have nothing to do with the qualities we’d want in these positions, but I have a more selfish motive. Basically, if we’re excluding a large proportion of the pool of potential leaders based on arbitrary ground, we won’t get the best leaders, and the society I live in will be poorer both materially and otherwise.

This brings me to a speculation about why the glass ceiling is so resilient.  It may be to do (in part) with differing variances in narcissism.

In our society, these positions of power are in hierarchy. They’re not market derived wealth and power but positions within and at the top of pyramids where the numbers thin out as power increases. To be on a board, or to be a CEO, or an MP, you have to select yourself as being, and convince others, that you are one of the very few suited for the job.

The put another way, to want to be a member of the Federal Parliament you need to think you are better suited than the 99.99% of the population who is not in the Federal Parliament. To be a CEO you need to genuinely believe that your judgment is better than similar proportions of the population and that you output is really worth many many multiples of the average worker. If you don’t believe it yourself, how can you convince others, claim credit and self promote?

Even if you can objectively claim greater than average intelligence, judgment etc., claims of this magnitude cannot be considered rational. Only a narcissist could believe them. (Continued)

In The New Republic this week Richard Just shines the spotlight on Barack Obama’s hopelessly contradictory position on gay marriage. He compares it to Woodrow Wilson’s pathetic attempts to dodge the issue of women’s suffrage by claiming it was an issue for the states.

The issue is topical in America because the United States District Court has just found that Proposition 8 — a recent California constitutional amendment, passed by referendum, prohibiting same sex marriage — violates the Fourteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution. The President responded to this development by saying: “I am not in favor of gay marriage, but when you’re playing around with constitutions, just to prohibit somebody who cares about another person, it just seems to me that that is not what America is about.” As Just puts it:

Obama appears to be saying that it is fine to prohibit gay people from getting married, as long as the vehicle for doing so is not a constitution. Presumably, then, he supports the numerous states that have banned same-sex marriage through other means, without resorting to a constitutional amendment? If so, he might be the only person in the country to occupy this narrow, and frankly absurd, slice of intellectual terrain.

There is an ongoing debate in the US about whether legislative change or judicial rulings are the best way to achieve marriage equality. There is certainly a good case for the latter, affirming the right as an inherent liberty rather than a privilege dependent on the largesse of public opinion.

In the US, in any case, judicial decisions appear at the moment to be the most promising vehicle as far as most of the country is concerned, especially if the Perry v. Schwarzenegger ruling withstands appeal.

If left to the politicians it would take a hundred years, if Obama’s unedifying squirming is any indication.

Unfortunately in Australia, cursed by a lack of constitutional protections, we will have to go on waiting for the squirming politicians to be lifted by the tide of public opinion. (Continued)

I’d read this paper.

Given that there are not, perhaps a Troppodillian will check it out and review it here.