Embezzlement and the testosterone fueled finance crisis

This is about claims that the financial crisis was caused by testosterone (or that there wouldn't have been a financial crisis if women were in charge of Wall Street).

Paul Elam did a nice debunking:

Power has corrupting influences.  It affects all human beings, and indeed it has become so rampant a problem in modern culture that we stand on a precipice of economic doom and may be too far gone in tipping over to stop the momentum.

And like always, when data is involved...I have to feature it, I present the "Marquet Report on Embezzlement 2009":

Contrary to conventional wisdom, women are more likely to be perpetrators of major embezzlement schemes than men. However, men, who still tend who hold more senior level management positions, embezzle significantly more in their schemes than women. [...] Nearly 63 percent of the incidents involved female perpetrators, consistent with our 2008 findings (60%). Male perpetrators, on average, embezzled nearly twice as much as females, consistent with our 2008 findings.

Well I really got nothing more to say....so....um....who would have thought....well well....

Child abuse and female perpetrators

Recently on ABC news:

An estimated 56 percent of all abusers -- physical, mental and sexual -- are women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The most common form is psychological.

"It happens a lot," said Dr. Philip R. Muskin, professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University. "Neglect and emotional abuse are every bit as damaging as sexual abuse."

Abuse can include name calling; threatening to kill the victim's family or pet; controlling access to finances; isolating the victim from family and friends; coercing the victim to perform degrading, humiliating or illegal acts; interfering with job, medical or educational opportunities; or making the victim feel powerless and ashamed.

Numerous studies have shown that maternal behaviors like constant criticism, withholding affection or humiliation can take a toll on children, adversely affecting their academic achievement, social growth and self-worth.

A closer look at the 56 percent number can be found on the CDC page - The Child Maltreatment Report 2008

This Child Maltreatment 2008 report, now in its 19th edition, presents national data about child abuse and neglect known to CPS agencies in the United States during Federal fiscal year (FFY) 2008. The data were collected and analyzed through the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS) supported by the Children’s Bureau. [...] For FFY 2008, 56.2 percent of the perpetrators were women, 42.6 percent were men and 1.1 percent were of unknown sex.² Of the women who were perpetrators, more than 40 percent (45.3%) were younger than 30 years of age, compared with one-third of the men (35.2%) (figure 5–1). These proportions have remained consistent for the past few years.

Not really surprising. It is always nice to have official numbers though.

Change of pace...

The idea of this blog once was to take the bits of useful information we get every now and then and create posts about it, comment on it, have a resource one could forward to someone else instead the searching through tidbits of informations I did in the past.

Creating such posts like the giant blobs of text you sometimes find on this blog takes me quite some time, time I do not have to such an extent that I had before due to personal reasons (including lower back pain that limits the time I can sit in front of a computer every day). As of now I have about 70 unfinished, unpublished blogposts and huge lists of "tidbits of informations" to add to these posts. These lists keep growing every other day and certainly do not help to keep me motivated to wade through all of them and create wonderful postings.

To get control of these amounts of information I will in the future cut back to what I did with the warcraft file, less comments and more information.

So to all of my readers (all 2 of them. Hi, Mum!) who are wondering why there are more and more short posts, you now know what is going on.


Ps.: I was kidding, my mum does not speak English and by god she should stop trying.

More about the mother's gap

I talked about the mother's gap before. This new study fits in nicely:

Researchers at the University of Maryland in College Park and the University of California at Los Angeles reviewed 35 years of data from some 2,200 women born between 1944 and 1954, and found that women who had kids in the early- to mid-20s or even younger didn't fare as well economically as those who delayed. [...] this new study, presented by co-author Joan Kahn, a sociologist at the University of Maryland in College Park, finds women who got more education and job training before having children don't experience that so-called "penalty." [...] "Women who delay childbearing end up as successful economically as women who didn't have children, and we look at it basically throughout their adult years - well into their 50s," she says. [...] The point, she says, is that women who are younger when they have kids and attempt to get back into the workforce later may not have that up-front investment in education and training, which those who have kids later benefit from. They earned equivalent wages and had higher status occupations just like women who were childless.

Now let us take a look at the wage gap for women, factoring in marriage and children:

Never married women without children make 117% of what their male counterparts make [1]
Never married women make 94,2% of what their male counterparts make [2]
Childless women make 90% of what their male counterparts make [3]

Another article with some interesting facts:

Recently, the conservative American Enterprise Institute announced the virtual death of the gender gap in wages--citing entry-level figures. At that level, women make 98 percent of what men do. But the institute failed to announce that it was only comparing the salaries of young workers. [...] Today, the gap in hourly wages between women with and without children is greater than the gap between men and women.
While the hourly wages of women without children are roughly 90 percent of men's hourly wages, the comparable figure for women with children is 70 percent.

When hourly wages of new employees are compared, the gender gap is very narrow. But by the age when most women begin having children, the birth of these kids penalizes women by roughly 20 percent. Among mothers, those who have more than one child, or who are black, or single, pay an even larger family penalty than married white women with only one child.

This mommy gap has come to light through new, sophisticated research on the gender gap, including the work of Jane Waldfogel at Columbia University.

What is going on is crystal clear and you don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand this. As long as women are the ones doing most childcare, this won't change. I assume empowering fathers will do more to the wage gap as every other legislation passed is trying to do. I wonder when then legislators will understand, but it seems to me this isn't going to be anytime soon.

The very first bill that President Obama signed into law dealt with equal pay for women, but activists say it's done little to close the ongoing difference between what men and women earn.

The law -- the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act -- may have extended the amount of time victims have to file discrimination cases, but it hasn't changed this fact: Women, on average, earn only 77 cents to a man's dollar, and the disparity is greater for women of color.

New legislation in Congress aims to close the pay equity gap, even as administration officials prepare to step up enforcement of the existing law.

Sources:

[1] - The New York Times front page headline recently tells us that "For Young Earners in Big City, Gap Shifts in Women's Favor." The big surprise? New York City women between 21 and 30 working full-time made 117% of men's wages. Everyone is wondering why. Here's why, for starters...
When I did the research for Why Men Earn More in 2005, I discovered that nationwide never-married women who had never had children earned 117% of the wages of never married men who had never had children. Manhattan women in their twenties are less likely to have married or had children than women in their twenties who live in suburban and rural areas. The overall pay gap with men earning more is not about discrimination; it is mostly about the division of labor once children arrive. - from here

[2] - a report titled Women's Earnings in 2008, published by the US Labor Department in July 2009, found that in aggregate (without controlling for preferences for higher or lower earning fields), women who have never married earn 94.2 percent of their unmarried male counterparts' earnings a figure that is within less than 6% of wage parity despite the fact that, "women, still..are more likely to choose jobs in education and healthcare, where earnings will tend to be lower." - from here

[3] - For childless women, the gap is 10 cents on the dollar.- from here

[4] - Bonus info - In their book “Women’s Figures” (1999), economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth and Christine Stolba meticulously compared data on the earnings of childless men and women aged 27 to 33. They found that the wage gap shrank to 98 cents.

Men's spaces

From Wikipedia:

Men's spaces refer to separate social and cultural spaces, roles and norms available to men in non-westernized societies. It is the membership of these spaces that determines a male's manhood. [...] The westernized view deems men's spaces as discriminatory toward the rights of women, and therefore fit for abolition. This western standard generally does not apply toward women's spaces, which are viewed as beneficial for women.

No comment needed....oh my.

Revisiting the poverty gap

From a recent article by Jessica Valenti

women work outside the home, but they make about 76 cents to a man's dollar and make up the majority of Americans living in poverty

I think I tackled the wage gap quite often and out of my mind when we look at more than raw wages and factor working time in women make 92 - 95 cents to a man's dollar and there is no proof that this gap is caused by discrimination.

Back to the majority of Americans living in poverty, which I also tackled before. And what can I say the new numbers are here, drumroll please:

U.S. Census Bureau Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplement, 2009

Poverty Status in 2008
Men living in poverty: 12%
Women living in poverty: 14%

A 2% difference. But there is something that the statistic do not show us.

Alimony and child support

Both of those are threated as monthly bills. What does this mean. Imagine a household with husband wife and one kid. Once the income in that household falls below a certain level, this family is listed as living in poverty. Now after a divorce it is assumed (by the statistic) that the one, who is not living with the children does not have to pay alimony and child support and is therefor less likely to be listed as living in poverty. Keep in mind that after someone who has to pay child support loses his job it can take quite a long time to adjust alimony and child support payments. Often those who have to pay child support are fathers. Some numbers:

In the past decade, child-support collections from the estimated 11 million fathers who do not live with their children have nearly doubled, to more than $18 billion a year. Most of that money comes from fathers who have stable jobs and can afford to pay. [...] Where the money does not come from is the 2.5 million poor noncustodial fathers in the United States. According to a study by the Urban Institute, nearly 30 percent of these men are in prison. Among the remainder, nearly half are unemployed. Those who do have jobs earn an average of $5,600 a year, well below the poverty line. [...] Poor fathers are often asked to pay significantly more, as a percentage of their income, than middle- class fathers, according to the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, a social policy research group that studied 5,500 low-income fathers in seven cities in the 1990's. Nearly two-thirds of the poor fathers tracked by the study had child support orders that demanded more than half of their income.[...] The maximum that child support enforcement can take under federal laws is 65 percent of a person's salary [...]  only 4 percent of fathers are able to get their child support payments reduced when their earnings drop by more than 15 percent. Judges tend to proceed on the assumption that the man's income will eventually get back to its former level. Even if a reduction is granted, it takes as long as six months - while arrearages mount.

Legislation also eliminated an automatic assessment of surcharges for unpaid child support. Starting Jan. 1, 2011, courts will have the authority to assess surcharges on a case-by-case basis if there's a finding of willful noncompliance with a court order. Watson (director of Berrien County Friend of the Court office) said a law that went into effect in 1996 assessed an 8 percent surcharge twice a year to any unpaid support. The idea was to give non-custodial parents an incentive to pay support, Watson said, "but it's buried people." The surcharge amount was reduced in 2006 to tie it to the five-year average of interest rates on treasury notes. Aside from the impact on individual payers, Watson said, the high interest rate and frequent compounding created a huge statewide total of IOU money that is unlikely to ever be paid. At the end of 2009, the statewide total of unpaid child support was more than $9 billion, and half of the amount is surcharges. Surcharges totaled $250 million in 2009 alone. Many people who pay court-ordered child support earn low wages and, for them, the surcharges are particularly burdensome. Watson said 54 percent of child support payers in Michigan report income of less than $10,000 annually. They account for 77 percent of the total past due support payments. - from here

Homeless men

Men are more likely than women to be homeless. Those are not in the statistic (it is a telephone survey). Numbers by the U.S. Conference of Mayors 2007 as deciphered by Robert Franklin about 75% of the homeless population are male:

Most studies show that single homeless adults are more likely to be male than female. In 2007, a survey by the U.S. Conference of Mayors found that of the population surveyed 35% of the homeless people who are members of households with children are male while 65% of these people are females. However, 67.5% of the single homeless population is male, and it is this single population that makes up 76% of the homeless populations surveyed (U.S. Conference of Mayors, 2007).

about 51% of all homeless adults are single men and about 17% are single women.  Strangely, it gives no overall figures for homeless adults, but if the 3:1 ratio for single adults is applied to the remaining 32% of adults who aren't single, that would give an overall percentage of 75% male and 25% female.  Of course the fact that it's been men who've lost 80% of the jobs during the past year may well mean that men make up more than 75% of the homeless, but we don't seem to know that now. 

Imprisoned men

Probably not among the gifted and wealthy I am citing the above Glenn Sacks's article again.

93% of our world-leading 2.3 million incarcerated people are men

Who will certainly have a hard time finding a job in a recession after being in prison.

In conclusion...

...I fail to see why poverty hits women that much harder. But I am certainly not surprised that Valenti sees it that way. I might be coming back to that article again.

Three woman caned for having extramaterial sex

An article I found via feministing, which highlights whom we care about. The news here is that women got caned, the article just dropped the men that were caned as well (and probably more harshly). Some quotes from other articles:

Malaysian authorities said Wednesday that officials caned four Muslim men and, for the first time, three Muslim women this month after being found guilty of having sex out of wedlock. [...] All seven were found guilty of illicit sex and sentenced by a Shariah court in the Kuala Lumpur area between December 2009 and January 2010. [...] Two of the women and the four men were struck six times, while the other woman was struck four times. Mr. Hishammuddin said that a doctor was present at the canings, which took place in male and female prisons, and that the offenders weren't tied. The women were seated while they were struck, and no injuries were reported. The idea, the officials previously have said, is to humiliate rather than injure—unlike the canings administered to drug pushers and other violators of civil laws, which can sometimes leave deep scars.

“It was carried out perfectly.” Hishammuddin said in a statement. “Even though the caning did not injure them (the women), they said it caused pain within them.” [...] Under these laws, the women have to be whipped in a seated position by a female prison guard and be fully clothed. Sex out of marriage is considered illegal under Islamic law and punishments can range from a fine to six strokes of the cane or both.

So to summarize, although caning affects more men than women, once women get punished as well there is an uproar. I am not surprised here. Hopefully that uproar leads to abolishing that kind of punishment (and not just for women).