How abt. greater levels of female employment, higher levels of female education attainment?

The answer can only be a resounding YES. The way to get there is

 Individualism

As always, it comes with a cost. In this case lower levels of total fertility. That is according to the paper

Does Individualism Promote Gender Equality?

Abstract

We argue that individualism promotes gender equality. Individualist values of autonomy and self-determination transcend gender identities and serve to legitimize women’s goals and choices. In contrast, collectivist values may subordinate women’s personal goals to their social obligations, generating greater acceptance of gender inequality. Using individual level data from World Values Surveys, we find empirical support for our hypothesis. Individualism is significantly associated with support for gender equality in key domains of life, including employment, income, education, and political leadership. In addition, individualism is associated with greater levels of female employment, higher levels of female education attainment, and lower levels of total fertility. Using instrumental variable analysis, we find evidence that the exogenous portion of individualism reduces gender inequality and the gender division of labor. These effects are also economically large. Our results are robust to controlling for income, education, religion, historical plough usage, and country and time fixed effects. Our within country analysis allows us to isolate the impact of individualism from other confounding effects.

Assortative Mating and Inequality

"I then show that changes in the degree of assortative mating accounts for a sizeable amount of the increase in family wage inequality across these family cohorts."

That's from a paper from the US but first let's look at Germany where the discourse about equal pay and parity is gaining momentum.

Germany’s Big Pay-Gap Problem

Despite Merkel’s status as one of the world’s most powerful women and German politics peppered with strong female leaders, the role of women in the corporate world is limited. While the #MeToo movement has drawn widespread attention to sexual harassment and assault, the pay gap is in many ways anchored in German culture, with the term “Frauenberufe” (women’s jobs) used to refer to lower paid careers such as social work, hairstyling and nursing.

Even in fields dominated by women, such as medical assistants, men can get paid 40 percent more. The lower pay, along with more part-time work for women, mean they earn about 50 percent less over their working lives than male peers, according to a 2017 study by the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin.

...

The institutional challenges were evident in a rare pay-gap dispute last year before the new law took effect. A reporter with German broadcaster ZDF lost a discrimination suit against her employer after a Berlin court ruled that employment conditions of a better-paid male colleague weren’t comparable. Without legal backing, German women at best can hope for the goodwill of employers or support from works councils, which represent staff interests inside German companies.

Here is a paper from the US that puts this inequality into some perspective and gives reasons for this perceived inequality and how it is driven.

Assortative Mating and Inequality

Alparslan Tuncay

Abstract

This paper studies the evolution of assortative mating based on the permanent wage (the individual-specific component of wage) in the U.S., its role in the increase in family wage inequality, and the factors behind this evolution. I first document a remarkable trend in the assortative mating, as measured by the permanent-wage correlation of couples, from 0.3 for families formed in the late 1960s to 0.52 for families formed in the late 1980s. I show that this trend accounts for more than one-third of the increase in family wage inequality across these family cohorts. I then argue that the increased marriage age across these cohorts contributed to the assortative mating and thus to the rising inequality. Individuals face a large degree of uncertainty about their permanent wages early in their careers. If they marry early, as most individuals in the late 1960s did, this uncertainty leads to weak marital sorting along permanent wage levels. But when marriage is delayed, as in the late 1980s, the sorting becomes stronger as individuals are more able to predict their likely future wages. After providing reduced-form evidence on the impact of marriage age, I build and estimate a marriage model with wage uncertainty, and show that the increase in marriage age can explain almost 80% of the increase in the assortative mating.

Conclusion

This paper investigates the evolution of assortative mating based on permanent wage in the U.S. since the late 1960s; quantifies its impact on rising family-wage inequality; and, finally, tries to understand the factors behind this evolution. It documents a significant increase in assortative mating, as measured by couple’s permanent-wage correlation, between families formed in the late 1960s and in the late 1980s. I then show that changes in the degree of assortative mating accounts for a sizeable amount of the increase in family wage inequality across these family cohorts. This finding shows focusing on the time trends in permanent-wage inequality is not enough to understand the mechanics of increasing family wage inequality. Note, this finding does not rule out a feedback mechanism. It might be that increasing family wage inequality incentivized individuals to care more about their spouse’s wages, causing a higher degree of marital sorting along permanent wage, which in turn mechanically increased family wage inequality.

However I then argue that the increase in the marriage age can explain most of the increase in assortative mating. I first show a positive association between the degree of assortative mating and years of work experience previous to marriage. This finding is complemented with a structural model that quantifies the impact of increased marriage age on assortative mating. I show that the increase in marriage age can explain most of the increase in assortative mating and thus accounts for a significant part of the increase in family wage inequality.

It is important to keep in mind that marriage age is not exogenous as assumed in the model. A large literature already documents the exogenous factors behind the increase in marriage age. The effect I attributed to the marriage age in my analysis, thus, should be understood as the indirect effect of all these factors on assortative mating through increasing marriage age. Going forward, an interesting extension of the model would be to allow individuals to choose when they marry. With this extension, one can discuss the link between these factors and assortative mating in a more transparent way and might even be able to quantify the role of each of these factors separately.

Another interesting extension of my analysis could be an examination of fiscal policy implications of assortative mating.

Full paper here

The Absurdity of Egalitarianism

Cross-posted from Law and Liberty

Egalitarians believe that inequality is unjust and justice requires a society to move steadily toward greater equality. This is the aim of proportional taxation, equal opportunity programs, and the various anti-poverty policies of a welfare state. These policies cost money. The egalitarian approach to getting it is to tax those who have more in order to benefit those who have less. The absurdity of this is that egalitarians suppose that justice requires ignoring whether people deserve what they have and whether they are responsible for what they lack. They suppose that it is just to ignore the requirements of justice.

Here is a consequence of egalitarianism. According to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, men’s life expectancy is on the average about seven years less than women’s. There is thus an inequality between men and women. If egalitarians really mean that it would be better if everyone enjoyed the same level of social and economic benefits, then they must find the inequality between the life expectancy of men and women unjust. Following their reasoning, it ought to be a requirement of justice to equalize the life expectancy of men and women. This can be done, for instance, by men having more and better healthcare and working shorter hours than women.

Moreover, an inequality that follows from the unequal life expectancy of men and women is that men are less likely to benefit after retirement from Social Security and Medicare. As things are, men and women are required to contribute an equal percentage of their earnings to these programs. This is clearly unjust from the egalitarian point of view: Why should men be required to subsidize the health and wealth of women? The egalitarian policy this suggests is to decrease the levy on men, or increase it on women. There is much that egalitarian policies could do to reduce the inequalities flowing from the disparate life expectancy of men and women.

Why Not Government-Sponsored Pleasure Centers?

There remains the question of how to compensate the present generation of men for the injustice of having shorter lives than women.
...

full article here

"sexualization may be a marker of social climbing among women that track the degree of status competition in the local environment."

Heiko, se non ti lecchi le dita ...

Remember then Justice Minister und midget Heiko Maas' drive against sexualized advertisements and plan to ban it by a law in 2016?

That small Heiko is a fucking idiot with a penchant for older retreaded women is no secret but it is even more reassuring that there is now proof.

Income inequality not gender inequality positively covaries with female sexualization on social media

Significance

Female sexualization is increasing, and scholars are divided on whether this trend reflects a form of gendered oppression or an expression of female competitiveness. Here, we proxy local status competition with income inequality, showing that female sexualization and physical appearance enhancement are most prevalent in environments that are economically unequal. We found no association with gender oppression. Exploratory analyses show that the association between economic inequality and sexualization is stronger in developed nations. Our findings have important implications: Sexualization manifests in response to economic conditions but does not covary with female subordination. These results raise the possibility that sexualization may be a marker of social climbing among women that track the degree of status competition in the local environment.

Oh, poor Heiko seems to be wrong on so many counts.

Abstract

Publicly displayed, sexualized depictions of women have proliferated, enabled by new communication technologies, including the internet and mobile devices. These depictions are often claimed to be outcomes of a culture of gender inequality and female oppression, but, paradoxically, recent rises in sexualization are most notable in societies that have made strong progress toward gender parity. 

That's bad news for feminists and Heiko is a feminist with a shaved cunt.

Few empirical tests of the relation between gender inequality and sexualization exist, and there are even fewer tests of alternative hypotheses. We examined aggregate patterns in 68,562 sexualized self-portrait photographs (“sexy selfies”) shared publicly on Twitter and Instagram and their association with city-, county-, and cross-national indicators of gender inequality. We then investigated the association between sexy-selfie prevalence and income inequality, positing that sexualization—a marker of high female competition—is greater in environments in which incomes are unequal and people are preoccupied with relative social standing. Among 5,567 US cities and 1,622 US counties, areas with relatively more sexy selfies were more economically unequal but not more gender oppressive. A complementary pattern emerged cross-nationally (113 nations): Income inequality positively covaried with sexy-selfie prevalence, particularly within more developed nations. 

Sexualization drives sales

To externally validate our findings, we investigated and confirmed that economically unequal (but not gender-oppressive) areas in the United States also had greater aggregate sales in goods and services related to female physical appearance enhancement (beauty salons and women’s clothing). Here, we provide an empirical understanding of what female sexualization reflects in societies and why it proliferates.

And on that bombshell Heiko should consider anal tightening.

Lesbian couples have greater vulnerability to poverty

POVERTY IN US LESBIAN AND GAY COUPLE HOUSEHOLDS

Alyssa Schneebaum and M. V. Lee Badgett

ABSTRACT

Poverty is a widely researched topic in economics. However, despite growing research on the economic lives of lesbians and gay men in the United States since the mid 1990s, very little is known about poverty in same-sex couple households. This study uses American Community Survey data from 2010 to 2014 to calculate poverty rates for households headed by different-sex versus same-sex couples. Comparing households with similar characteristics, the results show that those headed by same-sex couples are more likely to be in poverty than those headed by different-sex married couples. Despite that overall disadvantage, a decomposition of the poverty risk shows that same-sex couples are protected from poverty by their higher levels ofeducation and labor force participation, and their lower probability of having a child in the home. Lastly, the role of gender – above and beyond sexual orientation – is clear in the greater vulnerability to poverty for lesbian couples.

Interesting that lesbians live in more rural areas.

Increasing the benefits of characteristics that reduce poverty: 

The decompositions show that same-sex couples are more likely to be poor in the basic predictive model because they do not get as much protective value, or returns, to characteristics that reduce poverty. The one clear factor that hurts lesbians, in particular, is living in more rural areas, where people may have more negative attitudes toward LGBT people.

Unmarried different-sex couples more likely to be poor.

Lesbians are most likely to be in poverty, confirming the expectations laid out earlier in the paper; they are 2.4 percentage points more likely to be in poverty than different-sex married couples. Gay couples are 1 percentage point more likely to be in poverty than different-sex married couples. Unmarried different-sex couples are 2.1 percentage points more likely to be poor than married different-sex couples.

more here

Reading Lounge

1. Must try harder - Find out who.

2. Japanese Sumo robots



3. As Ever, Vice Businesses Present Opportunities For Investors

Without any doubt, Ahrens thinks, “big alcohol and big tobacco will be increasingly involved in the future of cannabis.”

4. Baby Donald Trump causes a stir in Afghanistan - Not likely to happen to Angela Merkel

"The rosy-cheeked toddler's parents named him after the billionaire US President in the hope of replicating his success. But now he is at the centre of a social media firestorm in Afghanistan after a photo of his ID papers was posted on Facebook.

A self-confessed fan of the American tycoon turned leader of the free world, Sayed Assadullah Pooya said he and his wife have been inundated with "vulgar and insulting" comments attacking their choice of name for their third child."

5. An employee whose job was to be sacked

According to no less an authority than Danny Baker (!) this story is absolutely true.

6. $11,000 luxury Japanese toilet will probably give you the best poop experience of your life

"Plus, when the toilet sees you coming (and yes, it sees you!), it sprays a fine mist inside the bowl in preparation to keep the surfaces moist, which helps keep even more nasties away from the walls.

The 360-degree tornado flush makes sure everything goes down smooth to keep you from ever having to plunge. And finally, after you finish, the toilet sprays ionized-water around the bowl to get rid of those persistent dirt and waste particles.

The mist and the ionized water also keep the toilet nice and hygienic for you, so you’ll never have to worry about picking up any yucky germs while doing your business. The bidet spigot cleans itself with the ionized water too, and the toilet even boasts a UV light bulb that further knocks out those tiny waste particles, keeping you, your toilet, and your tush clean and germ-free."

WHY ARE THERE FEW WOMEN IN TECH? WATCH A RECRUITING SESSION

Let's kick it off by joining one sort of a session.

If the company sends a female engineer, often she has no speaking role at all. If she does speak, her segment centers on ‘company culture’ or the company’s vision. Other women recruiters are in charge of handing out swag and other materials, or managing logistics. The ‘hard-core’ technical material belongs to the male presenters. 

In the company culture segment, the presenter mentions the ‘fun’ work environment, with a plethora of ‘perks’, such as free meals and haircuts, which mean employees never need to leave the office. Entertainment might include foosball tables, beer fridges, and other elements of fraternity culture. Sleep is a low priority, mentioned as a point of pride. 

Then the main male presenter opens the floor for a Q&A segment. Only male students ask questions. The conversation becomes a chest-beating competition – who can ask the most technical question that stumps the presenter? Meanwhile, the few female students remaining in the room stay silent.

The stage is set and here it might be noteworthy that the study was done by two female scientists in gender research and sociology. If you fancy to call those subjects science. 'Wired' sums their research up nicely.

The paper also describes recruiters using gender stereotypes. One online gaming company showed a slide of a woman wearing a red, skin-tight dress and holding a burning poker card to represent its product. Another company, which makes software to help construct computer graphics, only showed pictures of men—astronauts, computer technicians, soldiers. Presentations were often replete with pop-culture images intended to help them relate to students but instead furthered gender stereotypes. One internet startup, for example, showed an image of Gangnam-style music videos that featured a male artist surrounded by scantily clad women.

In an attempt to appear approachable, presenters often made comments that disparaged women or depicted them as sexualized objects rather than talented technical colleagues. For example, in one session, a man mentioned the “better gender ratio” at the company’s Los Angeles office compared with its Silicon Valley office. “I had no girlfriends at [University Name], but now I’m married,” he said, suggesting that the better odds had helped get him hitched.

This type of informal banter occasionally devolved into overtly sexualized comments. One presenter from a small startup mentioned porn a couple of times. Another, when talking about a project that would allow banking on ships, suggested that sailors needed access to cash for prostitutes.

The few sessions that featured women speaking on technical subjects had fewer such problems. When these women spoke on technical issues—and connected those issues to real-world impact—female students were much more engaged. In these sessions, female students asked questions 65 percent of the time, compared with 36 percent of the sessions without these features.

Abstract (of the study)

A ‘chilly’ environment limits women’s advancement through the educational pipeline leading to jobs in science and technology. However, we know relatively little about the environment women encounter after making it through the educational pipeline. Do technology companies create environments that may dampen women’s interest at the juncture when they are launching their careers? Using original observational data from 84 recruiting sessions hosted by technology companies at a prominent university on the US West Coast, we find that company representatives often engage in behaviors that are known to create a chilly environment for women. Through gender-imbalanced presenter roles, geek culture references, overt use of gender stereotypes, and other gendered speech and actions, representatives may puncture the pipeline, lessening the interest of women at the point of recruitment into technology careers.

Pdf here (worth reading)

Scientific evidence that women should stay in lower jobs as a job promotion doubles the baseline probability of divorce for women, but not for men.

This is the rather sad result of a study from Sweden. Not entirely unexpected if you are a man. Oops.

All the Single Ladies: Job Promotions and the Durability of Marriage

This paper contributes to understanding women’s absence from top jobs by investigating the effect of job promotions on divorce. We add to previous work about the friction between marital stability and women’s career success. It has been documented that an unexpected increase in the wife’s – but not the husband’s – earnings is correlated with divorce (Becker et al. 1977; Weiss and Willis 1997). Divorce and self-reported marital problems are also more common in couples where the wife earns more money than her husband (Bertrand, Pan and Kamenicka 2015). Experiments have shown that men are reluctant to date successful women and that women are aware of this sentiment (Fisman et al. 2009, Burtzyn et al., forthcoming). An interlocking piece of evidence is that high-ability women are much less likely than high-ability men to enter into marriages that specialize around their own career. These women are more commonly found in marriages where she is the primary caregiver and there is either a dual career focus or a focus on the career of the husband (e.g. Ely, Stone, and Ammerman 2014; Kleven, Landais and Sogaard 2018). 

We contribute the first causal evidence on how promotions impact marriage durability across genders and – in the second half of the paper – across more or less gender-equal couple formations. We document that a promotion leads to a large increase in the probability of divorce among women, but not among men. This causal claim is based on 30 years of detailed Swedish register data and a differences-in-differences (DID) design that follows job candidates before and after promotions. Most of the analysis concerns two jobs at the pinnacle of power in the public sector – local mayors and national parliamentarians.1 We can identify and follow both winning and losing candidates for these positions over time, before and after the promotion. This lets us document the absence of pre-trends in divorce and in other observables between the promoted and non-promoted candidates (see e.g. Greene and Quester 1982; Johnson and Skinner 1986).

The results show that after the promotion, women divorce at twice the rate of women who did not get the promotion. After three years on the new job, 7 percentage points fewer of the female mayors and parliamentarians remained married to their spouse compared to women who ran for office but lost. This result is corroborated in a sub-sample of close elections in which promotions are quasirandomly assigned between job candidates. 

Our data also allows a descriptive analysis of all CEO promotions in private firms over a 12-year period. Comparing men and women promoted to the CEO level, we document a strikingly similar pattern of a widening gender gap in divorce rates after promotion.

Could there be a "temptation effect" to yearn for a younger, sexier stud? Let's see.

We also explore a potential “temptation effect” – that women divorce because the promotion exposes them to new potential partners (McKinnish 2004). This investigation reveals no correlation between the proportion of men in the promoted women’s pre-promotion workplaces and the probability to divorce. Divorced and promoted women also remarry at a slower rate than other groups. Finally, no correlation is found between divorce and the woman’s age at marriage.

OK, that is a relief of sorts. Let us now invstigate the

Promotion and divorce among CEOs

Traditional couple formation, progressive at work: A recipe for divorce When couples meet, they form a union that is more or less gender equal. 

Economic theory speaks to the possible impacts on marriage stability from the wife’s promotion in a union that initially prioritized the husband’s career. Labor market events that change the performance of spouses in relation to what was expected at the time of couple formation may shift the balance of utility away from the marriage to being single (e.g. Becker, Landes, and Michael 1977; Weiss and Willis 1997). In a couple that is specialized in the husband’s career, the wife's promotion to a top job is more likely to challenge initial expectations, while the husband’s promotion would confirm them. This gives the expectation that divorces for women should be concentrated in couples with more gender-based specialization in the husband’s career.

Note here that we remain agnostic about which spouse initiates the divorce. In economic theory, a promotion of the wife in a male-specialized household shifts the cost–benefit analysis of being married vs. single for both spouses. Either spouse could initiate a divorce to realize their relatively improved outside options. An alternative view is that promoted women initiate divorce when they find themselves in male-specialized marriages that offer the least flexibility and career support (in the spirit of Newman and Olivetti 2017). This alternative interpretation is further discussed below.

Conclusions

We study the consequences for men’s and women’s relationships of being promoted to top jobs. The main result is that such promotions destabilize women's marriages but not men’s. This finding can contribute to understanding why few women are in top jobs. In our data, married women and men who obtained top jobs had both been married for 20 years on average – quite a significant time investment. At promotion, women were substantially more likely to give up the potential support system of a loving spouse than men. Giving up the relationship may very well be the woman’s choice, and may be a positive outcome for her. But the results still highlight a large gender inequality in access to the first-best option for most: a loving relationship and a successful career.18 It is also reasonable to expect that the candidate pool for top jobs would be skewed by a condition for women, but not for men, to willingly leave their relationship behind. 

Our descriptive analysis of common features of women who divorce indicated a link between couple formation and the destabilizing role of the top promotion. Couples that formed in a more gender-egalitarian manner did not experience an increased divorce rate after promotion. The divorces were instead concentrated among women in couples that focused on the husband’s career in their early stages of the relationship. This result indicates a link between the marriage market and the labor market. As long as the marriage market produces mainly couples that specialize around the man’s career, this pattern of couple formation may hinder gender equality in top jobs. Prioritization of the husband’s career remains common around the world, even in progressive countries like Sweden (Boschini et al. 2011) and even for women in the top of the ability distribution. As long as there is little specialization in the opposite direction – households in which the wife is the dominant earner and the husband takes primary responsibility for childcare – the average woman will face greater stress in her family life when trying to obtain a highly demanding top job.

Pdf here

One may call this the 'The Hidden Taxes on Women'. That's the title of an NYT article that covers also other studies.

The working world is unfair to many women, yet even when they succeed, they must confront another series of challenges. Their hard-won successes are taxed in ways that men’s are not.

Female child penalty is strongly related to the work history of the maternal grandparents. Come again.

Oh Lord, here we go again. Allegedly some evidence ...

CHILDREN AND GENDER INEQUALITY: EVIDENCE FROM DENMARK (Pdf)

ABSTRACT 

Despite  considerable  gender  convergence  over  time,  substantial  gender  inequality  persists  in  all countries.  Using  Danish administrative  data  from  1980-2013  and  an  event  study  approach,  we show  that  most  of  the  remaining  gender  inequality  in  earnings  is  due  to  children.  The  arrival  of children  creates  a  gender  gap  in  earnings  of  around  20%  in  the  long  run,  driven  in  roughly  equal proportions  by  labor  force  participation,  hours  of  work,  and  wage  rates.  Underlying  these  “child penalties”,  we  find  clear  dynamic  impacts  on  occupation,  promotion  to  manager,  sector,  and  the family  friendliness  of  the  firm  for  women  relative  to  men.  Based  on  a  dynamic  decomposition framework,  we  show  that  the  fraction  of  gender  inequality  caused  by  child  penalties  has  increased dramatically  over  time,  from  about  40%  in  1980  to  about  80%in  2013.  As  a  possible  explanation for  the  persistence  of  child  penalties,  we  show  that  they  are  transmitted  through  generations,  from parents  to  daughters  (but  not  sons), consistent  with  an  influence  of  childhood  environment  in  the formation of women’s preferences over family and career.

I have a problem right away with the abstract when it says "child penalties". In sports you get a penalty for acting or engaging outside of the rules of the game. Life has no such rules. You are expected to stay inside the law, apart from that you are pretty free. You may take a dump on the desk of your boss any day. Chances are, it won't be many of those days. You may talk rude to other people, there is no penalty doing so. You will perhaps dine in lonely places more often.

Seriously, a woman makes a conscious (hopefully) choice when bearing a child. So there is no penalty. These are life choices made out of free will. You are playing the game.

Under Conclusions it says among others:

Third, we have provided evidence in favor of environmental inuences in the formation of preferences over family vs career. In particular, we have shown that the female child penalty is strongly related to the work history of the maternal grandparents: women who grow up in traditional families with a male breadwinner and a female homemaker incur larger child penalties when they themselves become mothers. 

Not quit sure, but it sounds a little contrived to me. I still get the most out of Bourdieu and certainly so in terms of an entertaining lingo so typical of the French intelligencia.

It is no doubt in the encounter with the 'objective' expectations' inscribed, mostly in the implicit state, in the positions offered to women by the still very strongly sexually differentiated division of labour that the so-called 'feminine' dispositions inculcated by the family and the whole social order are able to be fulfilled or even blossom, and, in this very process, to be rewarded, thereby helping to reinforce the fundamental sexual dichotomy, both in the jobs, which seem to call for submissiveness and the need for security, and in their occupants, who are identified with positions in which, enchanted or alienated, they both find themselves and lose themselves. The essentially social logic of what is called 'vocation' has the effect of producing these kinds of harmonious encounters between dispositions and positions in which the victims of symbolic domination can felicitously (in both senses) perform the subaltern or subordinate tasks that are assigned to their virtues of submission, gentleness, docility, devotion and self-denial.

(Masculine Domination)

via Bradford DeLong

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

Pride and Prejudice