Category: Gender

Gendered Realty

Via someone on twitter this morning, I came to this infographic on how men and women are doing compared to each other in terms of home sales and prices. If that’s a confusing statement, or rather a vague statement, I intended it that way. That’s the way the infographic sets itself up. What it really means to present is how male and female real estate agents are faring, compared to each other, using home price sales and quantity of listings as their metric for success.

I like infographics, but I found this one to be unnecessarily confusing. If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, it gives you, in barely readable text, a good, solid way to read the infographic and accompanying list. But without that, I think it’s really unclear whether we’re talking about buyers (no) or sellers (no) or real estate agents (yes) and it doesn’t really give me much reason to care. Statistics are misleading enough without such beating around the bush.

On the state of economics

I haven’t yet written much about the Nobel Prize this week. There was little discussion of it within my department, likely due to a dearth of macroeconomists and a few days off for “reading days”. I will try to write something more in depth about it, perhaps over the weekend, but I found this piece, by John Kay, rather insightful for several reasons, two of which I’ll highlight here.

The first has to do with teaching. Students often struggle with the concept of a model. It’s something that is so profoundly simple, and even simplistic, that they struggle to see the use of it. I really like Kay’s description of the necessity of simplifying assumptions

All science uses unrealistic simplifying assumptions.  Physicists describe motion on frictionless plains, gravity in a world without air resistance.  Not because anyone believes that the world is frictionless and airless, but because it is too difficult to study everything at once.  A simplifying model eliminates confounding factors and focuses on a particular issue of interest.  To put such models to practical use, you must be willing to bring back the excluded factors.  You will probably find that this modification will be important for some problems, and not others – air resistance makes a big difference to a falling feather but not to a falling cannonball.

At lunch today with my chair, we discussed the decline in female economics majors. Our department, unlike many economics departments, has quite a few female faculty members. I didn’t have a single female economics professor at Duke, though I did in my time abroad. In fact, the female economics faculty with whom I did interact at Duke left a not-fantastic impression. At least anecdotally, I can say that high female-to-male faculty ratios didn’t push me down my current path, or low ones didn’t discourage me, either. Rather, Kay suggests there is something about the nature of our model-making that is profoundly asocial and disconnected, and thus, perhaps, male.

The knowledge that every problem has an answer, even and perhaps especially if that answer may be difficult to find, meets a deeply felt human need.  For that reason, many people become obsessive about artificial worlds, such as computer games, in which they can see the connection between actions and outcomes. Many economists who pursue these approaches are similarly asocial.  It is probably no accident that economics is by far the most male of the social sciences.

The whole piece is incredibly well done and provides a clear, straightforward critique of economics today; it is a bit dense. It addresses much of the debate behind current arguments for and against deficit spending, which, sadly, are likely not well understood by those pushing for either side. I highly recommend reading it.

Counting, miscounting and counting again

The Census Bureau reduced the number of same-sex couples it counted in the 2010 decennial census. Originally, when numbers were released in August of last year, more than 900,000 couples were counted, but now there are only 646,000, which is a pretty big drop.

The Census Bureau claims that the distribution of same-sex couples has remained unchanged. It seems rather unlikely that the distribution remained unchanged. For this to be true, I think a few things would have had to happen. Since the problems in identifying couples had to do with identifying the sex of respondents,a uniform process of identifying sex would have to have been done over all recorded Census questionnaires. This part, particularly if computerized, is not that hard (in STATA-speak–replace gender=1 if firstname==”Patricia”, replace gender==0 if firstname==”Michael”, etc). But it also is necessary to have taken proportional numbers from each state or region, which seems like it would be difficult to maintain over such a large area as the US. For instance, if 5% of the same-sex couple households reported in August were in Colorado, then exactly 5% of that extra 30% would have to be misclassified Coloradans. And the same for every state. It just seems like regional differences in naming and willingness to self-report same-sex household status would be different enough over states and urban/rural to skew it somehow.

I know that the Census Bureau imputes a lot of values and also works very hard to be accurate in the face of a lot of problematic data, but for almost 30% of the sample to disappear and still have the same geographic distribution seems unlikely.

But maybe I’m not giving us or the Census Bureau enough credit.

Good for mothers or for others?

The NYTimes Economix blog published a post today on how measures of well-being for women throughout the world fail to take into account mothers. Ability to access higher education, higher echelons of management, salary parity, etc, are all measures of how well women are doing in relation to men, but doesn’t say much about how able women are to care for their children. We know that women who have children take more time off of work, are more vulnerable to poverty and unemployment and likely suffer decreased salaries over time as a result of their decisions to raise children. A ever more limited focus on social safety nets like Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) makes them even more vulnerable.

Less than a week ago, the Times also published a piece lamenting the status of single people in the US. In particular, single people are not entitled to things like family leave and pay higher rates of insuranc.

So, who should we actually be worried about? Most likely the answer is that who worries us changes depending on what outcome we want to achieve. Both groups, mothers and single people, have a lot to contribute to society. Single people are more likely to be engaged in their communities, to volunteer and maintain social connections, contributing to a sense of community, perhaps, and mothers, well, they contribute their children. From an equity standpoint, it doesn’t make much sense to deny single people the benefits afforded to married people. And if we’re interested in overall climate for women, ignoring singleness in an analysis of economic well-being is (perhaps not quite) as deleterious as ignoring the plight of mothers. But perhaps that’s impetus for more clarity in our work and precision in our assessments. Measures of subjective analysis should identify the population that benefits, and if we’re going to include things like maternity leave, we should shoot for gender and marital status equality in those measures. Can father’s take time off after the addition of a child to the family (by birth or by adoption); can single people take time off to care for ailing siblings? I’m not necessarily advocating for equality within these sorts of things, just that if we’re going to ask the question of one group, we should ask it for all groups.

A (useful) rape analogy

Another blogger reminds us of the twisted logic and overt sexism that is used to counter claims of rape. It’s a quick read, and might take your mind off other things you don’t want to read tonight.

I’ll raise my glass to World Peace Day, not to celebrate, but because sometimes all you can do in the face of hatred and famine and violence, is hope.

Lies, damn lies and gendered statistics

A Gallup poll released today claims that both men and women prefer male bosses. Or at least that’s what the headline says. The actual story, in my opinion, is that about half of the population doesn’t care. Or they know enough to say that they don’t care, even if they do (ah, these social norms following me everywhere). According to the poll, a little more than half of those polled had a preference, and a little less than half did not. Of that half that had a preference, yes, more preferred a male boss, but that doesn’t mean that Americans prefer male bosses, as the first line of the story claims. It means that if they’re willing to state a preference, they prefer male bosses.

So, here’s a little story rewrite for you. “About half of Americans have no preference concerning the gender of their boss. Of those that do have a preference, 40% prefer female bosses. This is a huge gain over the first such poll that was taken in 1953 when only 5% of Americans stated a preference for female bosses. In the intervening six decades, preference for female bosses has increased more than four-fold.”

Yes, I’m being both terse and a little bit snarky, etc, etc, etc.

Surely, someone was going there

This article appeared Monday in the NYT, supposedly in response to the accusations leveled at Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s alleged victim (and yes, she’s still an alleged victim) concerning her asylum claim. In an earlier post, I expressed the concern that too much attention would be paid to her false claim for asylum. This, unfortunately, in addition to claims that she might be a prostitute, come with the corresponding disinterest in her claims of rape, and possible dismissal of the charges. We might never know what really happened between them because clearly, anyone who has ever lied would lie about being raped and put themselves through the hell and media firestorm that results when claim you’ve been raped.

Snarkiness aside, the somewhat sensationalist NYT article really only confirms one thing, that we have no idea how often people make fraudulent asylum claims. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen, and not to say that we’re bad (or good) at catching them, merely that we don’t know. They certainly happen. And from an economic standpoint, it’s likely, though, that if we make the process harder, we would see more fraudulent claims. Or if we make some other part of the immigration process harder, visas for skilled immigrants, for instance, we would see more fraudulent claims. If you increase the costs of something, particularly necessities, you create incentives to get around it, often in ways we don’t like. Most of the data on asylum claims are confidential in order to protect all parties (asylum-seekers, those who represent them, etc), so we’re stuck again in the place where even if we could come up with a clever way to test for fraudulent claims, we don’t have access to what we’d need to do it. We just don’t know.

However, our ability to econometrically test for this, as fun as it might be, is less important than whether people are being afforded the services and assistance they need. To paraphrase the words of a lawyer friend, there is bad legal advice everywhere. Despite attempts to keep lawyers within a strict code of ethics, there are of course people who would encourage clients to exaggerate their claims. There are also people who would do so of their own volition out of fear, all of this even when their own story is horrific enough to merit asylum without lying. What prompts someone to file a fraudulent claim, fear that it’s too difficult to get asylum, fear of returning to one’s country, bad legal advice? Some combination of the above? Also, there are checks in place to prevent fraud. Are they perfect? Probably not, but I have plenty of checks in place to make sure my students don’t cheat, that doesn’t mean some of them haven’t gotten away with it.

The fact that people file fraudulent claims doesn’t mean we should crack down harder on asylum claims, but perhaps we should be examining why someone might feel the need to lie. Gender, in particular, is not grounds for asylum, under most interpretations. You must be part of a particular class, like abused women, to seek asylum. Requirements are open to interpretation, but you must show that you’ve been persecuted for being part of one of those classes or show that you face imminent danger if you return to your country because of being part of one of those classes. It’s not particularly easy to prove, even when you’re telling the truth. But perhaps we should take a closer look at what drives people to lie to seek asylum, rather than using isolated examples of lying to encourage a backlash against all asylum seekers, most who would face real danger if they returned to their countries.

Picking boys over girls

I start almost every class I teach with a sort of overview of economics and what kind of research I do. My favorite thing to do is throw out facts that seem controversial and get my students a bit riled up. In that vein, my favorite fact to throw out is that if you give money to women, they spend it differently than if you give money to men. I, of course, phrase it slightly more contentiously, claiming that men buy booze and cigarettes and women buy books. In the simplest terms, women are likely to spend an extra dollar on their children, while men are likely to spend an extra dollar on themselves, particularly in the developing world. This is a generalization, of course, and reflects averages, and doesn’t necessarily preclude that men will spend any money on their children. They of course are spending money on their children.

A new strand of literature, in fact, is attempting to tease out exactly how men and women spend money on their children, and in particular, whether there are differences by gender of the child. One of my advisors is very active in this literature and has a recent paper* in the AER on expenditures on children in Mexican immigrant families. She shows that the absence of a male head of household, through migration to the US, shifts resources towards female children. As men send remittances home, women make the decisions about how to spend the money, and thus spend more on girls. When the male heads return, and thus the man resumes decision-making power on expenditures, resources shift back towards the boys. As much as my students might think I’m crazy or sexist, who is making decisions in a household is of extreme importance in determining expenditure allocations.

*Antman, Francisca M. 2011. “Migration and Gender Discrimination Among Children Left Behind.” American Economic Review 100:3, 645-649.

A lawyer, an economist and a social psychologist walk into a bar…

Over the last few months, I’ve been hard at work on an amazing project with two even more amazing coauthors. Through my undergrad, I’ve come into contact with so many fantastically smart people and as we all grow professionally, we’re starting to collaborate and work together on various academic projects. It just so happens that this most recent collaboration was proposed to me by a lawyer, to write a handbook chapter on gender-based violence, or GBV, from a social psychology perspective, with the other coauthor being a social psychologist. It starts to sound like a joke, but I promise it’s not.

I delved into this world of social psychology with some trepidation. My advisors expressed their qualms about the project, and not just because it would take time away from finishing my dissertation (it has, but it’s all going to get done). Academics in general, and economists in particular, are wary of crossing disciplinary lines, and there are good reasons for that hesitation. We’ve all been “raised” in very different academic environments, with not only different advisors, but different canonical texts, different standards for what constitutes research, for what constitutes a conclusion, different styles of writing, of citation, etc. In this light, our differences can seem overwhelming, to the point of excluding all possibility of collaboration. When it comes down to it, though, we’re all interested in asking interesting questions and finding answers to them. It’s that curiosity, that drive to solve problems, that I think unites us as academics. Certainly, we all took these (at least theoretical) pay cuts for a reason other than “summers off”.

In the research I did for this paper, and am still doing as organizations get back to me, and more sources and programs come to light, has opened up a whole new world in terms of how we present information. While I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how we ask questions, and particularly survey questions, I’ve spent less time in thinking about how we present information to change behavior. It’s easy to agree that gender-based violence is an undesirable outcome, but with the wealth of experience that tells us how easily we can alienate those we try to teach, how teaching can backfire in the face of culture and how unique individual situations are, it’s harder to say that we know how to combat it.

Programs that follow the dicta of social norms marketing fall squarely in this idea of how do we present information to change behavior. It’s a term that at first confused me, the economist, but quickly took hold. We talk about social norms all the time from what constitutes appropriate dinner talk to the acceptability of practices like FGM or honor killings in certain communities. As regards gender-based violence social norms, is gender-based violence acceptable? Or, rather, are there certain situations under which beating your wife is acceptable? We find that the answers to these questions are rather different, and how we pose them to survey respondents greatly affects the data to come out of such surveys.

The marketing part is the presentation of information. Through pamphlets or television shows or radio programs, advertisements, participatory workshops or events, social norms marketers try to present information about social norms, or rather present information about desirable social norms, using methods that are familiar, or not. Some of the most successful social norms marketing programs for gender-based violence rely on what are essentially soap operas and likable characters to portray desirable behavior.

Perhaps it’s my relatively naivete in the subject, but it really warms my heart to see new campaigns like this coming out. While in all reality, they really haven’t been sufficiently evaluated, the glimmers of promise in their success at creating desirable social norms around violence (it’s not okay to hit your wife, ever; rape is not something real men do, etc) bode well.

My coauthor recently sent me these videos from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, featuring a famous Congolese rapper in various roles portraying strong, loving, respectful real men. Real men who make their wives dinner when they’re late coming home from work instead of beating them and real men who treat women as equals instead of demanding sexual favors in return for employment. The videos don’t have subtitles and I don’t speak much French, but they’re cool nonetheless. I don’t see them winning an Oscar by any means, but hopefully they’ll change someone’s mind.

Turning around the war on girls

A new book about the infamous “missing women” by Mara Hvistendahl is gathering quite a storm, at least if you look at it from the perspective the Wall St. Journal (subscription required, my apologies if you can’t read the article), twitter, and my inbox. Unfortunately, I cannot comment on the book itself yet, as I haven’t read it (don’t worry, I will!), but there is a lot of fodder provided by the book review’s author, Jonathan V. Last, and the literature in economics.

The question of missing girls as a result of sex-selection is not a new topic, by any means. Amartya Sen, a revered development economist and Nobel Prize winner, sounded the alarm more than 20 years ago now with an essay in the New York Times claiming that 100 million women were missing in the world, mostly in India and China, countries known to show strong son preference. He showed this by pointing out that while in the US and Europe, we see women outnumbering men, this does not hold true in much of the world. In fact, it’s quite the opposite, and the ratios are becoming worse. He doesn’t get much into the evolutionary science that guides the numbers, but he reminds us that boys outnumber girls at birth, but girls babies are more likely to survive, leaving countries like the US (where son preference is present, but perhaps not enough to encourage sex-selective abortion or infanticide) with a few extra women per one hundred men. Despite the fact that girls seem to be a bit hardier than boys, many developing countries–particularly in Asia and particularly those with a history of government-backed population reduction initiatives–are experiencing an outsize number of male births and an increasingly imbalanced sex ratio in older cohorts. Instead of a few extra men for every one hundred women, we start to see 110, 115 or more men for every one hundred women.

Emily Oster made waves and a career when she (erroneously, it seems) claimed that Hepatitis B, not sex-selective abortion, infanticide, femicide, or the systematic discrimination against girl children, was the root cause for much of the case of the missing women. (Note to budding PhD economists, write your job market paper on a really controversial topic). Women who had contracted Hepatitis B, the story went, were more likely to give birth to boys, thus skewing the ratio of boys to girls. Her arguments have been shown to be rife with problems in a number of papers and the question of missing girls remains a hot topic in economics. Last year, a colleague attended a conference in which her session was only for papers on “Sex-selective abortion in India.” For reference, most sessions at large conferences bring together diverse papers for sessions on “Topics in Education” or “Monetary Policy”. Rarely do we see four papers on the same subject.

Without reading Mara’s book, what’s interesting right now is that there should be natural economic consequences, right? A skewed sex imbalance means that women are suddenly a scarce resource and we should see that scarcity leads to higher prices in the market. Unfortunately, this does not always translate into desirable outcomes when we look at the big picture, and it does not necessarily mean that women are suddenly more valued (culturally), just more valuable (financially, opportunity-cost wise). In the marriage market, we might expect to see dowry payments dropping, or even reversed, where men are paying a bride price instead. We should see increased wage rates for work that women tend to do. The lack of women available to do “women’s work”, should push other individuals–either children, men or older women–into that work. Older women working is probably not sustainable. While putting more children to work is certainly not a desirable development goal, it might end up being the eventual outcome for communities with strong social norms against men doing women’s work. To some extent, I’ve heard anecdotal evidence of all these scenarios playing out in various communities.

An extreme sex imbalance also creates a serious problem with regard to who can get married and may even lead to increased violence. In the case that women now have more bargaining power in a relationship because they can earn more money, they are perhaps more likely to delay marriage. In the case where women don’t have more bargaining power and cultural norms dictate marrying them off anyway, we might see younger women getting married to older men (perhaps men who have gained enough standing to ‘earn’ one of the scarce wives), which reduces the pool of marriageable women for men of their age. Regardless of which scenario (or an alternate one) plays out, the lack of women entering the marriage market has the ability to create, in all these different ways, a group of young, directionless men who are more apt to engage in criminal, or merely unsavory, activities or take out their aggression on women.

One email I received concerning the book suggested that we should try to change cultural attitudes about the value of women in these societies. Perhaps, she suggested, we could provide cash payments to women who give birth to children or other incentives. It’s an interesting idea, but one that could easily backfire.

Before we can talk about incentivizing the birth of female children, we have to figure out whether the sex imbalance is hurting or helping women, whether it is hurting or helping societies and what exactly would happen to those girl babies if they were born. As for hurting or helping, I think the general consensus is that it’s hurting, but I don’t know that we know that much about the outcomes associated with sex imbalances, yet, and it may be different in different places. Sex imbalances are still, I believe, much more skewed in younger populations than older ones, so we’re still not seeing the full effect on the marriage and labor markets of the lack of brides and female workers. Even if they are in place, there’s certainly not a consensus on what they are.

If we’re going to pay people to have girls, that raises all sorts of policy issues. On the one hand, though perhaps unlikely, it does run the risk of tipping the imbalance in the other direction. It may be that we have to wait for cultural norms to play themselves out to see a natural increase in the value of girl babies as dowry payments decline. Alternatively , there is evidence that social norms marketing sorts of programs have indeed altered some social norms and could have an effect on the value of girls, which may be more useful than paying parents.

The saddest part of just paying parents to have the girl children is that we might see more infanticide and general neglect of girls. Much of sex-selective abortion has been shown to be a substitute for infanticide and neglect of girl babies. Though certainly not relevant in every case, this also not a situation in which we can restrict abortion in order to repopulate the world with women. Cultural norms and attitudes are what economists would call ‘sticky’ and how best to change them, if we even should change them (there’s another benevolent dictator argument to be had here), or let them run their course, is a complicated question. It’s certainly one for which we don’t have all the answers.