1. Different ways of measuring the pay gap

2. Trends in the Wage Gap
3. What Causes the Wage Gap?
4. Myth: The pay gap only exists because men work so many more hours than women.
5. The Motherhood Myth
6. Myth: The pay gap only exists because women haven’t been in the workplace as long as men
7. Myth: The best way to measure the pay gap is to consider only the young and the childless
8. Myth: If women really got paid less for similar work, then employers would replace all of the male workers with female workers
9. Some Evidence of Discrimination
10. Myth: The Wage Gap Is Caused By Men’s Higher Pay For Dangerous Jobs

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

So suppose you want to look at the wage gap. The best thing to do is to consider only what happens to young workers without children, right?

This myth, based on an unpublished study by economist June O’Neill, has mainly been propagated by two members of the right-wing Independent Women’s Forum, Diana Furchtgott-Roth and Christine Stolba. A typical example, from an ILF webpage, says: “The ‘wage gap’ frequently mentioned in the press is the result of a crude comparison. This ‘gap’ refers to the average wages of men and women, without regard to important factors such as age, education, occupation, or experience. When those key variables are considered, women earn essentially as much as men. Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which does consider these key variables, reveal that among people ages 27 - 33 who have never had a child, women’s earnings are close to 98 percent of men’s.”

(By the way, counting both age and experience, as these folks advocate, is double-counting; age should not effect how much people are paid, except as a proxy for experience).

What other studies say

In fact, it’s not true that studies that account for age, education, occupation and experience - what economists call “human capital” favors - find no wage gap. Blau and Kahn accounted for all these factors and more, but a pay gap still remained. Wood and colleagues’ study of lawyers accounted for all of those factors and more, but again the pay gap wasn’t eliminated. Other scholars who have accounted for human capital differences but still found a substantial pay gap include Bellas, Wellington, Hampton & Heywood, Weinberger, England, Reid & Kilbourne, and Duncan (complete citations to all of these studies can be found at the bottom of this post).

What they miss by ignoring women over age 33

One important difference is in Furchtgott-Roth/Stolba’s unexplained decision to limit their study only to people ages 27-33. As the National Committee on Pay Equity asked, “where does that leave working women who are younger than 27 or older than 33?” It leaves them completely unexamined by the Furchtgott-Roth/Stolba study - which is very convenient, for right-wingers who want to minimize the pay gap.

This method of looking only at young women’s wages is hopelessly flawed. Discrimination in the workforce usually is a matter of “cumulative causation.” Among other things, this means that the effects of discrimination add up over a lifetime. So, for example, losing a single job offer or promotion usually won’t make a big difference; but dozens of such small losses over the course of women’s careers eventually add up to a big wage gap.

This is important, because it means we should expect the pay gap between men and women at the start of their careers to be small. The effects of discrimination build up gradually over time, and only becomes sizable once women have been in the job market long enough for the impacts of dozens of individual instances of discrimination to add up. So when Furchtgott-Roth and Stolba look only at the pay gap among young workers, they’ve selected workers who have not yet been in the workforce long enough to have experienced the worse of the pay gap.

For an example of what I mean, consider the U.S. government’s wage gap figures. Usually we see these presented for everyone in the labor force over the age of 16, but the numbers are also available broken down by age. What we find is that the wage gap gets larger as women get older - just as the theory of cumulative discrimination would predict. When we look only at workers age 16 to 24, the wage gap is 93% (that is, women are paid 93% of what men are paid, on average). But when we look at workers ages 45 to 54, the wage gap is 70%.

In short, Furchtgott-Roth and Stolba haven’t really shown that the wage gap doesn’t exist. All they’ve shown is that the wage gap is at its smallest among young workers - something that feminist economists have known for decades.

References:

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

This is a very common argument. In this view, the pay gap is only still around because women only recently entered the workforce; as such, women haven’t had as much time to work their way up the employment ladder to the well-paid positions. There’s no need to “do” anything about the pay gap; if we just wait, it’ll go away by itself.

What I always want to know is, exactly how long must we wait until we can admit that this argument no longer makes sense? The Equal Pay Act of 1963 was forty years ago, for goodness sake! A woman who had been in the workforce five years when the Equal Pay Act was passed might well be retired by now, and the pay gap still hasn’t gone away.

Work experience doesn’t account for the pay gap.

The fact is, workplace experience makes a very large difference - but it doesn’t make all the difference. The economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn (Journal of Labor Economics, January 1997) calculated the impact of a number of factors on the wage gap. The largest factor (other than “unexplained”) was labor force experience; the average female worker has 12.79 years of full-time experience, while the average male worker has 17.41. This difference accounted for between 26% and 30% of the total wage gap - meaning that even though work experience is the biggest factor in the pay gap, it still leaves most of the pay gap unaccounted for.

Another approach was taken by the economists Robert Wood, Mary Corcoran and Paul Courant (Journal of Labor Economics, 1993). They examined one profession (lawyering) in great detail, following the careers of female and male graduates of the University of Michigan Law School. Fifteen years after graduation, the women in their sample were earning 61% of what men earned. A lot of that difference is because many women had taken time off from work, or worked fewer hours, in order to raise children. But even when work experience and hours were accounted for, women still earned only 82% of what men earned. Again, even after you account for experience, there’s still a large pay gap between men and women.

Why assume that workplace experience isn’t affected by sexism and discrimination?

When anti-feminists say that workplace experience shows that discrimination doesn’t exist, they’re sneaking an unjustified assumption into the argument. Because part of the pay gap can be accounted for by experience, that part of the wage gap doesn’t, they say, have anything to do with discrimination. But is it logical to believe that discrimination wouldn’t have any effect on work experience?

As the economist Francine Blau and her colleagues point out, these arguments “neglect the feedback effects of labor market discrimination on the behavior and choices of women themselves. For example, women have traditionally received lower returns to labor market experience than men. The lesser amount of work experience which they have accumulated may be due in part to their response to these lower returns.” (On page 192 of Blau, Francine, Marianne Ferber, and Anne Winkler’s1998 book. The Economics of Men, Women and Work, third edition.)

In other words, there’s a vicious cycle at work here. If women are discriminated against at work, so they get less pay for what they do, that means women will be less motivated than men to work, and will therefore wind up with less work experience. So while the pay gap is partly caused by women’s lesser work experience, at the same time the pay gap partly causes women’s lesser work experience.

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

Myth: The pay gap only exists because women take time off from work to raise kids.

This is a common belief, especially among anti-feminists. Typical is Patricia Hausman’s article on The National Review’s website, which claimed that “it is not being a woman, but being a mother, that causes noteworthy differences in earnings.” In Ms. Hausman’s view, sexism doesn’t harm women; instead, “females make trade-offs between high wages and other rewards in life.”

Motherhood doesn’t account for all of the pay gap.

Hausman is simply wrong to say that motherhood accounts for all “noteworthy differences in earnings.” Motherhood makes a difference, of course; many mothers spend a few years (and sometimes longer) out of the workforce. When a mother returns to the workforce, she of course has less work experience than her male co-workers, and understandably gets paid less.

But how much difference does that make, exactly? The economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn calculated the impact of a number of factors on the wage gap (Journal of Labor Economics volume 15, pages 1-42.). The largest factor (other than “unexplained”) was labor force experience; the average female worker has 12.79 years of full-time experience, while the average male worker has 17.41. This difference accounted for between 26% and 30% of the total wage gap.

Another approach was taken by the economists Robert Wood, Mary Corcoran and Paul Courant (Journal of Labor Economics, volume 11, pages 417-441). They examined one profession (lawyering) in great detail, following the careers of female and male graduates of the University of Michigan Law School. Fifteen years after graduation, the women in their sample were earning 61% of what men earned. A lot of that difference is because many of the mothers had taken time off from work, or worked fewer hours, in order to raise children. But even when the mothers were excluded from the sample, women were still paid only about 80% of what men were paid.

Why assume the “motherhood penalty” has nothing to do with sexism?

It’s true that motherhood makes a difference in wages. But why assume that difference has nothing to do with sexism?

There’s no reason to narrow the discussion to the narrow question of employer discrimination, overlooking ways that the larger society is sexist. Many feminists believe that in a non-sexist society, fathers and mothers would share equally in childcare; and therefore, any “parenting wage penalty” would be split equally among men and women. The fact that women are virtually the only ones hit by the parenting wage penalty doesn’t prove that sexism no longer exists; on the contrary, it shows that sexism still matters, and has a big negative impact on women’s wages. (It also has a negative impact on men’s contact with their families.)

The American job market was designed for men - in particular, it was developed in a society in which workers were men who had a wife at home to take care of the kids. Society has changed, but our jobs haven’t, and that works to the disadvantage of all working mothers (and to mothers who would like to work, but can’t find a job that will give them the flexibility they need to combine work and motherhood). Isn’t it sexist to expect mothers to fit into a work system that was designed for Father Knows Best?

Critics of the wage gap, like Ms. Hausman, claim that mothers freely choose to sacrifice work for family, but how free a choice is that? Mothers don’t have the option of simply ignoring their children’s needs (not only would that be inhumane, it’s also illegal). Even if a father is present, he may refuse to do half of the childcare - or his boss may not be willing to give him the time off. Nor is it practical to just say that “women shouldn’t have children if they want to work” - most families can’t afford to have mothers not work, and our society can’t survive if no one is producing the next generation.

Finally, to whatever extent some women freely choose to stay out of the labor market, the choice isn’t made in a void. The fact that women - even non-mothers - get rewarded less for wage-work than men means that women give less up if they choose to trade off paid work for motherhood. Women’s lower pay means women have less reason to stay in the paid work market; it also means that when a married couple decides that the lower-paid spouse should give up work for children, the spouse who happens to be lower paid will almost always be the wife. Economists call this a “feedback effect”; it’s likely that women earn less because they work less, but it’s also likely that women work less because of lower earnings.

To sum up, motherhood can account for a significant part of the wage gap. But motherhood doesn’t account for all of the wage gap. Nor is it safe to assume that the “motherhood penalty” has nothing to do with discrimination or sexism.

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

This is a myth which is frequently repeated by anti-feminists on the internet. Although exact details vary, the argument is generally that the pay gap is a statistical illusion that has nothing to do with discrimination against women. Women are paid less because they work so many fewer hours; if US government statistics took account of hours worked, the wage gap would disappear. So the critics say.

There are two big flaws in this argument. First of all, the numbers don’t add up - taking account of hours worked does make the pay gap a little smaller, but not that much smaller. Second, the argument implicitly assumes that how many hours we get to work isn’t affected by discrimination; but there’s no reason to believe this is true.

How big a difference does hours worked make?

It is true that men work more hours than women, on average (at paid jobs, anyhow - but keep in mind women work many more unpaid hours at home). But the difference isn’t that large, among men and women who work full-time.

According to the US government’s Monthly Labor Review (April 1997, pages 3-14), the average full-time year-round woman worked 40.8 hours a week in 1995. Men, according to the same source, worked 44.5 hours - a significant difference, but not a huge difference (and not nearly as large a difference as anti-feminists sometimes claim). How much does that affect the wage gap?

Fortunately, we don’t have to do the math ourselves - the US Department of Labor has done it for us. According to a DOL web page in 2001 - a web page that, unfortunately, has since been taken down by the Bush administration - comparing only hourly wages, women were paid 83.2% of what men were paid in 2000. 83.2% is a noticible difference from the 76% figure for weekly full-time wages - but it still leaves the majority of the pay gap unaccounted for.

Is hours worked really a discrimination-free zone?

When anti-feminists say that it’s better to compare hourly wages, they’re sneaking an unjustified assumption into the argument. Because part of the pay gap can be accounted for by different hours worked, that part of the wage gap doesn’t, they say, have anything to do with discrimination. But is it really true that how many hours people work can’t be affected by discrimination?

Most people, after all, don’t have that much choice in how much they work. Once you’ve got a full-time job, whether you work 41 or 45 hours a week is as much up to your employer as it is up to you - and it’s quite possible for the hours assigned to be affected by discrimination.

In the eighties, for instance, I worked for a temp agency in NYC which discriminated against its black temps by giving white temps more and better assignments. (I found out when the Times printed a expose of the practice, after which I stopped accepting jobs from that agency). Presumably I earned more than black and latina counterparts that year in part because I worked more hours; but my working more hours was itself a result of discrimination.

The assumption that hours worked can’t have anything to do with discrimination is unrealistic. If discrimination exists in the job market, it potentially has effects on all aspects of the job market - including how many hours a week people work.

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

First of all, let’s dispel one common misunderstanding: the pay gap between women and men is not primarily caused by unequal pay for identical jobs. This does occasionally happen, but equal pay laws have by and large eliminated this form of obvious wage discrimination.

So what does cause the pay gap? There’s no simple answer to that question, because all sorts of factors go into creating the pay gap - and, making things more confusing, the different factors inter-relate. Let’s look at what some of those factors are.

Occupational Segregation

First, occupational segregation, in which women and men, due to social structures and also hiring discrimination, are “steered” into certain jobs. This causes some jobs (like child care worker) to be female-dominated, while other jobs (like truck driver) are male-dominated.

For example: In Philadelphia, social scientists sent fictional, equally-qualified resumes to different restaurants. The only important difference between the resumes they sent out was if the name at the top was a woman’s or a man’s. They found that snootier, higher-paying restaurants preferred to hire men, while low-paying places (diners and the like) preferred women. In this way, women were steered into a lower-paying job category: that’s job segregation.

Why does “occupational segregation” matter? It matters because workers in “women’s jobs” are paid less than workers in “men’s jobs.” As journalist Naomi Barko put it, “the biggest reason for the pay gap is not discrimination against individual women but rather discrimination against women’s occupations.” The more women work in a job, the lower the pay in that job is likely to be. (Paradoxically, this means that some men - men in female-dominated workplaces or job positions - are in effect paid less because of discrimination against jobs done by women!)

How much lower is the pay in “women’s jobs”? Different economists have calculated it different ways. The economist Paula England looked at data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (a U.S. government study that measures changes in people’s lives over time), and found that if a white woman in an all-male workplace moved to an all-female workplace, she’d lose 7% of her wages. If a black woman did the same thing, she’s lose 19% of her wages. The economists Deborah Figart and June Lapidus found that if female-dominated jobs had no wage penalty, women’s median hourly pay nationwide would go up 13.2% (men’s pay would go up 1.1%, due to raises for men working in “women’s jobs”).

Different Choices

As anti-feminists often point out, women and men often make different choices: in college major, in hours and years worked, and in what jobs to take. It’s not true that these “free choice” factors account for all of the wage gap, but they certainly account for some of it.

It’s often claimed that these “free choice” factors have nothing to do with sexism (usually this claim is made by people who want you to believe that the wage gap is nothing to be concerned about), because the choices are made by women, not by women’s employers. The reality isn’t so clear-cut, because the choices women and men in our society make aren’t made free of sexism.

For example, full-time year-round women workers work fewer hours than their male counterparts. In 1995, among workers who usually work full-time, men worked 44.5 hours per week on average while women worked 40.8 hours a week on average. Put another way, women worked 92% as many hours as men. (Source: Rones et al).

Anti-feminists claim that this shows that women make less money than men because they choose to work less. This is partly true, but it’s not the whole story. In reality, employers have at least as much to do with how many hours a particular full-time employee works as the employee’s choices. It is employers who decide who is and who is not offered overtime, for example. So while critics of feminism assume that how many hours one works is entirely the employee’s choice, actually we have no way of knowing how much of women’s fewer hours is due to women’s choices, and how much is due to discrimination in who is offered hours of work.

Another example is caretaking. Women are expected to be caretakers - both of children and of any other relatives in need of aid (elderly relatives, for example) - and to do the majority of the housework. This isn’t an example of employers discriminating against women, but it is a society-wide sexism that contributes to the wage gap. The person doing the lioness’ share of the unpaid caretaking work has far less time available for paid work; if men and women divided unpaid caretaking work equally, the paid work would be a lot more equal too. (Like many instances of sexism, this arguably harms both sexes: men are harmed by this same sexist belief because they are expected to work more and robbed of equal contact with their family.)

Nonetheless, even single women without children earn less than similar men, on average. (See, for example, Wood et al’s study of similar male and female lawyers).

Men Get More Credit for Their Work

Men’s work tends to be evaluated as higher-quality than equally-good or better women’s work. This can impact who is offered mentoring, who is assigned a job assignment, who is offered a promotion, and so on - and all of these factors in turn have an effect on the pay gap.

For example, one study of credit in the sciences, published in Nature, looked at productivity (measured in terms of publications in scientific journals, how many times a person was a “lead author” of an article, and how often the articles were cited in scientific journals) and sex. These factors were then compared to how an actual scientific review panel measured scientific competence when deciding on research grants. The results? Female scientists needed to be at least twice as accomplished as their male counterparts to be given equal credit.

Other studies have found similar results (see the bottom of this post for some citations). Men are simply given more credit for their work than women are.

Feedback Effects

To whatever extent some women freely choose to stay out of the labor market, the choice isn’t made in a void. The fact that women - even non-mothers - get rewarded less for wage-work than men means that women give less up if they choose to trade off paid work for motherhood. Women’s lower pay means women have less reason to stay in the paid work market.

This manifests itself every time a married couple, for whatever reason, has to decide to prioritize one spouse’s pay (and career path) above the other’s. If a couple has to choose whether or not to move to further one spouse’s career, all else being equal they will make whichever choice favors the higher-earning spouse. Similarly, if one person needs to take time off from work to take care of parents, grandparents or children, it makes sense for it to be the lower-paid person. But in most cases, the person with lower pay will turn out to be the woman.

Furthermore, the effect is additive - if a woman makes a sacrifice even once in her career for the couple’s best interests (say, giving up a good entry-level job because he’s been offered a good job in another state), then that’ll lower her pay for the rest of her work life - meaning that the next time such a decision has to be made (and the next, and the next…), her lower salery will seem even more expendable.

Economists call this a “feedback effect”; it’s likely that women earn less because they work less. But it’s also likely that women work less because they earn less.

Cumulative Causation

In 1944, inspired by race riots in Detroit, the influential economist Gunner Myrdal published An American Dilemma, which introduced the concept of “cumulative causation” in discrimination. Although Myrdal was discussing race, the same basic insight can be applied to the wage gap between men and women.

So what does “cumulative causation” mean, in this context? Among other things, it means that the effects of discrimination add up slowly over a lifetime. So, for example, losing a single job offer or promotion probably won’t make a big difference in the short run; but dozens of such small losses over the course of women’s careers eventually add up to a big pay gap.

The economists Robert Wood, Mary Corcoran and Paul Courant examined this question in detail, by looking at the work history of male and female lawyers over time. What they found is that at the start of their careers, women lawyers earned 93% of their male counterparts; but after fifteen years, the women were only earning 61% of what the men made. Even after accounting for hours worked, motherhood, education, and many more factors, women were still being paid only 82% of what similar men took home. (Trish Wilson recently posted more information on this).

Tomorrow I’ll post more on the wage gap, concentrating on refuting some particular anti-feminist arguments. Click on the link below to see the list of references for this post.
Read the rest of this entry »

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

Changes in the pay gap over time.

In 1972, women working full-time year-round earned 57.9% of what men working full-time year-round earned. In 1999, measured the same way, women earned 72.2% of what men earned. Many people, when they see this data, think that it means that women’s pay has been steadily climbing. But the real story is more complex then that; women’s pay hasn’t risen steadily, and not all of the closing wage gap is because women’s position has improved.

In 1951, women actually earned 63.9% of what mean earned - so women in 1972 actually earned less, compared to men, then women in the 1950s did! Using 1972 as the base year isn’t totally fair, because 1972 had the biggest pay gap between women and men of any year of the last 50 years. But throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the pay gap was always between 58% and 60% - while in the 1950s, the pay gap was usually closer to 64%. So it’s not true that the pay gap has been steadily getting smaller in the last 50 years.

The pay gap didn’t really change much until the 1980s. In 1981, the pay gap was 59.2%; in 1990, it was 71.6%, a change of over 12%. In 1999, on the other hand, the pay gap was 72.2%, a change of less than 1% since 1990.

So the pay gap was more-or-less stable from the 1950s until the 1980s; shrunk quite a lot in the 1980s; and stayed pretty much the same during the 1990s.

Women’s rising pay or men’s shrinking pay?

Women’s pay has been going up over time; however, women’s wage growth doesn’t account for all of the shrinking of the pay gap. From 1979 to 1989, the median woman’s hourly wage went up 52 cents (in 1997 dollars). During that same time period, the median man’s hourly wage went down $1.32. From 1989 to 1997, women’s pay went up only 8 cents, while men’s pay fell 88 cents.

What this means is that most of the reason the wage gap is smaller now than it was in 1979 is that men, on average, are being paid less.

Another way of looking at this is to ask: what would have happened to the pay gap if men’s average wages hadn’t fallen? In 1973, an average women’s hourly wage was 63% of an average man’s hourly wage; by 1997, an average women earned 79% of what an average man earned in an hour (a rise of 16%). But if men’s wages hadn’t dropped since 1973, an average woman in 1997 would have earned 67% of what an average man earned in an hour - a rise of only 4% since 1973.

(Data on the pay gap and men’s shrinking pay comes from The State of Working America 1998-1999, by Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein and John Schmitt. Graphic from epinet.org)

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

There are a literally unlimited number of ways one could go about measuring the pay gap between men and women. Here’s six ways, for example.

1. Compare wages among young workers only, excluding mothers. (98%)

2. Compare hourly wages among all workers.
3. Compare weekly wages among all full-time workers. (76% - pdf file)
4. Compare annual wages among all full-time, year round (FTYR) workers. (73% - pdf file)
5. Compare total annual income (wages plus benefits, pension, perks and bonuses) among FTYR workers.
6. Compare total income over the course of an entire work life.

I’ve arranged this list in order of how big the wage gap is. So if you measure by method number 1, you’ll find a relatively small wage gap - which is why conservatives so often use this method. Measuring with method number 2 will find a larger pay gap than method 1, number 3 will be larger still, and so on until method number 6 - which will find the largest pay gap of all.

The choice of where to measure is, to some degree, arbitrary; no one way of measuring is absolutely correct. Usually, when you see a pay gap figure in the newspaper, it’s measured by the third method I’ve listed - it’s comparing average weekly wages for full-time working women to average weekly wages for full-time working men. The reason most people use this figure is because that’s the way the U.S. government measures it, which means the figure is always conveniently available.

Each of these ways of measuring the pay gap includes and leaves out different things. For instance, if you just compare weekly wages among full-time workers (which is how the government does it), you leave out the value of benefits like medical insurance - but since men are more likely to be in jobs that pay benefits, not including benefits underestimates the size of the pay gap.

On the other hand, a conservative might reply, even among full-time workers men work more hours on average than women, so the weekly wage comparison overestimates the wage gap. (I’ll be responding to this argument later in this series).

The point is, no one way of measuring the wage gap is perfect, or can cover everything. The wage gap is useful as a broad indication of problems that exist in our economy, and as a way of examining how women’s relative pay has changed over time - but it’s not a precise measure.

More on the wage gap tomorrow.

(EDIT: In my first draft, I somehow wrote the same thing, slightly rephrased, for methods one and two. I went back and rewrote them to correct this error…)

• First and foremost, go read Nathan Newman on the Minimum Wage: Why the Minimum Wage Beats EITC, the Popularity of Raising the Minimum Wage to $8 an Hour, How the Minimum Wage Increases Employment, Who Pays for the Minimum Wage?, Why Job Losses from the Minimum Wage Don’t Matter, and Politics of the Minimum Wage. Nathan’s one of the best bloggers in the lefty half of blogtopia; reading all these posts will take only a few minutes, and leave you feeling well-armed and ready for your next lunchtable debate about minimum wage laws.

• In an earlier post, I wondered if George Bush has to consciously restrain himself from sneering and spitting every time he’s introduced to a soldier. Reading this snippet from Greg Palast made me wonder that again: the Bush administration is changing the laws for who is considered a “professional” for purposes of calculating eligibility for overtime. One change: if you learned your job skill in the military, you’re now a “professional.” In practice, what that means is that thousands of veterans will suddenly no longer be paid overtime, no matter how many hours their bosses make them work. Way to support the troops, Republicans!
• Whiskey Bar has a good - albeit depressing - series of links and posts about the growing oppression of women in Iraq. Here’s one quote, from Iraqi blogger Riverbend:
  Females can no longer leave their homes alone. Each time I go out, E. and either a father, uncle or cousin has to accompany me. It feels like we?ve gone back 50 years ever since the beginning of the occupation …

  We are seeing an increase of fundamentalism in Iraq which is terrifying.

• Speaking of Riverbend, she’s (or rather her “girl blog from Iraq,” Baghdad Burning) is the newest addition to my blogroll. Go read her blog; she’s a wonderful writer and paints a vivid picture of life in occupied Iraq. For a sample of how good she is, go read Road Trip.
• And speaking of women’s rights in Iraq, check out this interesting Boston Globe article about Iraqi women’s rights activists. (Via Diotima).
• An article on “The Dubious Rewards of Consumption” yields this quote (via Rebecca’s Pocket):
  For decades Lewis Lapham, born into an oil fortune, has been asking people how much money they would need to be happy. “No matter what their income,” he reports, “a depressing number of Americans believe that if only they had twice as much, they would inherit the estate of happiness promised them in the Declaration of Independence. The man who receives $15,000 a year is sure that he could relieve his sorrow if he had only $30,000 a year; the man with $1 million a year knows that all would be well if he had $2 million a year….Nobody,” he concludes, “ever has enough.”
• Mac Diva does a wonderful job attacking neo-Confederate arguments: check out this post defending Lincoln, and then scroll up to this post arguing that the Civil War was too about slavery.
• I love people who resign in protest, don’t you? Seriously - somehow I’ve always found that sort of thing heroic. Anyhow, Susanna at Cut on the Bias has a story of a small-town restaurant reviewer who wouldn’t compromise journalistic ethics. Cool.
• The definitive posts on Bustamante and MEChA have been written. Check out this post on Orcinus, which is valuable not just for the discussion of the at-hand issue but for the discussion of racism generally. And then check out this post, by Ted Barlow at Crooked Timber. Excellent, excellent work, folks. (Via Long Story; Short Pier). But you might also want to read this Volokh Conspiracy post, which begs to differ.
• A couple of months ago, I did a post about my drawing process. Now that post seems embarrassingly primitive, because Jenn Manley Lee has posted a description of her drawing process, which is frankly scary. Jenn’s one of the best cartoonists on the web, and this post makes it clear that a ton of very hard work goes into making her stuff look so good.
• Body and Soul discusses the latest pro-life efforts to make sure that no one who is working in China to reform China’s forced abortion policy will ever receive funding. I’ve blogged about this before, too: the fact is that UNFPA, the organization that some pro-lifers target, has actually reduced forced abortion in China - something that the hypocrites who attack UNFPA have not done. Apparently the idea of Chinese women having choice so infuriates some pro-lifers, they’d rather see them suffer from forced abortions. I’d really like to know how reasonable pro-life bloggers justify these pro-life attacks on UNFPA’s funding. Any comments, Eve? Or Sara?
• I suspect that only a former (or current) comic book geek would enjoy this biography of Ant-Man (probably the lamest superhero ever, although I think Skateman comes a close second) as much as I did. But I enjoyed it a hell of a lot (I never realized just how many new costumes - not to mention nervous breakdowns - the poor guy had over the years). (Via Eve Tushnet).
• Kieran Healy of Crooked Timber writes a terrific post regarding the economics of children and sex. He also discusses what I call the “Father Knows Best” economy - workplaces that assume that employees have a wife at home who will take care of all the necessary family tasks. Even if they don’t discriminate directly against women, workplaces that make this assumption are implicitly designing their jobs around outdated and sexist assumptions. Reforming the “Father Knows Best” workplace - so that all jobs assume that all workers have family responsibilities that must be accommodated - may be the single most important economic issue in the USA, from a feminist point of view.
• The discussion of the study of rape at Air Force Academy continues at Feministe, with many useful (and distressing) links about rape on campus.
• Do you desperately need a cigarette lighter, but all you have on-hand is some disposable silverware and some paper clips? Check out this page of prisoners’ inventions. (Via Boing Boing.)
• An interesting post by an opponent of affirmative action, over at All Facts and Opinions. There’s also a longish post by me in the comments.
• Eugene Volokh has an excellent post comparing anti-gay laws to hypothetical anti-Hindu laws; why is it that (some folks versions of) Christianity requires the former, but not the latter? It’s a mystery.
• Mark Klieman has a good post discussing the economic realities that whoever eventually emerges as governor of California will have to address (even if they’re now desperately avoiding doing just that). And while you’re at Mark’s site, also check out this post on prosecutors who resist DNA evidence showing that innocent people have been imprisoned.
• Playwright Brian Flemming, best known for the musical Bat Boy, has written a new one-act comedy called Fair & Balanced. There are sample pages available to read. Importantly, one of the play’s four characters is named “Ampersand”; it is therefore my opinion that this is the greatest work to hit the American stage since Death of a Salesman had its premiere. (Via Boing Boing.)

(An alternative, Variety-style headline for this post, suggested by a reader: Flix by Chix Nixed cuz no Dix?!?)

The LA Times has an interesting article on the lack of female directors. For example, “‘Chasing Papi,’ a low-budget movie directed by Linda Mendoza now in theaters, is the first female-directed film released by 20th Century Fox in four years.”

The article suggests several possible causes for the lack of female directors, which makes it more interesting than most such articles.

• Vestiges of past inequalities. Given the huge amount of money at stake, producers and studios only want to work with established directors. “…Executives are loath to stray from lists of bankable filmmakers, where the only safe bets are directors who’ve had box-office hits or directed a reelful of hip Nike commercials or Jay-Z videos.”

• The extreme male dominance of the commercial-and-video-directing field. Commercials and video directing is the major route for breaking into studio film directing. “Since most of the biggest box-office material revolves around special-effects thrillers, executives seek out video boy wonders whose visual style is suited to action-oriented material.”
• This is especially true because of the dominance of action films. This is where the money is. And, it is suggested, women just don’t want to direct films that are marketed for teenage boys.
  

  “I’ve tried over and over to hire great young female directors like Sofia Coppola and Kimberly Peirce,” says Columbia Pictures chairwoman Amy Pascal. “But I’m making ‘Men in Black II’ and Adam Sandler movies, so I don’t have the material they want to do.”

• Another culprit is the choices women make in higher education. Women in film school are more likely to train to be screenwriters and animators, but less likely to train to be directors. (Even so, 30% of the applicants to the relevant department at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema are women, whereas nowhere near 30% of directors are women). But is this a cause or an effect? Women may be avoiding the directing major because they see so few women directors who are finding work:
  

  “A lot of young women look at movie credits and think, ‘I’m going to spend $100,000 on school and then where am I going to go?’ From our vantage point, there’s a red line around the studios and it’s hard for women to get past that.”

• Women turn down offers to do dumb films. Where female directors do get their start is directing independent films… and a woman who gets her start directing a sophisticated independent film may not be eager to direct mainstream studio fare - especially of the sort offered women.
  

  First-time director Catherine Hardwicke got rave reviews at this year’s Sundance Film Festival for “Thirteen,” a disturbing portrait of teenage girls. Her first studio offer? A film starring the Olsen twins.

• Structural barriers to being a mom and being a director. Directing is a 20-hour-a-day job. Male directors usually have wives at home who take care of the children; but very few women are willing to miss out on their children, or are married to a willing househusband. The peak child-rearing years are also the essential career-building years, and taking time off to raise children can be a career-killer.
• And let’s not forget the importance of plain old sexist discrimination.
  

  Most executives acknowledge that men get to fail more often than their female counterparts. And even when women make it onto the studio’s coveted A-list of potential directors, they still have to pass muster with the male stars who dominate the movie business, who often feel more comfortable working with a male authority figure.

So what do we make of all this? To me, it indicates how complex the job (and wage) gaps between women and men are. Simple, direct discrimination is part of the problem, but that’s not the whole thing. To a great extent, what we have here is a job category that came into being in a “Father Knows Best” world, and is still designed around the sexist assumptions of that world. Is that discrimination? No, but it is a kind of sexism.

For example, the reason that studios look down on a director who hasn’t had a hit in years is the assumption that they’ve spent those years directing flops (or, worse, films that never made it to theatrical release at all). But that assumption simply doesn’t apply to a woman (or, for that matter, a man) who had a successful movie, and then took several years off to raise children. But even though that assumption doesn’t make as much sense in today’s world as it did in Father Knows Best World, it can still ruin careers.

There’s a lot more to discuss in this article, but I have limited blogging time today… I may return to this in the future.

Cut on the Bias - whom I disagreed with regarding abortion recently - has posted about a current brew-ha-hah: is the blogosphere sexist? (Cut on the Bias also has a well-written post about breasts, first of a series, which is recommended reading).

The debate was started by this post, by Dawn Olsen at Up Yours, but really took fire after Meryl Yourish weighed in. (Ms. Yourish also has a great "public service" post linking other folk’s comments). Of the comments I’ve so far read, the one that comes closest to my view is this post by Diane E (scroll down or search for the words "Meryl is right" to find it). Here’s a sample, but she says a lot more, so go and read the original.

Sexism doesn’t lie in the fact that there are more male bloggers, and more linked male bloggers, but the fact that there is a huge double standard: whatever certain male bloggers say is accepted and worthy of the blogosphere richochet; whereas if a woman were to say it, it would have been dismissed or ignored. And–when a woman speaks with knowledge on a subject, using logic and evidence, she is ignored.

Example: me and Steven den Beste.

I have to agree; if this were a pure meritocracy, Diane E. would get tons more links than SDB and many other "foreign policy conservative" bloggers, because she’s simply better: better-informed, better logic, better prose. (On the Blogosphere’s smaller left side, the paucity of links to Body and Soul, compared to many less thoughtful and interesting blogs, might be an equivalent case).

A 1997 study of scientific credit, published in the journal Nature (Wenneras and Wold, "Nepotism and Sexism in Peer-Review." Nature, volume 387, May 22 1997, pages 341-343) provides evidence of a mechanism for sexism that’s pretty similar to what Diane’s suggesting.

What the Nature study did was examine productivity (measured in terms of publications in scientific journals, how many times a person was a "lead author" of an article, and how often the articles were cited in scientific journals) and sex. Publication in peer-reviewed scientific journals is often considered to be the most objective and "concrete" sign of accomplishment in the sciences. These factors were then compared to how an actual scientific review panel measured scientific competence when deciding which applicants would receive research grants. Receiving grants like these are essential to the careers of scientific researchers.

The results? Female scientists needed to be at least twice as accomplished as their male counterparts to be given equal credit. For example, women with over 60 "impact points" - the measure the researchers constructed of scientific productivity - received an average score of 2.25 "competence points" from the peer reviewers. In contrast, men with less than 20 impact points also received 2.25 competence points. In fact, only the most accomplished women were ever considered to be more accomplished than men - and even then, they were only seen as more accomplished than the men with the very fewest accomplishments.

Similarly, "audit" and "blind audition" studies have shown that female job applicants, applying for the same position as identically-qualified men, are less likely to be offered a job - especially when applying for higher-status jobs. It’s unlikely many employers would consciously sabotage her own business by hiring an inferior employee; so why the male advantage? One possibility is that, even when viewing two basically identical resumes, some employers tend to "credit" the male applicant’s work higher; so they subjectively choose the employee they see as more accomplished.

* * *

So what’s to be done about it? Not much. It’s a good idea for bloggers to question themselves - if you only have one or two female links in your blogroll, maybe you should see if there’s a female blogger (or a dozen) who merits being included, but isn’t. (Which doesn’t show that you are yourself sexist, by the way, since a huge part of whom we all link is influenced by who the other folks we read have linked to. Mathematically, because the nonsexist bloggers will be influence by links of sexist bloggers, it’s possible for a minority of prejudiced bloggers to have a significant effect on an entire system.)

Beyond "be aware," though, there’s no particular action I’d advocate. After all, no one’s livelihood is dependent on getting more blog hits; nor is blogging a "zero-sum" activity, where one blog must lose for another to gain; given how little "who gets more hits" matters in the world at large, it doesn’t seem that more extreme measures (like affirmative action) could be justified, even if they were possible.. It’s a shame that folks don’t link more to excellent female bloggers like Diane E. and Je’anne D’Arc - and unfair to Diane and Je’anne, who don’t get to be as influential as they merit - but I haven’t the slightest idea, beyond what I’ve already said, how to remedy it.