Sex sells. Is it the best way to get support for women's soccer?
Five players from the German national team posed for Playboy to promote the 2011 Women's World Cup. Three members of the French team posed naked for Blid magazine to rival the attention. And back in 1999, Brandi Chastain, who was a commentator for ESPN in the tournament this year, posed for the cover of Gear magazine to promote the 99 world cup. An excellent post by Anjali Nayar debates the issue of selling sex to sell tickets. Meanwhile, Hope Solo has a different response to the sexual media attention and crushes on the world's best keeper. From ESPN: As soon as U.S. keeper Hope Solo arrived at a roundtable to chat to the media, a T.V. camera followed. Replying to a print reporter who said teenage boys all over the U.S. had pictures of her on their walls, she cut him off. "Well, let's hope there are teenage girls as well," Solo said. "We're here to inspire a nation." With that, she moved to the next question. Hat tip: LANS Carrell, Page and West find thought-provoking results studying the impact of female professors for first-year college students in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields:
Our results suggest that while professor gender has little impact on male students, it has a powerful effect on female students' performance in math and science classes, their likelihood of taking future math and science courses, and their likelihood of graduating with a STEM degree... Indeed, the gender gap in course grades and STEM majors is eradicated when high performing female students' introductory math and science classes are taught by female professors. Here's the working paper. When we presented this paper and a few others in a study on same-gender effects, it was hard to keep the discussion on research and methodology without throwing in a little anecdotal evidence. The truth is, I am a math major and I adored my first math professor in college. And at the time, she was the sole woman in the department. It's pretty easy to use the role model argument here, but as Carrell et all discuss, it could just as easily be that women who choose to teach STEM courses in college have certain shared positive characteristics (dynamic, comprehensible, inspiring). I'd say my Calc 122 professor had all of them (and I might have chosen my major for strange reasons, like getting back at Barbie) but its just as likely that I pursued math because I admired someone who looked a little more like me. An interview with Christina Romer, Obama's former economic adviser, from Newsweek:
Newsweek: Last fall, after 20 months at the White House, you moved back to the Bay Area with your husband, fellow economist David Romer, and your son. I suppose your job put a lot of pressure on your husband too. Romer: He basically walked around Washington saying "I need a job where I can pick up my son after school, and if we need to meet a plumber at the house, its going to be me." In the first few weeks we were there, he'd have all the ingredients out and ready for me to cook dinner when I got home. But then there was one night I was making beef with broccoli at 9:30 in tears and he realized he needed to learn to cook. What?! Christina Romer left her job as a top economic adviser because her husband can't help take care of the house and kids? So, there is probably more going on here (the position was always meant to be temporary) and I'm probably exaggerating her husband's incompetence (only slightly). But take note, Romer falls into the small group of American women over 50 with a full work profile that are still married. I wonder if anyone ever asked Larry Summer's wife if his job as an economic adviser puts a lot of pressure on her because it requires that she pick the kids up from school and make dinner (not to mention, of course, his public references to her lack of aptitude). An inspirational feel-good story about a women's football team in Kenya. Clearly, I'm a sucker for good videos about football teams (cue sports montage).
This video stemmed from a discussion about sport and (in? for?) international development. Sport is extremely powerful. Apparently, FIFA has more member countries than the U.N. Organizations like Right to Play claim to bring a whole lot of good through football: “Sport for development is a tool to help make the world healthier and safer, to build opportunities for children to grow physically, emotionally, and socially. They learn respect for themselves, for rules, for their teammates, respect for their own communities and for other communities. When kids play, the world wins.” While this plan sounds and looks fantastic, it's a little vague just how exactly playing sports will lead to global "development, health and peace." The good intention may be there, but the methodology details are a bit fuzzy to me. In the meantime, I'm all for "Anything a man can do, a woman can do." Well, I woke up this morning to an OECD report that pretty much backs up my claim in the last post that women still do most domestic work . I'm all for Rosin's optimism, but perhaps her talk is more hopeful than realistic.
Quick blurb of the OECD report on Marketplace Morning Report. A TED talk by Hanna Rosin on the rise of women gives very optimistic information on the state of women in the world. I hesitate to title this blog post with the same title as her talk (Rise of Women) nor the slightly sensationalist title of the article preceding this talk in the Atlantic: The End of Men. I also hesitate to say optimistic data, since she refers to a lot of anecdotal evidence mostly based on experience and observation (I call this folk data).
I make it clear that her main thesis is actually about parents preferring girls at fertility clinics in the U.S. And in East Asia, parents are no longer "strongly preferring baby boys". This doesn't seem like enormous progress to me, but I suppose its better than the generation of 1.2:1 boys-to-girls ratio currently coming of age in China. I also think her point that "young women are now earning more than young men" is relatively consistent with the blog post I wrote a month ago about working moms, which made the following harrowing conclusion: "Women do almost as well as men today, as long as they don’t have children". In other words, wages and income are relatively similar between men and women until babies come along. Many young women don't yet have babies, ergo young women could earn more than young men. And finally, I'm not convinced that these women she interviewed at the college in Kansas who expect their husbands to stay at home with the kids actually represent the norm ("Men are the new ball and chain!"). If she's going to use folk data to tell a story, I will too. I'd say that the impression that men will stay home with children is not quite a reality yet. Numbers of stay-at-home-dads appear to be rising, but its certainly not the norm. From my own perspective and experiences, the cultural tradition of women doing domestic work and childcare is still quite prevalent (and believe me, I am all for this reversal), but this seems to be my observation thus far. Even more curious is that this seems to me to be relatively accepted even if both parents are working and among my rather highly educated peers. Back during the resurgence of this blog, I wrote a long observational post about gender, families and work profiles. The general conclusion was: it doesn't look great for working women balancing families. Outright workplace discrimination over gender has decreased tremendously through some significant legislation, but why aren't men and women equal in the workplace? Full-time female workers still make on average 23% less than fulltime male workers. Through a good forward (thanks LW), I discovered a more optimistic interview addressing this same problem of women and work. Leonhardt's full article (though from last year) is here.
There's this harsh empirical reality: The main barrier is the harsh price most workers pay for pursuing anything other than the old-fashioned career path. “Women do almost as well as men today, as long as they don’t have children.” And these optimistic policy implications: There are steps that can help. Universal preschool programs — like the statewide one in Oklahoma — would make life easier for many working parents. Paid parental leave policies, like California's modest version, would make a difference, too. With Australia’s recent passage of paid leave, the United States has become the only rich country without such a policy....We’ll have to get beyond the Mommy Wars and instead create rewarding career paths even for parents — fathers, too — who take months or years off. Research and debate on gender discrimination and the labor force is still happening in full (as I'm learning in my Analysis of Discrimination class). This weekend, I'm heading to the Midwest Economic Association annual conference to present a paper (to be shared later) and the one I've been assigned to review is on patterns of mothers who opt-out of the labor force completely. Should be pretty interesting... A number of NGOs, hundreds of development projects and plenty of mission statements dedicate themselves the empowerment of women and girls in developing countries. One NGO that I worked alongside in Senegal is called Tostan. Tostan has been working with women and girls in rural areas of Senegal for nine years and prides itself in the emphasizing the community of community-led development. Empowerment has a pretty wide and rather vague definition, though, and outcomes of empowerment can be quite difficult to measure. And then there's the debate about if an organization is 'empowering women,' then any household or behavioral changes may not be truly organic within an individual, and how sustainable are these changes? For one of my development classes, I came across a critical narrative written by a collective of Indian women called Playing With Fire. Most of the women are employed for an NGO dedicated to empowerment of women, but the authors criticize the methods and implementation of empowerment.
As the debate on empowerment ensues, I'm looking forward to the results of this randomized experiment in Bangladesh at JPAL. The authors of the study will be comparing types and levels of empowerment, including the rights-based approach (similar to Tostan's methodology) to other more extensive training (financial literacy, education and vocational training, health information, and incentives for delay of marriage). I am curious about the timeframe for this study, though, because it seems that some results of empowerment may last (or not even show until) years after the study. I've been thinking a lot about the recent debate in Europe about banning burqas (a Muslim woman's face veil). To me, the arguments in favor of the ban seem rooted in fear of the different. Martha Nussbaum, a U Chicago philosopher and ethicist, provides an elegant destruction of the arguments in favor of the ban:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/veiled-threats/ |