Salon.com > Gender Gap

This is what the gender gap in Congress really looks like

Tue, 14 May 2013 21:44:00 +0000

Artist Emily Nemens has created a lovely infographic to illustrate a not-so-lovely point: Congress has a major gender problem.

A full screen version of Nemens' illustration can be found here. More on the history of women in Congress can be found here.

Sex (ratios) and the single girl

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 22:57:00 +0000

Amid all of the current Internet chatter about the perils of being a single woman, a recent piece in the New York Times shines a light on a different, more sinister, hazard.

The Times' John Eligon reported on a small oil town in North Dakota where “men are many, and women are hounded." The oil-rich pastures of Williston have attracted hordes of young men to work the lucrative, labor-intensive jobs that get the wells flowing. As a result, there are 1.6 single men for every single woman in Williston, a gender ratio that has created a stifling and dangerous environment.

According to Eligon:

Report: Performance counts more than connections for women on Wall Street

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 21:37:00 +0000

The American Economic Association finds that it's more difficult for women to succeed on Wall Street than for men. What's more surprising is that they succeed in different ways: It's what you know that counts most for women and who you know for men (bold text mine):

Male and female analysts are equally connected on average. Connection is associated with more accurate earnings forecasts for men, but not for women. Controlling for accuracy, connection is important in explaining men’s, but not women’s, probability of being voted by institutional investors as “star” analysts, an important measure of career success. For women, education achievements and accurate forecasts are important factors that determine voting outcomes. This asymmetry in the effect of connections between the two genders does not exist in an alternative, computerized process of evaluating analysts, and is most pronounced among young analysts. Our results suggest that men reap higher returns from connections than women, and that investors are more willing to rely on soft information such as connections to evaluate men than women.

Is Obama losing women?

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 21:37:00 +0000

After weeks of polling showing Barack Obama leading nationally with female voters, sometimes by nearly 20 points, we now have at least two polls taken after last week's debate suggesting that Mitt Romney is narrowing the gender gap. Which leaves everyone who wondered why Obama missed the chance at the debate to define Romney as an extremist on women's issues (after the Democratic convention centered very successfully around such issues) feeling grimly validated.

Most prominently, a Pew survey found that Obama and Romney were now tied among likely women voters, compared to their mid-September poll, which showed Obama besting Romney with women by 18 points. And a PPP poll commissioned by Daily Kos and released today found that the president's 15-point lead with women had shrunk to 6 points.

Study: Outnumbered by men, women don’t speak up

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 20:05:00 +0000

A new study confirms what most of us probably already know:

Scholars at Brigham Young University and Princeton examined whether women speak less than men when a group collaborates to solve a problem. In most groups that they studied, the time that women spoke was significantly less than their proportional representation – amounting to less than 75 percent of the time that men spoke.

This is maybe the most frustrating thing about being a feminist lady in the world every day, in my opinion. Because, as Lindy West points out, even loud-mouthed feminists often fall into this dynamic. “You forfeit, because their lungs are bigger, they’re groomed for assertiveness since birth, and you’re groomed to assume that nobody will take you seriously anyway. You wait for a pause in a room of interrupters.” I do this all the time. And the fact that I can feel myself doing it doesn’t really help usually–it just means I hate myself for it.