Randal Olson Takes A Close Look At The Wage Gap

Randal Olson, whose work I have previously admired, is back today (h/t Christina Hoff Sommers) with a look at the wage gap between the sexes, and in particular, how this is affected by college majors. Starting with a FiveThirtyEight post about remuneration for college majors, he then proceeds to dig through major-specific data (for a change, emboldening is all his):

The trend that’s immediately apparent from this chart is that female-dominated majors make less on average than male-dominated majors. Some interesting exceptions to the trend are Nursing (90% women; $48k median earnings) and Transportation Science (12% women; $35k median earnings), where Nursing especially stands out as a relatively lucrative major despite being primarily women.

 Unsurprisingly, after controlling for un- and under-employment, he looks at quantitative SAT scores and finds a strong correlation between that and earnings, i.e. the kinds of jobs that require analytical skills and compensation to match. His takeaways:

• Female-dominated majors tend to earn less than male-dominated majors
• This correlation isn’t explained by the employability of the majors
• It seems plausible that male-dominated majors are usually paid more because they are more quantitative in nature, which large companies tend to value highly

At least when dealing with the opposite sex, men have a strong incentive to find gainful, and in particular, remunerative employment: 78% of women in a recent Pew poll said they want a man with "a steady job", which was more than any other aspect desired in a potential mate by either sex. If feminism has shaped a new model woman exactly like men in every way, she has not manifested herself in the broad population as yet.

Wednesday Links

• Leading off with the fantastic news that bioethicist Alice Dreger has resigned from Northwestern under charges that the university refuses to grant her the academic freedom they supposedly support. Her resignation letter (PDF) details the complaint that dean Eric Neilsen demanded editorial control of her work on Atrium, and even formed a "censorship committee" to oversee future issues:
  

  The plain and simple fact is that Dean Neilson acted impulsively and wrongly in this situation. We all make mistakes, but this was a profound mistake that cut to the very heart of academic freedom. It should have been acknowledged and corrected immediately. That is most definitely not what happened. Instead, what happened was denial, avoidance, blame -­‐ shifting, and evasion. To this day, the university has not admitted its mistake, and it has not affirmed its commitment to academic freedom in a way that makes clear that similar incidents will not occur in the future. This failure should be embarrassing to an otherwise great university.

  Also, a high five for her exit tweet:

  I will not miss being asked to teach medical ethics in a room named after the drug company that paid for it.

  — Alice Dreger (@AliceDreger) August 25, 2015

• LAist recently ran a story on driving for Uber or Lyft as a woman. Surprise! It's actually mostly pretty good:
  

  [Ashley] Moon said, "I've only had one awkward situation with a man I picked up in Culver City while driving for Lyft. He was making really sexual and inappropriate comments about my body, his body, and his girlfriend's body who we were on our way to pick up. But I didn't feel like I was in danger, mostly because he was SO drunk that he was completely slumped over in my front seat and heavily slurring his words. I thought he might have alcohol poisoning."

  One anonymous driver reported "Truthfully, I dealt with more inappropriate behavior when I was a bartender." Lyft in particular allows drivers to drop passengers before their destination if the driver feels endangered (something Uber doesn't), so they're a little better. But it's interesting to read these anecdotes, which include drivers giving relationship advice, picking up weird passengers, and more.
• Remember Laurie Penny? I guess she's still out flogging her rage-tome, Unspeakable Things, which, according to those not part of her hallelujah chorus, draws from her Guardian (UK) and other online columns so much it's indistinguishable from them. Well, good news, fellas: feminism needs to find room for men!

  As Penny herself says, "women are only allowed to be experts on gendered things and nothing else, whereas that's the one thing men aren't supposed to talk about.

  Of course, men aren't allowed to have any actual differing opinions about intersex relations, because
  

  Men are our fifth column in all male spaces. Particularly when so many boardrooms and political meetings are all-male spaces, men can be very useful fighting in that arena.

  So nice to know men's only purpose as far as Penny's concerned is to shut up and parrot the party line! Also, reeducating your fellow knuckle-dragging males! Thank you, I'm here all night.
  
• Lesbian tendencies appear to go hand-in-hand with masculinization, which apparently means changes to facial features can also predict sexual orientation, which sounds awfully like phrenology. This gives rise to the theory that female sexuality conforms to opportunity to some extent. (H/t @facerealitynow.)

Uber, Lyft, And The False Spring At LAX

So we have been here before:

• July 16: LA City Council votes to allow Uber and Lyft to pick up passengers at LAX.
• August 5: Bowing to pressure from taxicab companies, the City Council then votes 11-2 to postpone the matter. Taxicab operators demand fingerprint scans and background checks, the same as for taxi drivers. (Later: prosecutors find 25 Uber drivers with criminal records.)
• Today: The City Council votes 9-6 to permit Uber and Lyft to operate at LAX provided they can hand off data about the number of drivers at the airport at any given time, something that should be childishly simple.

But you can pardon me some skepticism that this is the end. Between state demands to classify drivers for such shared car services are in fact employees and not contractors and changes to state insurance law (at least in California) that will almost certainly raise rates for anyone electing to use their personal vehicle for such commercial purposes (that is, if the insurers get hold of their Uber driving habits, which seems inevitable), the car services have a lot of people gunning for them. They have big enemies, and thus far, the Silicon Valley upstart does not seem inclined to spend lobbying money accordingly.

The Cognitive Dissonance, It Burns

Freddie deBoer, opening:

First is the now-ubiquitous claim that trigger warnings are only warnings, and that they have no connection whatsoever to an actual censorship impulse. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been told, with absolute confidence, that “no one is talking about actually regulating content!” Which just is not true.

Closing:

I don’t think political correctness is ruining campus, no matter how often I am accused of thinking that. In fact I don’t even like the term “political correctness” at all. I don’t think trigger warnings threaten the fabric of our education system. I do think that there are some legitimate problems with them and their use, and more, with the way that people who advocate for them go about arguing in their favor.

Look, you can't simultaneously argue that trigger warnings do, in fact, aim to regulate content while simultaneously ignoring the reality that imposes on campus life, and how they are antithetical to the university's supposed role in society. If they are part or descendant of a larger political correctness rubric, that's fine; but pretending they don't originate from a censorious, narcissistic impulse is delusional, as is pretending they aren't corrosive to free inquiry and public debate.

Janet Napolitano's Corrosive Due Process Whitewash

The Los Angeles Times has an an article about sexual assault on campus that, for once, isn't a stenographic reproduction of the campus rape industry lunatics. Focusing on the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, the interesting part is remarks from Janet Napolitano, University of California president:

Janet Napolitano, president of the University of California and a former prosecutor and secretary of Homeland Security, warned in an article in the Yale Law & Policy Review published online this month that "a cottage industry is being created" on campuses dedicated to handling tasks that fall outside the expertise of colleges and universities

"Rather than pushing institutions to become surrogates for the criminal justice system," she said, policymakers should ask if "more work should be done to improve that system’s handling and prosecution of sexual assault cases."

Unfortunately, Napolitano's essay at Yale Law & Policy Review (PDF) tries hard to thread the political needle of rape hysteria while at least appearing to give the accused their due. She makes the claim, which real civil rights advocates would reject, that "universities are well positioned to undertake the necessary education and research, and prevention and response actions, that leadership in this area will require." She further endorses the silly and wholly impractical "yes means yes" standard:

Critics claimed, among other arguments, that affirmative consent standards are unfair to those accused of sexual violence. But UC’S policy language negates those claims‐ -- “consent is an affirmative, unambiguous, and conscious decision by each par‐ticipant to engage in mutually agreed upon sexual activity.” The standard pro‐vides greater clarity for both partners than the previous “no means no” stand‐ard by requiring lucid, affirmative statements or actions at each step of a sexual encounter in order to ensure consent. Put simply, only yes means yes.

This is magical thinking that entirely elides the real problems of discerning consent in the absence of signed releases or actual video. As Cathy Young observed last year in Time,

One of the partners could start feeling ambivalent about an encounter after the fact and reinterpret it as coerced — especially after repeatedly hearing the message that only a clear “yes” constitutes real consent. In essence, advocates of affirmative consent are admitting that they’re not sure what constitutes a violation; they are asking people to trust that the system won’t be abused. This is not how the rule of law works.

In other words, there's no means to ascertain whether consent actually occurred. This recently came up in a case at Washington & Lee University, in which a girl declared she had been raped after seeing her boyfriend kiss another girl; rape charges were filed long after their sexual encounters. If anything, this is a setup for a mammoth expansion of the bureaucracy and a micromanaging of students' personal affairs.

Viewed strictly as a bureaucratic turf battle (i.e. mission creep), this makes sense, but it's clear it serves no other end. Napolitano created a new "task force" with broad mandates and lofty mission statements, but no specifics with regards to protecting the rights of the accused. It's larded with boilerplate language from the rape crisis hysterics, with accusors dubbed "brave student survivors" with all the forthright hyperbole one expects in praise for fourth graders. If Napolitano has come out, timidly, late, and not especially forthrightly for principles of justice, whatever positives may arise there are washed away by her collusion with the OCR and its corrosive contempt for due process.

Shanley Kane, The Backstory

My fascination with Shanley Kane as a manifestation of feminist psychosis got a doubling or tripling down today in the wake of a tweet from Milo Yiannopoulos, who resurrected three old columns of his. There's a lot of linked material therein, but I wanted to hit the highlights.

• In which Andrew Auernheimer makes the mistake of sleeping with the former racist, which probably amounts to birds of a feather. Auernheimer, in case you forgot, is "a convicted hacker, a prolific internet troll, a self-confessed anti-semite and, as we reported in October, a white nationalist—though he prefers the term 'pan-European supremacist.'" So he has his reasons to misrepresent Kane's positions, now or then. But her untethered loathing for men — "She does, however, legitimately hate men with an undying rage" — is by now incontestable. Must-read: Meredith L. Patterson's Medium essay outlining her own experiences, and rejection of Kane's entitled self-absorption:
  

  I have since been made painfully aware that my experience is atypical. Every time, it has been a woman who has done so. Every time, it has been a lesson in how the woman I am talking with expects the tech world to relate to her and other people like her.

  After proposing and implementing a feature to an open-source project, she subsequently learned that the developer's list had a brief discussion of her proposal.
  

  There had been interest, but one of the committers had dismissed the idea out of hand because a woman had proposed it. It was the funniest thing I’d heard in months — I literally doubled over laughing at how nonplussed he must have been to see it not only implemented, but implemented to rousing success.

  Whether he intended this as a snub or not, she didn't take it as one at the time. This, from Kane's perspective, turned out to be a huge mistake, because "talking about my overwhelmingly positive relationship with the tech community is nothing more than a callous announcement of 'fuck you, got mine.'" That is, she was too busy doing to worry about the possible social implications of some guy's offhand comment.
• If there's a one-piece takedown of Kane that warrants deep reading, "The Madness of Queen Shanley" appears to be it, providing as it does a significant backgrounder in Kane's dysfunctional, psychopathic behavior. I could spend an entire afternoon reading the links there. Must-read: Elizabeth Spears' Medium interview with Kane, in which Kane even takes softball questions as raging insults, and her editor Bobbie Johnson's followup outlining Kane's lunatic, paranoid response ("harassment", "coerced" among other things) to interview requests from what should have been a friendly reporter.
• Kane confesses racism and mental illness; the obvious must-read is Amelia Greenhall's essay on what it was like to be in close quarters with someone so obviously insane. I don't think she's learned much — the end of the piece appears to be an affirmation of the sorts of things that are explicitly problematic about Kane's totalitarian brand of feminism — but it's interesting to see how very brittle the supposed sisterhood is once there's bragging rights to be established.

No, Freddie, Kickstarters Aren't A "Swindle" (Necessarily)

Fredrik deBoer has a rant up about the sequal to the PC game Divinity: Original Sin (unimaginitively titled Divinity: Original Sin II), which is being published, as its predecessor, as a Kickstarter. DeBoer, who so far as I have ever known, has never run a company or had to manage assets, calls this a "swindle":

Let’s be 100% clear about what this is. This isn’t fans helping the little guy out. This isn’t charity. It’s not the townsfolk banding together to save the local community theater. It’s a for-profit company that just had a very successful product placing the financial risk of their next product on the people they’re going to be selling the product to. Once upon a time, in ye olden days, corporations that wanted a chance to make profits also had to accept the risk of a failed product. Now, hey, just crowdfund; place the risk burden on the very consumers that you want to wring profits out of in the first place! What could go wrong? Typically, criticism of crowdfunding turns on the possibility of failed product launches, such as in this great Gideon Lewis-Kraus piece on an overly ambitious coffeemaker, or the ubiquitous risk of out-and-out fraud. But I find these successes more disturbing: why not just keep going back to the well, no matter how profitable your company is, and reap the profits free of risk?

 No, not free of risk; we don't know, specifically, how much (if any) of their own capital they're putting into the product. But even if that figure is zero, deBoer's argument comes around, essentially, to "for historical reasons", i.e. because a thing has always been done a certain way, it must always be done in the future the same way. But even this utterly ignores the existing real-world examples in which customers put up risk capital in exchange for future goods and services: magazine subscriptions, community supported agriculture, even good faith money on building construction. Instead of Kickstarter supporters being patsies, as deBoer asserts, they're helping the creators mitigate risk and thereby aid in the creation of products those customers want. A great example of this mitigation was the highly successful Exploding Kittens card game; as Ben Kuchera in Polygon wrote,

If Exploding Kittens' creators wanted to print 420,000 copies of the game and ship them, hoping they would sell, the project would cost around $6.3 million, with no guarantee of return. Using Kickstarter allowed them to not only promote the project, but use sales to fund the game's creation, removing that risk and allowing them to increase the profit margin.

While everyone involved with Exploding Kittens will likely earn a very nice payday, the number of copies sold and the profit made from them won't be ridiculous; a better word is meaningful. Kickstarter allowed them to scale expectations and sales while removing much of the upfront cost and risk. It's not a perversion of the crowdfunding model; it's a great example of a team using it well.

Now, is that to say Kickstarters always work? No, of course not. One particular example that some friends got burned on was a proposed biopic of the dog trainer Dick Russell, Dog Man; reading the team's biographies, the title "producer" nowhere appeared at the time. (It is a separate job for a reason.) There's clearly interest in highlighting such failures, as for instance this spreadsheet documenting all game launches funded for $75,000 or more, or Kickfailure, a website dedicated to documenting notable failures. But none of these mean that Kickstarted projects are intrinsically fraud, or amount to exploitation of the customer (save for cases of fraud or incompetence).