Quick hit: even in academia, dads don’t do diapers

To help women in academia advance, elite universities should consider scrapping their generous paternity policies. That is the counterintuitive conclusion of a research paper published in the January issue of the Journal of Social, Evolutionary & Cultural Psychology.

The writers, Steven Rhoads of the University of Virginia and his son, Christopher Rhoads, of the University of Connecticut, studied a sample of 181 married, heterosexual, tenure-track professors all of whom had children under two and taught at schools with parental-leave policies. While 69 percent of the women in the sample took post-birth parental leave, only 12 percent of the men took advantage of the available leave—even though it was paid. They also learned that the male professors who did so performed significantly less child care relative to their spouses. Worse yet, they report that male tenure-track professors may be abusing paternity leave by using the time to complete research or publish papers, an activity that enhances their careers while putting their female colleagues at a disadvantage. One female participant quoted in the study put it this way: “If women and men are both granted parental leaves and women recover/nurse/do primary care and men do some care and finish articles, there’s a problem.

[...]

Not quite. As the authors of the paper state: “Most of the academics in our study said they believe that husbands and wives should share equally, but almost none did so.” To be precise, only three men out of 109 reported that they performed half the child-care work.

[businessweek]

Stalking for academic research

In what world is stalking a research “subject” acceptable? I would hope that you agree that such a “methodology” is never acceptable. As academic researchers, we must ensure that the privacy of our research participants is never invaded, that their identity is never revealed (at least so far as possible), and they we never do them any harm. When you stalk someone, you invade their privacy and you certainly do them harm. One would hope that the “researcher” who conducted this study would have known that. Maybe he did and just didn’t care.

In the numerous research projects I have conducted to date, ensuring that I am ethical with my research participants is always a priority for me. I am confident that I never did anything in any study to compromise the safety of a participant, or to cause them harm. I ask you again: In what world is stalking a research “subject” acceptable? Let’s ask the author of this article. It’s called: “Saved!” by Jena Malone: An introspective study of a consumer’s fan relationship with a film actress.

I think you all know what you’re about to read here.

For the “study”, the “researcher” developed an obsession with this woman, built a shrine to her in his home, spent several hours of his life devouring her films, had numerous pictures of her (included in the article), delved very deeply into her private life, and kept a diary and a “contemporaneous dataset” about his “relationship” with her – which, incidentally, stacked up to nearly 200,000 words.

He started off his description of this “relationship” with the following statement:

I still remember the day in April 2005, when I saw Jena Malone for the very first time. Her lovely smile and her beautiful eyes captivated me so much that my entire body was filled with the same prickling warmth that I feel each time I fancy a particular girl/woman.

If you, too, are picturing the archetypal peeping tom in a trench-coat, then you’re in good company here. He goes on to say:

Though I felt sexually attracted to her, my initial interest and admiration for Jena Malone was mainly based on her work and achievement as an actress. But the nature of my emotional attachment to her changed after suffering another major disappointment in my private life. As I hadn’t been on a date for a long time, I was filled with an enjoyable and arousing feeling of excitement, anticipation, happiness and nervousness mixed  together, when a nice girl finally agreed to go out with me.

What the actual fuck is wrong with you?! Is anyone feeling sick yet? Yes, you’re still in good company.

The whole narrative reads as if it were complied by a confused and horny teenage boy indulging his fantasy. But it wasn’t; this is a “study” by a grown man whose obsession is being passed off a piece of academic research. It is published in a respected academic journal. I’m finding it difficult to express just how unbelievable it all is.

OK, let’s breathe and start again.

So he never actually met the woman, and presumably he wasn’t hiding in the bushes outside her house with a flask and pair of binoculars, but that does not make his obsession any less disturbing. Stalking as a activity takes many different forms, particularly now with the increase in internet use and our unlimited access to other people’s lives (if you know where to look, wink, wink). This case qualifies as stalking just as much as any other. Perhaps she didn’t know she was being stalked (many women don’t, as it happens) but she was. This man knows everything about her life – intimate details about her past, her finances, her family and her upbringing. He’s no “fan”; he’s a repulsive obsessive. That he attempted to disguise this obsession as academic endeavour, and cynically used a theoretical framework to “explore consumerism”, does not make his obsession any less reprehensible. For crying out loud, he doesn’t even try to mask his motivations half the time!

Anyway, frustrated with having to live my lonely life as an involuntary single again, I started to seek romance and love from a very different source — Jena Malone.

My mind is well and truly boggled.  But creepiness, aside, this “study” has been published as a piece of  academic research. That is incredibly damaging to the academic research community. Cataloguing teenage masturbatory fantasies is not academic research. That is not what we do. Using theoretical terms to “introspect” on your teenage masturbatory fantasises is not academic research. That is not data. And stalking someone, whether in person, on the telly, online, or anywhere else, is not academic research. People like this give the rest of us a very bad name and I for one would like to see the publication of that article challenged.

The article ends:

This experienced ‘bond of emotional closeness’ can at times be strong enough to elicit a feeling of ‘personal friendship’ within the consumer or, in some way, even a feeling of ‘love’ towards the admired celebrity … that can express itself in a parasocial relationship. It also provides an explanation as to why fans sometimes feel enormously disappointed, when their most desired dream of actually meeting the adored celebrity in person comes true, because the celebrity turns out to be a different person in private life or just can’t live up to the (perhaps unrealistic) imaginary person that the consumer has created in one’s own mind.

Jena Malone, are you scared? I would be.

16% think it’s OK for a man to hit his wife? (Trigger warning)

[Trigger warning for violence.]

This piece from alternet.org really doesn’t require much additional comment. A report  (link to PDF) from a group called UN Women has revealed some frightening views on violence towards women,  and includes data on, for example, the massive gender pay gap (particularly between white men and women of colour) and sexual violence against women of colour.

On violence against women:

One of the most shocking statistics in the report? The public perception of gender violence as sometimes acceptable, within the context of marriage. This is from the report’s language: “In the USA, 16 percent of women and men agree that it is sometimes justifiable for a man to beat his wife.”

Sure, 16 percent is a fairly standard number for representing the lunatic fringe of American culture, but the fact that these respondents willingly admit they think it’s okay certainly sheds a disturbing light on why violence against women remains widespread: “Prevalence surveys in the USA show that 22 percent of women have experienced physical violence, and 8 percent have been targeted for sexual violence in their lifetimes.”

On the justice system and the justice system and rape cases:

One of the hindrances to women seeking a fair application of the legal system is a lack of women’s representation in that system’s hierarchy. While three female Supreme Court justices are certainly a step in the right direction, even that huge stride gives women disproportionately small representation. Women are under-represented as prosecutors, judges and police officers throughout North America. Statistics cited by UN Women indicate that “data from 40 countries where women are present in the police, reporting of sexual assault increases.”

…

“Evidence shows that jurors in the USA are especially likely to question the credibility of African American and Latina female witnesses in rape cases.”

On sexual violence towards Native American women:

One other element to these statistics that may be lesser-known is the issue of rape against Native American women, which is astoundingly high. Native American women are more than twice as likely as other women to be raped. One of the things compounding the problem was a confusion over judicial jurisdiction: “Crimes committed by non-Native Americans on reservations often went unpunished, due to uncertainty over which jurisdiction applied. This is thought to have contributed to the high levels of rape of Native American women, Progress shows.“ In other words, a culture of impunity existed.

On the gender pay gap:

We passed Lily Ledbetter, right? So why is this still an issue? Well, the gender pay gap remains at 23 percent in the USA, according to the new fact sheet from UN Women. If that number isn’t dismaying enough, for African American and Latina women, that gap swells to huge proportions: “On average 39 and 48 percent less than white men, respectively.”

It’s well worth reading the full report if you have time (it’s not long), not least because it includes a variety of other striking statistics (e.g., 127 countries do not explicitly criminalize rape within marriage, 61 countries severely restrict women’s rights to abortion), and it should be commended for including some very positive content on recent improvements in women’s rights worldwide.

I’m still reeling from the 16% statistic, mind you.

In brief: Satoshi Kanazawa removed from Psychology Today

Update to yesterday’s post: Get Satoshi Kanazawa out of LSE and off Psychology Today. Psychology Today has now removed Kanazawa as a contributor (links from change.org and colorofchange.org).

Good work. Now to remove him from LSE too.

I’m so glad this arrogant offensive little prick is finally being dealt with.

Get Satoshi Kanazawa out of LSE and off Psychology Today

I’ve written about this genius before (here or elsewhere or somewhere). He’s an evolutionary psychologist from the London School of Economics (LSE) – one of the top universities in the UK – and he writes, a lot, for Psychology Today. Now, Psychology Today is not, by any stretch of any imagination, a reliable academic source but it does have readership. It’s probably the best feeder of pop-psychology around at the moment.

I’m not a fan of evolutionary psychology. I don’t like its reductivist approach in making everything about sex. Because that’s what it does, when you strip off the big words. The boys have sperm, the girls have eggs, the boys want the girls but the girls need the boys and then a whole host of things happen that bring us where we are today. One of my very favourite colleagues does a bit of evolutionary psychology, and he argues it well, but I just don’t agree with the premise or the implications. No more than I agree with any of the offensive, sexist, racist, ill-informed claptrap that  Satoshi Kanazawa is known for on Psychology Today. (Not that I am equating my lovely colleague with Kanazawa, of course).  His latest stint involved a piece which was entitled “Why are Black women less physically attractive than other women?” Yeah. Seriously.

The piece was met with uproar, naturally, and was removed from the site almost immediately. (It doesn’t even deserve a critique but if you’re interesting in reading one anyway, you can find an interesting post here on Sociological Images.) Since then, change.org, a petition site, started a petition demanding that Psychology Today stops publishing sexist and racist articles and explains why  Kanazawa’s piece was published initially. (If you were cynical of mind and suspected that it was published because it’s good for site traffic, you may not be wrong.) The peititon also called for the removal of Kanazawa as a contributor to the site. And not before time. Indeed, since then, the student body of  LSE have called for Kanazawa to be sacked. He is not doing that institution, or the academy, any favours at all.

Two weeks after the offending article, Psychology Today issued an “apology”. It’s very sorry indeed if anyone was offended by the article. (Read: we’re not saying the article was offensive but if you were offended then I suppose we’re sorry. But you should probably be less sensitive.) It’s not good enough. Kanazawa is still listed as a contributer and Psychology Today did not address any of the on-going issues with his pieces, choosing instead to pretend that this piece was an isolated incident. Please sign the petition to keep the pressure on Psychology Today to address this problem properly. Its claim that it doesn’t support the publication of racist or sexist pieces is disingenuous when it had to remove a piece for exactly those problems. We have to put up with, “I’m not racist/ sexist but…” in too many places on the Internet and we shouldn’t have to put up with it on a “academic” site too.

Psychology Today is probably hoping that this will turn out to be a storm in the teacup (and, sadly, it probably will for there’s a lot of -isms around and eventually we’ll have to move on to the next one) but it really, really shouldn’t be allowed to wait it out and get that moron Kanazawa back on the front page again next week.

In brief: education for all

I have descended into Marking Hell. No, really, I’m not going to sleep for another fortnight. See you on the other side (if I make it)…

(This post is rather apt on the day that the British government announces that rich kids will be able to buy their university places again. So, the poor won’t be able to afford to go to university any longer, and the rich will be able to pay for places regardless of their talent or aptitude. Higher education is once more the preserve of the elite.)

Daily Mail says mothers should stay at home

Yesterday saw yet more “women should know their place” propaganda from the Daily Mail. The Mail reported from a recent meta-analysis that children suffer when mothers return to work in the year after giving birth:

Youngsters are less likely to succeed at school if their mothers return to work within a year of their birth, according to a major study. Children of mothers who resume work during their first year of life end up faring worse in formal exams and show signs of being more disruptive. The child’s success was particularly affected if the mother’s work was full-time, the study spanning five decades found.

Unsurprisingly, the Mail has taken some of the the findings from this meta-analysis and construed them for its own ends. It neglects to point out, for example, that issues around socio-economic status and family structure are equally important.

This message from the Mail resonates with John Bowlby’s thesis in the the 1940s when he conducted research on child development and “found” that mothers should stay at home for their children’s benefit. It transpired that Bowlby’s research was part of a wider government campaign to force women back into the home after WWII so that men returning from the war could regain employment. There is every reason to believe now that that the Daily Mail has the same agenda. Indeed, this agenda may be an indication of the current government plans in the coming years. It is now believed that women will suffer most from the financial cuts which were recently announced, and will be most likely to lose their jobs, so it is all too plausible that the government is planning to force women back into the home under the pretence of “child welfare” in order to alleviate pressure on the economy. Such an agenda would never be explicit, of course, but I don’t have any doubts that Cameron is devious enough to exact it. We will have to wait and see.

Are there any no-go, research-not-allowed areas?

Attacking what academics choose to research and how they do it seems slightly odd to me. I have no romantic ideas about freedom of academic thought but I do suppose people end up researching general areas in general ways because they are drawn to them. I think of research as an endless stream of fairly random coloured bits that sometimes come together to fill in part of a big picture we will never comprehend. Time passes and the shapes we thought we had figured out change, but new research brings new bits of understanding.

This is a very interesting post from Laura Agustín about academic research and comes on the back of a comment by Julie Bindel who criticised the author’s research on sex workers stating that there “was a lot of terrible anthropological research concerning women in the sex industry, and that they should not be treated as an anthropological field research group”. Agustin counters the argument, in part, by suggesting that it is not only anthropologists who research sex worker, and that it may be that Bindel is criticising a certain research method (ethnography). Agustin asked the question: What does it mean to suggest any subject should not be researched? I ask the same question here.

As an academic researcher who conducts research with vulnerable people, I am constantly aware of the ethics of such research and the effect that the research may have on the participants. I am, after all, going into their world from a very privileged position and I have to ensure, for example, that the research is not exploitative of, or will cause any distress to, participants. Indeed, when researchers are seeking ethical approval for their work, one of the main stumbling blocks is around the effects of the study on potentially vulnerable groups. But does that, simply put, mean that there are, or that there should be, no-go research areas?

In short, are there areas/ groups that should not be researched? And why?

Anti-depressants now kill your unborn child

There’s one thing I’m tired of and that’s hearing how ‘research’ has found that anti-depressants are bad for you. (Do you know if you take them for too long, your limbs fall off one by one?) Every time I read such a finding, I think of Tom Cruise’s rant about anti-depressants and how evil they are. I mean, for the love of the Gods (of Scientology), if Tom Cruise says it’s wrong, we know it must be right.

Anyway, the latest anti-anti-depressants decree maintains that anti-depressants are linked with a higher risk of miscarriage. The study, which was conducted at the the University of Montreal, examined 69,742 women from a a pregnancy register compiled in Quebec, 5,124 of whom had had a miscarriage. Among these women, 5.5% had had at least one prescription for an anti-depressant during their pregnancy, compared with 2.7% of the control group (presumably, those who were not on anti-depressants). Researchers calculated that those women who were on anti-depressants had a 68% higher risk of miscarriage than those who were not, and concluded that the findings indicate that the risk was greater for women who used two or more classes of anti-depressants.

Now, I don’t know the details of how these researchers did their analysis, but I’ve done some statistical analysis myself in my time. I’m thinking that it’s fairly unlikely that the very small proportional difference between those women who miscarried who were on anti-depressants and those who were not (5.5% vs. 2.7%) would be statistically significant, never mind that the likelihood of the former miscarrying was 68% higher. The difference between the two is so marginal that I cannot see where they could have got 68%. They also have not indicated how many women who were not on anti-depressants miscarried or how may who were did not. There is a lot more going in here than you first think.

And ultimately, this isn’t about warning the medical fraternity of the dangers of anti-depressants, it’s about contributing further to the swell of ‘rules’ that come from the medical industry which dictate what women are and are not allowed to do with their bodies. They should breast-feed, they should not be given drugs during birth, they should eat greens, they should not have caffeine. The lists go on and on and your choice during your pregnancy is constantly mediated by what ‘science’ dictates to you to do. This latest decree is particularly dangerous, however, because depression during pregnancy is very common and it is considerably more serious and important to consider than the effects of the odd cappuccino. It’s all too possible that new research will be released next week which will refute these findings and carry with it another rule about pregnancy, but we have to wait for that with baited breath.

In the meantime, I’d like to see a study coming out which concludes that women know what’s best for their own bodies, whether they’re pregnant or not, and that the decisions on what they do with their bodies should be left to them.