What are people searching for?

I had a conversation with a friend the other day, a piece of which went like this:

Friend: Do you know who Contessa Brewer is?

Me: Is Contessa her name, or is she some kind of royalty?

Friend: She’s a news anchor on MSNBC.

Me: No, never heard of her.

I don’t watch MSNBC, you see. I don’t eschew it purposefully, but I just don’t happen to watch it. So later, when I had a chance, I did a Google image search to see what she looks like, and whether I might have seen her after all. I haven’t.

But here: Google image search shows me, at the top of the search results, some related searches to the one I made. I’d searched just for the name. Here were the related searches, which I presume are ordered by popularity:

contessa brewer legs
contessa brewer msnbc
contessa brewer cleavage
contessa brewer bikini
contessa brewer body

She’s a news anchor, but all most men want to do is see her legs and cleavage.

Men are such pigs. Damn, but it makes me embarrassed to be one.

Equal-Pay Day

Today, 12 April 2011, is Equal-Pay Day in the U.S. If you took the median-salary American man and the median-salary woman, and started paying them both on the first of 2010, today is the day when the woman will have finally earned what the man took in through 31 December, about 14 weeks ago.

Of course, it’s not that simple. You can’t just take any man and any woman and make that comparison. The figure that’s used for this is the median income: take all the men’s annual salaries, list them in order of lowest to highest, then pick the one in the middle. Do the same for women’s salaries. Compare. The median of the women’s salaries is about 78% of the median of the men’s. We could use the average (mean) instead of the median, but for these sorts of economic comparisons it’s typically the median that’s used, because it doesn’t suffer from skewing by the extremes at the edges.

The problem is that the majority of the gap comes from the fact that men and women are not equally represented in all the different jobs... and the jobs that employ primarily men just so happen to pay more than the ones that employ primarily women. I can’t imagine how that happened, but, well, there it is. Nurses earn less than doctors. Beauticians earn less than plumbers. Teachers earn less than corporate executives. And so on.

And it doesn’t stop there: what about college-educated women? What about those with PhDs? Because another fact is that more women than men are finishing college, these days, and more women than men are completing PhD programs. Doesn’t that fix it?

No. For one thing, when we look at the fields that women are getting degrees in, we find the same thing: the fields that attract women more tend to be the less lucrative ones.

But also, when we break it down by field we still find differences. In April of 2007, the American Association of University Women released a study titled Behind the Pay Gap (PDF). The study showed that female biological scientists earn 75% of what their male colleagues do. In mathematics, the figure is 76%; in psychology, 86%. Women in engineering are almost there: they earn 95% of what the men do. But less than 20% of the engineering majors are women.

The other argument for why there’s a pay gap is that women and men make different decisions about their lives. Women choose motherhood, a bigger hit against career advancement and salary opportunities than fatherhood. More women work part time. And so on.

The AAUW study looked at that. They controlled for those decisions, and they compared men and women who really could be reasonably compared. They looked at people in the same fields, at the same schools, with the same grades. They considered those of the same race, the same socio-economic status, the same family situations. They didn’t just compare apples to apples; they compared, as economist Heather Boushey puts it, Granny Smith apples to Granny Smith apples.

And they found that even in that case, there’s an unexplained pay gap of 5% the year after college, which increases to 12% ten years later. From the study:

The pay gap between female and male college graduates cannot be fully accounted for by factors known to affect wages, such as experience (including work hours), training, education, and personal characteristics. Gender pay discrimination can be overt or it can be subtle. It is difficult to document because someone’s gender is usually easily identified by name, voice, or appearance. The only way to discover discrimination is to eliminate the other possible explanations. In this analysis the portion of the pay gap that remains unexplained after all other factors are taken into account is 5 percent one year after graduation and 12 percent 10 years after graduation. These unexplained gaps are evidence of discrimination, which remains a serious problem for women in the work force.

It has gotten better: if today the general pay gap is about 20%, 15 years ago it was 25%, and 30 years ago, 35%. The improvement is good news.

But the speed of the improvement is not. The disparity of pay between male-dominated fields and female-dominated ones is not. The gap in pay between highly trained men and women in the same field is not. And that unexplained 5-to-12 percent is certainly not.

Let’s keep pushing that date back, and look for the year when equal-pay day is December 31^st.

It’s not in my job description

Amy Alkon comments on this item from the New York Daily News:

Equal Pay For Equal Work...

Doesn’t that mean...equal pay for equal work? Meaning...the women do the same work the men have to do?

According to a story by John Marzulli in the New York Daily News, one of the charges in a harassment suit against the NYPD accuses the department of having a female officer perform heavy manual tasks normally assigned to males.

Sorry, but is that discrimination...or equality?

Now, the officer’s complaint points out a number of things, and the one singled out above is taken out of context. So let’s look at the issue of what constitutes job requirements, and, therefore, what can fairly be required of employees.

When I worked at IBM, my job involved computer software stuff, management stuff, working with people in other parts of the company, working with other companies, and so on. Once in a while, of course, we’d need to move a piece of equipment, but my job did not involve moving heavy things. That said, if we needed to shift a 21-inch CRT display^[1] from one place in the lab to another, I’d either muscle it myself or ask someone to help me carry it.

Alternatively, I could have called a mover in; we had people on site to do just that sort of thing. Put in a request, and they’ll be there in a day or two. Call directly and ask nicely, and you could often get someone over within the hour, if they weren’t already swamped.

But we’d do it ourselves, usually, because we could, and it was easier and quicker. It wasn’t, though, part of the job, and no manager would assign it to any of us. And, indeed, it’s not reasonable to ask a 110-pound person — of either sex — to move a bulky computer display that weighs more than 70 pounds.

Police departments don’t likely have movers sitting around at the stations, and when some heavy stuff has to get moved, they can call in contractors and wait a few days... or they can ask the officers who are there to do it. We can be sure that a sergeant is more likely to ask a couple of 250-pound men to do the moving, and less likely to call on a 130-pound woman.

But more to the point: what are the police officers there for? Is it to lift heavy stuff? Or is it to do any number of things we more commonly associate with police work?

Hm.

And, so, the point here is that we do things that aren’t strictly in our job descriptions, because it just makes sense to go ahead and do them. It helps us get things done, and it helps us get along. And in doing those things, we don’t worry so much about spreading the work as we do about who’d best suited to do it and get us all back to what we’re supposed to be doing.

It’s likely that the heavy manual tasks in Officer Glover’s complaint fell into this category, and they were normally assigned to males for exactly these sorts of reasons.^[2] That they were given to her was not a question of doling out job-related work, but formed part of a pattern of workplace behaviour that was meant to give her a hard time for being a woman in a man’s job, and for being a lesbian, on top of that. And that she objected does not bring into question her fitness for the job — the job that she was hired to do.

So, to answer Ms Alkon’s direct question: No, it’s not equality. It’s abusive behaviour — not on its own, but as part of an established pattern.

---

^[1] They’re heavy — more than 70 pounds each.

^[2] I suspect that the men could also complain about such assignments and refuse to do them, and I suspect that the union would back their refusal. They don’t refuse, because it’s all part of doing what needs to be done and getting along.

Interior decoration

On Morning Edition the other day, NPR reported that as the housing market has softened, so has the market for new furniture:

If the tumultuous economy is this year’s top “kitchen-table” issue, that isn’t good news for people who sell kitchen tables, coffee tables and other furniture. The furniture industry is experiencing a tough year — September sales were down about 10 percent from a year ago. The mood was glum at the world’s largest furniture industry trade show in High Point, N.C.

Nothing surprising here, but one thing was said that I want to comment on. A minute or so from the end, they say that companies are pushing “accessories” to people who are shying away from buying new furniture:

NPR: Nan Feldman’s company, Badash Crystal, imports vases and other decorative accessories. She promotes them as a way to freshen a room if you can’t afford to refurnish it.

Feldman: This is a piece that I call my cheap and good. Even at $10... feel the weight.

NPR: This is a $10 crystal bowl.

Feldman: Right. A woman can put that bowl with bath soaps in her bedroom, so that it adds a little inspiration to your furniture or to your home decor.

A man, on the other hand, such as I... well, you’d better keep that bowl away from us or we’ll likely wash our feet in it, or use it to pee in when we’ve had too much beer. Maybe it’d be a good place for us to put our used socks.

To be truthful, I’d probably not put bath soap in it if I were using it to decorate the bedroom. Some dried flowers instead, perhaps, possibly mixed with some aromatics (cinnamon is always nice). Or in the dining room I might toss in an assortment of small, colourful citrus fruits — lemons, limes, and tangerines might look and smell nice.

How about layers of coloured sand? Depending upon the shape and depth of the bowl, that could be very interesting, and could be changed with the seasons.

Some men are interested in nice decor too. And some of us are even straight.

 

While we’re talking about sexism, let me mention a slogan I saw a lot of in rural Virginia last weekend: “I’m voting for the chick!” Great. How about that?: a slogan that in one breath both supports the Palin/McCain... uh, sorry... McCain/Palin ticket and belittles Ms Palin as “the chick.”

I do wonder what people are thinking, sometimes.