A Sign of the Future: Female Majority in Government SES?

I think this is a portent of the future:

"The Health and Human Services Department is the only major Cabinet-level agency that boasts more female than male senior executives, according to the latest numbers from the Office of Personnel Management.
Of the 420 total senior executives at HHS as of September 2014, women made up 53 percent of the corps, compared to 47 percent who were men. That’s 223 senior executive women compared to 197 senior executive men, based on OPM’s Fedscope data compiled by CEB, a member-based advisory company. The bulk of the Senior Executive Service’s members are career employees – a whopping 90 percent.

Women have shown they'll work for less than men, on average, and members of the Senior Executive Service earn less than people in private, for-profit enterprise.  The "service" ethos, such as it is, of non-profit organizations and the government is also likely to appeal more strongly to women than men.  Thus I'd predict HHS is the first (article doesn't say that but I imagine it's true) but not the last department to see women become dominant at higher levels.

Persistence of Culture: Navaho Farming

Vox has an interesting post on where "lady farmers" are. (Note: the writer used the much better term "female farmers" when she actually wrote the piece, but I assume I can blame her for the URL.)

There's an interesting geographic pattern.  The counties with the highest percentage of femal operators seem to be either Native American (the Four Corners of the SW = Navaho) or exurban counties, presumably women who find fulfillment in farming, using the earnings from their first career as capital.

To Sea, Young Man, to Sea

Via Brad Delong's Grasping Reality with Both Hands, here's a study comparing the cost of college with the benefits of college.  What interests me on the graphic is the outlying institutions--some with names you'd expect, but some not.   For example, what's SUNY-Maritime doing so cheap and so rewarding?

I'm reminded of a high school math teacher, who returned to his alma mater after his predecessor died of diabetes (very much missed--Mr. Hayford), with a goatee!  Now this was 1958, when all men were clean-shaven.  But after leaving the Forks, Mr. Turna had gone off to the Merchant Marine academy and then spent some time at sea--I know he visited west African ports and as a mate had to bail out a crewman.  The ladies were attracted to him (may be faulty memory, though then it seemed as if every male my age or older had a greater attraction for women than I) though not to the extent they took his senior-level trig, spherical geometry, and advanced algebra classes. We were still back in the dark ages then; such math wasn't for women.

A Great Epitaph for Lady Sale

Via The Best Defense, a 10 best list of books on Afghanistan .  The entry for Lady Sale's book says:

Lady Sale was possibly the only Brit to come out of the first Afghan war with her reputation enhanced. She arrived with an unmarried daughter, seeds from her Agra garden and a grand piano. She survived the retreat from Kabul, with a musket ball in her shoulder and in due course led a jailbreak of her fellow hostages. Her tombstone reads: "Here lies all that could die of Lady Sale."

Surprise Line of the Day (Senate Women)

"Republicans have the same number of women in the Senate that they had in 1995."

From Jonathan Bernsteins Plain Blog About Politics

Margaret Chase Smith Is Happy

20 women senators in the new Congress, she was the only one when I became conscious of politics.

The Value of Female Leaders?

Apparently Bangladesh has been doing quite well over the last 20 years, during which they've had mostly female prime ministers.

Feminist Vegans and Dairy

From a letter to the editor of Book World (which I initially couldn't find through navigating the Times website, so retyped, and then found the link by a Google search.

Andrew Delbanco [in a review of The Victims' Revolution] classifies as "cant" the statement that "dairy is a feminist issue. Milk comes from a grieving mother."  I wonder which of these facts about dairy production he disputes: (1) mammals produce milk only after giving birth (2) female cows produce milk only if they have recently calved (3) people cannot take the milk if the calf drinks it; (4) dairy farmers therefore remove calves from their mothers within days of birth; (5) both mother and child resist and protest this separation; (6) mothers often bellow and moan for days thereafter; (7) mothers sometimes go to extreme lengths to locate and reunite with their calves; (8) dairy farmers utilize restraints to prevent them from doing so.

Dairy is the product of the exploitation for profit of the reproductive capacities of female bodies.  To consider this a feminist issue is a defensible political position.  Cows share with us the basic brain architecture responsible for emotion.  The idea that mother cows do not grieve when their children are removed from them, and are not grieving still as machines suck the milk from their bodies -- that is cant. 

signed: Patrice Jones
Springfield, VT

The writer is a co-founder of VINE, a feminist animal sanctuary that shelters, among others, survivors of the dairy industry.

The context of the quote referred to is: "A couple of years ago, Bawer [the author of The Victims' Revolution] made a trip home to see what’s happened to the academic world he left behind. He attended a few conferences for women’s studies, black studies, queer studies and Chicano studies, where he heard plenty of cant, as when a participant at a “Fat Studies” conference explained her veganism by declaring: “Dairy is a feminist issue. Milk comes from a grieving mother.”"

Based on my childhood on a small dairy, I would dispute the following:

(2) Cows produce milk for roughly 300 days after calving, not just "recently calved".
(3) Cows produce more milk than any calf could drink. 80 pounds daily in the first month after calving if memory serves, and that figure is probably twice as high now.  We fed our calves about 14 pounds of milk a day, gradually weaning them to hay and grain.  The calf was probably 3 months old, or so. Now if left together, would the calf have continued to suckle? Perhaps, though cows get tired of suckling and are willing and able to use their hooves on their offspring, so I wouldn't expect a prolonged babyhood.
(6) I'd say some cows bellow (never heard a moan) for a couple days, but the majority don't.
(7) We never had any cows go to "extreme lengths" to reunite that I remember.
(8) So we never used any restraints on "grieving cows" which weren't a part of the normal routine--i.e., stanchions to hold them from milking.

The Green Jacket Wearer Says: Open the Doors

Via John Sides at the Monkey Cage, from a post reporting on interviews/surveys of golfers:

Does it bother you that the club's membership excludes women?
The players say... No: 90%
"Nothing about the club's policies bothers me."
"It's their club. They can do as they like."
"You're asking the wrong people this question."
Yes: 10%
"Yeah, I care, and you can quote me on it." —Bubba Watson

The Masters and IBM

Both the Post and Times have pieces on women and the Masters Golf Tournament.  The Masters, of course, along with Bohemian Grove, is one of the last redoubts of male-only membership.  They've hung tough over the years, even after they finally admitted a black member.  They've always, of course, made the CEO's of their advertising sponsors members--that's only right and proper seeing as how the ads and TV have made the tournament. 

Everything was fine until...IBM, which is one of the three sponsors, named a woman as CEO.

How To Be an Assertive Woman

Follow Joan of Arc (Ken Anderson at Volokh Conspiracy posts her declaration of war).

Smoking and Sex

I owe a hattip to Suzy Khimm at Ezra Klein's blog; here's a post on the economist with maps showing worldwide cigarette consumption, by sex.

About 800m men smoke cigarettes, compared with fewer than 200m women. More than 80% of these male smokers are in low- and middle-income countries. The problem is particularly acute in China, where 50% of men smoke (compared with just 2% of women), consuming one-third of the world's cigarettes in the process.

 I can remember when the local radical (she was a Democrat and she wore slacks) was also a smoker, a scandal for a woman in that small community. She was one of my mother's best friends, and suffered from emphysema in her latter years.

I wonder if the dynamics leading to male smoking in China are the same as in the U.S.

Women and Haying

I stumbled across a site, Hay in Art, which I recommend to all feminists who grew up on dairy farms.  I was searching for images of haying for another blog, and found this site which apparently has collected all the paintings showing haying. You'd be surprised how many there are (6700+).  A subset of the collection is women doing haying. The site owner, Alan Ritch, finds a pattern: women raked and men used forks.  And apparently it was common to ted the hay (i.e., turn the cut hay over so it would dry faster). Where I grew up in Broome County, NY that wasn't normal: the hay wasn't dense enough and the conditions moist enough to require it. 

The sheer number of pictures of women in the fields provides a different picture of what life was like in previous centuries.

My sister, who likes to brag about driving the team pulling the hay wagon and hay loader when she was maybe 13 or so, will be disappointed--I didn't see any such images in the database. 

I strongly recommend the site: it doesn't seem to have been updated recently, but it has all sorts of special essays, as Ritch calls them.  Unfortunately, the images are limited in size, and the type's a bit small for old eyes, but it's still fascinating.

The First Woman (CED in OK)

The NYTimes Magazine yesterday had as its theme obituaries of people who died in 2011.  Included was a piece on people who were the "first African-American" to fill various positions.  I thought of that when today I saw this obit for Lori Ross of Ardmore, OK. It includes the paragraph:

"A 1952 graduate of Wayne High School, Wayne, Okla., she then attended East Central University, Ada, Okla. Mrs. Ross was the first woman in the State of Oklahoma to hold the position of County Executive Director for the U.S. Department of Agriculture/Farm Service Agency. Following her retirement after more than 30 years of employment with that agency, she worked at the Marietta Public Works Authority and also the First National Bank of Marietta. She and Marty Ross were married in Dallas, Texas, on March 13, 1971.

I understand that different states accepted women as CED's at different times.  I remember one district director in NC telling me confidentially he didn't believe in them: women shouldn't be subject to the rough language irate NC farmers could use.  One longs for such Southern chivalry today.  Or maybe he was pulling my leg?

Those Sex-Linked Differences in Math

When I was young, I was a math wiz.  That was when I was 17.  I rapidly lost my aptitude to the point I almost failed my college calculus course (in my defense the guy had a thick accent and was not an inspired teacher).  But I always accepted the idea that guys were superior in math.  In high school the math teacher, a goateed ex-sailor, graduate of the Merchant Marine academy, set up a class for advanced math (i.e., advanced algrebra, spherical trig, etc.) which was all guys (like 6 of us). 

So when Larry Summers speculated about the possible causes for women to be underrepresented in the sciences, technology and mathematics, and included possible genetic differences at the extremes, I was open to the idea, even though it's not politically correct.  I pride myself on being an open-minded liberal.

But the data seems to be running against that hypothesis, as witness this paragraph in a Washington Post article today:

A recent report from the American Association of University Women notes that, 30 years ago, the ratio of seventh- and eighth-grade boys who scored more than 700 on the SAT math exam, compared with girls, was 13 to 1. Now it’s 3 to 1.

The same article says women are getting more than 50 percent of all doctorates total (a fact I'd seen elsewhere).  But there seem to be two possibilities: between 1950 and now there's been a mutation in female genes which means they no longer "throw like girls" and can handle math, or the culture has changed.

When Women Didn't Do Science and Technology

How short a time that was. A post from the winner of the Google Science Fair--all three winners were female, meeting the President.

The Sexist Food Movement?

Sharon Astyk sends us to Harvard Magazine and a piece on restaurant food (bad) and home cooking (good). Much of it is channeling Mollie Katzen who's an adviser to Harvard cafeterias.  On page 2 I find this:

“I have friends in their forties who grew up right at the height of Mom never being in the kitchen,” says Katzen, who co-wrote Eat, Drink, and Weigh Less (2006) with Willett. “They didn’t see their mothers in the kitchen in any meaningful way—it wasn’t an integral part of life in the home. So they were opening a lot of cans, or buying fast food. In my [baby-boom] generation, our mothers lived in the kitchen; that’s where they parked themselves during the day and held court. In my family, at dinnertime, the kids would all help with the final steps: setting the table, helping Mom get the food on the table, helping clear afterwards. It was a team activity, part of what we did together as a family. My guess is that an equally, if not more, common way to gather around food now is to sit around the TV and watch Top Chef.”

 I'm a male chauvinist, due to my age, but it seems very anti-feminist to me.

Is the Justice System the Last Redoubt of the Secretary?

From Orin Kerr's advice to judicial interns at Volokh Conspiracy:

1) Be incredibly nice to the secretaries. You might think judges run judicial chambers. For the most part, though, they don’t: Judges’ secretaries run judicial chambers. Judges often keep secretaries for decades, and they rely heavily on them. If you’re working for a judge for a summer, the judge’s lead secretary (or only secretary, if the judge only has one) is going to be your friend or your enemy. Make sure the secretary is your friend. And don’t think for a second that the secretary works for you. You’re just an intern, and you work for the secretary and everyone else who will still be there when the summer is over.

Sounds like USDA in the 1970's.

The Glass Ceiling Cracks a Bit More--Osama's Tracker

 "And notably, the NGA [National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency] is the first intel agency to be headed by a woman: Letitia Long, an intelligence veteran." from a National Journal story on the tracking of Osama bin Laden.

(I suspect it traces its history back to, in part, the Army Map Service.

The Ride of the Valkyries--and the Furies?

Maureen Dowd writes about the idea that the Obama people who ended up pushing for the no-fly zone were women: Rice, Power, Clinton.  She missed the fact that two of the people commanding the effort were Major Gen. Margaret Woodward and Rear Adm. Peg Klein.  For Furies, see this.