There was an ostensible “news” article on the ABC news site about Trump’s executive order (EO) titled “DEFENDING WOMEN FROM GENDER IDEOLOGY EXTREMISM AND RESTORING BIOLOGICAL TRUTH TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.” The capitalisation is not mine; it is in the executive order FFS! Th...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW_IPF2GSpw As part of a new policy, I'm going to post stuff I've published on my substack here where it's substantial enough, or where I want to be able to link to it without the distraction of all the other stuff I pack into my weekly substack...
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Amid Australia's justified concern over male violence against women, it seems worth keeping in mind our achievements. Femicide, in particular, has more than halved in the past three decades. Prologue 1 : Violence against women is a bad thing, and it's still bad even when, as t...
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‘Critical race theory’ is the perfect villain Christopher Rufo https://vimeo.com/16717619 I wonder if I can keep this post short and sweet. Only by reminding myself that I’d like to write about his after much more consideration and effort. So can I keep this to a steak in the...
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Here's some claims about recent research on fintech and AI. Berg, Burg, Gombovic, and Puri (2018) suggest that digital footprints can help boost financial inclusion, allowing unbanked consumers to have better access to finance. Similarly, Frost et al. (2019) show that fintech...
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Till 20 year ago, IQ scores in the West increased about 3 points per decade ever since the 1920s, a phenomenon known as the “Flynn effect”. That rise in IQ test scores, which have an average of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, was attributed to improved schooling, improved...
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Posted in Uncategorized, History, Education, IT and Internet, Science, Gender, Media, Social, Parenting, Public and Private Goods, Inequality, Employment
They got him! It cost millions of dollars in legal fees, and involved multiple trials, settlements, and dismissal of the worst charges, but they convicted Harvey Weinstein. A bit like a buck who is taken down by a pack of wolves might receive the killing bite from a different...
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[caption id="attachment_35624" align="aligncenter" width="500"] If you put the golden age of female philosophy into Google Images you get this. It has accordingly been selected as the picture for this post by the Troppo Robot Barry.[/caption] I do think that in normal times a...
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The Wage Penalty of Regional Accents Jeffrey Grogger, Andreas Steinmayr, and Joachim Winter #26719 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyyT2jmVPAk Abstract: Previous work has documented that speaking one’s native language with an accent distinct from the mainstream is associated w...
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Do Equal Employment Opportunity Statements Backfire? Evidence From A Natural Field Experiment On Job-Entry Decisions by Andreas Leibbrandt, John A. List - #25035 (LE LS) Labor force composition and the allocation of talent remain of vital import to modern economies. For their...
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[just a thought] US total fertility rates were bobbing along very placidly around 2.05 live births per woman from 1990 to 2010, when suddenly there was a clear drop to 1.8 in 2010-2017. That drop has even continued to 1.76 births per woman in 2017 . When I asked myself what co...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LqZdkkBDas
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We examine whether exposure of men to women in a traditionally male-dominated environment can change attitudes about mixed-gender productivity, gender roles and gender identity. Our context is the military in Norway, where we randomly assigned female recruits to some squads bu...
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Sometimes, it feels like 1910 all over again. Then, a confident Germany was the up-and-coming industrial power house, fearing an even more up-and-coming Russia, with the UK and France desperately holding on to their colonial empires. Now, a confident China is the up-and-coming...
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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, Philosophy, Environment, History, Miscellaneous, Humour, Society, Religion, Sport-general, Theatre, Music, Economics and public policy, Science, regulation, Gender, Journalism, Media, Geeky Musings, Climate Change, Political theory, Business, Travel, Immigration and refugees, Information, Intellectual Monopoly Privileges, Innovation, Social, Race and indigenous, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Public and Private Goods, Death and taxes, Inequality, Social Policy, Democracy, Bullshit, Indigenous, Employment
The #MeToo flood of stories of women who feel abused by men – ranging from lurid stares to straightforward rape – seems like a disaster to me for the Democrats. Not because of the stories themselves, but because of how the progressive media and commentators have reacted to it....
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Posted in Life, Philosophy, Miscellaneous, Humour, Religion, IT and Internet, Gender, Media, Libertarian Musings, Health, Law, Information, bubble, Social, Cultural Critique, Bullshit
Let me indulge, purely for entertainment value, in some fan-speculation on what we will see on-screen after the Long Night is over and the final 6 episodes Of Game of Thrones are run in 2019. Let me first talk about the end-game aspects I think the books and the tv-series seem...
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Posted in Uncategorized, Uncategorised, Politics - international, Life, Philosophy, Print media, Environment, History, Miscellaneous, Humour, Education, Literature, Society, Religion, Films and TV, Sport-general, Theatre, Music, IT and Internet, Economics and public policy, Food, Terror, Science, Art and Architecture, regulation, Gender, Journalism, Media, Libertarian Musings, Geeky Musings, Health, Climate Change, Political theory, Metablogging, Law, Dance, Space, Review, Startup, Products, Travel, Immigration and refugees, Information, bubble, WOW! - Amazing, Social, Parenting, Race and indigenous, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Medical, Public and Private Goods, Death and taxes, Inequality, Personal, Social Policy, Democracy, Bullshit, Indigenous, Employment
"Research has shown that cultures with greater gender equity have larger sex differences when it comes to job preferences, because in these societies, people are free to choose their occupations based on what they enjoy." A month ago, a Google employee wrote a memo about his t...
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When Harry Fired Sally: The Double Standard in Punishing Misconduct , Mark L. Egan, Gregor Matvos, Amit Seru - #23242 (CF LS) Abstract: We examine gender discrimination in the financial advisory industry. We study a less salient mechanism for discrimination, firm discipline fo...
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In reciting his famous ditty, Henry Higgins offers a comical take on an ancient dilemma. This is a brief postscript to my essay on Care where I rather surprised myself by expounding my take on 'feminist economics' and the ethics of care. There's an inherent tension in feminism...
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Childhood Environment and Gender Gaps in Adulthood by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Frina Lin, Jeremy Majerovitz, Benjamin Scuderi - #21936 (CH ED LS PE) We show that differences in childhood environments play an important role in shaping gender gaps in adulthood by documenti...
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Some readers will be aware of my distaste for costume drama - films about the past without any serious effort to engage with the difference of the past. It's a crime against Oscar Wilde's great admonition to Bosie. Shallowness is the supreme vice. Anyway, we have two more crim...
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Domestic violence is constantly in the news these days which can lead to the impression that the problem is increasing. To the extent that scrutiny and public discussion shines light in dark places, we might have expected the real underlying rates to be tapering. So I was more...
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It's Raining Men! Hallelujah? Pauline Grosjean and Rose Khattar We document the implications of missing women in the short and long run. We exploit a natural historical experiment, which sent large numbers of male convicts and far fewer female convicts to Australia in the 18th...
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https://vimeo.com/90297488 (For the full 27 minute video from which this 6 minute video has been extracted, click here .) Family by Family about which you've heard before is spreading its wings. We've started in Mt Druitt where we've scoped the program investigating how it sho...
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Suicide and Property Rights in India by Siwan Anderson, Garance Genicot - #19978 (DEV) This paper studies the impact of female property rights on male and female suicide rates in India. Using state level variation in legal changes to women's property rights, we show that bette...
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Annabel Crabb wants us to get real about women in politics. The current carry-on is "all very interesting and thought-provoking and no doubt useful to a certain degree" but there's an elephant in the room: [F]or chicks, you can choose politics or you can choose having children...
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I recall going to a lecture by Naomi Wolf at the Australian National Gallery in Canberra when she burst onto the scene as the author of The Beauty Myth which seemed to promise some new beginning after the sixties' and seventies' 'second wave' feminism. The obsession with women...
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http://youtu.be/ge7i60GuNRg
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http://youtu.be/nuIiqKytvnU I saw a preview tonight. Incredible, fabulous stuff. Go if you can.
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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="284"] White to play and win: Click on the image to play the game.[/caption] Meanwhile, in case you're interested, the Candidates matches have begun. We are two rounds in with the four strongest players in the world in an eight man (yes,...
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Click on the image for the website from which it comes. Detail on the makeup of the index in the legend at bottom of the graphic. While unusually low female labour force participation sounds like bad news, I'm not sure that the higher the female labour-force participation the...
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These two images dominate a marketing email that's just arrived in my in tray from Olsen Irwin Galleries. Guy Maestri Ball's Pyramid No.10 oil on linen 183 x 152cm 2013 Click to view details Emma Van Leest Ingenue archival paper, foamcore and glue 51 x 31.5cm 2013 Click to vie...
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The ABC has broadcast a two part doco on Woody Allen's life which I really loved. He's a remarkable person, and just keeps churning out films, great, good, bad and indifferent. In any event by the end of watching this documentary I was an admirer of his, not just of his films,...
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Like lots of people, I've always been fond of Marilyn. She was an interesting and courageous person. I liked her apparent seriousness. And the cut of her ideological jib. She was one of the few people who stood against McCarthyism. Yet I always harboured the view that this was...
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http://youtu.be/TuIbEJz23uY 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...
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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 nego...
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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 ref...
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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 multitas...
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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...
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This piece suggests that the UK may i mplement 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 bo...
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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 issu...
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I'd read this paper. Date: 2009-09-22 By: André De Palma (ENS Cachan - Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan - Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan, Department of Economics, Ecole Polytechnique - CNRS : UMR7176 - Polytechnique - X) Nathalie Picard (Department of Economics, Ecole Po...
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Penélope Cruz? You decide. I saw Elegy last night. It's been around for a while but hadn't caught my attention, mainly because I haven't been paying much. These comments will be of interest only to readers who have seen the film, and might spoil it for someone who still intend...
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THE Victorian State Parliament has resumed sitting. In the front row there is an empty seat normally occupied by my husband, Theo. He remains in self-imposed exile, accused of a crime so awful that it is a struggle for me to fit inside my head that his name (and mine) is assoc...
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On the weekend the ABC News reported on the excitement about Bill Henson being given permission by a primary school principal to trawl for photography models. The news then covered the various photo ops put on by Kevin and Malcolm telling us how disgusted they were. (Malcolm w...
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Congratulations to Mathew Mitcham - I think I'm right in saying the only out gay guy in the Olympics. Congratulations for his coming through depression, and burnout and coming back and doing so well. Mathew was stoked to be getting silver. Then the guy coming first dived not s...
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There are two kids' games that are very gendered not so much in their gendered content as we understand the genders, but in their appeal to boys and girls. The first I observed in my daughter when she was in early primary school. It's routines that involve the mutual clapping...
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I've never known. Anyway, I've discovered a blogger I'd not read before - a stroppy femmo who's a great read - who seems to have similar views to mine . Go and have a good squiz around her site .
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In the recent mega blog discussion kicked off by Don Arthur, I ventured the opinion that "the truly remarkable thing is that the Gini coefficient of equivalised disposable income has only increased from 0.28 to 0.31 in the last 30 years of so." Given the underwhelming response...
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I've just been asked by the Department of PM&C to nominate someone to go to the 202o Summit. Who should I nominate - and why? This post will be moderated strictly. Suggestions should be serious and I hope you'll provide good reasons. Of course there will be people who want to...
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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, Life, Philosophy, Environment, History, Education, Society, Religion, Economics and public policy, Science, Gender, Journalism, Health, Climate Change, Political theory, Law
One formula for op ed writing is to annoy your readers . Another is to lay out some set of actual or imagined social phenomena onto some Procrustean ideological bed for interpretation. This lazy and infuriating piece of fluff from Catherine Deveny in the Age which is headed by...
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I have no reason to accuse Troppo readers of being particularly representative of the community from which they come, but I'd still be interested in the experience of those whose experience is relevant to this question. Why do women use their husband's surname when they marry?...
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According to Patricia Karvelas in the Australian yesterday (accompanied by the picture below) , it will be up to John Howard to decide whether or not same-sex couples will be granted equal status with heterosexual couples under Commonwealth law, since the Cabinet could not agr...
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Well I'm sure there was, but you wouldn't know by reading this bit of nostalgic Weekend Age fluff by someone who's apparently planning to turn her reminiscences into a book. I had the same response to this that I had reading Virginia Trioli's little debut in the book market. A...
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A little post to get the year off to an uncontroversial start! I mentioned a book I've read - "Children of the Lucky Country" below . Here is a quote from it relating to the division of labour at home between the genders (p. 83). In the past, the way society arranged for the...
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