The XX Factor: What women really think.

"Well, They Had To Give It to a Woman at Some Point"

In the wake of Elinor Ostrom’s surprise Nobel win, unemployed economists are really turning on the charm. Check out the seething bitterness on this message board for job-seeking econ geeks. Ostrom isn’t one of their studly quant jock heroes, so these boys have decided that she’s just a P.C., feminist-friendly token of a pick. My favorite comment: “This is the problem with Affirmative Action. Last time a woman tried to go to the moon, the Challenger exploded 73 seconds after the launch.” And not only does she lack the virile, rugged masculinity we all associate with working economists, she doesn’t even call herself an economist! She’s a politicial scientist—just the kind of hedging you’d expect from a woman ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).

Girl-on-Girl Theatrical Action

Ann, I think you're right that the Times article on gender bias in the theater may have leaned a bit hard on the women-keeping-their-sisters-down aspect of the original study. (I also think you're right that the best thing we can do, as audience members, is actually get out there and support quality work by buying tickets.)

But I also think there are elements of this study that should give us pause. When Sands sent those scripts out to producers, directors, and literary managers, she found that both female and male respondents were likely to rate a play with a female writer's name attached to be of lower quality—not just less economically viable, but actually of lower artistic merit—than the same script with a man's name attached ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.) 

Is There Gender Bias on Broadway?

It’s a catchy, catty angle, that’s for sure: An article in today’s New York Times about a recent study of potential gender bias in Broadway theater opens by suggesting that women playwrights do indeed have more trouble getting their work produced than men do—and that female artistic directors, producers, and literary managers “are the ones to blame.” That’s the conclusion purportedly arrived at by a precocious female Princeton undergrad, who undertook the study for her senior thesis in economics, and who recently gave a presentation to a mostly-female audience of playwrights and producers.

If you read further, and check out the thesis itself, it’s clear Emily Glassberg Sands says no such thing ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)

Real Men Don't Take Dictation

When the focus of an economy changes from making stuff to helping people—that is, manufacturing to services—low-skilled men drop out of the labor market in droves. A new study of unemployed men in Manchester, England, suggests that "idealized embodied masculinity" is partly to blame. Manual labor, claims Sociologist Darren Nixon, imbues working class men with a sense of pride that helps compensate for the very fact of being working class. They may not be financially dominant, but they feel relatively masculine compared to their white, middle class counterparts.

Women and the Mancession

The Feminism of Penicillin

When we talk about barriers to the entrance of women in the American workforce in the 20th century, the story we tell is largely cultural and economic. Married women with career aspirations had to contend with wage discrimination, marriage bars, and the perception that a working woman was ipso facto a degenerate wife and mother. A neat new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that we often understate the role of basic medical advances when talking about that sudden, collective jump from home to workplace. It's easy to forget how dangerous childbirth used to be; complications associated with sepsis, toxaemia and obstructed labor could ravage a body well into middle age. "Many maternal conditions had very long lasting or chronic effects on health," the researchers report, "hindering women's ability to work beyond their childbearing years."

Using historical data to quantify the effects of various maternal conditions, economists Stefania Albanesi and Claudia Olivetti find that medical advances like the introduction of antibiotics, the standardization of obstetric practice, and the hospitalization of childbirth were absolutely critical to the rise of married women's participation in the labor market over the last century. They also find a very large effect for the introduction of formula as a mainstream alternative to breastfeeding in the 1930s. A typical woman in 1920 between the ages of 23 and 33 would be nursing for something like 40 percent of her potential working time. As Hanna has so forcefully illustrated, our cost/benefit calculations change when we start to consider the possibility that a mother's time might have some kind of value.

The Black Market in Home Decorating

My old friends at Reason have a short video on a woman being prosecuted for practicing interior design without a license in Alabama. It would appear that the woman in question already has the skill required to competently arrange throw pillows. But the American Society of Interior Designers insists that licensing is a safety issue; indeed, that "every decision an interior designer makes affects the health, safety, and, welfare of the public." In order to get a license, this woman would have to obtain a college degree, complete an apprenticeship, and pass a test.    

One could argue that homeowners want some kind of relevant accreditation, but it's not clear to me why that accreditation need be legally mandatory. (Yes, I am dismissing the idea of color-scheme-related injury.) In any case I feel betrayed by Sally Struthers, who made it seem that any of us could become interior designers (or TV/VCR repairmen) without leaving the comfort of our living rooms.

“Rule by Republican Hissy Fit”?

I’m a bit disappointed by President Obama’s rude expurgation of contraceptive planning from the “economic recovery package”—as we’re being asked to call the stimulus bill that’s working its way through Congress. Perhaps I’m just not down with all the euphemism on tap this week: Why not just call “Republican skepticism” here on the Hill what it is—an attempt to derail the future expansion of health coverage, couched in a puritanical queasiness with contraception. Lisa Lerer reports Minority leader John Boehner asking: “How can you spend millions of dollars on contraceptives? How does that stimulate the economy?” Well, John—hot button-ness aside—birth control is a commodity bought and sold like any other.

I agree with EJ that in many cases (I felt this way about Rick Warren) progressives should attempt to see the forest, not the offending tree. But here, it’s not just a bunch of women begging for their crazy pills! The Democratic White House’s concession of rhetorical and political ground—about whether contraception (a better than average return on public investment) and other Medicaid assistance counts as “stimulus” or not—could have outsized effects on the future of the universal health coverage debate. Over at the Washington Independent, Lindsay Beyerstein makes roughly this point. Harold Pollack and Nicholas Beaudrot at TAP make it explicit: We’re now, the latter writes, subject to “rule by Republican hissy fit.”

Who knows whether it’s the public climate that requires lifting of the odious global gag rule to be done under cover of media darkness, or the lightweight status afforded to “women’s health” in general—but birth control represents an arm of the pharmaceutical industry that nets drugmakers over $5 billion annually—perhaps even in a recession. I imagine the investors of $5 billion in any other American industry could, presumably, expect some back-scratching, be it through money kicked into the search for a better product, or strenuous lobbying to ensure access to said product is available to American women—especially those planning families, and seeking “economic recovery” from the new Congress.

So 25 Grand Gets You Nine Months in an All-American Womb These Days and That's OK?

I'm with you, Susannah, on Alex Kuczynski and her (college-educated!) rent-a-womb. There are worse villains to vilify at a time like this, Internet haters! Right? Why does it continue to be so profitable for self-respecting media institutions to incite reader rage over harmless rich socialites who are not asking for as much as a penny of TARP funds? (I mean, imagine if wealthy men got pregnant! Imagine what impoverished, uneducated communities they'd be outsourcing the job to. Oh wait, there's a thriving surrogate industry in India as it is.)  Which is to say, um, was there not something off-putting about the economics of it? In vitro, while certainly not covered by most health care plans, is covered by some—and in any case, it's certainly a tax-free expenditure of a hundred grand. And for a quarter of that, Kuczynski finds a whole woman—a college-educated woman!—willing to carry around Kuczynski's child in her own goddamn womb for nine months? Hey, and now she's written a story about it; she can write off that money, too! (Plus, she probably made about exactly $25,000 writing the piece anyway.)

God, so what does it mean? Well, on one hand, that's the free market at work, folks! And yet, on the other hand, Kuczynski—who wrote a book about cosmetic surgery and a regular Times column critiquing fancy retail "experiences"—has this way of positioning herself smack in the middle of industries that thrive off the most loathsome markets! Take in vitro and cosmetic surgery: Both draw in some of the nation's most talented doctors by freeing them from the migraine that is haggling with insurance companies, the same insurance companies that have helped make basic health care costs so expensive that regular college-educated ladies like Kuczynski's surrogate are willing to be implanted with alien zygotes and carry them around inside her for the better part of a year. (Oh yeah, and did I mention, quit drinking? While Kuczynski gets to … not quit drinking? ) It's just no faiiiirr, not to mention creepy, and while I'll gladly admit it's a bit of both to the anonymous cow whose teat to which I fully intend on outsourcing my milk production if and when I ever have kids, it's a little different when you're talking about people, right? And I guess I'd just feel better if it seemed like Kuczynski had thought about it this way. Because there are a lot of people in this country who are wealthy enough to spend 25 grand outsourcing their pregnancies, and there are hordes more who are desperate enough to rent out their wombs, but once upon a time we lived in a country where the former camp would have been more inclined to adopt from the latter half. At least, that's what I've always been told.

Christina Romer, An Economist Who Knows The Difference Between "Schools" And "Shoes"

Emily, Larry Kudlow and I don't agree on much, but we seem for now to be equally satisfied with the appointment of Christina Romer to chair the Council of Economic Advisers. Larry—and yes, the CNBC is still on; it's gotten to the point where I feel anxious when it's not on—is convinced on the basis of Romer's critiques of the New Deal that she is a "secret supply-sider" who believes cutting taxes, not using them to fund public programs that create jobs, is the way out of recession. I like her because of what she told the Times last month about the distinctly horrifying nature of this particular credit crisis: "If you told me we were spending like crazy to build schools and send everyone to college," she said, "that would have infinitely different implications than borrowing like crazy to finance current consumption.” Hmmm, interesting thought!

I'm pretty sure Kudlow's honeymoon with Romer will be short-lived unless he's intellectually honest enough—"audacious" thought but one can hope!—to recognize that while federal debt as a percentage of the GDP has shrunk steadily and considerably since the post-Depression era, consumer debt has rocketed from the mid-single digits in 1943 to 250 percent today in a phenomenon wonks call the Great Risk Shift that, along with the fact that "tax hikes on the rich" under FDR meant a 90 percent tax bracket, render most cautionary fiscal policy tales learned during the New Deal sort of completely nonapplicable.  

I take these statistics, incidentally, from a Carlyle Group Power Point presentation forwarded to me by an i-banker friend; Wall Street recognizes this stuff—that's why they're so scared. Yesterday I was flipping through old clips from the Korean economic crisis in the late '90s to see if there wasn't anything America —or its auto companies—might learn from that country's astounding bounce back from a devastating nearly 7 percent GDP contraction it sustained in 1996, a recovery that, among many other things, catapulted ailing Hyundai Motors to bona fide auto brand greatness. And … not much, it looks like! Korea had sort of the opposite problems as us. Like … a fundamentally robust manufacturing sector that just needed a little fiscal discipline applied to it. And a somewhat stodgy cluelessness about marketing, design and other things "cool."  And … too many households saving too much money.

Those problems, mercifully enough for the Koreans, turned out not to be insurmountable! I am happy to say I do not worry that Christina Romer would be so glib in describing ours. That is about the only thing I'm happy about.