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Under PressureDo men and women react differently to stress?

Compiled by Adam ChristianPosted Thursday, Feb. 15, 2007, at 4:15 PM ET

Valentine's Day brought no truce in the age-old battle between the sexes, as Steven Landsburg's controversial article claiming that women perform worse than men under pressure provoked something close to the excoriation wrought upon Larry Summers after ill-received remarks about the aptitude of women in the sciences.

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Disdaining Landsburg's findings with an eye-rolling "give me a break," rundeep cites the rigors of pregnancy, among other experiences unique to the fair sex, as evidence of the contrary:

Women multi-task better than men. Period. They are designed to do so, and that involves constantly dealing with pressures men don't. They listen and attend to family business, subordinates' business and shareholder business. Their success is very often founded upon a more collaborative model.

On the other hand, men who tend to be very successful in business are often pathological -- they ignore all cues from external forces in order to peruse something singlemindedly. They succeed by not listening. When this works, we admire their focus and call them brilliant. When it doesn't, we call them narrow-minded ignoramuses.

To summarize: it's insane to measure the capability of men or women under "pressure" when "pressure" is defined solely as competition. It's not the way the world works. There are a large number of factors which influence how men and women (as groups and individuals) perform on the job. To boil it down to this insipid tea is insulting to both genders.

NickD replies with an amusing evolutionary take on mens' and womens' relative abilities to handle stress. Auros-4 raises the question of nature vs. nuture, while RUGER seizes on Landsburg's study here to stir up a predictable polemic over "the age of feminism and liberal political correctness."

AnikaG questions the definition of stress used in the study:

In terms of women being "chokers" (a denigrating, sexist term that far surpassed the bounds of ethics as well as good taste), my question is: how is Landsburg defining pressure? Women across America hold down multiple high-stress jobs, head single-parent homes and work in dangerous and time-sensitive conditions. What is this if not pressure? By taking a tennis court and an artificial maze as a representative sample of "all walks of life," Landsburg conveniently ignores the empirical evidence: more young women than men attend college, more women than men head single-parent homes. What are these performances if not standing up under extreme pressure?

Finally, in this extended rebuttal, eolianwold criticizes Landsburg for being "taken in by such amateurish scholarship" based on "M. Daniele Paserman's research, which … is filled with sloppy thinking and poor applications of standard techniques." For a truly impressive point-by-point dissection of Paserman's "pseudoscientific analyses," read the post in its entirety in Everyday Economics Fray. AC … 1:10pm PT

Thursday, Feb. 8, 2007

Anne Applebaum's dismissal of the Kyoto Accords in favor of a global carbon tax gave scientists, economists, urban and family planners all something to talk about in Foreigners. Sure, the Fray had its share of negationists, but most were concerned with the specifics of Applebaum's proposal.

LuxLawyer considers the carbon tax's distributive effects: