Angry Camels

This is the funniest thing I saw all week:

Guest Couple

Today Mrs. G. and I were the guest couple in my family life class. This is an annual exercise, and is always fun. This time I suggested a few topics that we should be sure to hit on, and divided up which of us would talk about which. I wrote the topics out on an index card, going back and forth between us. This worked very well. Our discussion flowed, and we stopped ourselves in time to let students ask questions for half the class time.

One of the questions was whether we argued, or whether we had been married so long that we had already worked out those problems. Of course we do argue, and said so. I noted, as I have argued in class before, that marriage does not really change your basic nature, but you can develop work-arounds for the points at which husband and wife clash. Mrs. G. then pointed out that the index card itself was one such work-around. For the last couple of years she has had so many interesting stories to tell that we ran out of Q & A time. Having the topics listed on the card was a way in which we (I) worked out how we (she) would talk to make our (mostly my, but also her) class work better.

I had not really thought about the index card as a work around, but she is entirely correct. And because we have spent years metacommunicating about how to work around communication glitches and conflicts, this technique worked without creating strife.

Lap Dancers Show That Estrus is Not So Hidden

Geoffrey Miller, Joshua M. Tybur, Brent D. Jordan of the University of New Mexico have done a wonderful study to see whether human beings can tell when a woman is ovulating. Unlike most animals, people have "hidden estrus." One good consequence is that men pay attention to their mates all the time, whereas in other primates females only get attention when they are "in heat." However, human beings may be able to tell when a woman is ovulating in more subtle, even subconscious, ways.

Miller and colleagues asked eighteen lap dancers to keep track of their menstrual periods, work shifts, and tip earnings for 60 days - more than 5300 lap dances. The researchers noted differences between women who were on the pill and those who were not.

The result:
Average tips during ovulation = $335 per shift
Halfway through (luteal phase) = $260
During menstruation = $185

Women on the pill, by contrast, showed no ovulation peak for tips.

[Thanks to reader Brittany for the study]

Women's Circular Business Plan

Last night Rebecca Kousky spoke at Centre College about her non-profit business, NEST. NEST makes microloans to women in poor countries to make traditional crafts. They pay back the loans with products, which NEST sells online and through craft stores. Kousky started this project at 24, fresh out of social work school - in other words, with no formal preparation for what she was getting in to.

What was most interesting to me was her description of her "business plan." She said that all of her male advisors insisted she write up a business plan, write up a financial model, then go to investors. She found herself unable to do that. Instead, she took all kinds of people to her favorite coffee house and told them her whole plan, including the whole process of how the idea grew out of her life. From these conversations she got ideas, business contacts, investors, and lots of relationships that form the real foundation of NEST today. It was only when she was applying for a grant months after she had gotten the business under way that she was able to write down what her plan was - in retrospect.

Kousky is conscious of being young and a woman. She has noticed how this makes a difference in how she can connect with the women they give loans to, to the in-country intermediaries that they work through, and with the many women on her staff and board. She sees her naturally developing "circular flow" business model as a more female alternative to the linear business model that she was counseled to use.

NEST is a case study, not a proof. It is still young, only in its third year, and is only one case. Still, Kousky's account of building a business based on relationships that flow into opportunities does match what I have read elsewhere about how women tend to think of their "careers" in general.

The Sexual Non-Paradox: Women Don't Have to Choose Like Men

Throughout The Sexual Paradox Susan Pinker addressed the economists' "gender paradox": as women's economic choices and achievements increase, they diverge more from men. Progressive opinion expected that we would come closer to a 50/50 division of all money and power positions by now. They thought women would, on average, make the same as men. But reality is not heading that way. Some aging liberationists think that sex discrimination must be the main cause.

Susan Pinker, and many others, are documenting that women do not make the same economic choices as men -- and that is fine. Moreover, she concludes, “Devaluing women’s preferences is an unintended aspect of expecting the sexes to be exactly the same.” The gender paradox is a paradox only if you deny sex differences. If we see that men and women, as a group, are different from one another and make different choices, then there is no paradox.

Men Are More ADHD, But Are Less Handicapped By It

Susan Pinker reports that more boys than girls are diagnosed with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. This I knew. I did not know, though, that about twice as many boys get this diagnosis in North America as in Europe - 10% vs. 5%. Pinker says the Europeans regarded the idea of a disorder called "hyperactivity" as an American fad, though they are changing their minds and catching up to us.

One of the things I like best about The Sexual Paradox is that Pinker follows up on the boys she treated years ago to find out what they did as men with their various disorders. She found that many hyperactive boys found ways to turn their vice into a virtue by making their work more efficient. She tells the story of the man who invented e-tickets because he was so ADHD that he kept losing his paper tickets.

Men are more likely to find ways to work around handicaps and deficits if they see them as a competitive challenge. ADHD is more of a problem in school than in the world of work. Girls do better in school in part because they are less likely to be hyperactive, as well as being more socially compliant. In the work world, though, Pinker suggests, hyperactive boys are more likely than hyperactive girls to compete to succeed.

Most Men Don't Believe in a Personal God; Most Women Do

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has been parsing its U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. They found that more than 2/3rds of Americans absolutely believe in God or a universal spirit. Women believe more than men, 77% to 65%. 2/3rds of this group of believers, or about 1/2 of all Americans, absolutely believe in a personal God. The female/male breakdown here crosses the 50% threshold. Of all American women, 58% report an absolutely certain belief in a personal God. Of American men, only 45% agree.

Pew report that women have stronger religious faith and practice across the board, not just on this item. In general, though, women prefer personal relationships to abstract concepts. This, I think, is the heart of the dispute between Carol Gilligan and Lawrence Kohlberg about whether loyalty to people or loyalty to abstract concepts represents the highest level of morality.

I do not read the Pew data as showing that most men are not really religious. I read it as showing that men and women differ somewhat in how they conceive of God and therefore of what they have religious faith in.

The Bigger the Backpack, the Brighter the Babe

Faithful reader Mark came up with three aphorisms about the clues that women's appearance can give men about the potential relationship they might have, such as "the thicker the makeup, the thicker the drama."

Faithful reader Rebecca came up with three excellent replies:

The baggier the sweat pants, the bigger the hugs.
The bigger the backpack, the brighter the babe.
The flatter the footwear, the funner [sic] the date.

Men Like Competing More

One of the reasons men make more is that they like competing more than women do. In particular, men like tournament competition, with clear winners and losers, much more than women do. In adult life, the clearest way to mark winning is with higher pay. Men are more willing to negotiate for pay; women not only don't like to negotiate, they don't like to be negotiated with. One of the reasons for this is that women are more likely to think that they are imposters - see yesterday's post. Women compete for intimate relationships, but they do not like anyone to lose completely - that is, to be utterly excluded.

My favorite piece of evidence that Susan Pinker cites is a study of what happens when boys and girls run alone, compared to when they run with others. Alone, boys and girls run at the same speed. When boys are running with someone else, especially another boy, they run faster. When girls run with someone else, especially another girl, they will slow down to keep pace with the other.

Women Think They Are Imposters

Women are more likely to think that their success is a fluke. Even if they have sustained success, they are more likely to think it is a fluke. When they fail at something, women are more likely to think it is due to their own failings. Women are more than twice as likely to get depressed over their failures - indeed, Susan Pinker calls the connection between women feeling like an imposter and getting depressed "the other problem with no name."

Men are more prone to overestimate their own skills. They are more likely to bluff, and take on responsibilities they are not really ready for. When they fail, they are likely to blame other people or outside conditions.

Reality is still reality, and offers a real bottom line of whether we succeed or not. However, men and women still draw different conclusions from the verdict that reality renders.

Men are more likely to see failures as investments from which they can learn, and to regard challenges ahead as something they can probably overcome. Because of the way women regard their own talents, even their own achievements, they are likely to aim lower than men. This has a cumulative effect. Imposter syndrome, as Pinker calls it, is one of the factors that means there are fewer women at the top of our power hierarchies than there are men.

Most Women Are Happier With a Balanced Life Than With an Absorbing Career

Susan Pinker's book is called The Sexual Paradox as a play on the economists' idea of a "gender paradox": compared to men, women earn less and have lower status, but are happier with their work. But this is only a paradox if you assess the value of your job on its own, not in relation to the rest of your life. Career-oriented women and men are likely to rate their jobs that way. As I noted yesterday, Catherine Hakim estimates that about 20% of women are primarily career-oriented. By contrast, about 55% of men are primarily career-oriented.

Thus the paradox: career-oriented male economists - that is, most economists - are puzzled that women don't count happiness the same career-oriented way that most men do. And some women are like most men. But most women are not like most men. There is only a paradox if you assume that men and women are the same.

Most Women Do Not Follow Planned Careers

One of the most useful ideas that Susan Pinker reports in The Sexual Paradox comes from Catherine Hakim's work on the distribution of women's preferences. Hakim calculates that about 20% of women are career-centered and 20% are home-centered. The 60% in the middle are "adaptive," trying to have it all, tacking between two poles. Hakim’s Preference Theory: not all women want the same thing, and only 20% want what men want.

This also means that in general, women are less likely to have a career plan than men. In particular, women’s plans are more likely to change after children than men’s. Men like to tell the story of their careers as their following a plan, overcoming obstacles. Women are more likely to describe their lives are a natural flow of one event into another, many of the turns not planned but not bad.

Babies Are More Addictive Than Crack

“the nurturing relationship is so rewarding to mothers that when given the choice, new mother rats choose newborn pups over cocaine. Before they had babies or once their pups were older, female rats definitely preferred the drugs.”

Susan Pinker, The Sexual Paradox (174)

However, if women get addicted to crack before they have kids, it disrupts their motherhood brain paths.

Presbyterian Property Rules Are Clear: Accept Them, and Get On With It

I had the honor of speaking in the convocation in Pittsburgh Presbytery this week, "Our Freedom of Religion at Risk: A Presbyterian Crisis." The meeting grew out of disputes in Pittsburgh Presbytery and elsewhere over dissenting congregations trying to leave the denomination with their property. Joe Small gave the big-picture opening address about our church's unity being based on communion. Euan Cameron talked about the British background to our denomination's history of union and dissent. This led directly to my part, to talk about the Adopting Act of 1729, which lets potential officers of the church explain their "scruples" about aspects of the church's constitution.

The most practical addresses were given by two lawyers, Mark Tammen and Jeff Tindall. They demonstrated that the legal standard of who owns church property is crystal-clear: the Presbyterian Church (USA) does. Many presbyteries, with Pittsburgh in the lead, are developing a process for negotiating with congregations that want to leave. In general, the dissenters who are willing to negotiate have gotten a good deal. Some of them, though, want the fight about the denomination's orthodoxy more than they want the property. In some cases, they bring in the civil courts to judge the case. The civil courts, for very good reasons, do not want to get into a religious dispute.

The denomination is getting better at working out ways for dissenting congregations to leave decently and order - if they want to. This convocation gives a clear account of the issues for those who want resolution more than drama.

Geek Mating and Aspergers Kids

Susan Pinker, in The Sexual Paradox, shows that there is evidence that math ability and the single-mindedness of Asperger's syndrome are both heritable. She speculates that the computer industry, which has been a haven for both kinds of people, brings together men and women with these traits as never before. Perhaps one of the reasons that there are many more cases of Asperger's reported now that before is because people inclined to produce Aspergery kids are more likely to find and marry one another than they used to.

This puts me in mind of one of the most interesting things I have read this year. This extract is from an essay in Best Australian Essays 2008 from a mom who appreciates her son's math-savant autism, and wonders if her mathematician parents made her kids a higher risk.

“When my parents talked about mathematics they often stood in the kitchen. Or rather, my mother moved around preparing dinner, and my father bounced up and down on a small square of floor in front of the most useful cupboard. As they talked about quadratic equations or topological vector spaces, my mother would gently push my father to one side so that she could reach inside the cupboard, and after she closed the cupboard, he would hop back in front of it. If he was only mildly excited or interested, he would just do this hop, balancing first on his right foot and then moving back to the left again. If the conversation was going well, my father would occasionally tap his forehead with the back of his right hand. When things heated up, he would add a left-hand slap to the back of his head just before the right hand hit the forehead, creating a kind of chain reaction. As the dinner neared preparation, there would be a flurry of activity in that kitchen, my mother stirring pots and lifting things out of the oven (she was feeding seven every night), and my father bouncing and hopping, slapping and tapping. Just when the conversation and the dinner were reaching a head, my mother would dash out into the passage and ring an old cow’s bell she’d picked up in Switzerland, and one of us kids would dart into the kitchen, dodging wordlessly between my parents to collect the cutlery to lay the dining-room table. A few minutes later, the bell would go again, signaling time to eat and a temporary end to the mathematical dialogue.” (136)

“Reaching One Thousand,” by Rachel Robertson

Empathy is a Great Strength in Women - But it Costs Money

Women, as a rule, are more empathetic than men. This is a robust finding, which even researchers who didn't believe it -- didn't want to believe it -- have been convinced by. It is a very good thing for human beings, especially for mothers dealing with children who can't explain themselves very well. Empathy helps you read other people's emotions and understand their motives.

High-powered careers are stressful. They take long hours, often require frequent travel and even household moves, and usually entail continuous competition with other people. Mothers in high-powered careers are likely to feel the stress that their jobs cause to other people - especially their children. Mothers' empathy is a very good thing. But it does mean that mothers are more likely to find their family's pain more painful than fathers do. They are also more likely to feel more stress themselves, which they transfer to others in their families. Feeling others' distress is not just social conditioning, it is a biological strength of women.

The cost of empathy, though, is that women are more likely to leave high-stress jobs if they can for the benefit of their families. They calculate that the greater money, power, and status that they and their families might get is not worth the greater distress to the family. This hurts them more than it does men. It is not that men are oblivious, it is that men are generally built differently. They don't feel as much stress, so they don't pass on as much stress. For them, a stressful job is a gift to their families, which they endure for the good of others. For women, a stressful job is a cost to their families, which they leave for the good of others if they can.

As a result, empathetic women are less likely to be found in the most stressful jobs -- which also tend to be the highest paying and highest status jobs. Empathy is a great good for human society. But it can cost money.

Women Leave Math and Science for a More Meaningful Life

There are many women who start math and science careers - almost as many as men. There are many programs designed to draw women to math and science careers, including paying them more, providing mentors, providing family support, giving faster promotions, and giving high status. Many women at the highest levels of math and science in the younger generations report that the men in their lives, colleagues as well as family, are very supportive of their careers. The world has changed for women in math and science.

Yet women also leave math and science careers 2.8 times more than men do. Women in math and science are 13 times more likely to leave the workforce altogether. They are not leaving for higher-paying jobs -- they have the highest-paying jobs already. And women are more likely than men to leave math and science careers even if they do not have children.

Susan Pinker reports that even women who are very good at math and science are likely to leave good jobs because they want to do work that they find more meaningful. And the more freedom that women have to choose, the more likely they are to leave demanding math and science careers to work with people, for a more immediate social good, and part time.

Women in general are likely to use financial freedom to work less, but on things they value more. Men, by contrast, are more likely to seek higher pay and more responsibility for their own sake. Creating a male-model career path for women has not resulted in women pursuing those careers like men. With ability, money, and freedom, women pursue careers more like women.

Boys are More Likely to Be Dyslexic, But Are More Likely to Make Good, Anyway

One of Susan Pinker's themes in The Sexual Paradox is that boys are more fragile than girls from conception to old age. However, Pinker has been in clinical psychological practice long enough to see some of her patients turn from fragile boys to successful men. They still have the handicaps they had, but they have developed work-arounds. The key is the single-mindedness that men are also more likely to show than are women.

Boys are at least twice as likely as girls to be dyslexic. Girls do better than boys in school anyway; dyslexic boys find themselves doubly behind in school. Yet dyslexic boys often find other ways to succeed. The building trades are full of dyslexic men who are good with spatial relations, a skill that favors men. Pinker's example is a young man who was doing well as a chef. A big-time kitchen is a highly competitive, aggressive, hands-on, and visual place -- all male skills that can compensate for trouble reading.

Dyslexic girls do better in school than dyslexic boys, though worse than other students without reading problems. They are likely to go the other route in working around reading, by emphasizing talking, empathy, and the people skills that women are generally better at.

The bottom line, as Pinker reports it, is that dyslexic men make more as adults than dyslexic women, even though the women did better in school. In fact, the dyslexic men worked so hard that they made more, on average, than women without reading problems.

Men and Women Are the Same in the Middle, But Men Are More Extreme

Susan Pinker, in The Sexual Paradox, reports that men's and women's IQ curves have the same middle, but the tails of the men's curve are longer - on both sides. There are more men at the highest levels, and more at the lowest. This is how both of these things can be true: men and women have the same average intelligence, and there are many more men at the highest levels of math achievement.

There are other reasons why there would be more men at the top levels of public achievement, especially in power hierarchies. Pinker treats them in the book, and I will talk about them in the next few posts. But it helps to keep some perspective on what else this means. There are also fewer women at the bottom levels of public achievement. Pinker quotes the ever-colorful Camille Paglia: “There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.”

Lincoln/Darwin: Providential Gifts or Survivors of Struggle?

Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born two hundred years ago this week, within hours of one another. They are both, in my estimation, great men who made essential acts at a crucial moment in history. Lincoln saved the American union and refounded the country. Darwin showed how billions of micro-competitions in the whole integrated living world produce the great macro-outcomes that we see in lineages, species, and the entire ecology.

Some Darwinists today think that Darwin's insight requires that we believe that there are only material forces shaping these competitions. We evolve, but we don't progress. We change through time, but not in a meaningful way. Nature "selects," but there is no Providence guiding the selection. By this logic, the great intellectual achievement of Darwin and Darwinism itself is ultimately meaningless; it is just another change, not better or worse than any other idea with social consequences.

Lincoln, on the other hand, believed that Providence had a plan for the world. He was a humble man, and did not think that he was forcing Providence to follow his plan. On the contrary, Lincoln thought the American nation had a destiny, in which he was but one humble worker in it.

In the great competition to produce scientific theories, someone would have come up with some kind of evolutionary synthesis eventually. Wallace almost did, which spurred Darwin to publish the work he had in a drawer for years. In the great competition of politics, someone will get elected president. The election of 1860 produced a very rich crop of men with great gifts - and great flaws - who came close to winning. If the Democrats had not split, surely their nominee, Douglas or Breckenridge, would have been president that year. Lincoln's rivals within the Republican Party likewise had many serious contenders to win the election. It is part of Lincoln's genius that he not only prevailed in that competition, but then united many of his rivals for the worse competition, the civil war, that followed.

Perhaps Darwin and Lincoln were just the guys who happened to win the particular competition of their day. If not them, then someone else; if someone else, then history takes some other turn. And if we take materialist views seriously, those other turns of history would have been just as meaningful, and meaningless, as the history we turned out to have.

But as for me and my house, I believe the Lincoln -- and Darwin too -- were helped to become the right people for their time in history by the Providence that ultimately superintends nations and species, with and sometimes the despite the choices we make in our micro-competitions.