Women three times more likely to be arrested for domestic violence

Ugh, sometimes one can just be speachless. I was after reading this gem.

Men are responsible for most cases of domestic violence, but women are three times more likely to be arrested for incidents of abuse, research reveals today.

I am more disappointed with the headline than the report itself.. The study was based on a small sample (96 participants) of police data which simply isn´t fit as a basis for generalized statements like the above. A rundown on different types of studies.

Studies based on CTS-Surveys

A random sample of persons is asked if they were hit/slapped/kicked etc. or did this themselves to their partner.

Those studies give us a good reflection of reality.

Findings:
- Men and women batter each other equally in minor and severe cases
- Women are more likely to use weapons
- Men are less likely to be injured (about 40% of injured victims are men)
- High number of victims. Low percentage of severe violence

Studies based on Crime-Surveys

A random sample of persons is asked if they were victims of a violent crime.

This kind of survey finds less victims as a lot of victims don´t see their victimisation as a crime (My partner only punches me when he/she is drunk. I still love my partner she/he has just temper problems) it also finds more violence crimes as those where injury occurs are more likely to be seen as crimes.

Findings:
- Men are more likely to batter women
- Women are even more likely to use weapons
- Men are even more likely to be injured among that sample
- Lower number of victims. Higher percentage of severe violence

Studies based on Police Data / Women´s Shelter Data etc.

Not based on a random sample but on police / women´s shelter data.

Findings:
- Men are far more likely to batter women
- Even more women use weapons
- Lowest number of cases analysed
- Highest percentage of severe crimes
- Men are more likely to be injured
- Women are more likely to be arrested

Explaining the gender difference

We live in a society where female violence against men is something seen as funny in the media while violence against women is stigmatised. Boys are raised to never hit a girl, girls are not. If a woman in a relationship is slapped people advise her to leave, if a man in a relationship is slapped he is asked what he did wrong. While we accept women as victims and victims only, we accept men as perpetrators but never as victims.

Findings from a report on ABC.

Turning the Tables

How Do People React When There's Abuse in Public, But the Gender Roles are Reversed? How Would You React?

[...]
On previous shows, "Primetime" has staged scenes of abuse in which the man is the aggressor, and the woman is the victim. And in these situations, passersby -- men and women -- often stepped up and intervened. So producers were curious. What would happen if the tables were turned, and the man was suddenly the victim? Would people be just as willing to come to his defense?

This staged scenario happens more often in real life than you may think. According to Colgate University psychology professor Carrie Keating, women abusing, even assaulting their male partners "is a big problem in this country."

"There are some data that suggest that women actually hit more than men do," says Keating. "Men create more damage, but women hit more than men do."

A report prepared for the Centers for Disease Control estimates that each year there are over 800,000 serious cases of men being physically abused by women. But the actual figures are believed to be much higher, since many men are often too embarrassed to admit being the victim of abuse by a woman.

Even professional athletes, with their macho reputations, have alleged abuse. In 2002, Major League pitcher Chuck Finley's wife, actress Tawny Kitaen, was arrested and jailed after he accused her of pummeling him, causing bruises and abrasions. She pleaded not guilty, and charges were dropped after she agreed to attend anger management classes.

[...]

One after another, passersby witnessed the abusive scene… and kept right on going.
Mathilda was one of those bystanders. She says she didn't think the man was in any physical danger, and could probably take care of himself. "I didn't immediately think to protect the man at all," she said. "It didn't look like any harm was being done."

The reaction of another woman, Lynda, was stunning. As our actress continued to heap abuse on her make-believe boyfriend, she walked by the scene and pumped her fist in a show of sisterly solidarity.

"Good for you. You Go, Girl!" is how Lynda recalls her reaction.
"I was thinking he probably did something really bad," she said. "Maybe she caught him cheating or something like that…and [it] made her lose it and slap him in the face. I reacted like, 'Yes. Woman power.'"

This type of reaction didn't come as a surprise to Keating. Observers often excuse their "own lack of response by denigrating the victim and making up stories that he really deserved the punishment he was receiving," Keating says.

She says that perhaps these people have some past frustration in their lives which makes them "actually enjoy vicariously the experience this woman was having by being aggressive" toward her boyfriend.

'Old-Fashioned Views'

Later, a husband and wife out for some exercise observed the abusive situation and continued on their way. So "Primetime's" producers stepped in and asked, "Why not stop or at least call 911?"

"What they were havin' there…[they were] just havin' a little tiff. They'll be all right," said the man, a police officer in a nearby community. His wife told "Primetime" that she would have found it "more upsetting if [the young man] had put his hands on" the young woman."

"Oh, without a doubt," her husband readily agreed, acknowledging the double standard. "Call it old-fashioned views. If you're raised the way I was raised, you don't put your hands on a woman, right?"

Keating says that holding those kinds of values and beliefs "is going to give them a very different lens through which they see the behavior of the actress, the aggressiveness of the woman against the man. They under-value the potency of her responses."

[...]

Over two days of taping, "Primetime" watched 163 people just walk right by the actors – the abusive woman and her boyfriend. Of all those who had the chance to step up and get involved, only one group of women stopped.

After taking time to assess the situation, these women -- four of them -- gathered at a distance to assess the situation. They then sent an emissary to offer the fighting couple some assistance.

But when the actress replied that "this is not your business," the woman respectfully walked away.

But while the first woman was attempting to engage the couple, one of the other women, Clare, was calling 911 from her cell phone.

"I'm in Leonia Park, and there are two people fighting on a bench," she reported. "She's …beatin' him up and I was wondering if somebody could come and just check it out?" (The police were aware of the hidden camera experiment).

The fact that the abuser was a woman did not matter to Clare and the other women with her. They said they just knew they had to do something.

"She was a little out of control," said Clare.

"I was concerned for both their safety," another woman said.

Another member of the group, Donna, recalls "trying to assess the situation before we reacted."

Keating found this group of concerned women to be "an interesting collective. In a sense they verify the sort of cognitive steps we all go through whenever we see a situation that conveys some sort of ethical dilemma: 'Should we respond or not'?"

"They saw it as requiring intervention," she said. "They stepped up to take responsibility. They collected as a group and tried to figure out what to do and actually put into place a plan of action where they could be of help."

 Another finding.

Survey finds male abuse approval

More than half of women questioned at a Glasgow university said they approved of wives hitting their husbands.

The Glasgow Caledonian students were among 6,500 women surveyed from 36 universities for an international study into attitudes on domestic violence.

Of the 200 women, 60% said it was acceptable for women to hit their husbands while 35% admitted assaulting their partner.

Also imagine the impact the shelter movement had on these numbers. I doubt a crime-survey in 1950 would have found many female victims (my husband sometimes slaps me but I deserved it). This is very much where men are today (my wife sometimes slaps me, but I deserved it). A female assault is less likely to be seen as a crime (as men are less likely to be injured, this also leds to less reports) and therefor is less often reported. Some evidence.

37% of female victims of DV called the police only 15% of men did (Family violence in Canada - 2003)


17% of male victims of DV seeked helped with "formal social agencies" compared to 48% of female victims (Canadian General Social Survey - 1999)


Female victims are 9-time as likely to call the police and 5-time as likely to talk to a relative or friend than male victims (National family Violence Survey - 1985)


8% of male victims called the police compared to 22% of female victims (British Crime Survey - 1996)

47% Of female victims and 16% of male victims called the police. Only 39% of male victims defined their expierience as domestic violence but 77% of women did. (Scottish Crime Survey - 2000)

Women are more likely to report minor cases to officials: Only 25% of all cases reported by women were severe cases compared to 86% of cases reported by men. Men were injured in most of this cases and most of this cases also involved weapons (most often knives) (McLeod - Women against men: An examination of domestic violence based on an analysis of official data and national victimization data - 1984)

To make matters worse (and to further explain the widening gender gap in studies based on police-data) the police (and society) are treating male victims different than women.

Often victimised men are not taken serious by the police (Farrell - 1993 | Wilkinson - Children and divorce - 1981) and often that leads to men not reporting their victimisation (Steinmetz - The battered husband syndrome - 1980 | Machietto - Aspects of male victimisation and female aggression - 1992)

Data that comes from helplines that support male victims confirm this. An analysis of callers to the ManKind Initiative’s Helpline ManKind

Did You Seek Help From The Police – How Did They Help
(Yes Answers Only)?
Arrested you - 26%
Sympathetic – no help offered - 39%

Characteristics of Callers to the Domestic Abuse Helpline for Men

Male victims’ experiences with the system
[...]

[A] common theme in the men’s qualitative reports:
When men are victimized by women, they may be additionally victimized through their dealings with domestic violence advocates. Consider also these men’s experiences:

“I called eleven different numbers for battered women and got no help.”

“She stabbed me with a knife, and I didn’t even defend myself, and after I got out of the hospital two weeks later, the court tells me to go to a group they say is for victims. It turns out to be for batterers and I am expected to admit to being an abuser and talk about what I did to deserve getting stabbed.”

“M, a 37 year old ex-police officer with two young children is seeking a temporary safe haven from threats of serious violence from his ex-wife, who will be released from prison soon. . . . In M’s case, attempts to access domestic violence resources increased his sense of fear and helplessness which he expresses as anger, particularly over the apparent lack of concern for the welfare of his children, who would receive no shelter from the violence of one parent simply because the other parent is male. The only helpMobtained from a local domestic violence agency was a referral to a statewide ‘resource center’ for men, which turned out to be program for batterers. [DAHM confirmed with both agencies. The referring agency stated, ‘We send all our male callers there.’]”

“J tried to access the limited resources available in his area in an attempt to initiate couples counseling. reaching out for help left J feeling further abused; he was treated with suspicion, disbelief and thinly veiled accusations that he was a ‘batterer.’ [DAHM confirmed.The first response of the agency supervisor was, ‘Why would a man call a helpline if he were not the abuser.’]”

“While married, R was kicked in the groin, punched, stabbed and strangled. R states that for several years he ‘just took it’ because ‘that’s what we’re supposed to do.’ . . . Although separation has stopped the physical violence, R’s estranged wife continues the abuse through the only means available: preventing visitation, alienating the children and filing false allegations with Child Protective Services.”

As these quotes illustrate, several men, prior to finding the DAHM, were revictimized by a system that is set up to help female victims of IPV, and at times, may not even consider that men can be victimized. A number of male victims in the current study reported calling several different domestic violence helplines only to be turned away, laughed at, or accused of being a male batterer. These quotes are illustrative of the ways in which male victims can be revictimized through the current domestic violence service system:
A man who was stabbed by his abusive wife must admit that he deserved being stabbed because he is the real abuser; another man who is stabbed by his wife but was not violent in return is prevented from seeing his children; a man seeking refuge for both himself and his children because of a violent wife is referred to a batterers’ program. The revictimization that many of these men experienced in the very system that is set up to help victims of domestic violence is important to consider because it can have grave consequences. Consider this woman’s call to the DAHM. She called to receive support and validation of her son’s experiences:
“B is calling for support; it is close to the anniversary of her son’s suicide. She wants someone to hear her grief and understand her belief that he was driven to suicide by the false allegations of a controlling wife who knew how to manipulate the system. After leaving the relationship, his estranged wife would obtain a restraining order, initiate contact, then charge him with violating the order. Several such encounters with the justice system left her son emotionally and financially drained. With ‘no where to go and no one to talk to,’ he became increasingly despondent and eventually took his own life.”

Malcolm George (Riding the Donkey Backwards: Men as the Unacceptable Victims of Marital Violence - 1994) made a nice summary.

Straus & Gelles (1986) sum up much of the problem we find when discussing male victims of female violence when they say "Violence by wives has not been an object of public concern. There has been no publicity, and no funds have been invested in ameliorating this problem because it has not been defined as a problem" (p. 472, italics added). It can be argued that by defining wife battering as the problem, and husband battering as a non-problem, realistic estimates of husband-battering, be they large or small, are nearly impossible to obtain. It is easy, for instance, to argue that battered husbands occur only as rare and isolated cases. Nearly all male victims are isolated individuals owing to the relative paucity of groups willing to acknowledge their victim status. The fact is that a large proportion of the social agencies that deal with family violence target only female victims. Thus we should not be surprised if these groups do not find evidence of male victims of domestic violence. Further, the politicized nature of domestic violence among many within academia mitigates against finding any evidence of male victims. Consequently, some professionals, like mental health professionals, may be insensitive or even hostile to a man describing himself in victim terms (Macchieto, 1992). Added to all this, the traditional stereotypes give creditability to a woman to be seen as a victim. The stereotypes associated with men, however, lead most to deny such a possibility or to ridicule' such a notion as male-as-victim (Farrell, 1993; Wilkinson, 1981). This clearly deters men from making such an admission (Machietto, 1992; Steinmetz, 1980). Also, male victims may be aware, if only dimly, that to proclaim victim status will only lead to unfavorable or unequal treatment compared with female victims (Harris & Cook, 1994).

If a man is attacked by his wife and decides to call the police, he is the one who is likely to be arrested. (quoted in Wolff, 1992, p. 22)

She was knocking the shit out of me; no one would believe me. (Male victim and resident of the Kingsland Estate, Hackney, London, England speaking on Kingsland, Channel 4, television documentary, 4th June 1992)

When you are talking to your mates, it's hard to admit you're being bullied by a woman. (quoted in Kent, 1993, p. 37)

Steinmetz (1980) has suggested that some men, following traditional social norms, consider it unmanly to attack or even retaliate against an assault by a woman. Further, when men and women rate violent male-female interactions, they perceive male-to-female aggression as more negative than female-to-male aggression (Arias & Johnson, 1989). By implication, female-to-male violence has a type of social acceptance not accorded to male-to-female violence (Greenblatt, 1983). Thus while it is argued that "society does not appear to shape the attitudes of most men and women to accept the use of violence by men against women..." (O'Leary, 1993, p. 24), we could suggest that society does appear to condone the use of violence by a woman against a man.

And finally, the whole issue of male victimization can be suggested to receive scant attention because of the threat it poses to masculine self images and "patriarchal" authority, as much as for any threat it poses towards efforts to counter female victimization. The lack of attention of female aggression, as opposed to male aggression, has been suggested to be rooted in scholarly debates on nature, culture, and gender in which "sameness" or "differences" are key issues; but actually result from a reluctance to consider similarities between men and women, as opposed to differences (Fry & Gabriel, 1994). Thus it is not surprising that domestic violence against women, as opposed to men, is a socially acceptable concern and receives study and support. This reinforces two more easily recognized social stereotypes, female vulnerability and male authority or dominance, and protectiveness. The admission and recognition of male victimization, in the battered husband, is the antithesis of this acceptable order and an equality between the sexes that has been resisted historically, especially by men (e.g., see judgments in the Willan vs. Willan and Teal vs. Teal cases, Bates, 1981).

[...]

No matter their number, battered men deserve better than to be seen as little more than footnotes from earlier historical periods when they were castigated and forced to ride a donkey backwards.

Undermining male victims does nothing to help the fight against violence.

VAWA turns 15....well Happy Birthday...but what about men?

This is about the Violence against Women Act which turned 15 recently. Congrats!

We learn the following.

505,000: The number of victims who were assisted by the STOP Violence Against Women Formula Grant Program, a project of the Office of Violence Against Women.

1,201,000: The number of services provided to these victims in communities across America as a result of the grants awarded by the Office of Violence Against Women’s STOP program.

4,700: The number of individuals arrested for violations of protection orders intended to prevent violence against woman under the STOP program.

This data, from 2007, is startling, because we know it only represents a fraction of the women who are victims of violence. One in every four women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime. An estimated 1.3 million women are victims of physical assault by an intimate partner each year, and one in six women will experience an attempted or completed rape at some time in her life.

Without a doubt supporting victims of DV is a good thing. A fast Wiki research reveals that VAWA provides a whooping 1,6 Billion $ to support those victims. That certainly is a lot of funding. But what about men?

Looking at the numbers above, I can instantly tell you that those numbers are from the National Violence Against Women Survey (NVWS). I cite

1.3 percent of surveyed women and 0.9 percent of surveyed men reported experiencing such violence (intimate partner violence) in the previous 12 months. Approximately 1.3 million women and 835,000 men are physically assaulted by an intimate

835,000 men or 39% of all yearly vitims found by that study are men. I seriously doubt that 39% of VAWA (which is by the way written gender-neutral) fundings were spent to support male victims. We also learn this from Wiki.

Many grant programs authorized in VAWA have been funded by the U.S. Congress. The following grant programs, which are administered primarily through the Office on Violence Against Women in the U.S. Department of Justice have received appropriations from Congress:

STOP Grants (State Formula Grants); Transitional Housing Grants; Grants to Encourage Arrest and Enforce Protection Orders; Court Training and Improvement Grants; Research on Violence Against Indian Women; National Tribal Sex Offender Registry; Stalker Reduction Database; Federal Victim Assistants; Sexual Assault Services Program; Services for Rural Victims;Civil Legal Assistance for Victims; Elder Abuse Grant Program; Protections and Services for Disabled Victims; Combating Abuse in Public Housing; National Resource Center on Workplace Responses; Violence on College Campuses Grants; Safe Havens Project; Services for Children and Youth Exposed to Violence;Engaging Men and Youth in Prevention.

The highlighted grant seems to be the only one that involves men. And it is not about male victims but prevention. Now I have more than once heard that MRAs should built there own shelters. The problem is not building shelters, the problem is funding.those shelters. Domestic Violence researcher Straus talks about VAWA and male victims here.

There is a small but increasingly influential men’s movement starting to change the political climate. For example, they have lobbied members of  Congress to make the renewed Violence Against Women Act gender inclusive. In New Hampshire, the legislature created a committee on the status of men. There is a hotline for male victims and another that is explicitly gender-inclusive. Both have been refused funding under the Violence Against Women Act; however, legal action is being taken to reverse that, just as legal action was crucial in the effort to force police and prosecutors to treat violence against women as the crime that it is.

And indeed VAWA will be up for reauthorization in 2011 and I still hope that a huge chunk of victims will NOT be ignored because of their sex in the future. Well one can dream...

National Coalition for Men

Certainly an interesting group.

The National Coalition for Men (NCFM), formerly the National Coalition of Free Men, is a non-profit educational & civil rights organization based in the United States. The NCFM looks at the ways sex discrimination affects men and boys. The organization has sponsored conferences, adult education, demonstrations and lawsuits. NCFM is the United States' oldest and largest generalist men's rights organization. (Although they have had members operating from Guam, the association is based almost entirely in the US). It professes to being politically neutral, neither conservative nor liberal. - from Wiki

With an interesting web presence as well. Besides good links and a great library, we find some interesting ressources. Excerps:

Myth: “Men are rarely victims of domestic violence.”
Fact: Half of domestic violence (”DV”) victims are men. Although men are less likely than women to call police, randomized sociological (behavior-based) research consistently shows: (1) women initiate DV as often as men do; (2) women use weapons and surprise more than men do; and (3) about 38% of physically injured DV victims are men.

Even the latest fact sheet from the Centers for Disease Control (partly from crime-based data) states: “In the United States every year, about 1.5 million women and more than 800,000 men are raped or physically assaulted by an intimate partner” (i.e., 36% of the victims are men).

Unfortunately, the DV industry has covered up female violence for decades for purely ideological reasons.
(Kelly, Linda, “Disabusing the Definition of Domestic Abuse; How Women Batter Men and the Role of the Feminist State,” 30 Fl. St. U. Law R. 791, 2003,)

Myth: “Most DV by women is in self-defense.”
Fact: Women commit DV for the same reasons men do. In a large DV study that looked at motives, men and women gave similar reasons for assaulting their partners, usually to “get through to them,” and self-defense was among their least common motives.

(Carrado, “Aggression in British Heterosexual Relationships; A Descriptive Analysis,” Aggressive Behavior, (1996) 22: 401-415.)

A 32-nation study found factors correlating with DV, such as substance abuse, jealousy and controlling behaviors, is found equally in men and women who commit DV.

In a survey of college women at California State University, Long Beach, 30% of them admitted assaulting a male partner, the most common reasons being (1) “he wasn’t listening to me,” (2) “he wasn’t being sensitive to my needs,” and (3) “I wished to gain his attention.”

(Fiebert & Gonzalez, “Why Women Assault; College Women Who Initiate Assaults on their Male Partners and the Reasons Offered for Such Behavior,” 1997, Psychological Reports, 80, 583-590, www.batteredmen.com/fiebertg.htm.)

The only DV shelter we know of that shelters male victims and their children is Valley Oasis in Lancaster, where men and their children desperately travel from hundreds of miles for shelter because nobody else will shelter them. Male victims are already reluctant to seek help due to shame, embarrassment, and lack of outreach, fear of false arrest, or fear of losing custody of their children. When male victims “take it” and don’t seek help, or are denied services, the violence often escalates until someone is injured, and children who witness it are emotionally damaged no matter how severe it is. DV is an inter generational cycle. To end it, we must first be honest about it.

Myth: “False accusations of rape or abuse are rare.”
Fact: While the frequency of false accusations is difficult to measure, it happens far more often than we are led to believe. Almost every month, DNA clears a man after years of imprisonment for rape. A U.S. Air Force study found over one-fourth of women who accused men of rape recanted either just before taking or after failing a lie detector test — their most common reason being “spite or revenge” — and it concluded 60% of the rape allegations were false.
(Forensic Science Digest, v. 11. n. 4, 12/85; Archives of Sexual Behavior, 1994, v. 23, n. 1.)

In divorce proceedings, false accusations of domestic violence or child abuse, and restraining order abuse, are common. Without warning, men are arrested, jailed and barred from their homes and bank accounts without due process. More than 50% of child sexual abuse allegations are unsubstantiated.(Eckenrode, Powers, “Substantiation of child abuse and neglect reports, Journal of Consulting & Clinical Psych., 1998, 56, 9-16; Lewis, “Reliability rather than zealotry,” Summer 1996, Kentucky Bench & Bar, 60, 23-30.) False accusers are rarely prosecuted.

Myth: “Men’s health gets priority over women’s.”
Fact: Men’s health is significantly neglected compared to women’s health. In the 1920s men died one year younger than women (the rate women died in childbirth was almost equal to the rate men died in war). Today, men die 6 years younger than women and have higher death rates for all 10 leading causes of death.

Men also account for about 85% of homeless adults, 90% of prisoners, 65% of dropouts, 80% of suicide deaths, and 92% of occupational deaths.

(Warren Farrell, Ph.D., “The Myth of Male Power: Why Men Are the Disposable Sex.)
Male suicide has skyrocketed in the last 30 years, especially among young men and divorced men. Men are also more likely than women to have mental disabilities but less likely than women to receive treatment, especially in prisons.

Despite these figures, there is still no federal office of men’s health even though there are about 7 federal offices of women’s health. Most states and local governments have offices of women’s health but not men’s health (only Georgia has an office of men’s health). The government has long spent multiple times more on breast cancer than prostate cancer research, despite nearly equal mortality rates.

Fact: Only men are required to register for the draft. Male citizens and resident aliens ages 18-25 must register. Men with disabilities must register if they can reasonably leave their homes and move independently. “Only sons,” “the last son to carry the name,” and “sole surviving sons” must register as well. The fact that a man is the only child or only son does not exempt him unless he survives one who dies in military duty. Men who do not register can be denied federal student loans, grants and other public benefits (even driving privileges in some states). Women are exempt from this law. The Vietnam Memorial has 58,000 male names and 8 female names.

Myth: “Men make war.”
Fact: Both sexes make war. Women have contributed as much to war as they have to science, medicine, literature and everything else. Women have supported wars at nearly the same rate men have (76% of women and 87% of men supported the Gulf War invasion). Women leaders have also supported wars. Women have sat on draft boards. Women even publicly shamed men who refused to go to war by giving them a white feather as a sign of their unmanliness during the White Feather Campaign.

If you want to get active and live in the USA, it is certainly not a bad thing to join them.

Pay gap persists: Women still make less, study says

After I talked about the wage-gap in quite a few posts, I wanted to tackle data that comes from another direction. This gem was something I saw recently pop-up more than once. A study by the "American Association of University Women Educational Foundation". I cite the press article:

Women make only 80% of the salaries their male peers do one year after college; after 10 years in the workforce, the gap between men's and women's pay widens, according to a study released Monday.

The study, by the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation, found that 10 years after college, women earn only 69% of what men earn.

They mention this first because that are the numbers that should stuck. One year after college? 80%? Unbelieveable....

Even after controlling for hours, occupation, parenthood, and other factors known to affect earnings, the study found that one-quarter of the pay gap remains unexplained. The group said part of the gap is "likely due to sex discrimination."

This is mind boggling, information that really is useful is considered afterwards. Of course occupation and hours worked etc. is important. One would hope this was in the first information. What is left? A quarter of the gap or 5% of the differences in wages could not been explained by the AAUW. Of these 5% a part is "likely due to sex discrimination".

"Over time, the unexplained portion of the pay gap grows," the group said in a news release.

I read that study and can say the unexplainable percentage after 10 years is 12 percent. On with the article.

Catherine Hill, the organization's director of research, said: "Part of the wage difference is a result of people's choices, another part is employer's assumptions of what people's choices will be. ... Employers assume that young women are going to leave the workforce when they have children, and, therefore, don't promote them."

Interestingly what Hill is talking about here was not subject of the study. My last post about the glass-ceiling had something to say about women and promotion.

General Electric just completed a study of its 135,000 professional workers and found that women quit at a higher rate: Annual voluntary turnover of the women is 8%, vs. 6.5% for the men. (That may not sound like much, but it adds up to 2,025 more women than men a year.) Research firm Catalyst reports that 26% of professional women who are not yet in the most senior posts say they don't want those jobs. And of the 108 women who have appeared on the FORTUNE 50 over the past five years, at least 20 have left their prestigious positions--most of their own volition

[...]

[O]ur interviews (FORTUNE Magazine) show that lots of women push for promotion less strongly than men not because they're reining in their ambition but because they really don't hang their egos on the next rung of the corporate ladder. Instead, powerful women often dream of moving on to more meaningful things.

[...]

A Carnegie Mellon University study has concluded that women executives out-earn their male counterparts.

The study, which examined 16,000 executives over 14 years, found that women at the top of the business world bring in a bit more than men and are promoted at the same rate, countering the popular notion that women earn less than men for the same work.

Female executives on the whole still earn less than male executives, but that's because more women quit before they reach the top, the study says.


"At any given level of the career hierarchy, women are paid slightly more than men with the same background, have slightly less income uncertainty and are promoted as quickly," it concludes. "We concluded that the gender pay gap and differences in job rank in this most lucrative occupation is explained by females leaving the market at higher rates than males."

Why they quit is harder to explain. Younger women opt out of the work force to have babies, but the average age for executives in the study was 53, beyond the child-bearing years.

Yet female executives still retire earlier than men and are more likely to switch careers. The CMU paper offers some possible reasons, including "more unpleasantries, indignities and tougher, unrewarding assignments" at work. The authors also suggest that women over time acquire "more nonmarket human capital" than men -- meaning connections outside the workplace -- that make retirement more attractive.

[...]

Some studies had indicated female executives were paid the same as men, but those didn't address the rate of promotion as this one does, he said.

More recent studies reached similar conclusions. A report released last month by The Corporate Library, a research firm in Maine, said women corporate directors earn 15 percent more than male counterparts, although they are still outnumbered 8-1 by men on boards.

Now we take a closer look at that study. At first one of course must accept that the "American Association of University Women Educational Foundation" is not an independend institution. This study highlights a problem studies of that kind have, that try to prove that there is wage discrimination against women. They can´t.

Discrimination cannot be measured directly. It is illegal, and for the most part, people do not believe that they discriminate against women or other groups. One way to discover discrimination is to eliminate other explanations for the pay gap. To uncover discrimination, regression analysis was conducted to control for the different choices women and men make.

This study also lists many points why men and women are not equal workers. Of course it is not easy to measure these findings, and my question would also be, how one could measure motivation or the aggressiveness to climb the corporate ladder to the top. This, what we find at the ending, was for example not measured by the study.

Further magnifying these gender differences, women expect less and negotiate less pay for themselves than do men. Researchers have found that women expect less, see the world as having fewer negotiable opportunities, and see themselves as acting for what they care about as opposed to acting for pay. These learned behaviors and expectations (which may be based on experiences) tend to minimize women’s pay (Babcock & Laschever, 2003).

How can one measure such a factoid? I honestly don´t know. Back to our negotiating difference, which seems to have quite an impact.

The current legal standard fails to account for the insidious results of gender differences in salary negotiation. A study of master's-degree candidates at Carnegie Mellon University by economist Linda Babcock found that only 7 percent of first-job-seeking women negotiated their salary, as opposed to 57 percent of men. There was no small consequence to this failure to negotiate. In their book Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide (Princeton University Press, 2003), Babcock and co-author Sara Laschever found that candidates who negotiated increased their starting salaries by 7.4 percent (about $4,000), and that the starting salaries of males averaged 7.6 percent higher than the females'.

Babcock calculated that failing to negotiate for a first salary can lead to an overall loss of over $560,000 by age 60. That comprises a good chunk of the estimated overall wage gap between men and women

Apart from that CONSAD made a recent analysis (Jannuary 2009) for the U.S. Department of Labour about the gender wage gap.

- In 1970, about 43 percent of women aged 16 and older were in the labor force; by 2007, over 59 percent were in labor force.
- In 1970, only 17.9 percent of women aged 25 and older had gone to college; by 2000, almost half had gone to college; and by 2006 one-third of the women in the labor force held a college degree.
- In 2007, women accounted for 51 percent of all workers in the high-paying management, professional, and related occupations. They outnumbered men in such occupations as financial managers, human resource managers, education administrators, medical and health services managers, and accountants and auditors.
- In 1970, the median usual weekly earnings for women working full-time was only 62.1 percent of those for men; by 2007, the raw wage gap had shrunk from 37.9 percent to just 21.5 percent.

However, despite these gains the raw wage gap continues to be used in misleading ways to advance public policy agendas without fully explaining the reasons behind the gap.

[...]

The major findings are:
There are observable differences in the attributes of men and women that account for most of the wage gap. Statistical analysis that includes those variables has produced results that collectively account for between 65.1 and 76.4 percent of a raw gender wage gap of 20.4 percent, and thereby leave an adjusted gender wage gap that is between 4.8 and 7.1 percent. These variables include:

A greater percentage of women than men tend to work part-time. Part-time work tends to pay less than full-time work.

A greater percentage of women than men tend to leave the labor force for child birth, child care and elder care. Some of the wage gap is explained by the percentage of women who were not in the labor force during previous years, the age of women, and the number of children in the home.

Women, especially working mothers, tend to value “family friendly” workplace policies more than men. Some of the wage gap is explained by industry and occupation, particularly, the percentage of women who work in the industry and occupation.

Research also suggests that differences not incorporated into the model due to data limitations may account for part of the remaining gap. Specifically, CONSAD’s model and much of the literature, including the Bureau of Labor Statistics Highlights of Women’s Earnings, focus on wages rather than total compensation. Research indicates that women may value non-wage benefits more than men do, and as a result prefer to take a greater portion of their compensation in the form of health insurance and other fringe benefits.

In principle, more of the raw wage gap could be explained by including some additional variables within a single comprehensive analysis that considers all of the factors simultaneously; however, such an analysis is not feasible to conduct with available data bases. Factors, such as work experience and job tenure, require data that describe the behavior of individual workers over extended time periods. The longitudinal data bases that contain such information include too few workers, however, to support adequate analysis of factors like occupation and industry. Cross-sectional data bases that include enough workers to enable analysis of factors like occupation and industry do not collect data on individual workers over long enough periods to support adequate analysis of factors like work experience and job tenure.

Although additional research in this area is clearly needed, this study leads to the unambiguous conclusion that the differences in the compensation of men and women are the result of a multitude of factors and that the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers

[...]

Extant economic research has identified numerous factors that contribute to the gender wage gap. Many of the factors relate to differences in the choices and behavior of women and men in balancing their work, personal, and family lives. These factors include, most notably, the occupations and industries in which they work, and their human capital development, work experience, career interruptions, and motherhood. Other factors are sources of wage adjustments that compensate specific groups of workers for benefits or duties that disproportionately impact them. Such factors for which empirical evidence has been developed include health insurance, other fringe benefits, and overtime work.

It is not possible to produce a reliable quantitative estimate of the aggregate portion of the raw gender wage gap for which the explanatory factors that have been identified account. Nevertheless, it can confidently be concluded that, collectively, those factors account for a major portion and, possibly, almost all of the raw gender wage gap.

And although it must feel like flogging a dead horse, a fact sheet by the National Center for Policy Analysis

Tuesday, April 16, 2002, is Equal Pay Day - the day on which many organizations protest wage discrimination between men and women. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median income for all women is about three-quarters that of men, although the results vary significantly among demographic groups. Feminist organizations and some politicians point to these statistics as evidence of the United States as a patriarchal society that discriminates against women. But a closer examination leads to a different conclusion. 

The Good News. 

When women behave in the workplace as men do, the wage gap between them is small. June O'Neill, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, found that among people ages 27 to 33 who have never had a child, women's earnings approach 98 percent of men's. Women who hold positions and have skills and experience similar to those of men face wage disparities of less than 10 percent, and many are within a couple of points. Claims of unequal pay almost always involve comparing apples and oranges. 

Lifestyle Choices
Women make different choices, and those choices affect how they work. Women often place more importance on their relationships - caring for children, parents, spouses, etc. - than on their careers. A study by the Center for Policy Alternatives and Lifetime television found that 71 percent of women prefer jobs with more flexibility and benefits than jobs with higher wages, and nearly 85 percent of women offered flexible work arrangements by their employers have taken advantage of this opportunity.
 
Entry and Exit from the Job Market.
Women are more likely to enter and leave the workforce to raise children, take care of elderly parents or move with their families. Working mothers are nearly twice as likely to take time off to care for their children as are working fathers in dual-earner couples. Yet time out of the workforce is an enormous obstacle to building an attractive resume and working up the corporate ladder. Women 25 years of age and over have been with their current employer 4.4 years, on average, compared to 5.0 years for men. Data from the National Longitudinal Survey reveal that women between the ages of 18 and 34 have been out of the labor force 27 percent of the time, in contrast to 11 percent for men. Women ages 45 to 54 who have recently re-entered the workforce after a five- or 10-year break are competing against men who have had 20 years of continuous experience. 

Part-Time Work.
Women are also more likely to work part-time. In 2000, one-quarter of all women employees worked part-time, compared to less than 10 percent of men. Nearly 85 percent of those who worked part-time did so for non-economic reasons; e.g., to spend more time with the family or to further their education. In general, married women would prefer part-time work at a rate of 5 to 1 over married men.

While part-time work usually increases flexibility, the part-time worker loses out on promotions and pay increases. Part-time work also tends to mean lower hourly pay. Shorter labor stints and part-time work contribute to the probability of working for the minimum wage. Nearly two-thirds of minimum wage earners are women.

However, women's wages hold up quite well to men's wages when comparing specific job categories. [See Figure I .] Among adults working between one and 34 hours a week, women's earnings are 115 percent of men's. Among part-time workers who have never married, and who thus confront fewer outside factors likely to affect earnings, women earn slightly more than men. These statistics suggest that skill level, tenure and working hours - not gender - determine wages. 

Occupational Choices.
Beyond work behavior, women gravitate to sectors of the economy that compensate workers at lower levels. While women hold 53 percent of all professional jobs in the United States, they hold only 28 percent of jobs in professions averaging $40,000 or more in annual compensation. For example, fewer women have chosen to enter such technical fields as computer sciences, math and science teaching, medicine, law and engineering. In 1998, women earned only 26.7 percent of computer science degrees.

Closing the Gap.
Despite all these factors, the gap between men and women's wages has been closing. Figure II illustrates that over the last 20 years women's earnings have jumped at least 12 percentage points relative to men's earnings, closing the wage differential at every level of education. A change in women's work expectations also has tended to close the gap. Until the 1970s, a minority of women expected to work after marriage. Today, almost 75 percent of young women expect to be working at age 35.

Changing work expectations are an apparent cause of women's increased focus on education, and the enrollment of women in higher education has grown much faster than that of men. Women were awarded more than 50 percent of associate's, bachelor's and master's degrees in the 1990s. Women currently earn more than 40 percent of Ph.D.s, medical and law degrees.

The narrowing of the gender wage gap approximately one percentage point a year since 1980 is particularly significant, since during the 1980s and '90s the overall wage level rose little and the wage inequality between skilled and unskilled workers grew. Without enhanced skills, women's wages likely would have fallen further behind men's. However, market pressures have helped to generate corrective mechanisms, and as the costs of denying employment to women mounted, prejudices were set aside.

Conclusion.
Women's work-life patterns and their occupational preferences are significant factors in determining wages. Rather than being "funneled" into low-wage, low-prestige and part-time positions, women often choose these occupations because of the flexibility they offer. After adjusting for these factors, scholars find that the difference between men's and women's earnings is very narrow.Those who still cite women's 76 cents for every male dollar as evidence of sexism fail to take into account the underlying role of personal choice. The "wage gap" is not so much about employers discriminating against women as about women making discriminating choices in the labor market.

What do we learn from all of this? Certainly that discrimination had little to no effect on women´s wages. The most interesting question in my mind is, do we really have to take action, to make women in the work-place behave more like men, to fight women´s "indoctrination" (which some assume there is) with another kind of indoctrination? Well I don´t think so as I certainly believe that women have free will.

The MRM, Feminism and Labels

A mesh up of some interesting posts. We start with Pelle Billing who categorized feminist critics for us.

1. At this level you have no criticism towards feminism and believe that feminism is spot-on. You are a feminist yourself and possibly self-identify with a particular branch of the movement.
2. Some mild criticism starts appearing. You find it important that masculinity studies within the feminist framework are carried out, since you believe that patriarchy hurts men too. Many liberal men and cultural creatives can be found in this category.
3. Radical feminism (i.e. the belief that men structurally oppress women) is criticized without hesitation, but classical feminism is embraced and deemed to be the solution to gender issues. You believe that women were unfairly disadvantaged in the past, but that the only correction needed is civil and legal equality around the world. You may or many not have anything against a men’s movement. This is the level where we find Christina Hoff-Sommers, who’s written Who Stole Feminism and The War Against Boys - two very important books for the men’s movement.
4. Both gender roles are viewed as being more or less equally limited and harmful to the individual. Men and women face very different gender roles, but neither one can be said to be much worse than the other. Consequently, you believe that feminism only views half of the problems that a discourse on gender needs to address, and a masculist discourse is needed to balance things out. This is the stance (according to my interpretation) of author Warren Farrell, who is perhaps the best known and most important writer in the men’s movement.
5. This level is identical to number 4 above, with the addition that you criticize the common feminist position of believing that all gender differences are socially constructed. It’s not that people at level 4 ignore innate sex differences, but at level 5 you consider them to be crucial in any balanced discussion on how gender shows up in culture and society.
6. At this final stage, you believe that the male gender role is worse than the female gender role, and that things could only be set right by by having a dominant masculist movement, similar to the way we now have a feminist movement dominating the discourse.

 Looking at this list I would say I am somewhere in between 5 and 6. I want a stronger MRM as feminism is dominating the discourse and believe that the male gender role has more disadvantages than the female one. I still wouldn´t go so far and call it oppression, which I think is a too strong word as men and women in the western world usually live a fairly good (privileged compared to other parts of the world) life . As I also believe there must be a balanced discussion (a MRM that is just the reversal of feminism is equally bad) I am really in between 5 and 6. Probably, depending on the topic at hand between 4-6 (of course the female role has its downsides as well). A part of me believes to stop looking at feminism completely and just focus on men´s rights. You can see me fail doing so regularly here.

On the feminism is NOT about ending ALL inequalities post, this one, by Jerry Bogs from the battlingblog, is a nice follow up, critisizing feminist leaders.

Countless feminist writers wonder, often in seeming exasperation, why many women and men still reject feminism or feel threatened by it. 

 [...]

What such feminist writers fail to understand is that for probably most of the men and women “who reject or are threatened by feminism,” the problem isn't feminism. It is feminist leaders.

There's a difference, just as there is a difference between religion and religious leaders. The Islamic religion and extremist Islamic leaders illustrate the point. Islam, I'm sure, is a fine religion, but some of its extremist leaders promote it by denouncing as evil — and often calling for violence against — all those who refuse to accept Islam. Like Islam, Christianity provides excellent tools for living a life of goodness and faith. Yet consider Christian leaders like Pat Robertson. He supposedly writes about “enforcement measures” not only for criminals but also for dissenters from the "soon to be re-established" Christian culture. Religious leaders in this category no doubt prompt many people to throw the baby out with the bath water, to spurn not just the religious leaders but their religion along with them, to see both as one and the same.

| Any "ism" is only as good -- or bad -- as its leaders and the media portray it. | 

A similar conundrum exists for feminism vis-a-vis feminist leaders. While increasingly fewer people oppose feminism — when it's defined as the Merriam Webster Online Dictionary defines it: the "theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes" — a huge number continue to oppose feminist leaders whose views they often regard as sexist and divisive. “Too many prominent feminist leaders,” says Christina Hoff Sommers, author of Who Stole Feminism? “are role models of intolerance and anti-male prejudice. Too many play fast and loose with the truth.”

[...]

I believe feminist writers can do more than write commentary asking why so many men and women resist feminism. They can challenge feminist “leaders,” feminism's dominant voices, to jettison their antimale ideology and become more sensible and under- standing of men. (He who feels understood by a person feels more willing to listen to that person. But this is a whole new topic, one for a future commentary!)

They might also demand that the mainstream media stop letting these feminist “leaders” dominate the discussion on gender. “Regrettably,” says Daniel Potter, a senior journalism major, “as in the case of many other well-intentioned movements lacking broad support, generally political radicals receive the preponderance of attention.”

My sentiments exactly. If over the years feminist radicals had not received the preponderance of attention on gender -- if there all along had been fair-and-balanced reporting that included the male side -- we might not have seen such tragedies as that committed by Canada's Marc Lepine, the disturbed man who, before killing himself, killed 14 Dawson College women, mostly because, I suspect, he had formed his view of feminism from the vilely antimale views of radical feminists.

A worthwile read. In that posting he made quite some examples about feminists in the media. Some noteworthy.

Doing exactly that on the issue of violence, renowned feminist leader Phyllis Chesler says without citing sources, “According to contemporary studies, 90 percent of all violent crimes are still committed by men. ... When those women who commit 10 percent of all violent crimes do kill, nearly half kill male intimates who have abused them or their children, and they invariably do so in self-defense.” In other words, Chesler divides the sexes into two chief categories: men as violent victimizers and women as peaceful innocents. (For a more balanced perception on gender violence, go here.)

[...]

Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, supports Roe v. Wade for women but says about Roe v. Wade For Men:

According to the National Center for Men Web site, as a result of Roe v. Wade, "[w]omen now have control of their lives after an unplanned conception. But men are routinely forced to give up control, forced to be financially responsible for choices only women are permitted to make, forced to relinquish reproductive choice as the price of intimacy.” That's a whole lot of talk that, when you get right down to it, means "have an abortion or I get to walk away." Either way it means zero consequences and zero responsibility, and they want the courts to call it "reproductive choice for men."

Gandy blatantly lies when she asserts that Roe v. Wade For Men tells women “have an abortion.” Her lie, of course, serves a purpose: telling it permits her to then justify rejecting for men the very reproductive choice she demands for women. To her, apparently, women should be legally allowed to escape the responsibility of parenthood, but men shouldn't be — this from a prominent feminist leader who claims the feminism she represents is about equality and individual choice! (For the record, Gandy has on at least one occasion acknowledged “societal” bias against fathers, though she failed to admit that at least an equal part of the bias comes from women.)

[...]

Fabled feminist leader Gloria Steinem built a career on, among other things, fleshing out sexism. Yet according to BrainyQuote.com, she can dish it out fairly well herself: “If women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn't it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long?” And there's this: “Pornography is the instruction. Rape is the practice.” Might I remind Steinem that since this venomous outpouring about male sexuality, porn has proliferated like mold in a dank cellar, yet rape has dramatically dropped? 

[...]

Attorney Wendy J. Murphy is called upon frequently on cable TV to proffer feminist interpretations of sex crimes. She teaches a seminar on sexual violence at the New England School of Law in Boston. Showing how she apparently regards male sexuality, she reacted with particularly vitriolic misandry after male students at Harvard built a 9-foot-tall snow sculpture of a penis in reaction to the widespread campus celebration of female sexuality and anatomy, an on-going celebration that is inspired by “The Vagina Monologues.” “'What if students,” Murphy said, “had built a snow sculpture of a Nazi swastika or the confederate flag? As a sculpture, a snow penis can't cause much direct harm, but it clearly serves as a powerful symbol of sexual dominance and gendered violence. Would Harvard's administration have been so deafeningly silent if students built a sculpture that symbolized race dominance or ethnic cleansing?”

Murphy's misandry is appropriately dealt with by Cathy Young:

Let me get this (no pun intended) straight. An erect penis is a symbol of sexual dominance and violence, comparable to the swastika and the confederate flag. Does this mean that sexual intercourse is comparable to the Holocaust, slavery, and ethnic cleansing? A more shocking statement of hatred for maleness and male sexuality is hard to imagine. Unfortunately, these silly and hateful comments are typical of the state of academic feminism today. And then, feminists act surprised and outraged when feminism is perceived as silly and anti-male.

Can you imagine what kind of sexual-violence seminar Murphy must teach at Boston's New England School of Law?

While I certainly do agree here, I must say online feminists are not necessarily any different. Of course to say all feminists are this or that is a lie. I had fairly good discussions with some of them. With the majority sadly not. Of course one has to keep in mind what the internet does to people.

 

Finally some thoughts about feminism and labels. Some time ago I found yet another feminist tag. Pro-BDSM feminists. I assume this is an add-on to pro-sex feminism as a lot of pro-sex feminist are probably quite liberal when it comes to sex, porn and prostitution but not when it comes to BDSM lifestyle which could be interpreted as man dominating woman (maledom). This however was not meant as a critique for BDSM or that kind of feminism, I was again surprised to what extend labels in feminism are used and applied, if you believe in one more additional thing. We have radical-, eco-, pro-sex-, postmodern-, marxist-, black-feminism and much much more. I was trying to jokingly come up with anti-feminist-feminism (as of course being for equality means one is a feminist), but realised there is already such a thing -> Sommers equity feminism (which critics describe as anti-feminism). There is probably no point where one drops that label to become something totally new. I wonder if there are pro-life feiminists....of course there are....and I am not really surprised as a topic like "Can I do xyz and still be a feminist" quite often appears on feminist sites. So much for my observation.

EDIT: While I am at it I am snatching Pelle Billings core belief which really sound reasonable and very well

- Gender liberation is a good thing

- Feminism is too one-sided to ever achieve gender liberation

- Men’s voices need to become part of the gender debate

- Both sexes have been oppressed by their gender role, not only women

- Gender roles have developed as a functional fit to historical circumstances

Gay Marriage and the MRM...

For some strange reason gay marriage (or as it is correctly called civil union or same sex marriage) sparks some interesting discussions among MRAs. Being out of Germany, as we already have civil union here and I don´t see it as such a big thing, some arguments often confuse me. Apparently I am in good company. Recently on Glenn Sack´s blog.

I pay attention to social science on the value of marriage to children and society and there are few people who are more adamant on the subject than I am. In fact, I'd say that the decline of marriage and the astonishing rise in out-of-wedlock childbearing may be the single most important issue we face as a society. So when anyone claims that something stands to threaten or further damage the institution of marriage, I listen hard.

And I still don't get it.

It's true that marriage has always been between a man and a woman (or a man and several women). But in the past, it served to enhance human procreation by giving men a greater reason to invest resources in offspring they could be reasonably certain were theirs. That was at a time when expanding the number of human beings in the world was perceived as important by human beings. Now the opposite is true. There are far too many of us for the resources of the planet. Contraception is more important than procreation.

That doesn't mean that marriage isn't important, though. It is vitally important to the children that we choose to have. But I completely fail to understand how granting the right to marry to homosexual men and lesbian women threatens the rights or abilities of the rest of us to marry, and have and raise children. On the contrary, I view changing laws to permit gay and lesbian marriage as an expression of how much we value the institution. We think it's such a good idea that we don't want to prevent anyone from doing it.

And, contrary to what the article cited implies, lesbians and gay men adopt and raise children. I know several of each who've adopted and, although the synergy of male-female parenting styles is largely lost in those couples, are they really worse for children than raising them in foster care or orphanages? That's not a tough one to answer.

The article says that if we allow same-sex marriage, "children would view marriage completely different (sic) and fewer are likely to set marriage as a goal." But why would that be so? Indeed, gay and lesbian children would be more likely to "set marriage as a goal" because they'd know they could.

I definately share Glenn´s sentiment. It gets especially confusing when in a discussion among divorced fathers suddenly marriage, formerly known as peonage-contract that enslaves all men, turns into something sacred by god, only a man and a woman can share.

As I said before, like quite a few countries on that planet we have same sex marriage here and pretty much nothing changed. So for me this discussion falls into the "who cares category". Who cares, not because on the topic of same sex marriage (nothing wrong with that imho), but on the topic of men´s rights.

The problem I see, and the same is true for abortion to some degree, that focusing on that issues distracts from the real issues there are. And there are many. And another problem I have is the impression this makes on the whole movement, because people will very likely hear these arguments and come to the conclusion that the MRM is nothing more than another anti-gay / pro-life group. For once, the MRM was not about these topics and secondly there are already plenty groups that focus on that issues.

All I am trying to say here is, focus. Don´t get distracted, and look at the real issues. Any thoughts on that one?

The Glass Ceiling or what do women want?

Another one of those endless posts:

The glass ceiling is somehow the ugly cousin of the wage-gap. Both go hand in hand and the usual message is that women are discrimanted and therefor are much less likely to reach the jobs at the very top. Men are apparently only supporting other men. The assumption behind this stance is always, women want this jobs at the very top as much as men do.

What took be abak was this post.

A broad new survey of Wikipedia users found that only 13% of the online encyclopedia’s contributors are women. The November survey, which had some 175,000 valid responses, was conducted in multiple languages by the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates the site, and United Nations University’s tech-research program MERIT. [...] The male/female ratio is closer among those who read entries but don’t write or edit them: 69% men to 31% women. [...] Altruism and fact-checking are the top motivations of contributors, the study found. About 73% indicated “I like the idea of sharing knowledge and want to contribute to it,” while 69% said “I saw an error I wanted to fix.” - from here

One of the gaps that can not be explained by discrimination that easily. Contribution is free and I bet looking at the gender ratio at universitys women certainly have a lot of knowledge. Apparently the motiviation of men and women when it comes to editing Wikipedida seems to be different.

More importantly this reminds me of another gap.

Women and politics

I was thinking about blogs. The NY Times featured an article about "Bloggings Glass Ceiling"

There is a measure of parity on the Web. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, among Internet users, 14 percent of men and 11 percent of women blog. [...] Yet, when Techcult, a technology Web site, recently listed its top 100 Web celebrities, only 11 of them were women. Last year, Forbes.com ran a similar list, naming four women on its list of 25. [...] At the seminar “How to Take Names and Be Taken Seriously as a Political Blogger,” many women said that their male colleagues and major media groups tended to ignore them, and to link to them less often (unless they are Arianna Huffington).

The outline is crystal clear hear. Parity in blogging, but yet female bloggers get ignored -> Discrimination!

Now it is not that easy. It is true that there is (almost) parity whent it comes to blogging, but is there parity when it comes to political blogging? The blog census has a clear answer.

Equal Numbers, Different Interests 

A recent Jupiter Research article included the claim that "blogging is split evenly among the genders".

We were curious to see if this result would hold for Blog Census data. On August 5, we hand-checked a random sample of 776 out of a pool of 490,000 English-language weblogs. We looked for unambiguous evidence of the blogger's sex (such as photos or gendered pronouns in reported speech), and marked sex as unknown when such evidence was unavailable. [...] When we looked at the sample blogs in more detail, however, an interesting pattern emerged. Nearly half of the blogs in our sample (368, or 47%) fell within the category of 'personal diary' - a journal dedicated entirely to recording the events of the blogger's life. Within this group, women outnumbered men by about two to one. [...] Of the 6.2% of sites in the 'political' category - sites primarily devoted to politics, current events, foreign policy, and various ongoing wars - a bare 4% were written by women.[...] This quick look suggests that the overall even split between the sexes masks significant differences in what men and women choose to write about

Please note that there was a high error margin, but keep in mind that even in the best case scenario women are still outnumbered. Of course if far less women are engaging in political blogs, the percentage of women among the top blogs will not be as high as the number of men and this is more about mathematics then about discrimination.

But what about real life? This study gives us some answers.

In 2008, the profound gender gap in interest in seeking elective office persists. Despite the historic events of the last seven years, women of all professions, political parties, ages, and income levels remain less likely than their male counterparts to express interest in seeking any political office. The gender gap in political ambition grows as we move from local, to state, to federal office. The gender gap in political ambition is driven largely by women’s greater aversion to campaigning, lower levels of political recruitment, and traditional family arrangements and responsibilities. [...] Women in 2008 are still less likely than men to take concrete steps that precede running for office. - Why Are Women Still Not Running for Public Office? - 2008 - Jennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox

This information goes in a different direction. But why does it even matter? Often it is argued that women in politics are more likely to fight for women´s issues. Some even go so far to say that when women have political power no wars will start anymore. Reality looks quite different though. For example, the one behind the Violence against Women Act was Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton would have supported the war in Irak, Donald Tusk prime minister of Poland recently talked about a women quota on electoral lists, while the most powerful woman in the world (according to Forbes) German Chancelor Angela Merkel is against a women´s quota on board rooms. It is indeed a bit naive to believe that male politicans do not care about women´s issues as women are the majority of voters in most countries.

Women and the "Top Jobs"

When we talk about the glass ceiling we can not avoid one factoid.that is often cited. The number of women Ceos amont the Fortune 500 top companies. The cream of the cream so to speak. Among those we only find 12 women. Discrimination? When we look at the top colleges, women pretty much outnumber men. Soon those women have to become future top earners. Is this really true?

At Yale and other top colleges, women are being groomed to take their place in an ever more diverse professional elite. It is almost taken for granted that, just as they make up half the students at these institutions, they will move into leadership roles on an equal basis with their male classmates.

There is just one problem with this scenario: many of these women say that is not what they want.

Many women at the nation's most elite colleges say they have already decided that they will put aside their careers in favor of raising children. Though some of these students are not planning to have children and some hope to have a family and work full time, many others, like Ms. Liu, say they will happily play a traditional female role, with motherhood their main commitment. [...] Much attention has been focused on career women who leave the work force to rear children. What seems to be changing is that while many women in college two or three decades ago expected to have full-time careers, their daughters, while still in college, say they have already decided to suspend or end their careers when they have children.

[...]

While the changing attitudes are difficult to quantify, the shift emerges repeatedly in interviews with Ivy League students, including 138 freshman and senior females at Yale who replied to e-mail questions sent to members of two residential colleges over the last school year.

The interviews found that 85 of the students, or roughly 60 percent, said that when they had children, they planned to cut back on work or stop working entirely. About half of those women said they planned to work part time, and about half wanted to stop work for at least a few years. Two of the women interviewed said they expected their husbands to stay home with the children while they pursued their careers. Two others said either they or their husbands would stay home, depending on whose career was furthest along. The women said that pursuing a rigorous college education was worth the time and money because it would help position them to work in meaningful part-time jobs when their children are young or to attain good jobs when their children leave home. In recent years, elite colleges have emphasized the important roles they expect their alumni - both men and women - to play in society.

[...]

"It really does raise this question for all of us and for the country: when we work so hard to open academics and other opportunities for women, what kind of return do we expect to get for that?" said Marlyn McGrath Lewis, director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard, who served as dean for coeducation in the late 1970's and early 1980's. It is a complicated issue and one that most schools have not addressed. The women they are counting on to lead society are likely to marry men who will make enough money to give them a real choice about whether to be full-time mothers, unlike those women who must work out of economic necessity. It is less than clear what universities should, or could, do about it. For one, a person's expectations at age 18 are less than perfect predictors of their life choices 10 years later. And in any case, admissions officers are not likely to ask applicants whether they plan to become stay-at-home moms. University officials said that success meant different things to different people and that universities were trying to broaden students' minds, not simply prepare them for jobs.

[...]

There is, of course, nothing new about women being more likely than men to stay home to rear children.

According to a 2000 survey of Yale alumni from the classes of 1979, 1984, 1989 and 1994, conducted by the Yale Office of Institutional Research, more men from each of those classes than women said that work was their primary activity - a gap that was small among alumni in their 20's but widened as women moved into their prime child-rearing years. Among the alumni surveyed who had reached their 40's, only 56 percent of the women still worked, compared with 90 percent of the men.

A 2005 study of comparable Yale alumni classes found that the pattern had not changed. Among the alumni who had reached their early 40's, just over half said work was their primary activity, compared with 90 percent of the men. Among the women who had reached their late 40's, some said they had returned to work, but the percentage of women working was still far behind the percentage of men.

A 2001 survey of Harvard Business School graduates found that 31 percent of the women from the classes of 1981, 1985 and 1991 who answered the survey worked only part time or on contract, and another 31 percent did not work at all, levels strikingly similar to the percentages of the Yale students interviewed who predicted they would stay at home or work part time in their 30's and 40's.

What seems new is that while many of their mothers expected to have hard-charging careers, then scaled back their professional plans only after having children, the women of this generation expect their careers to take second place to child rearing.

[...]

For many feminists, it may come as a shock to hear how unbothered many young women at the nation's top schools are by the strictures of traditional roles.

"They are still thinking of this as a private issue; they're accepting it," said Laura Wexler, a professor of American studies and women's and gender studies at Yale. "Women have been given full-time working career opportunities and encouragement with no social changes to support it.

"I really believed 25 years ago," Dr. Wexler added, "that this would be solved by now." - from here

A surprising find. Attaining a top university to become a stay at home wife? More importantly the female CEOs also do not seem to be the perfect role model for the working woman.

Dozens of powerful women we interviewed tell us that they don't want to be Carly Fiorina, the CEO of Hewlett-Packard (and No. 1 on our Most Powerful Women list for the sixth straight year); many don't want to run a huge company. But there's a fundamental disconnect here. Those very same women also tell us that they foresee the day in which there is parity in terms of gender representation at the top of corporate America. It is a goal that they honestly, fervently want to reach. Which makes us wonder: If these educated, accomplished, powerful women don't seek the biggest jobs, who is going to? To take it one step further: Do women lack power in business because they just don't want it enough? [...] And as we delved deeper into the attitudes of America's most powerful women--not only in the corporate arena but in government and academia as well--we kept hearing the same rap about power: It's a turnoff. "I'm afraid of it," confesses Fox Entertainment president Gail Berman, who is, at No. 25, the highest-ranking newcomer on this year's list. (To see the list, open the foldout that follows this story.) "Power is in your face and aggressive. I'm not like that," says another newcomer, Jenny Ming, president of Old Navy (No. 42). Power, says Meg Whitman (No. 2), "has a negative connotation." Even Hillary Clinton would rather not embrace the label. "I never think about [power]," Clinton insists. "I certainly understand it. But I don't think about it in relation to myself."

[...]

General Electric just completed a study of its 135,000 professional workers and found that women quit at a higher rate: Annual voluntary turnover of the women is 8%, vs. 6.5% for the men. (That may not sound like much, but it adds up to 2,025 more women than men a year.) Research firm Catalyst reports that 26% of professional women who are not yet in the most senior posts say they don't want those jobs. And of the 108 women who have appeared on the FORTUNE 50 over the past five years, at least 20 have left their prestigious positions--most of their own volition, like former Pepsi-Cola North America CEO Brenda Barnes (who moved home to Illinois to focus on her family) and former Fidelity Personal Investments president Gail McGovern (now a marketing professor at Harvard Business School). Apparently it's not that women can't get high-level jobs. Rather, they're choosing not to. 

Which makes the responses to our Carly Fiorina question less surprising. Most of the powerful women we asked said that they admire her, but they wouldn't want to trade places with her (and practically all of those insisted on anonymity). Fiorina has never relished her role as corporate America's female icon; she would rather be a model for both men and women, she says. Still, the feedback from these women leaders distresses her. "Perhaps they can't relate to the passion and drive I have for the business," she says. In fact, most women say that Fiorina has a drive and tenacity that they simply cannot match--and wouldn't want to. 

Indeed, a common strand among those who take on ever bigger jobs is the notion that power seeks them rather than the reverse. "I never sat down and thought, 'I'll major in political science and Soviet studies, get a Ph.D., become a professor, serve in the first Bush administration, become provost at Stanford, and then become National Security Advisor,'" says Condoleezza Rice. "Not planning has permitted me to accept the twists and turns." 

These women don't always greet promotions eagerly. When Marge Magner's boss at Citigroup, Bob Willumstad (Citi's new president), told her last July that he was promoting her to CEO of the company's jewel, its $37 billion Global Consumer Group, she replied, "Are you sure?" The promotion (which lifts her from No. 22 to No. 5 on our list) is "a double-edged sword," Magner says. "Yes, I really wanted it, but I have a bit of awe about the role, the responsibility. I'm on the front line. I have people knowing who I am--all this stuff I've avoided until now." 

Andrea Jung (No. 3) says that she has never asked for a promotion. Nor has Genentech COO Myrtle Potter (No. 29). Indeed, early in her career Potter rejected two bigger jobs outright. She figured that lateral moves would better develop her talents. "Everyone thought I was crazy--well, not crazy, but naive," says Potter. "Today I tell young people that they need to develop themselves broadly." (She's probably right: Lack of line management experience is the No. 1 barrier to women's reaching the top, according to Catalyst.) During her 12 years at Wal-Mart, Linda Dillman (No. 28) has never asked for a promotion either. "Promotions have come to me before I felt I was ready," she says. Last year, when Wal-Mart CFO Tom Schoewe and then-CIO Kevin Turner told Dillman that they planned to elevate her to Turner's job, she replied, "Tell me what you're going to do if I don't take the job." She recalls, "Their jaws hit the table. They walked me through why I had to take the job. They said, 'We really didn't have a contingency plan.'" 

When it comes to professional modesty, "women overdo it," says Citigroup's Magner, herself a model of self-effacement. When she interviews candidates for stretch assignments, she says, women often tell her they're not ready. Men almost never do. Says Magner: "One of the things I tell women is, 'Listen, next time someone offers you a job, don't tell them why you're not capable. Keep it to yourself!'" 

[...]

Of course, some women reject the offer of greater power at work because they're not willing to make personal sacrifices. Jamie Gorelick, formerly vice chairman of Fannie Mae, recalls that a few years ago CEO Frank Raines invited her to be considered for the COO job. She declined. "I just don't want that pace in my life," says Gorelick, who has a 15-year-old son and a 10-year-old daughter. Seeking flexibility and more variety in her work, she quit Fannie Mae this year and joined law firm Wilmer Cutler & Pickering. "The dirty little secret," Gorelick adds, "is that women demand a lot more satisfaction in their lives than men do." Asks Hillary Clinton: "Are women willing to pay the price for corporate life? They have to play by the same rules as men do. And right now there are really brutal rules for women who want to have families." 

To get to the highest levels of power, of course, something's gotta give. And that something is often children. (In a recent interview, FORTUNE asked U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao whether she could handle that job if she had kids. After a long pause, she answered, "It would be awfully difficult.") Or what gives is the spouse's job. As we reported last year, more than one-third of the women on the FORTUNE 50 have stay-at-home husbands--as do several of this year's newcomers, such as Gail Berman, Pepsi-Cola North American president Dawn Hudson (No. 50), and Ursula Burns (No. 44), who is Anne Mulcahy's right hand at Xerox. Mulcahy (No. 4) has a stay-at-home spouse too. 

If they do have children, women often don't take the most demanding positions until the youngsters are older. That's especially true for single parents. "While my children were growing up," says Shirley Tilghman, the president of Princeton and a renowned molecular biologist who divorced when her son and daughter were toddlers, "I turned down all administrative jobs. So I've never been a dean. I've never been a provost." (Two years ago, Tilghman "was stunned" when the chairman of the committee searching for a new president asked her to become a candidate for the job; she says she didn't know if she wanted it or was qualified for it.) 

[...]

[O]ur interviews show that lots of women push for promotion less strongly than men not because they're reining in their ambition but because they really don't hang their egos on the next rung of the corporate ladder. Instead, powerful women often dream of moving on to more meaningful things. Meg Whitman has been saying for years that she will do something in education or philanthropy after her eBay job. Ann Fudge quit her Kraft Foods job "to do something different." During her two years away she traveled with her consultant husband to Thailand and Bali and Morocco, and spearheaded a tutoring program for African-American kids in conjunction with Harvard Business School.

 

[...]

Achieving parity at the top in the next generation is possible only if that generation wants it. And those future leaders have a decidedly lukewarm attitude toward business. According to a 2002 study of 4,200 teenagers by Simmons College and the Committee of 200, a women's group, only 9% of girls (vs. 15% of boys) anticipate careers in business. Meanwhile, business schools are struggling to attract more female students. Women make up 36% of MBA students, vs. 47% of medical school and 49% of law school students. Judy Rodin, president of the University of Pennsylvania, reports that young women on her campus are saying, "'You women worked too hard. You're too strung out.' It's the single most worrisome thing to me. They might not want to fill the pipeline." Says Judy Olian, the dean of Penn State's Smeal College of Business: "In our lifetime and in our daughters' lifetime, given the numbers, there's no way there can be parity." Unless, she jokes, "men all die in a plague."

[...]

"If corporate America could somehow figure it out and let women get to the top without requiring them to charge hard their entire careers," she says, "we may get there someday." - from here

The last sentence is very telling. Without requiring them to charge hard their entire careers...how is that supposed to work? And how can this be fair, talking about quotas here, to promote someone because of gender and not because they were charging hard?

What about women who want to reach the top?

Another interesting, recent and large study found the following.

Women at the top of business outearn men - Saturday, December 13, 2008
By Torsten Ove, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

A Carnegie Mellon University study has concluded that women executives out-earn their male counterparts.

The study, which examined 16,000 executives over 14 years, found that women at the top of the business world bring in a bit more than men and are promoted at the same rate, countering the popular notion that women earn less than men for the same work.

"That common perception is not borne out by this study," said Robert A. Miller, professor of economics and strategy and one of the authors. "If you're looking for evidence of gender discrimination in executive promotion and compensation, it's not happening there."

The study, "Are There Glass Ceilings for Female Executives?," was released last month by Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business but hasn't been published yet.

The largest empirical analysis of the top echelons of publicly traded companies determined that women earned about $100,000 more per year than men of the same age, educational background and experience.
 
[...]

"Once you control for the position that they're in, that is, their rank, and you control for experience and control for their education, background and turnover, once you do that you find that they earn a little more," said Dr. Miller.

[...]

Female executives on the whole still earn less than male executives, but that's because more women quit before they reach the top, the study says.

"At any given level of the career hierarchy, women are paid slightly more than men with the same background, have slightly less income uncertainty and are promoted as quickly," it concludes. "We concluded that the gender pay gap and differences in job rank in this most lucrative occupation is explained by females leaving the market at higher rates than males."

Why they quit is harder to explain. Younger women opt out of the work force to have babies, but the average age for executives in the study was 53, beyond the child-bearing years.

Yet female executives still retire earlier than men and are more likely to switch careers. The CMU paper offers some possible reasons, including "more unpleasantries, indignities and tougher, unrewarding assignments" at work. The authors also suggest that women over time acquire "more nonmarket human capital" than men -- meaning connections outside the workplace -- that make retirement more attractive.

[...]

Some studies had indicated female executives were paid the same as men, but those didn't address the rate of promotion as this one does, he said.

More recent studies reached similar conclusions. A report released last month by The Corporate Library, a research firm in Maine, said women corporate directors earn 15 percent more than male counterparts, although they are still outnumbered 8-1 by men on boards.

The CMU study compiled data representing 60 different job titles at more than 1,800 companies between 1992 and 2006. In addition to examining promotion rates, the researchers also analyzed total compensation, including benefits, bonuses, retirement packages and stock options in addition to salary. Overall, the study concluded that job turnover and tenure are better indicators of compensation than gender.

Do you see what is happening here? Women who want to be on top apparently are way better off than their male counterparts. Now we get Psychological.
Susan Pinker - The Sexual Paradox

This is about the book written by Canadian psychologist Susan Pinker and goes in the direction of innate behaviour. Of course this nature vs nurture topics spark some controversy, as this fits well into this post, I´ll let this in and let my readers decide what to do think about this one. This tidbits are taken from different sources.

“If you were to predict the future on the basis of school achievement,” says Susan Pinker, in her new book The Sexual Paradox, “the world would be a matriarchy.” Women are powering ahead of men in education. As graduates, many are earning more than their male peers. But by their mid-thirties they stick in the middle ranks or drop out altogether, while men who may have much more erratic educational histories are excelling. This trend is most pronounced among the most gifted women, many of whom have bosses or husbands who urge them to aim high. And it is not just a motherhood issue: educated women without children are also not choosing the same paths, in the same numbers, as educated men. As Pinker puts it: “Even with all the barriers stripped away, they don't behave like male clones.”

Why? Pinker believes that the answers are mainly biological. It is not lack of ability or opportunity that prevents so many women from reaching boardrooms and the upper echelons of science, she says, (although she does not claim that discrimination has been abolished). It is because women are wired in the womb to want different things. Baby boys are more exposed to testosterone, which drives them to be daring and aggressive. Baby girls are doused in oestrogen, which helps them to empathise. This makes women by nature resistant to investing all their energies, single-mindedly, in one thing. It makes them less extreme. Women tend to seek “inherent meaning” in their jobs, whereas men tend to seek domination.

Parents like me, who have failed to tempt their children away from gender-stereotyped toys, may nod at this. Some people will see it as an outrageous attack on equality - as I would have done in my feminist twenties. But it is really an argument for a better understanding of why some women dislike roles that are defined by male ambitions. Pinker asks why we think of the male as the standard model and the female as a version with a few optional features. All the high-powered women she interviews are happier for having left their top jobs. In different ways they explain that society impelled them towards the male model, but that it didn't quite fit.

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The story that's emerging, according to The Sexual Paradox, is that, like it or not, biology does play a role in cognitive development and career selection. Women, on average, tend to favour people-based jobs where human interaction and social responsibility come to the forefront. They are also less likely than men to subject themselves to gruelling workweeks for the rewards of a high paycheque. But if women are opting for less lucrative fields and choosing to work part-time in order to pursue other interests or raise a family, then it might not be only the glass ceiling contributing to the salary gap.

And it isn't that women don't excel at math and science, either. In fact, The Sexual Paradox points out that women often thrive in academic settings, and in school, they outstrip the males at such a pace that many institutions of higher education now employ affirmative action admission strategies for males in order to achieve gender balance in the student body. But in general, in spite of ability and rabid recruitment strategies, fewer women than men are choosing to go into male-dominated fields such as engineering, physics, and computer science, and there are still far fewer female than male CEOs.

According to Pinker, this goes back to the fact that women are choosing careers that emphasize people over things. Women are also less likely to thrive on risk and competition. A study by economists cited in The Sexual Paradox found that men and women had the same success rate in solving timed mathematical problems in a scenario in which each competitor was paid per correct answer. But given the option, the men were 40 percent more likely to choose a winner-takes-all model of the game, in which only the individual with the most correct answers receives a prize. The researchers found that even men who were less skilled at addition (and thus more likely to lose) were more eager than women to compete under these circumstances.

Pinker suggests that ignoring these temperament differences may actually hurt women in the long run, especially in the workplace, where advancement often depends upon blowing one's own horn ."What's happening now," she explains, "is if we expect women to behave like men, and they don't negotiate aggressively for salaries, then they're going to come out behind because they're not going to ask for the same types of raises. They're not going to go into salary negotiations in the same way, so they're going to take a hit. My view is that by pretending this doesn't exist, you're more or less allowing this to happen-instead of saying, 'We know women aren't going to negotiate, so how are we going to give them a leg up?' Or, 'We know women are less likely to throw their hats in the ring for a new promotion or a new project, so how are we going to go and solicit the talented women that we recognize out there in the talent pool?'"
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Consider this startling study done with fourth-grade Israeli schoolchildren: when boys and girls each ran alone on a track, there was no measurable speed difference by gender. But when each child was teamed with another child and asked to run again, the boys ran faster and the girls ran slower—slowest of all when running against other girls! What females love is bonding, helping, sharing, and oxytocin—that “opiatelike hormone” dubbed by one anthropologist “the elixir of contentment.” Forget all this tedious racing: what girls would really like to do is carry each other around the track—taking turns! Indeed, studies show that whereas competitive situations drive adrenaline increases in men, they drive adrenaline decreases in most women. Men associate more pleasurable feelings with competition than do women, and even “an eagerness to punish and seek revenge feels more fun.” (Remember “tragedy of Prickarus” and “He’s going to have a clus-ter-fuck; he’s going to have a clus-ter-fuck”? Good times! Good times!) Even more harrowing: for men, not only does the urge to punish correlate with an increase in testosterone, but testosterone can measurably spike when they touch a gun.
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But the real question is why. And it's not a bit clear that entrenched discrimination is the answer. Women may see lower pay as a reasonable trade-off for having more time to themselves - or, being women, for their children. They may, contrary to government policy, prefer to rear their own children, rather than farming them out to someone else.

The psychologist Susan Pinker asked, in a book titled The Sexual Paradox, and plainly designed to tease, “why females are biologically driven to nurture their young rather than climb the corporate ladder”. Why indeed? But it's a perfectly valid choice if some decide that the rat race isn't for them.

The really interesting comparison isn't between women and men but between single, childless women and men. If you compare women who aren't married or cohabiting with men who aren't married or cohabiting, you know what? The pay gap goes the other way. Hourly pay for the women is £8.82; for men £8.72. The moral is that if women want equal pay, they should give up men and children. Any takers?

Conclusion

What can we learn from all this? Certainly that one should be careful with screaming discrimination once we encounter such a gender gap. Thinking about a Ceo post among the Forbes 500, this is something I really wouldn´t want to do, as this sounds like a lot of work and far less family time and I believe my thoughts are something that a lot of others men and women also share. Apparently working your ass off, day in and out, year after year, is a stupidity more men are willing to take.