Economics takes such a quantitative approach to research; we excel at measuring effects, not at explaining why those effects exist. So, I understand the value of focus group discussions. Allowing people the opportunity to openly explain why, and have responses that include more than a 0 or 1, is a small pittance to that effort.

It’s also useful to have a few anecdotes. There was the woman whose in-laws intervened after she and her husband had decided to use contraceptives.  Or a family planning worker who swears people listen to her public health message more when her she carries her official work bag. Even if my quantitative analysis is extremely rigorous, people remember these stories.

However, I mostly find focus groups to be an unpredictable, methodologically imprecise and difficult to analyze.

Last Tuesday, we conducted a focus group in one of the nearby study villages that was included in the intervention educating local family planning workers.  My field assistant liked this village; the village officer was very helpful, and this often made a big difference on how smoothly the household data was collected.

I was also impressed as a group of eight men were waiting at the village office for the meeting to start. Family planning discussions with men in Meatu can send off a flurry of debate, as many in these villages are firmly pro-natalist.   However, this focus group discussion went extremely smooth.  Yes, family planning would be useful for families in this village. Yes, I discuss contraceptive use with my wife. No, we don’t find it difficult to discuss.  So, conclusively positive reactions to family planning?

Not exactly. If I were to simply analyze the discourse during this discussion, I would miss the entire story.   With a little subjective judgment, I saw that the village leader officer had put on a nice show. The sample of this focus group discussion was clearly biased in favor of family planning. These men were mostly well educated and had mostly been screened to be appropriate for our discussion. 

However, there was one older gentleman in the corner who added two things to the discussion. His initial response to questions about the cost of children was that they are not expensive. And his conclusive statement about family planning was that  “it’s complicated.”

This guy was clearly not on the family planning train, had more-or-less gotten the message that the conversation should stay positive for the American guest and he was keeping his opinions to himself.

Meanwhile, my other beef with qualitative research analysis is the Worldes trend (see below). Apparently, this has become a hip and acceptable as a form of analysis. I could be the old man in the corner and just say the word “think" over and over, and this deep insight would make its way into some analysis in a presentation. 

Great for a t-shirt, I think, not for a conference.

Hat tip: ALD, LN

Well, I don't actually have the answer to this. But apparently some people at some universities are thinking about the answer. Including, as previously mentioned, the cool kids.

At a conference this weekend, I met a female grad student from another large Midwestern university. In the most recent candidate search in her department, she asked her advisor if the search committee could make some effort to find a female economist to add to their ranks (currently, there is one tenured female faculty member in the department).

His response was that the department has struggled to recruit women faculty because there aren't enough industry jobs in their mid-sized Midwestern city for their husbands to find employment. In her words, she called his bluff: the sociology department at the same university is over half female. She believes that the its a struggle to bring in female faculty because the department that is already so male-dominated (in other words, the reason there aren't more women in leadership is that there aren't more women in leadership). So, departments, go out of your way to change that dynamic and start figuring out how to answer this question.

Update 4/1/2014
I was doing a lot of hypothesizing above. I talked to a friend who has actually experienced the job market as a female economist and she brings to light two points. Both challenge my previously implied hypothesis that the econ departments were simply not doing enough to hire women, based on the fact that the sociologists have plenty.

1. Who do female sociologists and economists marry? There's a good chance that the pool of trailing husbands is not the same.

2. Female economists have more outside options. Many female economists could get jobs in cities like DC, Boston and New York City, where their spouses have huge amounts of industry (or academic) options. The non-academic job market in these large cities is probably smaller for sociologists.
h/t: Professor T.

Also, relocation is a whole lot easier when one spouse has a geographically dispersed occupation.

1. It turns out that contract farming shortens the duration of periods of hunger during the dry season (in addition to increasing income) for smallholder farmers in Madagascar. Is contract farming specific to developing countries? Nope; Tyson's popularized it in the chicken market in 1947. Don Tyson developed industrial chicken production (and contributed to the oligopoly of the chicken market) through a high-tech form of sharecropping.

2. Women in academia are less likely to collaborate with junior colleagues. Keep in mind that the sample size is 55 female faculty members in this study. That is less than the number of female faculty members in the Psychology Department at the University of Minnesota.

3. How (the demand for) toilet paper (and other types of sanitation) explain (wealth in) the world

4. Images from Crimea.

The second chapter of Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg begins with an example of a high-level meeting with representatives from the Treasury Department and executives across Silicon Valley where the small group of women took seats in chairs off to the side of the room instead of at the main conference table. The title of the chapter is, coincidentally, "Sit at the Table."

Because I am historically vigilant in my life-is-gendered observations, I was so relieved to have someone other than me point this out. When I worked at the RAND, I was part of several client meetings that were run by my male colleagues although the principal investigator on the project was a female. My macroeconomic theory class at the University of Minnesota (in the non-applied economics department at the university, where the faculty is 8% female), the class was about 60 people, 1/5th of whom were female (applied econ and econ combined). In this competitive yet fairly interactive class, aside from me, only one other woman spoke up once in class the entire semester.

So for me, it was extremely encouraging to read Sandberg's review of academic studies and corporate examples that support what I feel like I've already seen in my hyper-observant feminist life. The Heidi and Howard study experiment heightens what appears to me to be a subtle yet consistent stress for women on the importance of likeability over the importance of success. Here's how the story goes.

Colombia Business School ran an experiment to test perceptions of men and women in the workplace describing a successful venture capitalist with "outgoing personality and vast personal and professional network including powerful business leaders in the technology sector." The professors tested the impact of the name Heidi or Howard on perceptions of this individual. Students rated Heidi and Howard as equally competent, yet Howard came across as a more appealing colleague. Heidi on the other hand was seen as selfish and "not the type of person you would want to hire or work for."

I think the results of this study, among the others reviewed in the book are important to keep in mind in order to purposely overcome our subconscious perceptions of gender.  I push the line by calling into question whether gender stereotypes played a role whenever I hear criticisms of individuals being unpleasantly ambitious or confident (and bless my friends for patiently explaining themselves every time). However, Sandberg points out that it does take intentional effort to overcome ingrained perceptions of gender roles, to criticize the "Having it all" working mom stereotype as harried and guild ridden and to laugh at the ridiculousness of Sad White Babies with Mean Feminist Mommies.

We can also appreciate the fluency with which Sandberg puts feminism back into the public conversation. She admits that in the past, "we accepted the negative caricature of bra-burning humorless, man-hating feminist and... and in sad irony, reject[ed] feminism to get male attention and approval. In our defense, my friends and I truly, if naively, believed that the world did not need feminists anymore." I think this is an incredibly common perspective and I hope that this book will put a cheery successful new face on the shoulders of feminism.  And although she does acknowledge the difficulty of discussing gender without appearing overly defensive, Sandberg's openness to proudly calling herself a feminist and the public dialogue in response to the book have begun to bring gender back on the table.

Frankly, the work-family balance is something extremely important to talk about. I read I Don't Know How She Does It when I was a nineteen year old math major, and had a serious discussion with my Calculus study buddy about how we felt more pressure to think about families in our male dominated department (this friend is now also interestingly pursuing a PhD in Economics).

The book does come from an outwardly privileged perspective (we can't all hire nannies) and has the occasional shortcomings as a feminist (breastfeeding is actually not frightening). And while I am in favor of inclusive definitions of feminism, the emphasis on dedicating oneself to her career does seem to simplify movement. Kate Losse at Dissent Magazine criticizes the obvious corporate benefit of a movement of leaning in.

However, when it comes down to it, Sandberg hits the nail on the head: the reason there aren't more women in leadership positions is because there aren't more women in leadership positions. While it is true that institutions and the structure of the workplace impose obstacles for women in academia, executive roles, legislature, corporations and coaching soccer teams, Sandberg proposes that institutional changes will come more fluidly when women are themselves in leadership positions. As uncomfortable as it is to admit to, I think she's right that we need to step up to the game ourselves:

We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in. We internalize messages that it's wrong to be outspoken, aggressive, more powerful than men.

We move closer to the goal of true equality when more women throw off the stereotypes of being pleasant and submissive ourselves, by applying for promotions, raising our hand, asking for raises and advocating for ourselves at work and in life.

Hat tips: KSM, CBT, JCH

[After asking all the normal safari questions...]

Me: Are all of the guides men?
Arnold the manager: Yes
Me: Why haven’t you hired any women as guides?
Arnold: [Laughing, looking at male guides] Ah, well, guiding a safari is hard work.
Me: Driving and talking about wildlife? Women can’t do that?
Arnold: Ah, but they have to change tires.
Me: I can change a tire [Slight exaggeration.]
Arnold: Ah well, some there are some guides who are women, but they are very few in all of Tanzania.
Me: But you haven’t hired those guides?
Arnold:[Laughing] Ah, no, not yet
Me: This is serious. I’m doing economic research here in Tanzania and if you leave women out of the formal labor market, and don’t let them have good jobs like guiding safari, this will be very bad for the Tanzanian economy. Very bad. [Slight exaggeration, mostly in regards to my qualification for that statement]
Arnold: [Contrived seriousness] I understand.
Me: Well, I have to do some research about other companies and compare prices.  But if you hire a woman guide, I will definitely hire your company for the safari [Slight exaggeration].

With widespread intimate partner violence in Tanzania (39% according to DHS) and in Meatu district (35% according to my sample), there is likely a   relationship between contraceptive use and violence. It's hard to say what exactly that relationship is, especially with the difficulty of establishing causality when these things are all related to the personal intricacies of an intimate relationship. This study in the Journal of Biosocial Science, however, finds a strong relationship between covert contraceptive use and violence.

But again, does that mean using the pill in secret increases violence, or is it the case that women who experience violence are more likely to hide the pill? Researchers wanted.

Do you creak at the end of your sentences?  Apparently, this kind of speech affect that sounds like staccato bursts from the back of the throat, is especially prevalent among young American women. So yes, I creak.  And this amazing podcast from Slate's Lexicon Valley discusses why.

It turns out that regular male voice is on average an octave lower than a female voice, but men and women both "creak" at the exact same frequency. Not-so-tangentially, as a political science study points out, both men and women prefer political leaders with lower voices and associate lower-pitch with traits such as integrity, strength, and competence. So there's a very solid possibility that women are emulating masculinity voices as a way to consciously or unconsciously sound more like men for some perceived benefit. And in fact, according to Lexicon Valley, women who use the vocal fry are perceived as "contemporary upwardly-mobile young Americans." Since I like to think I fall into that category, and accordingly spend a lot of time with other people in that category, now that I've noticed it, I can't stop hearing the fry.

Hat tip: DW and COC

Well, we are approaching hiring season in academia, and my department is no exception this year. The influx of candidate job talks, free lunches, CV attachments, solicited and unsolicited opinions gets me thinking about gender, of course. And while my peers are probably sick of my persistent gender-based inquiry, I tend to question both our intuitive and professional perceptions of candidates.

There's a long pipeline towards tenure, which includes publication, hiring and dissertating along the way. The evidence of the gender gap in publications, by subject, is glaring according to JSTOR and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

These graphics and facts beg the question as to what combination of factors might cause this problem. And I'm quite sure that the gender bias in academic hiring is one of these factors. This research tested what I only hypothesized. Using a double-blind study to measure the effect of male or female names on judged competence, hireability and mentoring, the authors find that both male and female academic scientists rated women consistently lower. Keep in mind, this was based on the exact same application materials, the only difference was the gender of the applicant's name.

What is the source of this bias? I have a few untested hypotheses. I think women tend to be judged more harshly on their personalities, more than just strictly their professional work (although, this of course doesn't explain all the paper discrimination). And I think as much as we'd not like to admit it, implicit biases still linger in our social perceptions. Forbes has a few ideas about limiting negative stereotypes of successful women, as well. Overall, the fact that the gap is huge and that the bias empirically exists are reasons enough to critically question our opinions of candidates for academic positions. Or at least to start a discussion about pants suits.

Hat tip: COC, NAJ,

... and trying to be one does not develop spatial skills.

Introducing Goldie Blox, founded by Debbie Sterling, who created the above video to fund her project. And it worked! The company site is here, and Christmas is coming. Develop the spatial and verbal skills of a little girl!

For her sake and, coincidentally, the sake of the economy.

Hat tip: For the inspired title of this post, Justice Sonia Sotomayor

Here's a projection of how much GDP could increase across countries if female employment rates matched those of men (source).