One of my friends in Berkeley, California recently linked to “The Invisible Workload That Drags Women Down” (TIME, December 29, 2016). She has previously used Facebook to heap scorn on the stupid, racist, sexist, and anti-gay Americans who voted against Hillary. Also to throw rocks at skeptics of published climate change predictions. After the election of the Trumpenfuhrer, she condemned the “anti-intellectualism” to which America was now doomed (a country that produced Britney Spears can be considered somehow anti-intellectual?).
The research described (from 1996, so it is unclear why the editors of TIME thought it was news in 2016) is based on 23 data points, all from couples with infants:
She interviewed 23 husband-wife couples, finding them through the rather quaint method of reading birth announcements in a local newspaper. All had brought a baby home in the last year.
The author’s thesis is that women are wearing out their brains ensuring stocks of toothpaste and peanut butter in the house. In a private message, a male reprobate asked for his opinion wrote
“wrong toothpaste is the kind of thing that can seriously ruin a child’s morning—not to mention their parents.”
If my kids tried to whine about toothpaste, I would make them eat it. Wtf.
The poster’s female friends, however, were impressed with this article and the underlying research. The post was showered with “likes” and comments in agreement.
Of course, given the topic of my recent talk at the economics university, I felt that I should question this celebration of social science…
Even if you accept that 23 is a statistically significant sample and that the sample was appropriately random, this covers only those couples with an infant. The vast majority of couples do not have an infant at home (owing to the tendency of infants to age out of infancy). Would you expect the division of labor to be different among couples with an infant compared to couples with no children or couples with teenagers? Why would it be reasonable to apply these findings to all male-female partnerships?
Women in lesbian couples would be a lot more productive, then? Because there is no man to “drag them down”?
(And gay male couples wouldn’t have essential supplies in their house because there was no woman to notice that they were running out?)
In a society where there is little social pressure and no legal requirement to be part of a couple, any study that concludes that some class of people are exploited within couples leads to the questions “Why would they agree to join a couple?” and “If part of a couple, why wouldn’t they go back to being single?”
These questions generated a flurry of ad hominem attacks from the warm-hearted pussyhat-wearing Hillary supporters. Despite their professed reverence for the scientific method, and contempt for those Trump voters who purportedly reject it, none of them seriously addressed the substance of the above questions.
From the inability of these folks to entertain any questions regarding their beliefs, can we concluded that faith in American female victimhood is now a religion?
Getting back to the substance of the study, is it actually kind of insulting to women? The TIME author assumes that men can manage household inventories: “If she were gone, you bet her husband would start noticing when the fridge went empty and the diapers disappeared.” If that assumption is correct, then women just need to do is stop worrying/noticing because a male partner will pick up the slack. Why aren’t women intelligent enough to do this?
If the assumption is false and men are hopelessly inept and managing toothpaste and peanut butter is preventing women from being successful in their careers, working women could hire someone (another woman?) to handle this management task. If women adopted this strategy they would be as or more successful than men in the workplace, but have a slightly lower spending power (since some after-tax income would be going to the toothpaste/peanut butter manager). If women aren’t adopting this strategy, why aren’t they intelligent enough to adopt it?
I’m in agreement with part of the article (not the “women are too stupid to see how badly they are being exploited” part!). I think that Americans of both sexes have their brains filled up with clutter that is the result of owning and managing too much stuff. By owning a house instead of renting, for example, the typical American is forced to think about plumbing, electric, paint, appliance repair, etc. By owning a car, the American is forced to manage recall notices, re-registration, property tax payments, etc. Let’s not get started on what it is like to own an aircraft, be a pilot, or renew one’s airport security badges periodically!
Readers: What do you think? Are American brains filled with non-work task-related clutter? If so, is there is a substantial gender difference? [Is the 1996 research obsolete due to Amazon Prime (2-day) and Prime Now (2-hour) services?]
Related:
On the subject of “too much stuff”: As a parent of young children, you have perhaps noticed that your children have an enormous amount of small toys littering their bedrooms. When I was a child, I had a few toys that I was very attached to. When I had children I noticed that, without any effort on my part, my children wound up with hundreds of toys, small stuffed animals, colored cards, and so on. All of these wound up on the floor and I wound up cleaning them up all the time. I started throwing out all the toys my kids got in gift bags at birthday parties, toys with fast food at MacDonald’s, basically anything they didn’t play with got thrown out. Also, any product that had a “kid’s version” which was basically the same as the adult version. No need for kid’s toothpaste, kids can use the same toothpaste as adults. My life got a lot easier and my kids seemed happier not having to contend with all this stuff on the floor all the time.
I took my kids to the expensive custom toy store in the rich neighborhood and let them pick out their own toys. Much nicer than going to Walmart.
Social signalling is another matter. Other kids have rooms filled with toys neatly stacked on shelves e.g. 30 teddy bears lined up on a shelf. You look like the bad parent with deprived children.
This does seem to be a gender linked thing with women being more comfortable with kids having a lot of stuff and a lot of stuff in the house in general. I was only able to to all this post-divorce.
I note that when my current wife is in town, my refrigerator is always full. When she leaves town, my refrigerator is two thirds empty, only containing the food I am going to eat. I think that, if you live with a woman, she will fill your refrigerator with food regardless of whether you need the food and regardless of the size of the refrigerator.
Male teachers in the local school had much less cluttered classrooms, perhaps the same principle at the workplace.
>can we concluded that faith
>in American female victimhood
>is now a religion?
How exactly was the sample upon which you want to base this conclusion selected?
I do not agree with this article. I suggest this women look at some households where the 2 kids are involved in sports and the man is the coach and heavily involved with his kids. I am sure there are lots of households around where this situation exists. Then the math will look a lot different. My son has two boys. He has been their after school coach in hockey and baseball for six years since they were five. He presently puts in about 10-20 hours per week doing baseball stuff. The season last for 12 weeks. He helps his kids and 20+ other kids on two teams. He also spends time coaching a hockey team in the winter. He works from home and his kids walk to school. I figure he spends 1-2 hours per day watching after them when they are not in school as he is at home.
By owning a house instead of renting, for example, the typical American is forced to think about plumbing, electric, paint, appliance repair, etc.
After fifteen years as a happy renter, I bought a single-family foreclosure five years ago, and since that time, I’ve spent about ten work-hours per week on-line researching home improvement & repair and shopping for various home items and tools. And at least two round trips to Home Depot and five to ten hours of home improvement and maintenance work each week. My home purchase has tripled in value over the past five years, but sometimes I think renting would have been better overall. I’m tempted to cash out and rent again.
Your question of whether “there is a substantial gender difference” has a definitive scientific answer.
As I mentioned earlier, “there’s no such thing as a ‘male’ or ‘female’ brain” ( https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28582-scans-prove-theres-no-such-thing-as-a-male-or-female-brain/).
Furthermore, there is no gender, really, as you seem to agree in your earlier messages on the subject. Modern science corroborates your hunch as well: “Gender, like all social identities, is socially constructed. ” ( https://othersociologist.com/sociology-of-gender/).
@Brian: yes that’s true, another example that women are the biggest consumers on the planet and therefore, responsible for most of the climate change that they are worried about. But to paraphrase Bill Burr: “nobody wants to correct them because everyone wants to sleep with them”
The post is not well structured. Is it supposed to mainly about the Time article or you Facebook friends?
Will check out the original paper..However, one has to manage tooth paste, peanut butter and toilet paper kids or no kids..So with this logic, a childless person would need a peanut butter manager as well to be succeed in career..Perhaps, I am missing smth..
@Ivan
Maybe I am missing something but the link writes ‘This means that, averaged across many people, sex differences in brain structure do exist, but an individual brain is likely to be just that: individual, with a mix of features. “There are not two types of brain,” says Joel.’
So the difference depends on your meaning of the word types. If types means 2 types like a penis and a vagina then there are not 2 types of brains. If type is used to refer to a more loose categorization, like male and female clothes, then there are 2 types.
@Natalia: kids definitely complicate things.
“Other kids have rooms filled with toys neatly stacked on shelves e.g. 30 teddy bears lined up on a shelf.”
The social signal I perceive here is little Imelda Marcos in training.
Both men and women in relationships should also take notice of the settled science: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/men-who-do-housework-have-less-sex/
MVI5:
“averaged across many people, sex differences in brain structure do exist, but an individual brain is likely to be just that: individual, with a mix of features.”
The statement above is almost incoherent statistically speaking — and the statement is nowhere to be found in the study itself.
What the study claims is that the male/female brain structure distributions, as measured by their “internal consistency” metric, overlap so much (see page 4) that there is hardly any difference to be found. In other words, out of 100 random people on the street, you’d found female/male brain difference only in roughly one person, ceteris paribus.
“This extensive overlap undermines any attempt to distinguish between a “male” and a “female” form for specific brain features”, ibid
As opposed to say clear distribution bimodality/dimorphism wrt the upper body strength where the level of overlap is reversed:
“less than 10% overlap between the male and female distributions, with 99.9% of females falling below the male mean.” https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247233659_Costs_and_benefits_of_fat-free_muscle_mass_in_men_Relationship_to_mating_success_dietary_requirements_and_native_immunity
Whether or not you accept Joel’s et al study and their conclusions is a separate question.
Ivan – 13
To quote your article:
“If a neuroscientist was given someone’s brain without their body or any additional information, they would still probably be able to guess if it had belonged to a man or a woman. Men’s brains are larger, for example, and are likely to have a larger number of “male” features overall.”
How does this jive with your statement preceding the link to the article that “there is no such thing as a male or female brain?” If there were no such difference between the brains, how could neuroscientists tell a difference?