GOP Emails

Every liberal special interest group from MoveOn.org to Big Labor to anti-drilling extremists are laying it all on the line in 2008 with one goal in mind: to seize total control of our government.

It's the housework, stupid

I hope I’m not the only person who raised an eyebrow to this article on the gender wage gap. This first part isn’t necessarily a surprise:

Men with egalitarian attitudes about the role of women in society earn significantly less on average than men who hold more traditional views about women's place in the world, according to a study being reported today.

It is the first time social scientists have produced evidence that large numbers of men might be victims of gender-related income disparities. The study raises the provocative possibility that a substantial part of the widely discussed gap in income between men and women who do the same work is really a gap between men with a traditional outlook and everyone else.

The differences found in the study were substantial. Men with traditional attitudes about gender roles earned $11,930 more a year than men with egalitarian views and $14,404 more than women with traditional attitudes. The comparisons were based on men and women working in the same kinds of jobs with the same levels of education and putting in the same number of hours per week.

Ah, we wander into the little bubble of reality where I can claim some competence as a thinker. From everything that I understand about the gendered economy, I could’ve predicted this response. But I didn’t, and so these guys got the “big find I got cited in the Post” honors. Good on them, and I’ll cede the floor so they can interpret their findings.

"Some would say, 'Of course traditional men earn more than traditional women -- they are both fulfilling their desires to play different roles in the home and workplace,' " said Judge, emphasizing that the researchers compared working men with working women, not working men with women who stay home. "Our results do not support that view. If you were a traditional-minded woman, would you say, 'I am fine working the same hours as a traditional-minded man in the same industry with the same education but earning substantially less'? I don't think traditional-minded women would say that."

[…]

Livingston and Judge said there are two possible explanations: Traditional-minded men might negotiate much harder for better salaries, especially when compared with traditional-minded women. Alternatively, it could also be that employers discriminate against women and men who do not subscribe to traditional gender roles.

"It could be that traditional men are hypercompetitive salary negotiators -- the Donald Trump prototype, perhaps," Judge said. "It could be on the employer side that, subconsciously, the men who are egalitarian are seen as effete."

Livingston, a doctoral candidate in management, added: "People make others uncomfortable when they disconfirm stereotypes -- we don't know how to interpret them."

Um… no.

The authors are right to note that women who adhere to traditional gender roles, especially career women, would think it wrong to be denied equal pay for equal work, but Livingston and Judge pay too much attention to attitudes as being a determinant.

It would seem that there’s a fairly strong correlation not between attitudes, but in contributions to the economy of the household. The person adhering to the gender role that contributes the least amount of work to social reproduction is the one who has the advantage in the realm of the formal economy. I look at those numbers and I see the economic costs of cooking, cleaning, and taking the kids to the doctor for both women and men.

The explanations put forward remain firmly focused on individual variations and miss the bigger picture. Traditional-minded men bargain harder and better? I don’t buy that for a second. You’d have to develop a metric for bargaining ability that didn’t rely on monetary success as an indicator. At any rate, I don’t think some mythical “bargaining ability” is differentially distributed between men and women or between those who adhere to different gender roles. The second hypothesis, that managers subconsciously perceive more feminist men as “girly men,” similarly seems to assume a little too monolithic mindset amongst that population.

Essentially, what we’re seeing is a subsidy that enables men to single-mindedly devote themselves to their careers, for various reasons putting them at a distinct advantage to those who attempt to strike a more equitable balance between work and family. For the method geeks, I didn’t notice any mention that they controlled for marital status and/or number of children, and I’d be interested to know if there were some interesting multiplier effects among some of the variables (adherence to traditional gender roles X gender; adherence to traditional gender roles X marital status, among others). That the authors went with seemingly implausible explanations suggests not seeing the forest for the trees. But whatever – I’m glad they’re interested in the problem, even if I think they’re barking up the wrong tree. But wait.

Parents looking at the study might be tempted to inculcate their sons with traditional gender views with an eye to greater financial success, but the researchers warned that this would come at their daughters' cost -- traditional-minded women suffer the greatest income disadvantage for doing the same work.

"Traditional values," Judge said, "do not have to be traditional gender-role values."

That the Post would jump to the cheap locker room guffaw of “maybe we should train our boys to keep women barefoot and pregnant” and that the authors would respond with a liberal piety worthy of its own bumper real estate just seems offensively hokey.

It's Like Milwaukee's Best

In that it makes my head hurt.

The Onion AV Club has an interview with the guy who created Stuff White People Like. The dude pretty much admits to being an over-privileged hipster who just got famous by accident for writing shit that made him giggle. The hipsters who read the AV Club, naturally, have to hate on this guy because this is something that they might actually like, but it has achieved some level of popularity, rendering it unacceptable to a hipster (see Chuck Klosterman, Judd Apatow, or Batman). Not that those that read the AV Club would admit to being hipsters, which is all part of tension, as to admit that you don't like something because it has achieved popularity is the height of hipsterdom, so part of the commentary is a struggle to come to grips with the fact that they, the AV Club readers, are the very people they hate most. Unless they are not.

A Timely Reminder

I am not having the best of days. This perked me up considerably. Thank God for youtube.