One study that’s been cited a lot in favor of Joint Custody laws is Wallerstein’s and Kelly’s five-year study which found that children who maintain relationships with both parents adjusted best after a divorce divorce.

But Wallerstein’s study conclusions were for families where “the conflict between the divorcing partners had subsided,” not for all divorced parents - which is the trouble with studies of Joint Custody outcomes looking at families which chose Joint Custody, who are likely to be more affluent, better educated and more cooperative than the average divorcing parents. In her later followup of the same sample group, Wallerstein found that the most destructive post-divorce situation for children is where the parents are extremely hostile to each other. If both parents have custody of the child, the children can end up caught in the middle, which is a terrible situation - but one that’s much more likely if courts force Joint Custody on unwilling parent(s).

There’s also the value of small children having a stable environment, and going to a single school. It’s one thing for my friend Greg, whose parents divorced when he was 12 and voluntarily chose Joint Custody. Luckily, Greg’s parents had similar incomes, making it possible for them both to live in the same school district, in walking distance of each other, with Greg having a bedroom in each home that he could wander to at will. I think that outcome was, without a doubt, the best possible set-up for all concerned in that situation.

It’s quite another thing for small child to have to live equally in two households in alternate weeks or months - small children being shuttled from home to home report feeling disoriented and unstable, and sometimes have trouble with their schoolwork and social skills. (See “The experience of children in a joint-custody arrangement,” American Journal of Orthospychiatry v51 #3) This is something two cooperative parents will be able to deal with, we might suppose - but two parents who had gone through a nasty, hateful divorce?

And how is Joint Physical Custody handled with two parents of uneven incomes (the most common thing by far), who perhaps can’t live in the same town & school system? What happens when two parents who can’t agree that the ocean is wet need to decide what kids their child is allowed to play with, or what school to send their child to? What if one parent gets a great job offer - or a great new marriage - in another state - should the other parent be required to move, too?

All of these problems are reasonably solvable when parents get along well - but among parents who cannot get along, these situations are liable to lead to harmful tugs-of-wars with the child as the rope.

I have trouble accepting the idea of a right-wing feminist.

Partly that’s because most of the examples I’ve come across - the IWF, Christina Hoff Sommers and ifeminism.com, for example - are so discouraging. It seems to me that to be a feminist, one ought be in favor of feminism. Therefore, it’s difficult for me to accept that these “right-wing feminists” - none of whom ever take the feminist side in current controversies, and all of whom make their livings doing nothing but slamming feminism - are feminists.

But examples aside (after all, that’s just anecdotal evidence), as a matter of theory I think right-wing politics and feminism are fundamentally in conflict.

As I understand it (and speaking in sweeping generalizations), there are two dominant brands of right-wingers in the US today: social conservatives and libertarians. Social conservatism is pretty obviously incompatible with feminism: social conservatives are anti-abortion, anti-lesbian, anti-women-in-the-workplace. Basically, they’re anti-feminist.

Libertarianism is on the surface more compatible with feminism. Libertarians disapprove of sexist discrimination, believe in equal legal rights for lesbians (and gay men), and usually don’t think it’s the government’s proper role to enforce childbirth on unwilling women.

But there’s more to feminism than disapproving of sexism and keeping abortion legal. There’s a huge variety of feminisms out there, but there are a couple of things virtually all feminists believe. One is that feminists can, by taking collective action, change society in ways that improves the status of women-as-a-whole. Towards this end, feminists have worked collectively for battered women’s shelters (and have sometimes lobbied for government funding), rape crisis lines (ditto), anti-discrimination laws, affirmative action, pay equity, state-funded day care, the family leave act, a higher minimum wage, government-funded research on violence against women, and so on.

But libertarianism opposes most collective action: for libertarians, everything is about the individual. Strict libertarianism opposes laws against discrimination; if an individual business owner wants to discriminate, he should have that freedom, because after all it’s his business and his money. Similarly, pay equity, affirmative action, minimum wage and family leave are bad, because government shouldn’t tell business owners what to do. Rape crisis lines and battered women’s shelters should be provided by private charity and markets, not by tax dollars “taken at gunpoint.” And so on, and so on.

Of course, I’m not saying that no feminist can disagree with welfare, or affirmative action, or family leave, or whatever. Feminists disagree on things like this all the time. But can someone be against virtually every policy that might help women and still be a feminist? After all, it’s not just that libertarians want to prevent new laws to help women: libertarians also want to repeal most of the current laws that help women.

Getting rid of Social Security would hurt women more than men; getting rid of the minimum wage would hurt women more than men (because more women are minimum-wage workers); getting rid of anti-discrimination laws would hurt women more; I could go on with examples like these all day. All these policies would hurt women’s interests, and all of them are favored by libertarians. If virtually all the policies a person favors would hurt women’s interests, doesn’t that make it a contradiction to call that person a feminist?

So that’s why I think libertarianism is contrary to feminism. Does that mean that I think libertarians can’t be feminists? No, not really. I think there’s a bad contradiction there, but people deal with contradictions in their lives all the time, after all. But I’m skeptical that such a feminist will ever create any meaningful change for gender justice.

There’s one other reason I think it’s unlikely that any coherent philosophy could be both right-wing and feminist. Feminism’s mandate is justice, and especially justice for women. But fighting for “justice” for women isn’t meaningful if it only applies to some women. Consider the feminist principle that “all women must have the freedom to choose abortion.” If we’re serious about that principle, it’s not enough that abortion remain legal; it also has to be meaningfully available to all women. That means feminism has to concern itself at least partly with class justice - if poor women can’t afford abortions, then poor women lack the freedom to choose abortion.

Similar arguments could be made about why feminism has to not only consider gender justice, but also the places where gender justice “intersects” with racial justice, economic justice, justice for lesbians, and so on. Certainly, there are many individual right-wingers who are personally anti-racist, concerned with the plight of the poor, and so on. But on the whole, it is the left which is fighting for social justice on all these fronts; and insofar as feminism has to be concerned with social justice for all women (and not just white middle-class first-world ablebodied heterosexual women), it’s more natural for feminism to ally with the left than with the right.

(By the way, I’d make a similar argument that to be consistent, all non-feminist social justice groups must be concerned with gender justice; i.e., just as feminism without concern for economic justice is incomplete, socialism without concern for gender justice is incomplete.)

UPDATE: Dr. Hager has told reporters that he will be leaving the FDA’s Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee at the end of June. So that’s good news. So long, and please be under the next bus out of town. But it still leaves Plan B unavailable over the counter, unfortunately.

Dr. W. David Hager, a gynecologist and leading conservative activist on “women’s issues,” is in the news today for seeming to admit having been asked to send a “minority report” regarding “Plan B” contraception to the FDA. The overwhelming majority of the expert panelists had recommended making “Plan B” an over-the-counter drug. From the Washington Post:

Speaking at the Asbury College chapel in Wilmore, Ky., Hager said, “I was asked to write a minority opinion that was sent to the commissioner of the FDA. For only the second time in five decades, the FDA did not abide by its advisory committee opinion, and the measure was rejected.”

Hager told the group that he had not written his report from an “evangelical Christian perspective,” but from a scientific one — arguing that the panel had too little information on how easier availability of Plan B would affect girls younger than 16. The FDA later cited that lack of information as the reason it rejected the application.

“I argued from a scientific perspective, and God took that information, and he used it through this minority report to influence the decision,” Hager said. “Once again, what Satan meant for evil, God turned into good.” [...]

While the FDA sometimes rejects the recommendations of its expert panels, the Plan B case was highly unusual in that the vote was so lopsided in favor of over-the-counter sales and its own science staff had also strongly favored approval.

As far as I can understand, whether or not there’s a scandal here depends on that horribly unspecific “I was asked…” Who did the asking? If it was someone at the FDA, or the Bush Administration, that could be an example of improperly trying to make politics - or personal religious convictions - influence what should be a decision made on scientific grounds.

Unfortunately, even if President Bush himself called Hager and asked him to make up some basis for rejecting the application, as long as Hagar is smart enough to not say so in public, I doubt anything here will stick. The truth is, virtually everyone knows that the primary grounds for opposing Plan B is not scientific. The Republican contempt for science is not exactly news.

Maybe I’m wrong; maybe something here will stick, or someone will be able to use this information to pressure the FDA into letting scientific concerns rule the day. I hope so.

But there’s another, ultra-disturbing aspect to this story. Dr. Hagar - the author of As Jesus Cared for Women, and one of the go-to conservative activists for moral and medical guidance on sexual issues - has been credibly accused of rape by his ex-wife, co-author of some of his published writing and a Republican, conservative Christian.

From a Nation article released today (these are just bits and pieces, read the whole thing):

By the 1980s, according to Davis, Hager was pressuring her to let him videotape and photograph them having sex. She consented, and eventually she even let Hager pay her for sex that she wouldn’t have otherwise engaged in–for example, $2,000 for oral sex, “though that didn’t happen very often because I hated doing it so much. So though it was more painful, I would let him sodomize me, and he would leave a check on the dresser,” Davis admitted to me with some embarrassment. This exchange took place almost weekly for several years.

Money was an explosive issue in their household. Hager kept an iron grip on the family purse strings.[...]

By 1995, according to Davis’s account, Hager’s treatment of his wife had moved beyond morally reprehensible to potentially felonious. [...] For the next seven years Hager sodomized Davis without her consent while she slept roughly once a month until their divorce in 2002, she claims.[...]

As Hager began fielding calls from the White House personnel office in 2001, the stress in the household–and, with it, the abuse–hit an all-time high, according to Davis. [...]

For a while, fears of poverty, isolation and damnation were enough to keep Davis from seeking a divorce. She says that she had never cheated on Hager, but after reuniting with a high school sweetheart (not her current husband) in the chaotic aftermath of September 11, she had a brief affair. En route to their first, and only, rendezvous, she prayed aloud. “I said to the Lord, ‘All right. I do not want to die without having sex with someone I love,’” she remembers. “‘I want to know what that’s like, Lord. I know that it’s a sin, and I know this is adultery. But I have to know what it’s like.’”

Davis was sure that God would strike her dead on her way home that weekend. But when nothing happened, she took it as a good sign. Back in Lexington, she walked through her front door and made a decision right there on the spot. “I said, ‘David, I want a divorce.’”

Marital rape is a foreign concept to many women with stories like this one. Indeed, Linda Davis had never heard the term until midway through her divorce.[...]

As it turned out, when the dust settled after their divorce, nearly everyone in the Hagers’ Christian and medical circles in Lexington had sided with Hager, who told people that his wife was mentally unstable and had moved in with another man (she moved in with friends).

Davis had only told a handful of people about the abuse throughout her marriage, but several of her longtime confidantes confirmed for this article that she had told them of the abuse at the time it was occurring. Wilson, the attorney, spoke to me on the record, as did Brenda Bartella Peterson, Davis’s close friend of twenty-five years. Several others close to Davis spoke to me off the record. Two refused to speak to me and denounced Davis for going public, but they did not contest her claims.[...]

As disturbing as they are on their own, Linda Davis’s allegations take on even more gravity in light of Hager’s public role as a custodian of women’s health. [...] The public has a right to call on Dr. David Hager to answer Linda Davis’s charges before he is entrusted with another term. After all, few women would knowingly choose a sexual abuser as their gynecologist, and fewer still would likely be comfortable with the idea of letting one serve as a federal adviser on women’s health issues.

I feel bad about how much I cut out there. Read the whole article, it’s quite compelling. And infuriating.

My first reaction is to feel very sad for all that Linda Davis has suffered.

I’m leery of politicizing Davis’ personal tragedy too much. But I’m struck by the fact that Linda Davis - who had never even heard of “marital rape” until recently, and who seems unlikely to know much about feminism - has described an abusive marriage that matches, in every detail, what feminists say about how abusers operate.

The abuser is controlling; the abuser can be charming; the abuser believes in the male right (and “duty”) of taking a leadership position within the household; the abuser has weird issues with prostitution and pornography; and the abuser knows how to get the community on his side. Fear of poverty, fear of disbelief, commitment to her family obligations and her marriage, and not having anyplace to go keeps the victim by her abuser’s side. Davis is probably no feminist, but the story she tells is exactly what feminists have been saying about abuse for decades.

(Although Davis probably doesn’t see it this way, I find it unsurprising that it was only when she built a new relationship - that is, only when she had someplace else to go - that she was able to demand a divorce. I don’t criticize Davis even slightly for that; I only wish that she could have found a way to leave much earlier, and that all abuse victims could have someplace else to go).

This is what’s wrong with the idea of a male duty to head the household, in my view; no doubt some kind men take on that “duty” with kindness, but not all men are kind. An abuser and rapist like David Hager (and I know he hasn’t been and probably never will be convicted in a courtroom, but in my personal opinion Davis’ account is entirely believable) takes that message as a license to abuse and rape. And a community that beleives in male headship will take his side and defend his “rights” until given genuinely extraordinary evidence of abuse.

And, as the Nation article says, it’s beyond disturbing that this rapist and abuser has become one of the nation’s leading “guardians” and “advocates” for women’s health.

It’s sometimes not that easy to write laws that can be applied equally to all people. A law that’s equal on its face may not be equal when applied.

Let’s look at a commonplace example of an “equal” law: the law against murder. But it’s not enough to just outlaw murder: we have to define murder, and define what are the legal defenses to being charged with murder. What kind of model we imagine our laws applying to will affect whether or not they’re actually equal when applied to real people.

So our laws say that killing in self-defense can be legal, and define “self-defense” as legitimate when a “reasonable person,” looking at the situation, would have felt that “imminent threat or a confrontational circumstance involving an overt act by an aggressor” was taking place. (The language I’m quoting comes from the Kansas Supreme Court, by the way, but the law is pretty similar to this nationwide).

In other words, once Brad pulls a knife and begins advancing on Bill, it’s legal self-defense for Bill to pull a gun and shoot Brad. But before Brad pulled that knife - committing an “overt act” that made him an “imminent” threat - it would have been murder for Bill to suddenly shoot Brad.

Is that self-defense law equal? Well, it’s certainly equal in the sense of being possible to hold women and men to the same standard. It’s very unequal, however, in terms of what threats to life women and men are most likely to face.

The most likely murderer of a man is a male stranger or acquaintance, and if a man defends himself, it’s likely to be an instance of “mutual combat” - Bob pulls a knife on Bill, Bill shoots Bob. The laws on self-defense are written for a model of what kind of situations are likely to happen to men.

In contrast, the most likely murderer of a woman is an abusive husband or boyfriend. Does the “mutual combat” model make much sense in this case?

It’s interesting to note what this requires of a battered woman who, though years of intimate knowledge of her boyfriend or husband, has excellent reason to believe her life is in danger: in order to defend her life, she must wait until her abuser is awake, alert and attacking before it is permissible to defend herself.

In effect, the defendant must act in a way that puts her life at profound risk to defend herself without being convicted of murder. That this is all judged against a “reasonable person” standard is extremely ironic, since no reasonable person would choose to put their life at such extreme risk if a less risky alternative is available. To meet a reasonable person standard, defendants must act irrationally, and fail to protect their own lives effectively. Isn’t that bizarre?

Would a reasonable hostage, if he knows he is no physical match for a terrorist captor, choose to wait for the man-to-man confrontation? No, of course not; a reasonable hostage would attack while his captor was asleep or had his back turned, if at all possible. But a reasonable battered woman cannot legally act to protect herself until her life is about to end - when it’s least likely that she’ll be able to defend herself.

This is what happens when laws are designed to be enforced equally according to a male model. The truth is, “equal enforcement” isn’t the same as “equality.” If the laws aren’t written to account for the real circumstances of people’s lives (not just men’s lives), then they will be unequal in application - no matter how equally enforced they are.

Now, to solve for this, we don’t have to have one set of self-defense rules for women, and another for men. We do have to have rules for self-defense that are molded around the kinds of situations in which women are most likely to have to defend themselves, as well as the kinds of situations in which men are most likely to have to defend themselves. The “reasonable person” standard has to become just that; what reasonable people, of both genders, do, instead of just what reasonable men do.

From an op-ed by Stephanie Coontz in the LA Times: OurKids Are Not Doomed

Tying such dire predictions of social decay to divorce and single motherhood seemed credible in the 1970s and 1980s. But a funny thing happened in the 1990s: Almost every negative social trend tracked by the census, the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Justice declined.

Teen birthrates fell by 30% between 1991 and 2002. The number of violent crimes in schools was halved between 1992 and 2002. Teen homicide rates dropped to their lowest level since 1966. Teen suicides decreased by 25%, and drug abuse, binge drinking and smoking all fell.

Yet the number of couples living together unmarried increased by more than 70% over the decade; the population at large increased by only 13% during this period. Gay and lesbian parenting became more common. The number of families headed by single mothers rose five times faster than the number of married-couple families.

Obviously, attributing the improvements of the 1990s to the continued increases in families headed by single moms is as absurd as blaming all the social ills of the 1980s on divorce.

Single parenthood does increase the risk that teens will get into trouble. But so do poverty, parental conflict, frequent school relocation, parental substance abuse and even an emotionally distant relationship with married parents.

Studies show that the majority of teens who exhibit serious behavior problems have five or more separate risk factors in their lives.

Read the whole thing, that’s my advice.

As I’m sure folks have noticed, Pseudo-Adrienne hasn’t posted in a while. This is partly because she’s been having a life (”life” being well known for its blogging-output-reducing properties), but mainly because her laptop in in the shop getting major repairwork done.

If all turns out well, Pseudo-Adrienne’s laptop returns to her, and she in turn returns to “Alas,” on Monday.

[This was originally a comment left by La Lubu on an earlier post; I'm "promoting" the comment to be its own post. --Amp]

“Preference.” Interesting word. Some people around here think that women simply prefer to not take tradeswork into consideration. But there’s more here than meets the eye.

When I entered the trades, the usual working hours were 8AM-4:30PM M-F. That has slowly morphed into 7AM-3:30PM, M-F; and some areas it’s 7AM-5:30PM, M-Th. And yeah, this has had an effect on the number of women who can consider going into construction.

I live in a city of 120,000 people, which by Internet standards is a very small town. By Illinois standards, it’s a decent size city. There is one child-care facility (three locations) that opens before 7AM. Just one. That facility, and a couple of others, are the only ones open after 6PM (most facilities require you to pick up your child before 5:30PM). There is only one child-care facility open on Saturday. There are no child-care facilities open on Sunday. None.

What this means, is that single women, or women with husbands that work difficult hours, or on the road, or who are in the military, or whatever, are unable to choose this line of work. “Flex-time” is not an option in my field. There have been cases of contractors adjusting the hours for male journeymen whose wives do shift-work, and thus had to take their kids to the SCOPE program (before and afterschool care within the public school system; the hours don’t begin until 7:30AM), but no contractor has ever made the adjustment for apprentices (male or female) because apprentices need supervision by journeymen (translation? someone would have to be paid overtime).

Single women have always been the largest group of women interested in tradeswork, and the largest group who’ve stayed. But not without a scramble. I’ve seen women drop out of the apprenticeship program because try as they might, they couldn’t solve the child-care scramble. For a while, my solution was to have my retired mother be my child-care provider. Now my mother is terminal, and that is no longer an option. I’ve been using the one child-care facility that opens before 7AM. They don’t accept kids older than seven. What will I do when my daughter turns eight? I don’t know yet.

The trades have had a difficult time retaining skilled women. A common scenario is a woman who has been in ten-fifteen years starts taking night classes and gets a degree, then gets out of the trades. Why? Well, because contractors aren’t promoting us to foreman’s positions; we get scads of opportunities to work for (white) male foremen younger than our old t-shirts (not much of an exaggeration, unfortunately). If you aren’t a foreman by the time you’re forty, your earning potential will plummet. There is plenty of documented eveidence of age discrimination in the construction field. The Labor Paper in Peoria had an article about it; unfortunately it is not available online.

We are also laid off first. I’m not kidding about the “but the men really need the job” attitude. Check out a book by Susan Eisenberg (a journeyman wireman) called “We’ll Call You If We Need You“. It’s an in-depth account of the struggles facing women in construction. See also another book by Victoria King (another journeyman wireman) entitled “Manhandled: Black Females”. It delves into racism as well as sexism in the trades, but Ms. King, like Ms. Eisenberg, still advocates for women entering the trades. Both were single mothers. Neither still works in the trades (I believe Susan Eisenberg is teaching now; Victoria King is an attorney).

Most of us who came into the trades and stayed come from a less-privileged background, so it takes a while for us to…not notice the discrepancies, we notice them right off the bat!…..but to assign them a value. Once we start comparing what our pension statements look like in comparison with our brothers, and how often we are laid off in comparison….we start looking for alternatives. That, and most women have to wait until their kids get older (and can watch themselves) before taking night classes. Some tradeswomen find their alternative in Civil Service positions. Some aim for administrative positions in their Local, or in their International. And some just get out, with most telling other women not to bother.

Not me. I still think this is an excellent way for women to make a living. It’s the best alternative if college is too costly an option for you. But job hours incompatible with child care options is a barrier. A huge barrier.

I’ve been lucky. For one thing, I had my child at an extremely advanced age by Illinois standards…32. And I’ve already attained journeyman status, and know a lot of the ins-and-outs. I can try to negotiate “flexible hours”, if need be (and file a grievance if the contractor in question provided that benefit to male journeymen, but won’t for me). My journeyman status also means I have the option of applying for Civil Service positions. I came into the trades during a decent economy, and so haven’t had a long-term layoff until recently. When work gets slow, faces on the job get more white and more male. Call it discrimination (because it is), or if the D-word makes you uncomfortable, call it the “halo effect”. There is a reason white male apprentices have an easy time finding mentors, and get invited out for after-work extracurriculars. There is a reason white male journeymen have an greater chance of staying when work gets slow. Hey, who wants to lay off a buddy? But the folks you don’t know so well? (That’s why I always advise female and apprentices of color to get seriously involved in the Local, in the labor community, and in political activities sponsored by the labor community…..it’s about the only way to jump-start a real professional relationship with one’s co-workers, that is anywhere near being on-par with what the white guys naturally fall into).

Hey, what’s life without the Struggle, right? But that doesn’t mean we have to fall into the “three monkeys” routine and act like all “choices” are equal, or even that they are really choices.

Via Ann Althouse, an interesting review in the Times of Linda Greenhouse’s book Becoming Justice Blackmun. The book focuses on the relationship between Justice Blackmun and Chief Justice Warren Burger, a friendship that wouldn’t seem plausible in fiction:

Justice Blackmun’s 60-year relationship with Chief Justice Burger, as Ms. Greenhouse notes, “would seem unlikely if depicted in a novel.” The two met in kindergarten in St. Paul, remained friends until adulthood and were appointed to the Supreme Court within a year of each other.

What really caught my interest, however, was the discussion of Roe v Wade.

In her careful account of the decision, Ms. Greenhouse shows that after Justice Blackmun resolved to strike down restrictions on abortion in 1972, he spent the rest of his career in search of constitutional arguments that might justify the decision. His colleagues found the thin legal analysis in his original draft entirely inadequate. Because of his experience as former counsel to the Mayo Clinic, Justice Blackmun’s focus was always on the rights of doctors rather than the rights of women. But he never produced a convincing constitutional defense of either rationale.

Justice Blackmun was no feminist, and he strenuously resisted claims involving women’s rights for most of his tenure on the court. He complained when the court voted before Sandra Day O’Connor’s arrival in 1980 to omit the traditional reference to “Mr. Justice.” He was impatient with the briefs that Ruth Bader Ginsburg filed as an advocate for the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of women’s rights, calling one of them “mildly offensive and arrogant,” and dismissing her as “too smart.” After Justice Ginsburg was appointed to the court in 1993, Justice Blackmun continued to resent the fact that she had criticized Roe as too broad.

By the 1990’s, however, constitutional scholars came to agree with Justice Ginsburg that women’s equality was a more plausible grounding for the right to choose than Justice Blackmun’s focus on medical privacy. On the day he resigned in April 1994, Justice Blackmun belatedly called Roe v. Wade “a step that had to be taken as we go down the road toward the full emancipation of women.” As Ms. Greenhouse notes, “On Harry Blackmun’s improbable journey, becoming a feminist icon was perhaps the most improbable destination of all.”

• Judge Sends Pregnant Mom To Jail For Mother’s Day, Gives Custody To Abusive Dad. Trish Wilson is blogging up a storm about this case: here on her blog, and here and here on her other website.
• Speaking of Trish, I’ve been meaning to point out these two studies she blogged about: One finding that marriage counseling doesn’t work very well, and one finding that “adolescents who take public virginity pledges are just as likely to engage in sexual activity as those who do not, according to a study of Los Angeles and San Francisco teens.”
• Damn, does this piss me off. Remember that pro-tolerance ad from the United Church of Christ which ABC refused to run because (they claimed) ABC’s had a policy against accepting ads from religious groups? Apparently it’s only gay-accepting religious groups they turn down. ABC is running explicitly “faith-based” ads from the very religious - and very gay-hating - Focus on the Family. Wanna tell ABC what you think? 818 460-7477. (Curtsy to The Sideshow.)
• Utopian Hell does a wonderful job “keeping her eye on the ball” as she analyzes that Title IX case in Colorado.
• There’s a 1 in 4,745 chance that you’ll someday die due to falling off your bed, or off a chair, or some other fall involving furniture. Which is much higher than the chance you’ll someday die from drowning in a bathtub (1 in 10,582). For more fun death statistics, check out this page put together by the National Safety Council.
• Crooked Timber presents South Park Republican Bingo (which seems like an odd name, since South Park Republicans are supposed to hate stuff like this). Nevertheless, it’s really impressive seeing it all put together in one chart.
• Something that could have been included in South Park Republican Bingo: in Virginia, American history textbooks omit the Civil War.
• Amanda at Pandagon concludes her excellent five-part series on the men’s rights movement. I’ve closely read and enjoyed all of these posts.
• BBC NEWS: A two-day prison siege in Australia has ended after inmates agreed to exchange their hostage for a delivery of pizzas.
• Suzanne Nossel describes the Top Ten Things the UN Does Well.
• Interesting - and, to me, compelling - argument against Oregon’s assisted suicide law: “If assisted suicide were really about personal autonomy, it would be available to all suicidal people. But really, assisted suicide statutes are the ultimate societal judgment that the life of a person with a disability is not as worthwhile as that of a non-disabled person.” The Gimp Parade has more.
• Pro-Life wacko thinks that everyone in Georgia has sex with mules.
• Christine at Ms Magazine highlights a bunch of interesting articles about Mother’s Day.
• AmbivaBlog has a well-observed post musing on the pleasures of blogging - and how blogging changes how you view blogging. “But the blog generates a drawing sensation. Every day it’s empty again and needs to be fed.” Curtsy to Ann Althouse.
• “It has taken me a long time to decide that this article is not a hoax. I so wanted it to be a joke. It is written by one Ronald E. Williams, an American Talibanist of an extreme kind, and it advocates corporeal punishment of children.” It gets worse - much worse. Go to Echidne’s blog to read the rest.

Sydney got ahold of her daddy’s glasses, and suddenly she looks so smart.

Looking so sharp in specs is by no means the only sign that Sidney is swiftly becoming a pint-sized soi dissant cultural elite bleeding-heart intellectual sheeple - as regular “Alas” readers may recall, she’s also been spotted enjoying the New York Review of Books.

(This is one of a series of posts on the wage gap.)

Over on Amanda’s blog, reader “JenK” writes:

Men are more willing to take on dangerous jobs so can find better paying jobs than those who are not willing to risk their lives.

This is an argument I’ve seen before. When anti-feminists explain why the gender wage gap doesn’t exist or is justified, they frequently claim the wage gap is reflects men getting paid more for hazardous jobs or dangerous jobs. Often men’s rights activist (MRA) Warren Farrell is cited. The following arguments are typical:

• John Leo: Farrell argues that many men outearn women by a willingness to take risky and dangerous jobs as well as work that exposes them to stress and bad weather…
• Arrah Nielsen (from the IWF’s website): The real reason than men tend to out-earn women is the choices they make. Men are far more likely to take unpleasant and dangerous jobs, what Farrell calls the “death and exposure professions.” For example, firefighting, truck driving, mining and logging — to name just a few high-risk jobs — are all more than 95 percent male. Conversely, low risk jobs like secretarial work and childcare are more than 95 percent female.
• Glenn Sacks: Of the 25 most dangerous jobs in the United States (according to the U.S. Department of Labor), all of them are overwhelmingly or exclusively male. Over 90% of American workplace deaths and serious injuries occur to men. It is not unfair in the least that dangerous jobs pay more than safe jobs at the same skill level.

The anti-feminist argument here sounds logical and just. It’s true that men are much more likely to die or to be injured on the job than women. Surely no one would be willing to risk their life without getting paid a premium for it; and no reasonable person would argue that extra pay for extra danger is unjust. So how could feminists object to a “danger premium” that raises men’s wages?

The problem is, there is no premium for dangerous jobs. And since the “danger premium” doesn’t really exist, it can’t explain the wage gap.

This post will first look at some general evidence, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showing that high pay doesn’t equal high wages. Next, I’ll discuss the dubious right-wing assumptions implicit in the belief that dangerous jobs are paid for with higher wages. Finally, I’ll briefly discuss some of the peer-reviewed economic studies showing that high risk isn’t associated with high pay (and is even associated with lower pay, for non-union workers).

There is no premium for dangerous jobs.

Let’s look at some graphs (all graphs in this post were taken from the Bureau of Labor Statistics website). Here are some of the most dangerous industries to work in in the USA, based on on-the-job deaths:

Just looking at that graph should make people suspicious of the “high risk = high pay” myth. Yes, construction workers and miners earn decent pay, but agricultural workers? They face the highest risk of death, and get paid less than almost any other class of workers in the USA. From a BLS page entitled “lowest paying occupations in 2002“:

If danger jobs really paid a premium, we wouldn’t expect the most dangerous industry in America to be the second lowest-paid. Indeed, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics investigated job traits that are associated with wage premiums, they found that “Job attributes relating to … physically demanding or dangerous jobs… do not seem to affect wages.” Here’s a bar graph. As you can see, what pays most is specialized knowledge. The very tiniest bar, all the way over on the right, that’s actually slightly negative? That’s the “death and exposure” effect on wages Warren Farrell is talking about.

The right-wing economic assumptions behind the anti-feminist economic theory

Many anti-feminists are conservative or libertarian in viewpoint (the IWF, for example, exists chiefly to put a “good for women” face on whatever the Republican party’s current talking points are). However, some MRAs - including Warren Farrell and Glenn Sacks - think of themselves as liberal on many issues, despite their opposition to feminism. This makes their easy acceptance of right-wing economic assumptions implicit in the “high risk = high wages” theory somewhat surprising.

The key right-wing assumption - one frequently used to argue against policies such as the minimum wage and worker protection laws - is the belief that the free market produces the best possible outcome for workers. Obviously, workers would never accept jobs that risk life or injury without getting paid extra for it, right?

Well, no.

Believing that high risk is paid for by a wage premium means making a lot of assumptions; and if even one of those assumptions is off-base, then risk and wages might not be connected at all. From an article by economists Peter Dorman and Paul Hagstrom:

The theoretical case for wage compensation for risk is plausible but hardly certain. If workers have utility functions in which the expected likelihood and cost of occupational hazards enter as arguments, if they are fully informed of risks, if firms possess sufficient information on worker expectations and preferences (directly or through revealed preferences), if safety is costly to provide and not a public good, and if risk is fully transacted in anonymous, perfectly competitive labor markets, then workers will receive wage premia that exactly offset the disutility of assuming greater risk of injury or death. Of course, none of these assumptions applies in full and if one or more of them is sufficiently at variance with the real world, actual compensation may be less than utility-offsetting, nonexistent, or even negative - a combination of low pay and poor working conditions. [Source: Dorman and Hagstrom, "Wage Compensation for Dangerous Work Revisited," Industrial and Labor Relations Review vol 52(1) Oct 1998]

What would make a labor market less than perfectly competative? Many things. Feminists and liberals are likely to think of the effects of discrimination and persistant unemployment, which may leave some workers without the option of refusing to take a low-paying, high risk job. There are also industry premiums - workers do not move freely between industries, and some industries simply pay higher than others, in a pattern that cannot be reliably accounted for by skill requirements, education, risk, etc..

And of course, workers often lack the ability to accurately access risks. For instance, an agricultural worker may assume that she or he (most likely he) isn’t doing anything risky if his job doesn’t involve operating heavy-duty farm equiptment; but he’s far more likely to be killed on the job if his duties involve driving. And the construction worker hanging from a girder thirty stories above the ground? He’s much less likely to be killed than the construction worker who stays on the ground driving a pick-up. (Leigh & Garcia, “Some problems with value-of-life estimates based on labor market data” Journal of Forensic Economics, Spring-Summer 2000 v13)

Because workers do not move freely from one industry to another, differences in how much different industries pay may prevent wages from being perfectly competative. (As I’ll explain later this post, this is a particularly important factor when looking at wages and risk).

The point is, the assumption that the marketplace compensates workers for risk is, in the end, another example of blind ideological faith in the market to always produce the best outcome. We should be skeptical of such assumptions.

What academic studies have found

Several academic studies have found a significant connection between risk and higher wages. These studies generally don’t include agricultural workers - which is possibly a problem, since this cuts out the US workers who face the highest risks for the lowest pay. Furthermore, these studies usually don’t account for the differences in pay between industries - meaning that they can easily mistake the higher industry wages in an industry like construction or mining, with higher pay for risks.

How do we know that higher average pay in those industries aren’t premiums paid to workers in physically risky jobs? By comparing employees who face comparable levels of risk in different industries. A secretary working for a mining firm is not more likely to die on the job than a secretary working for an elementary school, for example. But when economists J. Paul Leigh and Jorge A. Garcia compared clerks across industries, they found that the so-called “danger premium” paid to construction and mining workers applied even to clerks facing no danger. The standard economic theory - stating that firms pay a premium to workers facing a higher risk of death or injury - cannot explain why a construction firm would choose to pay a low-skill clerk much more than an insurance firm would.

Dorman and Hagstrom’s analysis (pdf link) found that if industry wasn’t accounted for (and agricultural workers weren’t included), higher risk seems to be associated with higher wages. But once other factors were accounted for, there was almost no association between risk and pay. And what little association existed was negative - that is, workers who face a higher risk of death actually get paid lower wages than similar workers facing less risk.

This “negative premium” - workers getting paid less for facing risk - only happens to non-unionized workers. This result is not easily explained by conservative economic assumptions. It is, however, not unexpected to left-wingers, who would expect that worker bargaining power would have more to do with wages than risky work conditions.

Conclusions

First conclusion: The anti-feminist argument that the gender wage gap is (partly or fully) caused by justified higher pay for men who take on riskier work is not true. Evidence shows that taking on risky work isn’t associated with higher pay.

(Note that a related argument made by some MRAs - that sexist occupational segregation leads to men being more likely to be injured or killed on the job - holds true. That is sexist, and unfair. Men’s greater likelihood of workplace injury and death has nothing to do with the wage gap, but that doesn’t mean it’s not unjust.)

Second conclusion: The widely-shared conservative assumption that the market produces just and fair outcomes is not supported by looking at how the market compensates for risk. Workers who risk their lives often receive very low compensation, and for non-unionized workers they may be paid even less than similar workers in less risky jobs. Quoting Dorman and Hagstrom:

In plain terms, nonunion workers in dangerous jobs are, in many cases, simply unlucky; they have found their way in to situations of high risk and low pay and would presumably move to a better job if they could. …

From the perspective of public policy, dropping the assumption that risk coefficients fully reflect workers’ desired tradoffs strengthens the case for regulatory policies to promote safe working conditions… [and there is a basis for] assigning a higher priority to policies that target the conditions of the less-compensated.

The bottom line: Neither the anti-feminist, nor the conservative, assumptions about risk and pay hold water. The wage gap between men and women is not fair or justified; and the market is not fairly compensating those workers (mostly men) who face the highest risk of death or injury at their jobs.

This Saturday is Free Comics Day!

This means a few things. It means that if you drop by your friendly neighborhood comics shop, maybe they’ll give you some free comics.

And it also means that all Girlamatic comics will be free all day tomorrow. Free! Free! Here’s a not-especially-formal statement from the publisher, Joey Manley:

As a sort of unofficial tip of the hat to Free Comic Book Day, and to celebrate our recent recovery from a catastrophic server crash, Girlamatic.com’s archives will be free to all visitors all day on Saturday, May 7, 2005, starting at midnight Eastern time.

http://www.girlamatic.com

If you haven’t yet checked out the great comics on the site (including Jenn Manley Lee’s amazing “Dicebox,” Jason Thompson’s creepy teen-angst drorror — horror and drama, get it? — “The Stiff,” the Narbonic spin-off “Li’l Mell,” or the too-cute-for-words “Jeepers,” just to name a few, now’s your chance!

Girlamatic is an award-winning webcomics publication featuring lots of comics that aren’t specifically targetted at male readers, and that, you know, kind of sort of are mostly intended for female audiences. But guys are welcome or whatever. I guess that’s the politically-correct way to put it. Or, as Girlamaticker Lisa Jonte puts it — “Come for the cooties, stay for the comics!”

Subscriptions cost $2.95/month or $29.95/year and include heaping helpings of our eternal gratitude.

As most “Alas” readers already know, my own comic Hereville is a Girlamatic comic. So if you’d like to read a bunch of Hereville for free, tomorrow’s the day!

Oh, and hey - when Boing Boing reproduced Joey’s statement, they also included a Hereville drawing by yours truly! I’m on Boing Boing! Super-keen. (Thanks to Jakob for pointing this out to me).

[UPDATE: Broken image on the Hereville page has now been fixed, so people can actually see the new page.]

Another week, another page; I hope I keep this up.

This page has a number of “firsts” in it. Artwise, it’s the first Hereville page drawn on real paper rather than copier paper; and it’s the first that I’ve used a real brush on (this very cool Japanese brush Jenn gave me years ago) rather than a brush-marker.

It’s also the first page that Mirka doesn’t appear on. Nothing like ten panels of Zindel in a row to remind me that the way I’ve decided to draw his coat and hat is a total pain in the neck. :-)

Right now, I really like panel 9.

The color isn’t done yet [UPDATE: now it is!], and finishing that has to take a back-seat to other things (my day job, the new Dollars and Sense cartoon) right now, but I hope to update with a color version in a day or two.

If you don’t mind listening to audio stuff, check out this debate between Evan Wolfson, Executive Director of Freedom to Marry, and Reverand Lou Sheldon, President of the Traditional Values Coalition. The debate took place on April 20th at Stanford Law School.

I found it startling how unprepared Sheldon was; when discussing the question of same-sex marriage in the Scandinavian countries, for example, he said that he didn’t know the difference between causation and association. It’s also striking how poorly hidden the Reverand’s obvious anti-gay bias is (at one point he dismisses a document Wolfson cites by sneering that the authors were gay). I kept imagining people from the “opposing SSM isn’t anti-gay” wing listening to Reverand Sheldon and wincing.

I frequently read the reasonable opposition to same-sex marriage - people like Elizabeth at Family Scholars or Eve Tushnet, who are well-informed and don’t have a personal bias against lesbians and gays. If I’m not careful, this could lead me to a distorted view of the opposition; bigots like Reverand Sheldon are much more typical of the anti-SSM movement’s leadership.

Anyhow, it’s fun listening if you have something to do with your hands for a long while, like inking a page of your comic book or something like that.

I don’t have much time to blog today (or this week) due to drawing deadlines; so I’m just going to quote from this article in yesterday’s Times.

Researchers at the University of Alberta carefully observed how parents treated their children during trips to the supermarket. They found that physical attractiveness made a big difference.

The researchers noted if the parents belted their youngsters into the grocery cart seat, how often the parents’ attention lapsed and the number of times the children were allowed to engage in potentially dangerous activities like standing up in the shopping cart. They also rated each child’s physical attractiveness on a 10-point scale.

The findings, not yet published, were presented at the Warren E. Kalbach Population Conference in Edmonton, Alberta.

When it came to buckling up, pretty and ugly children were treated in starkly different ways, with seat belt use increasing in direct proportion to attractiveness. When a woman was in charge, 4 percent of the homeliest children were strapped in compared with 13.3 percent of the most attractive children. The difference was even more acute when fathers led the shopping expedition - in those cases, none of the least attractive children were secured with seat belts, while 12.5 percent of the prettiest children were.

Homely children were also more often out of sight of their parents, and they were more often allowed to wander more than 10 feet away.

Age - of parent and child - also played a role. Younger adults were more likely to buckle their children into the seat, and younger children were more often buckled in. Older adults, in contrast, were inclined to let children wander out of sight and more likely to allow them to engage in physically dangerous activities.

Although the researchers were unsure why, good-looking boys were usually kept in closer proximity to the adults taking care of them than were pretty girls. The researchers speculated that girls might be considered more competent and better able to act independently than boys of the same age. The researchers made more than 400 observations of child-parent interactions in 14 supermarkets.

The article does go on to quote a skeptical expert, who points out that this study fails to control for class.

So I’m writing a “top ten” cartoon, in a format similar to this cartoon. But I’m stuck - I’ve only got nine ideas I like so far. So, as I do every time I have a problem, I thought “heck, I’ll ask the blog!”

The theme of the cartoon is “TOP TEN REASONS NOT TO REGULATE DANGEROUS CHEMICALS IN COSMETICS.” Here are the nine panel ideas I’m working with right now::

1. The free market is perfect. If consumers are buying cancer-causing makeup, then consumers must WANT cancer.
2. In France, chemicals in makeup are regulated. You don’t want to be like FRANCE, do you?
3. Ya gotta suffer to be beautiful. (HER: “O! My skin is peeling off!” HIM: “Yes, but so smooth!”)
4. Until we’re absolutely sure a product causes birth defects, we just can’t risk a slight dip in corporate profits. (EXECUTIVE: “Let’s not rush into anything!”)
5. Straight white men don’t wear makeup. (SWM: “So what’s the fuss about?”)
6. An industry-funded panel of experts said it’s safe. (Puppet in white lab coat being held by business type: “No problem! Nope! No way!”)
7. An industry-funded website concurs. (”If it says so on the internet, it must be true!”)
8. Why should test rabbits be the only ones to suffer? (BUNNY: “Share my pain!”)
9. A pretty lady like you shouldn’t worry her little head about complex stuff like chemicals! Cootchy-coo!

Please post or email your suggestions! If I use your idea, you’ll get… well, you won’t get anything. Except the warm glow of having helped a cartoonist, of course.

“Alas” reader Samantha emailed me this speech by Stephen Lewis, UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, which he delivered in Pennsylvania last week. The entire speech, about women, HIV, and Africa, deserves your reading time, but here’s a few samples.

I’ve been in the Envoy role for four years. Things are changing in an incremental, if painfully glacial way. It’s now possible to feel merely catastrophic rather than apocalyptic. Initiatives on treatment, resources, training, capacity, infrastructure and prevention are underway. But one factor is largely impervious to change: the situation of women. On the ground, where it counts, where the wily words confront reality, the lives of women are as mercilessly desperate as they have always been in the last twenty plus years of the pandemic.

Just a few weeks ago, I was in Zambia, visiting a district well outside of Lusaka. We were taken to a rural village to see an “income generating project” run by a group of Women Living With AIDS. They were gathered under a large banner proclaiming their identity, some fifteen or twenty women, all living with the virus, all looking after orphans. They were standing proudly beside the income generating project … a bountiful cabbage patch. After they had spoken volubly and eloquently about their needs and the needs of their children (as always, hunger led the litany), I asked about the cabbages. I assumed it supplemented their diet? Yes, they chorused. And you sell the surplus at market? An energetic nodding of heads. And I take it you make a profit? Yes again. What do you do with the profit? And this time there was an almost quizzical response as if to say what kind of ridiculous question is that … surely you knew the answer before you asked: “We buy coffins of course; we never have enough coffins”.

I was listening to the presentations at the dinner last night, and thinking to myself, when in heaven’s name does it end? Obstetric fistula causes such awful misery, and isn’t it symptomatic that one of the largest — perhaps the largest — contributions to addressing this appalling condition has come not from a government but from Oprah Winfrey?

I was noting, just in the last 48 hours, that Save the Children in the UK has released a report pointing out that fully half of the three hundred thousand child soldiers in the world are girls. And if that isn’t a maiming of health — in this case emotional and psychological health — then I don’t know what is. And perhaps you notice the rancid irony: women have achieved parity on the receiving end of conflict and AIDS, but nowhere else.

Although they don’t make for easy out-of-context quoting, Lewis also suggests some concrete steps that institutions (governments, the UN, and large universities) should be taking.