Tuesday, October 29, 2019

Whaddya Know: American Women “Marrying Down” In Terms Of Education

A terrific new study out from the Institute for Family Studies, showing that college-educated women, contra the suppositions from Dateonomics, are actually marrying “down” in large numbers in terms of education. It’s not yet large numbers, but the trend is undeniable:


Of particular interest is the 23-32 group of women on the right side. Just under 40% of women with a bachelor’s degree are marrying men without one, which is astonishing. Of course, given the tiny number of marriages occurring among millennials, this could easily be the product of a systemic bias problem:

That is, the relative few women marrying men without college degrees are marrying from the cream of the blue-collar or undegreed ranks. It does not seem a scalable trend.

Monday, October 21, 2019

Rachel McKinnon Wins Another Women’s Cycling World Title

M2F transsexual cyclist Rachel McKinnon is in the news again, having won a women’s sprint world championship, and earlier, setting a world record qualifying time in the 200m event. As usual, she is full of the same lame justifications as to why she should be allowed to participate in women’s cycling:
"All my medical records say female," she said. "My doctor treats me as a female person, my racing licence says female, but people who oppose my existence still want to think of me as male.

"There's a stereotype that men are always stronger than women, so people think there is an unfair advantage. By preventing trans women from competing or requiring them to take medication, you're denying their human rights."
Luckily, the Sky News piece goes on to mention (without linking to) the Karolinska Institute study showing M2F transwomen retained the vast majority of their leg strength even after a year of hormone therapy. On Twitter, she was even more uninhibited, claiming
Pressed on the Karolinska study as to whether she retained an advantage, McKinnon weaseled her way out: "Is it possible? Yes it is possible. But there are elite track cyclists who are bigger than me.“ Needless to say, this is less than satisfying. The main reasons why transwomen’s stature within women’s sport is what it is come down to a number of causes:
  1. The bullying of trans advocates to gain M2F transsexual entry to biological women’s sporting events. It is telling that the IOC’s position statement on transwomen participation contains not a single reference to any scientific papers.
  2. The small sample sizes available even in the limited number of quality studies available in this space (c.f. the Karolinska Institute study linked above, n=11 for transwomen, and n=12 for transmen).
  3. The minuscule number of M2F transsexuals actually participating in biological women’s sporting events.
McKinnon routinely elides the strong evidence that transwomen retain a huge advantage over biological women in athletic events, expressing the narcissism, feigned ignorance, and contempt that has been her hallmark ever since she started winning UCI races. I have to believe this is typical of the whole of trans activists. When do any of them express any kind of empathy for the fourth place biological woman denied her place at the podium?

Update: McKinnon has written off participating in the 2020 Olympics, and I can only wonder at the reasons. Is it because she can’t compete among the best (younger) women in the world? Or because she knows what a firestorm she would face if she won on that stage? Consider her differing photos from victories in 2018 versus 2019:

2018

2019

McKinnon literally towers over her second- and third-place competitors in 2018 (per this Velo News article, she is six feet tall), but has been apparently shot to minimize her height advantage in the 2019 photo. I have not been able to find Kirsten Herup’s height thus far, but assume six feet (183 cm) is unlikely.

Saturday, October 12, 2019

Richard Stallman Stays On As "Chief GNUsance"

Richard Stallman refused to resign his position as head of the GNU project, per Slashdot. His personal website says
I continue to be the Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project.

I do not intend to stop any time soon.
His disturbing politics otherwise, I am heartened to see he is refusing to let the bullies go after him in his technical capacities.

Thursday, October 10, 2019

Melinda Gates Declares War On Men

All the old feminist malarkey about chimerical wage gaps and the absence of women on corporate boards, in STEM fields, etc. The Harvard Business Review story on the subject is both depressing and predictable, hitting on the “we’re not showing enough women in STEM and positions of power in Hollywood” nonsense, raising the obvious rebuttal of many people believe gender inequalities in professional advancement are a reflection of women’s own choices” while failing to seriously grapple with the real arguments behind it — the usual feminist hand-wave that accompanies such facile, boilerplate dogma.

Then there’s the business of eliminating sexual harassment in the workplace. Here’s their big idea:
That’s why it’s so important that companies, philanthropists, and activists follow the lead of organizations such as TIME’S UP and the Collaborative for Women’s Safety and Dignity, both of which are committed to fighting for equity foreverywoman in the workforce. TIME’S UP is partnering with major organizations like the National Women’s Law Center and the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team to promote an unprecedented policy and advocacy agenda to expand rights and protections for women, whether they work in the C-suite or on the factory floor. The Collaborative for Women’s Safety and Dignity is focused on ensuring that survivors of sexual harassment — and women of color in particular — have a central role in creating solutions to end gender-based violence in the workplace. The Collaborative’s early ideas include building an evidence-based communications hub to help drive more-effective messaging, and seeding and scaling data-driven programs that develop leadership capacity among survivor-led movements.
This is all boilerplate, dogma that assumes “survivor” first, as though every lame effort at a pass were the same thing as violent rape. And we can’t have a whole paragraph without kneeling before the intersectionalists (“women of color”)! She then stumps for mandatory paid time off for caregiving, never mind Sweden’s outcomes there. She observes that women are underrepresented in Congress versus their overall numbers in the population, and opines that “When you look at the data, though, you see that the problem isn’t that women don’t win; it’s that they are less likely to run.” So ... she’s going to force women to run for elected office? Randomly boot male candidates for office?

The muddle-headedness continues ever on. Why do women leave the field? They gamely try to answer:
The Kapor Center, an organization dedicated to diversity in tech, commissioned the Tech Leavers study in 2017, a “first of its kind national study examining why people voluntarily left their jobs in tech.” The study found that workplace culture plays a significant role in driving turnover — especially for women and underrepresented minorities. Nearly two-thirds of the 2,000 respondents indicated that they would have stayed in their jobs had their employers fixed their culture. The study also found that culture problems are expensive — costing the industry more than $16 billion each year.
If you actually dig down to the Kapor Center/Pew survey of people who left the tech field (PDF), on page 24 you will notice a chart of all the reasons why people experienced unfairness; many of them are similar across the board (more white/Asian women were likely to complain about bad management [47%] than any other group, but it was the most popular single complaint of all surveyed), and many are similar across sexes. Particularly striking is the fact that 10% of white/Asian women surveyed had experienced unwanted sexual attention — in contrast with 7% of white/Asian men! If the big problem is inept management, it's hard to see how diversity voodoo would fix that.

The eyelids start to droop. We have read this all before, the tendentious assumption of guilt, the painful, earnest, and venal belief that shamans could right these non-problems. At last, she gets to the real point: she’s going to harangue and pressure companies to make stupid decisions based on whether they have “enough” women (emboldening mine):

Those of us eager to increase women’s power and influence can’t rely on other people’s sense of ethics or self-interest. We need to amplify the pressure they’re feeling. Three constituencies — shareholders, consumers, and employees — hold disproportionate influence over institutions. By mobilizing they can translate that influence into targeted pressure.
Translating back to English: there is no upside to companies for any of this insane program because we have nothing to offer them but pain. There is no quid pro quo for hiring more women — and frankly, there never will be, because people who think as she does operate based on a victimhood ideology that blames men for every disparate outcome, divorcing women from volition, agency, and responsibility. As John Barry writes in Quillette,

A world that has been told—falsely—for decades that gender is merely a social construct, is a world in which a well-intentioned multi-billionaire can throw a huge amount of money at gender equality, despite admitting that this is “only a small fraction of what’s necessary.” But what if the reality is not so much a leaky pipeline as an unstoppable tidal [wave] of women’s choices? What if money can’t make mother nature go away?

California’s Toothless Statewide Rent Control Law

Suppose you were a progressive rent control advocate, and suppose you were an idiot — but I repeat myself. California‘s legislature, now in full thrall of the loony left, has lately passed a statewide rent control law, with all the predictable consequences thereof:
Economists and other policy experts have long criticized rent control for reducing the supply and quality of rental housing in the long-run. California's rent control bill is no exception says Michael Hendrix, state and local policy director at the Manhattan Institute.

"What we are going to get is a reason for landlords to convert apartments to condos," says Hendrix. "The net result of that is potentially more units being taken off the market, and long-term this housing crisis getting worse, not better." Hendrix argues that landlords, when faced with limits on how much they can raise their rents, will simply take their rental units off the market, converting them into condominiums that can be sold at market price.

A study of rent control in San Francisco published in the journal American Economic Review this month found that "while rent control prevents displacement of incumbent renters in the short run, the lost rental housing supply likely drove up market rents in the long run, ultimately undermining the goals of the law."
Economics? Bah, say the progressives who imagine themselves smarter (or at least more virtuous) than landlords. Gavin Newsom cashed in on that sentiment when he tweeted his support for the measure:

Of course, what makes this interesting is what precipitated the measure: rapidly rising rents. The bill caps increases at 5% plus inflation. So, how fast was rent rising in California overall? I looked at my former home turf of Orange County, and found this:

So, if we look at the Orange County figures as typical (they probably aren’t, the slope on the other two markets is slightly higher, and the LA County figure is about 31%), amortizing this backwards over the eight years covered in this graph, the annual average rent increase is 2.5%. In steeper Los Angeles County, the average annual rent increase is 3.8%. All of which is to say, the rubes have been conned again, just as they were in Oregon, which has a crazy high 9.9% annual rent increase limit.

Wednesday, October 9, 2019

Andrew Yang Forgets Korematsu

Andrew Yang is, I take it, a smart person, according to various reports, but this is something like ethnic suicide:
 Absent SATs, how do we determine who gets seats in UC and Cal State schools? Oh, right, that would be a project for the intersectionalists, who would insist upon equal proportionality based on overall population. Asians are over-represented in higher education, something that was not lost on them when in 2014, the California legislature threatened to reinstate affirmative action; the biggest losers would be (wait for it) Asians, who were instrumental in killing that bill. The whole point of standardized tests is to emphasize merit over skin color, sex, or any other arbitrary measure. Yang's universal basic income is a stupid, virtue-signaling effort at vote-buying; this attacks what should be a group of core supporters, only he's too dumb to see it.

Sunday, October 6, 2019

M2F Transsexuals Retain Strength Advantage Even After One Year Of Hormone Therapy

Fair Play For Women brings us a new Swedish study showing that even after one year of hormone therapy,
[There was] no change in a transwoman’s thigh muscle strength after 12 months of hormone therapy. Still a full 50% higher than female thigh strength. Even still higher than the thigh strength of a transman after 12 months on high T.
The number of trans women was still small (n=11), but the study was performed with much more rigor than prior studies in this area. The Fair Play piece concludes:
The IOC must immediately suspend its eligibility guidelines saying that male-born trans athletes can play in female teams if they reduce their T to 10 nmol/L for 12 months. There is no credible science to support this position.

They must also stop tinkering around the edges having meaningless debates on whether to lower the rules on T from 10nmol/L to 5 nmol/L. It doesn’t matter how low you set the T levels. Male muscle strength stays the same even at <1nmol/L FACT.

Sports bodies where thigh muscle strength gives a clear advantage in competition must suspend their trans eligibility rules immediately. Like Cycling, Rugby, Weight lifting, Athletics etc. No more women must lose their place on the podium to males.