That pesky male female gap

The Pew Research Center found that 2019 will be the first year in which women will comprise the majority of the college-educated labor force in the United States. Women first received more than half of the bachelor’s degrees awarded in the 1981-82 academic year—almost 40 years ago.  Today they earn about 57% of bachelor’s degrees. The number of college-educated women in the adult population (ages 25 and older) surpassed the number of college-educated men in 2007. Does anyone fret about that imbalance created by loans, scholarships, affirmative action and unfair regulations?

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/20/u-s-women-near-milestone-in-the-college-educated-labor-force/ft_19-06-20_womenlaborforce_women-now-half-of-us-college-educated-labor-force-2/

So why are we still hearing about the “gap,” especially since for about 4 decades the college enrollment rate for females has exceeded males and for the younger demographic there is no gap given the same starting place and position? 

There’s a lot of mischief in gap statistics.  Especially college degrees.  Women, even in the same fields as men, may select different specialties—pediatrics instead of neuroscience, family law instead of corporate law, bibliographer instead of library director, or they may want to be an artist instead of a plumber or electrician. Women may decide to raise their own children and “stop-out” for 5-10 years, reentering the labor market with reduced value to employers.  Married women with husbands of equal education and financial status often have the luxury to leave the medical or law fields to start a business in a completely different direction such as interior design or selling craft items. 

Unfortunately, these “justice” studies rarely compare women with women—female doctors with female pre-school directors, or female TV hosts with female owners of bed and breakfasts, or female chefs with female dishwashers, female traffic court judges with female circuit court judges. Why not compare single women who are heads of household with married women who have no children?  In the universe of women employees there are gaps with men, but there are overlaps also, with low end of the bell curve  the men who clean the offices of  wealthy women politicians like Pelosi and Warren who are sitting at the high end of the bell curve.

What is concerning to me is that college educated women increasingly vote for Democrats, seeing themselves still as needing additional help from the government to manage their lives.

Unequal childhoods and unequal adulthoods

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xq_iCMgP2Q

It will take about an hour to watch this lecture by Annette Lareau as she follows up her original research (early 2000s) on children in middle class and working class families, with how they did as young adults. I’d noticed in stores how differently some parents talk to their children (who may be in the shopping cart).  Although these days, they may be talking on the phone!  Often I wish they’d just shut up.  My goodness, they talk and talk and talk.  But some don’t.  Low income parents talk much less to their children, and by the time kids get to school there is an enormous gap in vocabulary.  But her research goes a lot deeper—about how middle class families “untie knots,” research ways to do things better, get the better school, or teacher, or activity. They have different social networks, they marry different people, and live in different neighborhoods which have different schools.

It’s worth watching.  But I don’t buy any government solution for this which we’ll hear from the academics.   The common complaint will increasingly be “white privilege,” but Lareau found similar attitudes in black and white families who are in the same socio-economic class. Fathers are more likely to be present in the middle class families; parents have more education; more sibling rivalry in middle class families; more talking; more boredom among middle class kids; and middle class kids stay “younger” longer with fewer responsibilities.  Race was not as big an issue as values and attitudes. Many middle class teaching approaches are the opposite of what works with low income kids. Drilling and memorization work well for them—just not for the teachers. Immigrant parents seem to have stronger academic standards for their children which may be lost by the 3rd generation.

How smart is WiseWoman?

In common parlance, the words "wise woman" mean someone who depends on cards and herbs and pagan rituals to heal or help someone. But not so in the federal government.

The WISEWOMAN program (Well-Integrated Screening and Evaluation for WOMen Across the Nation) is administered through CDC's Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention (DHDSP). The WISEWOMAN program provides low-income, under-insured or uninsured women with chronic disease risk factor screening, lifestyle intervention, and referral services in an effort to prevent cardiovascular disease. The priority age group is women aged 40–64 years.

CDC funds 21 WISEWOMAN programs, which operate on the local level in states and tribal organizations.

The current budget for this program which essentially screens women for health problems is $16 million and change. So I was browsing through the screening pie charts and was more than a little shocked to see that 84% with hypertension, 84% with high sholesterol and 88% with diabetes had previously been diagnosed.

It seems we have an awful lot of programs to meet the needs of the uninsured, but wasn't that the reason we needed to rush Obamacare through without reading it--because so many didn't have these things, which are clearly right under their noses, plus screening women previously diagnosed. A screening or a diagnosis or a counseling moment doesn't mean treatment, doesn't mean research. Actually, doesn't mean diddly squat if the patient doesn't follow through.

You can look at the list of accomplishments, but you'll find nothing about mortality or extended life for those participating.

Dan Quayle right again--Single Moms at Midlife have more health problems

Remember Dan Quayle--how he was ridiculed for taking on the Murphy Brown single mom story line about 20 years ago? Oh, the press had a ball with that--said he was too dumb to know she was fiction. Then a few years later, the research shows that despite the income and social class of the mother, children of single mothers didn't thrive as well as children in two parent homes with a mom and a dad. It turns out that Uncle Sam can't be a step-father--even for those kids who don't need any financial assistance and have educated moms.

According to a growing body of social-scientific evidence, children in families disrupted by divorce and out-of-wedlock birth do worse than children in intact families on several measures of well-being. Children in single-parent families are six times as likely to be poor. They are also likely to stay poor longer. Twenty-two percent of children in one-parent families will experience poverty during childhood for seven years or more, as compared with only two percent of children in two parent families. A 1988 survey by the National Center for Health Statistics found that children in single-parent families are two to three times as likely as children in two-parent families to have emotional and behavioral problems. They are also more likely to drop out of high school, to get pregnant as teenagers, to abuse drugs, and to be in trouble with the law. Compared with children in intact families, children from disrupted families are at a much higher risk for physical or sexual abuse. Link to Barbara Dafoe Whitehead's article.

This study done at OSU shows that later marriage doesn't reverse some of the negative health affects of single motherhood. It "was beyond the scope of this study to determine why unwed mothers in general had poorer health than others. But other research suggests it may be related to the high levels of stress and the poor economic conditions faced by single moms." Or maybe women who don't take care of their bodies when it comes to sex, don't take care of it in other ways?

Single Moms Entering Midlife May Lead To Public Health Crisis

Seems God was on to something when he created marriage for man and woman.

Sarah, Nancy and Hillary

I was surprised that someone in the MSM gave Hillary Clinton the credit for so many women running for office and doing well in the recent primaries--even the conservatives. Huh? Hillary Clinton would not have been a powerful New York Senator if she hadn't been first lady for 8 years, and if she didn't have the backing of all her husband's friends and cronies. Nancy Pelosi and Sarah Palin, although at opposite ends of the political spectrum, did not run on their husbands' coattails or names. In fact, the joke goes, "So you think you've got it bad? Imagine somewhere there's a Mr. Pelosi!" Who even knows his name? But credit should also be given to the various grass roots conservative and constitutional groups. Indirectly, that leads back to Obama--people are outraged by his behavior, character and beliefs and it has been an energizing force, so they are out-running and out-performing the tired old Republican blah, blah, blah, and looking for something different.

Oprah and Orpah

Oprah (no last name needed) is the richest woman in the United States. . . and no, the lists don't say that because they include women who got their wealth from their family status, and inheritance--wife, widow, daughter, granddaughter, etc. Oprah actually earned her billions. And then there's Orpah, the check-out clerk (not her real name). Orpah is a Biblical name, the daughter-in-law of Ruth (means "she who turned back") and Oprah is probably a misspelling of that Biblical name on her birth certificate.

Poor Orpah behind the cash register is about Oprah's age, but she's white, skinny, with a long gray pony tail, a sullen grimace for all the customers, and no fashion sense at all, unless baggy t-shirts and work boots are in style.

So, here's a question for all you Democrats and liberal Republicans. How much of Oprah's wealth should be redistributed to Orpah who didn't get the personality, looks or education to become a successful talk show host and media mogul? She's a victim. Maybe her parents died; maybe she had an abusive husband; maybe she was a single mom.  Just because she rarely speaks to the customers and isn't photogenic, didn't pursue an education (although I really don't know--perhaps there were no scholarships or loans for skinny, unathletic white teen girls in the 1970s) doesn't mean she deserves to have so much less money than Oprah. She'd probably enjoy a few of those acres by the ocean in California, or attentive personal assistants, or dining out in fancy restaurants, or even Oprah's health care plan.

So, liberals, how would you redistribute Oprah's wealth to Orpah? And how much before Oprah would notice it was even gone?