Gender and the economy
2009
2009-01-04-WP-Spar-women-finance-risk-averse
One Gender's CrashBy Debora Spar (president of Barnard College)
Washington Post Op-Ed, 2009-01-04
Barnard College President Spar shows
the combination of cluelessness and deceit that characterizes feminists,
especially those in academia.
She sees
only the good that women do, never the bad, and
only the bad that men do, rarely the good.
Hers is a completely deceitful view of the world
(BTW, a view shared by
the people that keep government agencies busy with
false charges against the politically incorrect).
For an example of
the somewhat less-than-perfect risk management of Wall Street women,
see 2009-06-05-NYT-Brinkley.
Or perhaps better yet, read
“The woman who built financial 'weapon of mass destruction' ” (about Blythe Masters).
2009-06-05-NYT-Brinkley
Bank of America Ousts Head of Risk OversightBy LOUISE STORY and ERIC DASH
New York Times, 2009-06-05
Facing pressure from federal regulators
to improve its risk oversight,
Bank of America forced out
its chief risk officer on Thursday
and continued a shake-up of its board.
The officer the bank replaced,
Amy Woods Brinkley, 53, was
one of the highest ranking women on Wall Street.
...
Regulators want to ensure that
the bank has a stronger handle
on its balance sheet and capital needs
after it wrote off billions of dollars from credit cards and mortgages.
...
A spokesman for the bank said
Mr. Lewis and Ms. Brinkley agreed that she would retire,
with both believing that
the bank needed a new approach to risk.
She was at Mr. Lewis’s side
as the bank rapidly expanded its credit card and home equity lending,
businesses that are causing charge-offs for the bank.
...
Ms. Brinkley spent the bulk of her career at the bank,
rising from the front lines of corporate lending.
She ran the bank’s consumer lending and marketing programs before
taking over risk management eight years ago.
Recently, she was the point person between the bank and the regulators
during the stress tests.
Ms. Brinkley’s husband, a lawyer,
stayed home with their children in recent years.
Ms. Brinkley is the latest in
a line of upper-level women on Wall Street
to lose their jobs during the financial crisis.
In the last 18 months,
high-profile women have left Citigroup, Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley.
Ms. Brinkley received no bonus last year.
But
she took home at least $37.2 million
during her tenure as Bank of America’s risk chief from 2001 to 2007,
according to an analysis by Equilar, a compensation research firm.
She is also entitled to pension benefits worth more than $12 million,
and potentially millions more in deferred pay and accumulated stock....
[For more on Ms. Brinkley's departure from BoA,
see this DealBook story.]
For another tragic case of female bad judgment, see
Tests Show Driver Was Drunk in Parkway Crash That Killed 8.
2009-06-22-FP-Salam-Death-of-Macho
The Death of MachoManly men have been running the world forever.
But the Great Recession is changing all that,
and it will alter the course of history.
BY REIHAN SALAM
Foreign Policy, 2009-06-22
[1]
The era of male dominance is coming to an end.
[2]
Seriously.
[3]
For years, the world has been witnessing a quiet but monumental shift of power from men to women. Today, the Great Recession has turned what was an evolutionary shift into a revolutionary one. The consequence will be not only a mortal blow to the macho men’s club called finance capitalism that got the world into the current economic catastrophe; it will be a collective crisis for millions and millions of working men around the globe.
[4]
The death throes of macho are easy to find if you know where to look. Consider, to start, the almost unbelievably disproportionate impact that the current crisis is having on men—so much so that the recession is now known to some economists and the more plugged-in corners of the blogosphere as the “he-cession.” More than 80 percent of job losses in the United States since November have fallen on men, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And the numbers are broadly similar in Europe, adding up to about 7 million more out-of-work men than before the recession just in the United States and Europe as economic sectors traditionally dominated by men (construction and heavy manufacturing) decline further and faster than those traditionally dominated by women (public-sector employment, healthcare, and education). All told, by the end of 2009, the global recession is expected to put as many as 28 million men out of work worldwide.
[5]
Things will only get worse for men as the recession adds to the pain globalization was already causing. Between 28 and 42 million more jobs in the United States are at risk for outsourcing, Princeton economist Alan Blinder estimates. Worse still, men are falling even further behind in acquiring the educational credentials necessary for success in the knowledge-based economies that will rule the post-recession world. Soon, there will be three female college graduates for every two males in the United States, and a similarly uneven outlook in the rest of the developed world.
...
2009-06-29-Sommers-skewing-stimulus
No Country for Burly MenHow feminist groups skewed the Obama stimulus plan towards women's jobs.
by Christina Hoff Sommers
Weekly Standard, 2009-06-29
[1]
A “man-cession.”
That’s what some economists are starting to call it.
Of the 5.7 million jobs Americans lost between December 2007 and May 2009,
nearly 80 percent had been held by men.
Mark Perry, an economist at the University of Michigan,
characterizes the recession as
a “downturn” for women but
a “catastrophe” for men.
[2]
Men are bearing the brunt of the current economic crisis
because they predominate in manufacturing and construction,
the hardest-hit sectors,
which have lost more than 3 million jobs since December 2007.
Women, by contrast,
are a majority in recession-resistant
[and bloated and notoriously inefficient and unproductive, cf.] fields
such as education and health care,
which gained [!!] 588,000 jobs during the same period.
Rescuing hundreds of thousands of unemployed
crane operators, welders, production line managers, and machine setters
was never going to be easy.
But
the concerted opposition of several powerful women’s groups
has made it all but impossible.
Consider what just happened with
the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
[3]
Last November, President-elect Obama ddressed
the devastation in the construction and manufacturing industries
by proposing an ambitious New Deal-like program
to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure.
He called for
a two-year “shovel ready” stimulus program to modernize
roads, bridges, schools, electrical grids, public transportation, and dams
and made reinvigorating the hardest-hit sectors of the economy
the goal of the legislation that would become the recovery act.
[4]
Women’s groups were appalled.
Grids? Dams?
Opinion pieces immediately appeared in major newspapers with titles like
“Where are the New Jobs for Women?” [by the infamous Linda Hirshman] and
“The Macho Stimulus Plan.”
A group of “notable feminist economists”
circulated a petition that quickly garnered more than 600 signatures,
calling on the president-elect
to add projects in health, child care, education, and social services
and to “institute apprenticeships” to train women
for “at least one third” of the infrastructure jobs.
At the same time, more than 1,000 feminist historians signed an open letter
urging Obama not to favor a “heavily male-dominated field” like construction:
“We need to rebuild not only concrete and steel bridges but also human bridges.”
As soon as these groups became aware of each other,
they formed an anti-stimulus plan action group called WEAVE--
Women’s Equality Adds Value to the Economy.
[5]
The National Organization for Women (NOW), the Feminist Majority,
the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, and the National Women’s Law Center
soon joined the battle against the supposedly sexist bailout of men’s jobs.
At the suggestion of a staffer to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi,
NOW president Kim Gandy canvassed for a female equivalent of
the “testosterone-laden ‘shovel-ready’ ” terminology.
(“Apron-ready” was broached but rejected.)
Christina Romer, the highly regarded economist
President Obama chose to chair his Council of Economic Advisers,
would later say of her entrance on the political stage,
“The very first email I got . . . was from a women’s group saying
‘We don’t want this stimulus package to just create jobs for burly men.’ ”
[6]
No matter that those burly men were the ones who had lost most of the jobs.
The president-elect’s original plan
was designed to stop the hemorrhaging in construction and manufacturing
while investing in physical infrastructure
that is indispensable for long-term economic growth.
It was not a grab bag of gender-correct programs, nor was it a macho plan--
the whole idea of economic stimulus is to use government spending
to put idle factors of production back to work.
[7]
The president-elect responded to the protests by sending Jason Furman,his soon-to-be deputy director at the National Economic Council,
along with his senior aides to a meeting organized by
Kim Gandy and Feminist Majority president Eleanor Smeal.
Gandy described the scene:
I can’t resist saying thatThe senior economists listened attentively
this meeting didn’t look like the other transition meetings I attended.
In addition to the presence of more women,
the room actually looked different--
because Feminist Majority President Ellie Smeal
had asked that the chairs be set in a circle,
with no table in the center.
as Gandy and Smeal and other advocates
argued for a stimulus package that would add jobs for
nurses, social workers, teachers, and librarians
in our crumbling “human infrastructure”
(they had found their testosterone-free slogan).
Did Furman mention that jobs in the “human infrastructure”--
health, education, and government--
had increased by more than half a million since December 2007?
[8]
One could pardon him for not being argumentative.
His boss at the economic council, Lawrence Summers,
had become a national symbol of
the consequences of offending feminist sensibilities
and had been opposed by feminists
in his appointment to the top White House post.
Gandy and Smeal found their circle partners to be engaged and curious
and were delighted that they stayed longer than scheduled:
“We left feeling that all our preparation would bear fruit
in the form of more inclusion of women’s needs,
and we were right.”
[9]
They were right indeed.
Our incoming president did what many sensible men do
when confronted by a chorus of female complaint:
He changed his plan.
He added health, education, and other human infrastructure components
to the proposal.
And he tasked Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein,
Joseph Biden’s chief economist, with preparing an extraordinary report
that calculated not only the number of jobs the plan would likely create,
but the gender composition of the various employment sectors
and the division of largess between women and men.
[10]
Romer and Bernstein delivered
“The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan”
on January 10.
They estimated that
“the total number of created jobs likely to go to women is roughly 42 percent.”
Lest anyone miss the point, they added that
since women had held only 20 percent
of the jobs lost in the recession,
the stimulus package now
“skews job creation somewhat towards women.”
[11]
In triumph, Gandy, Smeal, and their sister activists
turned their attention to Congress.
They perfected a special “handshake pitch” for members of Congress
to be used when reminding them of the importance of
rebuilding our human infrastructure, intoning,
“That infrastructure is fragile too.”
With Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on board,
the revised recovery act sailed through Congress,
and President Obama signed it into law on February 17.
[12]
In her March “Below the Belt” column on the NOW website,
Kim Gandy could not contain her elation over
“this happily-ever-after ‘stimulus story.’ ”
When she and her allies saw the final recovery package,
they were amazed to find “over and over”
versions of “very specific proposals that we had made.”
More than that,
the programs NOW had proposed had vast sums of money next to them-
”numbers that started with a ‘B’ (as in billion),” Gandy said gleefully.
“It’s impossible to convey
just how many hours we put into this issue during December and early January
and how fruitful it really turned out to be.”
[13]
Right again.
It is now four months since the bill was signed into law.
A recent Associated Press story reports:
“Stimulus Funds Go to Social Programs Over ‘Shovel-ready’ Projects.”
A team of six AP reporters who have been tracking the funds find that
the $300 billion sent to the states is being used mainly for
health care, education, unemployment benefits, food stamps, and other social services.
According to Chris Whately, director of the Council of State Governments,
“We all talked about ‘shovel-ready’ since September
and assumed it was a whole lot of paving and building
when, in fact, that’s not the case.”
At the same time, the Labor Department’s latest (June 5) employment report
shows unemployment rates of
8 percent for women and
10.5 percent for men.
“Unprecedented” is what Harvard economist Greg Mankiw called
the new 2.5 percentage-point gender gap.
“It’s the highest male-female jobless rate gap
in the history of BLS [Labor Department] data back to 1948,”
said Mark Perry.
[14]
There is great room for debate over
the effectiveness of government stimulus programs,
and over how much impact a focused “shovel-ready” spending program
would have achieved by now.
What is not debatable is that
changes in the American economy and workforce
are favoring
service sectors where women are abundant
and that
the current severe contraction is centered on
sectors where men, especially working-class men, predominate.
should be designed with gender in mind
is itself remarkable.
That, in current circumstances,
it should be designed to “skew” employment further towards women
is disturbing and ominous.
[15]
Here is a clue to what has happened.
The op-ed attacking the “macho stimulus plan”
invoked Abigail Adams’s famous admonition to her husband to
“remember the ladies” at the Constitutional Convention,
and concluded,
“Obama would be wise to do the same and balance the package.”
It is, of course, preposterous to think of Abigail Adams,
or any of the illustrious feminists of yore,
proposing to “balance a package,”
much less opposing an effort to put unemployed men back to work.
The historical allusion is revealing.
[16]
Within living memory, the American feminist movement was
a valiant, broad-based vehicle for social equality.
It achieved historic victories and
enjoys continuing, richly deserved prestige for its valor and success.
But it has now harnessed that prestige to
the ethos and methods of a conventional interest group.
[17]
Recall that the Obama administration has taken extraordinary steps
to insulate itself from the machinations of organized lobbyists,
establishing strict limits and procedures
for contacts and communications of every sort.
Yet its first major policy initiative was transformed by
an orchestrated barrage of emails, op-eds, online petitions, open letters,
faxes, phone calls, scripted handshakes, and meetings.
And the administration went to great lengths to satisfy its petitioners that their proposals had been adopted directly into law.
The administration (and Congress) must have been thinking that
groups such as NOW and the Feminist Majority were crusading for social justice,
when in fact they were lobbying for their share of the action,
to the detriment of urgent necessities.
[18]
A Washington feminist establishment that celebrates
the “happily-ever-after” story of its victory over burly men
cannot represent the views and interests of many women.
Those men are fathers, sons, brothers, husbands, and friends;
if they are in serious trouble,
so are the women who care about them and in many cases depend on them.
But NOW and its sister organizations see the world differently.
They see the workplace as a battlefront in
a zero-sum struggle between men and women,
where it is their job to side with women.
Unless the Obama administration and Congress
find the temerity to distance themselves from the new feminist lobby,
the “man-cession” will deepen and further mischief will ensue.
Christina Hoff Sommers
is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
She is the author of The War Against Boys
and editor of The Science on Women and Science, forthcoming from AEI press.
2009-08-24-Caldwell-Pink-Recovery
The Pink Recovery: Why Women Are Doing BetterBy Christopher Caldwell
Time, 2009-08-24
[This is discussed in blog entries as early as 08-14 (e.g.),
so it is placed ahead of them, despite its official release date.]
[1]
A week ago, President Obama touted
a newly published report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)
that showed the country had lost 247,000 jobs in July.
It seemed an odd thing to boast about,
but you have to consider the context.
The economy was losing jobs at three times that clip
when Obama took office in January.
So it is possible that
we are emerging from the most frightening economic downturn since the Depression.
We won’t be the same country when we do.
[2]
One thing that seems bound to change is
the relationship between the sexes.
Since the recession began in December 2007,
the vast majority of the lost jobs have belonged to men.
About half are in the heavily male domains of construction and manufacturing.
At one point last winter, there were four men being laid off for every woman.
The male unemployment rate is 9.8%, the female rate 7.5%.
What constitutes “women’s work” today?
Well, health care, for one; 81% of the workers are female.
According to the report Obama cited,
20,000 health-care jobs were gained in July, while
76,000 construction jobs and 52,000 manufacturing positions were lost.
[3]
A job is a claim on a certain amount of society’s resources and esteem.
As men lose that claim, they lose the instruments by which
they have traditionally controlled society.
A lot of people see that as fitting punishment.
There weren’t any women among
the high-profile malefactors in last fall’s financial meltdown.
Maleness has become a synonym for insufficient attentiveness to risk.
Journalists have lately been having a field day with a study by
two Cambridge University professors, J.M. Coates and J. Herbert,
who sampled the testosterone levels of London traders
and found they positively correlated with high-profit trading days.
Of course, nobody harped on this research
back when housing prices were doubling
and people were using their home-equity credit lines to buy third cars.
But to paraphrase Richard Nixon’s comment about Keynesians,
we are all feminists now.
[4]
In Foreign Policy this summer,
journalist Reihan Salam predicted that the “macho men’s club called finance capitalism” would not survive the present economic ordeal.
Provocatively--but correctly--he claimed that
this male order rests on foundations
considerably older than Ronald Reagan’s supply-side revolution.
The economic system that FDR shored up was a male one.
The New Deal focused on infrastructure
at a time when there were not a lot of lady dam builders around.
(Salam might also have mentioned the GI Bill,
the most effective instrument ever devised
for giving a leg up to males in universities and workplaces.)
Salam sees Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package as a break with the New Deal.
It spends relatively little on infrastructure
and relatively much on female-friendly sectors like health care and education.
Not to mention aid to state and local governments,
where 3 in 5 employees are women.
[5]
Although clichés about the “vulnerability” of women in the economy have been disproved by hard BLS data,
we want to believe them.
When women lose jobs, the victims are women.
When men lose jobs, the victims are, um, women,
because they have to make up for that lost male income.
The scale of male job losses was evident
even when the stimulus bill was passed.
That did not stop incoming Congressman Jared Polis, a Colorado Democrat,
from warning Obama that
“gender imbalance in occupations related to physical infrastructure development means that
the direct job creation will benefit mostly men.”
[6]
Men still make up 53% of the workforce,
and the percentage of society’s work they do is considerably higher,
owing to women’s shorter hours and more frequent sabbaticals for child-rearing.
In prosperous times, women may yearn for more time at home.
But economic realities have a way of washing away these yearnings.
One such reality is the recession.
Another is that women receive 58% of the bachelor’s degrees in this country,
along with half the professional degrees.
[7]
Should we expect men to cede some control over
an economy they have so thoroughly messed up?
No.
We have no examples of that ever having happened.
What we have plenty of examples of--
you can see variants of it all over the developing world--
is economies in which women do all the arduous work
while men sit around smoking and pontificating in coffeehouses and barbershops.
For decades,
policymakers have been attentive to
the [alleged] flaws of a
patriarchal, middle-class,
single-earner, nuclear-family-oriented
model of family economics--
and their attention remains fixed on it.
dominated American society as much as its critics claimed,
we are now leaving it behind.
Maybe there is a humane model that can replace it.
We have not found one yet.
Caldwell is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard
2009-08-14-Sailer-mortgage-meltdown
Which sex was most responsible for the mortgage meltdown?by Steve Sailer
isteve.blogspot.com, 2009-08-14
[1]
Christopher Caldwell, author of
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe:
Immigration, Islam, and the West
has a pretty good essay in Time Magazine called
“The Pink Recovery:”
One thing that seems bound to change is
the relationship between the sexes.
Since the recession began in December 2007,
the vast majority of the lost jobs have belonged to men. ...
A lot of people see that as fitting punishment.
There weren’t any women among
the high-profile malefactors in last fall’s financial meltdown.
Maleness has become a synonym for insufficient attentiveness to risk. ...
In Foreign Policy this summer,
journalist Reihan Salam predicted that
the “macho men’s club called finance capitalism”
would not survive the present economic ordeal....
Of course, nobody harped on this research
back when housing prices were doubling
and people were using their home-equity credit lines to buy third cars.
But to paraphrase Richard Nixon’s comment about Keynesians,
we are all feminists now.
[2]
Okay, but, consider that at the base of the financial crash
were people, typically couples,
taking out home mortgages that they couldn’t afford,
mostly to either buy homes
(generally sold to them by female real estate agents)
they couldn’t afford or to do home improvements they couldn’t afford.
[3]
In the typical couple who has defaulted, which sex -- husband or wife --
on average do you think was more ardent for the granite countertop upgrade?
Was it husbands or wives who tended to insist most on
buying the larger house with the exercise room
and enough space for relatives to stay over
and the extra big dining room for hosting dinner parties?
[4]
Caldwell gently satirizes the conventional wisdom:
Although clichés about the “vulnerability” of women in the economy
have been disproved by hard BLS data, we want to believe them.
When women lose jobs, the victims are women.
When men lose jobs, the victims are, um, women,
because they have to make up for that lost male income.
[5]
Then, Caldwell goes on to illustrate one reason
why he writes for Time Magazine and I don’t:
Should we expect men to cede some control over
an economy they have so thoroughly messed up?
No.
We have no examples of that ever having happened.
What we have plenty of examples of--
you can see variants of it all over the developing world--
is economies in which women do all the arduous work
while men sit around smoking and pontificating
in coffeehouses and barbershops.
For decades, policymakers have been attentive to the [alleged] flaws of
a patriarchal, middle-class, single-earner, nuclear-family-oriented
model of family economics--
and their attention remains fixed on it.
Whether or not that model dominated American society
as much as its critics claimed,
we are now leaving it behind.
Maybe there is a humane model that can replace it.
We have not found one yet.
[6]
Good point.
[7]
Still, the reason Caldwell writes for Time and I don’t
is that if I were to write:
What we have plenty of examples of--Rather than gesture vaguely at “the developing world,”
you can see variants of it all over the developing world--
is economies in which women do all the arduous work
while men sit around smoking and pontificating
in coffeehouses and barbershops.
I would actually then give an example.
In fact, I would pick the best example:
i.e., the largest region of the world where men are most inclined
to have their womenfolk do most of what work gets done.
[8]
Caldwell’s way is dull, not very informative,
and potentially misleading to the handful of readers
who actually stop and wonder what he means:
Is he talking about, say, China?
China is definitely developing.
So, I guess he’s talking about China.
Do men not work very hard in China? I didn’t know that.
I guess men must not work very hard in China
or it wouldn’t say that in Time Magazine.
You learn something new every day!
[9]
Now, you know and I know what part of the “developing” world
Caldwell is primarily talking about here,
and why it’s relevant to America.
(The reference to “barbershops” is a clue.)
He’s referring to Henry Harpending 101.
But Caldwell has the good sense to keep his point misty and abstract-sounding
so that few people will have much of an idea what he’s talking about.
Nicholas Wade, the NYT’s genetics reporter, will get it,
but Morris Dees of the $PLC hopefully won’t.
[Frankly, I wish Steve had been more explicit there.
Evidently political correctness has gotten so bad
that even Steve Sailer has to equivocate like that.]
2009-08-16-Carney-women-recession
Did Women Cause The Recession?by John Carney
www.businessinsider.com, 2009-08-16
[1]
This recession has been particularly hard on men.
At one point last winter,
four men were laid off for every woman.
Largely this is due to the fact that
so many men work in vulnerable sectors like manufacturing and construction
that have been devastated the the recession.
Women tend to work in safer sectors like health care.
[2]
If the reverse were true, we’d probably be reading a lot about
how women were being victimized and forced into the least safe jobs.
Some bright women’s study professor would talk about
how society was “privileging” male jobs and denigrating women’s work.
But you won’t hear that kind of case from men
because, well, it’s distinctly unmanly
to whine about being dominated by women in society.
[Really?]
[3]
Chris Caldwell has a great essay in Time Magazine
on what he calls our “Pink Recovery.”
[4]
“Although clichés about the “vulnerability” of women in the economy
have been disproved by hard BLS data, we want to believe them.
When women lose jobs, the victims are women,” he writes.
“When men lose jobs, the victims are, um, women,
because they have to make up for that lost male income.”
[5]
There are plenty of people--
we’ve actually met and worked with some of them--
who think there’s a kind of cosmic justice operating here.
Men dominated
the investment banks and financial fortresses that led us into this mess,
so they deserve to suffer more during the recession.
[6]
But is that true?
Sure there weren’t many women among the malefactors in the financial meltdown.
But when it came to the mortgage and consumer spending boom,
the innocence of women is not so obvious.
[7]
As Steve Sailer points out,
at the very least, men and women worked together to build our empire of debt.
And for a great many couples, women were probably the drivers
in really piling on household debt.
Okay, but, consider that at the base of the financial crash
were people, typically couples,
taking out home mortgages that they couldn’t afford,
mostly to either buy homes
(generally sold to them by female real estate agents)
they couldn’t afford
or to do home improvements they couldn’t afford.
In the typical couple who has defaulted,
which sex -- husband or wife -- on average do you think
was more ardent for the granite countertop upgrade?
Was it husbands or wives who tended to insist most
on buying the larger house with the exercise room
and enough space for relatives to stay over
and the extra big dining room for hosting dinner parties?
[8]
It would really be fascinating to see
which sex was responsible for spending the cash-out mortgage money
and the HELOC drawdowns.
2009-09-02-Sailer-estrogen-recession
The Estrogen Recessionby Steve Sailer
Taki Magazine, 2009-09-02
[1]
Are men to blame for the economic crash?
[2]
That’s become a popular theme in the press.
[3]
For example, the BBC’s business editor Robert Peston recently stated in
“Why men are to blame for the crunch:”
“I routinely characterise the credit crunch as ‘men behaving badly’—
because it’s almost impossible to find a woman to blame.”
He went on to list the usual suspects:
“reckless chief executives of banks,”
“financial engineers,”
“central bankers and regulators,” and
“finance ministers.”
[4]
Similarly, the New York Times headlined
“Maybe the Meltdown’s a Guy Thing,”
giving this idea a biochemical spin:
“The study suggests that raging hormones might explain
why the men who rule the global markets
send them rocketing up when they’re on a roll,
and swooping down when they get scared …”
[5]
All guilty as charged.
[6]
And yet … for something as absurdly awful as this collapse to have happened,
there had to have been two failures.
The BSDs of Wall Street concocted mountains of leverage
on top of what turned out to be molehills of ability to pay back mortgages.
[7]
So,
who bought houses and home improvements
they couldn’t afford in the first place?
[8]
Ordinary people.
[9]
And who, on the whole,
were those ordinary people who insisted on buying too much house?
[10]
Women.
[11]
Perhaps it’s different in the BBC’s domain.
My awareness of the balance of power in English domestic life
is limited to Fawlty Towers reruns.
And, here in the U.S., my wife and I managed to avoid the entire Housing Bubble,
so I’m not speaking from bitter personal experience.
[12]
In American marketing, though, it’s not exactly a secret that
women have greater influence than men
over the purchase of most things
In good times,
the power of the purse is widely celebrated in the business press.
For example, in the introduction to Martha Barletta’s 2003 book,
Marketing to Women:
How to Understand, Reach, and Increase Your Share of
the Largest Market Segment,
Tom Peters (the “In Pursuit of Excellence” business maven), exclaimed:
Women are responsible for 83% of all consumer purchases.
Home furnishings … 94%.
Vacations … 92%.
Houses … 91%.
Consumer electronics … 51%.
Cars … make 60% of purchases, significantly influence 90%. …
Translation: Earth’s largest economy … American Women.
[13]
Now, don’t ask Tom Peters to detail
the methodology behind that 91 percent figure for houses.
Having spent the ‘80s and ‘90s in the marketing research business,
I can assure you that sales convention speakers such as Peters
are there to provide inspiration, not exactitude.
[14]
I can also assure you that it’s taken for granted by most marketers
that women, not men, are their prime targets.
In reading the trade press, you constantly see statements like,
“An often-cited marketing maxim holds that
around 80 percent of consumer purchases are driven by women.”
Or, “Women’s Marketplace Dominance Is Clear in Every Area.”
Or, “Women Are America’s Chief Purchasing Officers (CPO’s).”
[15]
Each year, on balance,
men hand trillions of dollars they’ve earned over to women to spend.
Some of these vast transfers are through the tax system,
and some through inheritance by widows.
(She-conomy.com claims, for whatever it’s worth,
“Senior women age 50 and older control net worth of $19 trillion
and
own more than three-fourths of the nation’s financial wealth.”)
Nonetheless, most male-to-female handovers are
from husbands who are specialists at making money in a particular career
to their more generalist wives,
who take on for the family the bulk of
the onerous task of trying to spend it wisely.
[16]
Still, women tend not only to be more interested shoppers,
but also more enthusiastic shoppers.
For example, a 1995 survey found that
women are more likely than men to admit that they
shop to celebrate, buy without need, buy unplanned items,
and can’t resist a sale.
[17]
When a bubble bursts, however,
the business press suddenly shuts up about the role of women in spending.
After all, advertisers don’t want to offend their biggest customers.
[18]
(By the way, the rise of the Internet,
by wrecking the subscription model for all but
HBO, World of Warcraft, the Wall Street Journal,
and a few other male-targeted media enterprises,
is making the media even more female-oriented.
That’s because selling advertising—
which consists, more or less, of attracting female eyeballs—
is now the only way to get paid.)
[19]
Two exceptions in the financial media have been
John Carney and Joe Wiesenthal of Business Insider.
One of the commenters on Carney’s “Did Women Cause the Recession?”,
Becky, wrote:
As an architectural designer
with 20 years of experience working with people,
it is a good generalization that women drove the new home market.
I might start out with a couple on the first meeting,
then work with the wife the rest of the time.
The husbands generally get the basement and garages
(the least expensive construction),
and the wife is focused on what other women have
and what is in all the magazines.
Women worry about keeping up with the Joneses much more than men.
Men will give in to women easier than women will give in to men also.
[A man might want a pole barn, but the house with
granite countertops, vaulted ceilings, pro kitchens,
a bath for each kid (or at least shared), lots of closet space,
and upstairs laundry and mud room complete with lockers and pet space,
is pretty normal these days.
[Good grief.]
The third car garage is typical because
many subs won’t allow a pole barn in the back yard.
Women spend the majority of money in my experience.]
[20]
Similarly, women outnumber men almost three to two
among dues-paying members of the National Association of Realtors.
[21]
Speaking of real estate ladies,
Wiesenthal has flagged a Century 21 commercial from 2006,
the peak year for over-inflated home prices.
This 30 second spot was formally called The Debate,
but it’s now better known as Suzanne Researched This:
Basically, the commercial touts the fact that
your Century 21 broker will team up with your browbeating wife
and guilt you into buying the home you can’t afford.
It must be watched.
We still think it kind of might be a parody.
[22]
God, I hope so.
[23]
Unfortunately, Suzanne Researched This
was almost certainly meant seriously as
a training flick for the wives of America.
Strikingly,
the giant real estate firm did not advise wives to use tears or seductiveness
to get their husbands to plunge far into debt.
Instead, women of America, you should employ derision and hostility
to bend your feeble mates to your iron wills!
[24]
Here’s the script:
Husband
[the usual overweight, doofusy-looking white guy husband/father
we know from a million other commercials, stalling for time]:
It’s not the point, the point—
Wife [Pointedly]: What is the point? What?
Wife: I love that house. Plus the schools.
Husband: The kids are three and one.
Wife: They’re going to grow up.
Wife: What? [At the 0:14 mark,
the wife makes a very brief but hate-filled gesture toward her husband,
thrusting her face at him with a look of contempt and repulsion on it.]
Wife: Suzanne researched this!
Suzanne [the Century 21 realtor,
whom the paterfamilias has allowed to listen in on the speaker phone]:
This listing is special. John, you guys can do this.
Wife [wheedling]: We can do this.
Husband [dazed and defeated]: Yeah … okay.
Wife: Are you kidding me?
[Hugging poor dumb bastard husband]
This is awesome!
Husband [trying to look on the bright side of his upcoming bankruptcy]:
See the size of that garage?
Wife [triumphant]: Yes!
Suzanne [on the speakerphone]:
Ka-ching!Oh, that’s great, now let me get to work.
[25]
After seeing the original, you should watch this version
with subtitles explaining what the characters are really saying.
[26]
That women tend to be more house-proud than men is often a very good thing.
It keeps most of the human race from living in the kind of dumps
with which so many bachelors are content.
[27]
Yet, when women go over the top with spending on homes,
as too many did in this decade,
they merit criticism,
just as Wall Street guys are taking their deserved lumps.
[28]
The ethics of this is not complicated.
It’s Aristotle 101—the golden mean.
Don’t spend too little or too much.
[29]
Should women qua women be criticized
for helping get us into the mortgage mess?
[30]
Of course they should.
[31]
Women should be reminded, frequently,
that each one of them needs to be on guard against
her sex’s tendency to overspend on homes.
[32]
Criticism makes people behave better.
Look at white men.
We’re just about the only people
you are allowed to criticize as a group these days,
and now, under this stream of constant criticism,
we’re usually on our best behavior.
[33]
The alternative (and more popular) theory is that
criticism depletes crucial self-esteem vitamins,
causing the formerly criticized groups to live down to their stereotypes.
Thus, no critiques are allowed today of the propensities of
women, blacks, homosexuals, Latinos,
and most other organized pressure groups.
With so few targets left,
TV advertising humor is now directed relentlessly at
putting down the clueless white guys who run everything.
[34]
Of course, that just underlines the fact that
white guys are still primarily the ones keeping this society running.
[35]
And that means that if the conventional wisdom is true—
that public criticism is horribly deleterious to self-esteem—
this would imply, logically,
that white males are going to stop creating new things
and increasingly just retreat in a funk into playing WoW—
well, then, we’re all in big trouble.
2009-10-19-WP-Consumptionism
Frugality falling out of fashion?A returning hunger for retail therapy thaws out the credit card
By Annie Gowen
Washington Post, 2009-10-19
2010
2010-08-30-WP-Faiola-British-cuts-impact-women-more
Women set to bear 72% of British austerity cuts, report showsBy Anthony Faiola
Washington Post, 2010-08-30
LONDON –
[1]
As Britain prepares for the deepest budget cuts in generations
to tackle a crippling mound of public debt,
the government is facing a pressing legal question:
Is its austerity plan sexist?
[2]
Like other wealthy nations including the United States,
Britain ran up an unprecedented deficit in recent years -
a liability that ballooned with
a $39 billion stimulus package unleashed against the Great Recession.
Now, the new government headed by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron
is making a round of spending cuts that not only roll back that stimulus,
but also hit at the heart of Britain’s social safety net
and big government machine.
[3]
Women, recent studies here show,
are far more dependent on the state than men.
Women are thus set to bear
a disproportionate amount of the pain,
prompting a legal challenge that could scuttle the government’s fiscal crusade
and raise fairness questions over deficit-cutting campaigns
underway from Greece to Spain,
and in the United States when it eventually moves to curb spending.
[Get a load of that!
When women get a disproportionate share
of government benefits and government jobs,
hey, no problem.
No man would dare to question women getting more than their fair share.
But when times get tough, and those government benefits and jobs
that disproportionately benefited women are cut,
then the cuts also disproportionately affect women,
but this time on the down side, not the up side.
And what do you know?
It’s a legal issue when women are disproportionately adversely affected,
but never when they are disproportionately favorably affected.
If the courts accept this argument, then the law really is an ass.]
[4]
One major target in Britain, for instance, is the bloated public sector,
with as many as 600,000 government jobs - or one in 10 -
potentially on the chopping block.
But 65 percent of state employees are women,
including single mothers in part-time job programs,
setting them up to suffer more than men.
[5]
Overall, a report published by the House of Commons indicates,
women stand to bear the burden of 72 percent of the government’s cuts.
...
2011
2011-03-22-Hymowitz-White-House-Council-on-Men-and-Boys
What America Really Needs Is A White House Council On Men And BoysBy Kay S. Hymowitz
Washington Examiner, 2011-03-22
Original Source
A few weeks ago, the White House Council on Women and Girls
released an inter-agency report titled
“Women in America: Indicators of Social and Economic Well-Being.”
I learned a lot from reading it, like, for instance, the answer to the question:
Do we need a White House Council on Women and Girls?
The answer, many readers won’t be surprised to hear, is no.
To be sure, the report has plenty of interesting data --
almost all of it indicating that women are doing very well indeed.
Women are living longer than men,
which probably explains why
there are 4 million more of them in the United States.
They are less likely to be victims of violent crime or to be unemployed.
These days, far fewer women are having children as teenagers.
[But compare.]
Instead, they are busy earning more high school degrees than men,
taking more Advanced Placement courses
and earning more college degrees.
Fifty-seven percent of today’s college grads are female,
and projections are that the number
will reach 60 percent by the end of the decade.
Women make up the majority of graduate students.
They are also 51 percent of management and professional workers,
though they make up only 47 percent of the work force.
Of course, as most people know, there is one area where women lag:
They don’t earn as much as men.
The foreword to the report puts it this way:
“At all levels of education, women earned about 75 percent of
what their male counterparts earned in 2009.”
Look carefully at the body of the report
and you’ll see the two primary reasons why:
First, women major in fields that tend to lead to lower-paying jobs.
They dominate the ranks of the humanities and education majors,
while they’re relatively scarce in science and technology.
The second reason for lower female earnings is that women work fewer hours.
In 2009, employed married women spent on average
seven hours and 40 minutes in “work-related activities,”
compared to employed married men’s eight hours and 50 minutes.
Could discrimination still explain some of the wage gap?
It could, but the evidence from “Women in America” is that
women earn less because they work less
and because they work as teachers rather than software developers.
[Hymowitz avoids talking about male-dominated Wall Street.
I wonder why?
Maybe the people at the Manhattan Institute aren't very familiar with it :-)]
The report doesn’t tell us whether there is any evidence that
most Americans see either of these tendencies
as a problem that a government council should solve.
That may be because there is no such evidence.
In fact,
as the economist Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute has suggested,
there’s a stronger case to be made for a White House Council on Men and Boys.
A report from that imaginary council would begin by noting that
72 percent of girls get a high school degree, compared to 65 percent of boys.
(Again, that’s Sixty. Five. Percent.)
It would go on to state that
the percentage of men getting a college degree has not budged since the 1970s.
It would point out that
the share of men in the labor force has hit historic lows,
as they account for seven of every 10 jobs lost during the Great Recession.
It would also show that the trends for young men are ominous, since
single, childless women in their 20s
are now outearning them in most major cities
by as much as 21 percent.
And finally it would observe that all of these trends
reduce the proportion of “marriageable men,” that is,
men with steady jobs whom women might want to marry and raise children with.
The irony is that the dearth of such men means more single mothers,
which in turn means more female poverty and lower income for women.
Unfortunately, the Council on Women and Girls never makes that connection.
2012
2012-10-30-Furchtgott-Roth-bogus-aauw-study-perpetuates-wage-gap-myths
Bogus AAUW study perpetuates wage gap mythsby Diana Furchtgott-Roth
Washington Examiner, 2013-10-30
Now for the latest salvo in the wage gap myth, a report entitled “Graduating to a Pay Gap” from the American Association of University Women.
Authored by AAUW anthropologist Christianne Corbett and Director of Research Catherine Hill, the press release states that “just one year out of college, millennial women are paid 82 cents for every dollar paid to their male peers. Women are paid less than men even when they do the same work and major in the same field.”
The AAUW recommends passing more pay equity legislation, such as the failed Paycheck Fairness Act, to require firms to provide more information to the government about pay practices and increase penalties for discrimination.
Buried in the report is the finding that, accounting for college majors and occupations, women make 93 cents (not 82) on a man’s dollar. The remaining seven cents, the authors contend, is likely due to discrimination, because they cannot explain it. So let me offer a possible explanation for them: The study’s occupational categories are too broad. One cannot draw precise conclusions about pay equity when comparing workers within fields such as “Other White Collar,” “Business and Management” and simply, “Other Occupations.”
A footnote tells readers that “Other White Collar” includes “social scientists and related workers ... ; lawyers, judges, and related workers; education, training, and library occupations ... ; arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media occupations; social science research assistants; and law clerks.” So, the AAUW report compares the pay of male lawyers with that of female librarians; of male athletes with that of female communications assistants. That’s not a comparison between people who do the same work.
“Other Occupations” includes jobs in construction and mining, a high-paying, male-dominated occupation, and also jobs in food preparation and serving occupations, a low-paying, female-dominated occupation. If a waitress is paid less than a miner, does it follow that it’s because she’s been discriminated against?
In order to show discrimination, the report should document differences in salaries of men and women in the same job with the same experience. If there’s a big difference under those circumstances, then there may be discrimination, giving women grounds to sue. The AAUW study didn’t even look at men and women in the same field, much less on the same job.
Why would the AAUW put out such shoddy material? Lisa Maatz, director of public policy and government relations at AAUW, answered this question at the AAUW media conference call when the study was released.
Maatz said that part of the reason the AAUW wants to do this work is that it has an extensive get-out-the-vote movement. In this sense, she continued, this report is very well-timed. The AAUW get-out-the-vote program has been targeting millennial women to get to the polls. This particular year, the AAUW has made a huge investment in trying to get millennials to vote.
It seems that the AAUW is twisting the data to get young women to feel that they are victims of discrimination and march out and vote for President Obama, who is promising pay equity.
But since Obama assumed office in January 2009, women have fared poorly. The percentage of employed women in the population has declined from 57 percent in January 2009 to 55 percent in September 2012. (Data for October are expected Friday.) Over the same period, the number of unemployed women increased from 4.4 million to 4.9 million.
President Obama says he’s in favor of equal pay, but women staffers in his White House are paid 90 cents on a man’s dollar -- if one calculates the figure incorrectly based on simple averages.
If women actually were paid 82 cents on the dollar for the exact same work as men, they could sue. They are too smart to believe the AAUW’s political propaganda.
2013-09-25-NYT-Porter-for-american-women-is-it-enough-to-lean-in
To Address Gender Gap, Is It Enough to Lean In?By EDUARDO PORTER
New York Times Opinion, 2013-09-25
...
The trend is troubling.
The slowdown in women’s labor supply
is expected to dent the nation’s growth rate over the long term,
according to projections by the Congressional Budget Office.
A study last year by Booz & Company estimated that
raising women’s labor force participation to match men’s
would add at least 5 percent to the nation’s gross domestic product,
which currently stands at about $16 trillion a year.
...
[This, from America’s generally most respected newspaper,
is typical of how the “elite” cherry picks what to emphasize and how to look at things.
In particular, note how increase in GDP is given as the sole measure of merit.
WHAT ABOUT THE TRADE DEFICIT?
That is an issue that our current “elite” seems to ignore
whenever they push their favorite issues and solutions
(as, here, closing various gender gaps).
The “new economy” which they seems so happy about,
while it is tailored to the interests and abilities of women and Jews
(and if anyone should question that last, do they deny that
Jews are spectacularly overrepresented
in precisely the segments of the U.S. economy
which have had the greatest growth,
namely, health care, finance, and education?),
churns out services (of dubious, in my opinion value.
Personal trainers? Yoga instructors? Therapists?)
which add to the GDP and the pockets of those providing the services,
but do nothing to produce goods which foreigners buy.
I.e., they do nothing to close the trade deficit.
So the problem is this:
If you do increase the percentage of women in the labor force and close the pay gap,
what will those women produce that foreigners are interested in buying?
At some point, that trade deficit will rise up and bite America,
and harm the general American standard of living.
The arguments then will be how to rectify that problem at that time.
I am trying to raise the issue now,
pointing out that the pet projects of the PC “elite”
are only increasing the problem that will arise in the future,
while that "elite" ignores that problem.]
posted by KHarbaugh at 00:05
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