Fantasy football?

Another in a series of paradoxes:
It's amazing that in 2009, a professional football league for women was born - in which the players wear only helmets, shoulder pads, shoes and bikinis. It's full contact, with blocking, tackling, passing and injuries. "True fantasy football," as the Lingerie Football League describes itself. Fantasy for men, of course. Game videos show what appear to be athletic swimsuit models mixing it up on the field, being cheered on by bleachers full of male fans. While this may have created professional opportunities for women in sports, depending how one defines sport, it also calls into question how far we've really progressed in the forty years of the modern women's movement. The fans willing to buy tickets to these games surely are more interested in the sight of nearly naked female bodies wrestling each other to the ground than in the athletic ability on display.

If I were a resident of a Middle Eastern nation defending local practices that seemed to Western sensibilities to be demeaning to women, I would cite Lingerie Football as an example of Western hypocrisy.

Are bonobos retarded chimpanzees?

A group of researchers led by Harvard’s Richard Wrangham has sought to prove a theory that because the unusual food sharing behavior of bonobos is found in juvenile but not adult chimpanzees, we can think of bonobos as developmentally delayed chimpanzees. “Developmental delayed” is the politically correct replacement for “retarded.” Human behaviors more closely resemble those of chimpanzees than bonobos, so some may infer that the researchers began with the presumption that chimpanzee behaviors are more advanced. After all, aren’t humans the most advanced species on the planet, and isn’t capitalism – based on selfishness, not sharing – the most advanced exchange system? Humans, except when they attend Burning Man, don’t rely on a gift economy.

“Grumpiness is a sign of advanced civilisation” screamed one headline over a story about the research. Does Wrangham assume that selfish and conflict prone patriarchal chimpanzees are more advanced than matriarchal bonobos, peacemakers and sharers? If so, that offends both fans of peace and admirers of women. Putting aside the gender issue, Darwin himself recognized that cooperation is highly evolved way of helping one’s species survive. Before criticizing further, it’s worth examining how Wrangham’s gang came to their theory and their attempt to prove it.

They would argue they are simply trying to find a Darwinian mechanism to explain one of the key behavioral differences between the species, not to make a value judgment about them. The two species split from a common ancestor relatively recently, possibly less than a million years ago, but live in different habitats. Bonobos’ available food resources generally are far more abundant than chimpanzees’. The researchers presume that chimpanzee selfishness most likely was characteristic of the common ancestor of the two species in part because the species closest to them is us, and human children start out wired to behave selfishly and come to share only after considerable socialization. (Chimpanzee youngsters default to sharing, but then seem wired to learn by experience to be selfish to compete for scarce food.) Thus, in trying to explain the two species’ divergence, the scientists sought to explain the evolution of sharing in bonobos rather than selfishness in chimpanzees.

In formulating their developmental delay theory, the researchers observed that chimpanzees’ brain structures change more from childhood to adulthood than do bonobos’. For additional support, they looked to a famous long term experiment involving Siberian silver foxes bred for greater tameness. Those foxes retain more juvenile physical characteristics into adulthood that did wild foxes, leading to the conclusion that natural selection for peacefulness also tends to select for individuals with more juvenile characteristics. Also, sexual dimorphism – size differences between the genders – is less in these tame foxes, as it is in bonobos as compared to chimpanzees. Perhaps the researcher also were inspired by the fact that bonobos appear less muscular than chimpanzees and their calls are higher pitched.

All of these phenomena support the theory that a mechanism for making a species less aggressive is for natural selection to favor individuals with more juvenile characteristics. As the authors of the study say, “This idea does not imply that bonobos are juvenilized globally; instead, it suggests that juvenilization has occurred in a set of traits that are genetically linked.”

The thirty chimps and thirty bonobos in the study were in “semi-captivity” on Congo reserves for apes orphaned by the bushmeat trade. Assuming it would even be possible to replicate the experiments on wild animals, the same results might not be obtained in a wild population. In one part of the experiment , the researchers observed pairs of either chimpanzees or bonobos in an enclosure with food. Younger chimpanzees shared food with each other at about the as much as either young or adult bonobos. Adult chimpanzees shared much less than juveniles, while bonobos’ tendency did not change with age.

Testing young apes’ skills of social discrimination, three experimenters stood side-by-side, arms outstretched toward the each subject, who were either infants, age two to four, or adolescents, age five to seven. After a few trials is which all three experimenters held food and then just two adjacent ones did, in the experimental trial only the two on the outside reached into a food container in view of the subjects and only those two then had food concealed in their hands. The chimpanzees soon only begged from outsiders with food and not from the one without in the middle. There was no difference in skill between infant chimpanzees and adolescent chimpanzees. Infant bonobos performed much less well, but adolescents performed as well as the chimpanzees. The authors of the study saw this as evidence that bonobos are developmentally delayed compared to chimpanzees.

The second social experiment tested adolescent and adult apes, and for each trial employed two experimenters. One had food and the other did not. Halfway through the trial, their roles changed. Again, chimpanzees of both ages did well recognizing the switch in their begging, while adolescent bonobos did not and only adult bonobos eventually did as well as the chimpanzees.

The begging experiments using the experimenters as objects of begging are fraught with design biases and value judgments. The authors describe these trials as simulating what the apes would experience in feeding with intolerant individuals. But what evidence is there that adult apes switch their generosity on and off toward particular individuals in their group several times day? Even if one stretches things enormously regarding what chimpanzees experience in the wild, this most certainly is not what bonobos deal with. Thus, the experiment was designed to test skills that chimps have, but bonobos don’t, and as such is a self-fulfilling prophesy: chimpanzees are better at chimpanzee skills than bonobos are.

The authors argue that if characteristics don’t change with age, that is a sign of retention of juvenile characteristics. In the social discrimination experiments, the chimpanzees did not change as they got older, but the bonobos did. Which species most retains its juvenile characteristics? To be complete, they’d have to design some tests at which bonobos excel, and see if chimpanzees fall behind bonobos of the same age. If they did could we then say that chimps are retarded?

Maybe sharing, which has to be taught to human children, is the more advanced adult trait. Maybe it is chimpanzees that lack self-control, much as we often label a selfish adult human as immature. Perhaps the bonobos’ advanced brains, despite their relative lack of structural change in adulthood, can see forward in time and better recognize the concept of future reciprocity of reward for present sharing, which the chimps cannot do as well. Maybe bonobos, known for their greater communication skills, assume that begging to humans with food, as well as those without, maximizes their chances of success. By soliciting to the foodless humans, perhaps the bonobos believe they are encouraging those humans to beg from those with food, thereby increasing the odds that will get something in the exchange instead of nothing. This might make sense in the context of bonobo culture, even if in the context of their cultures human experimenters and chimpanzees don’t get it.

Putting aside any value judgments about the apes’ cultures and just talking about the mechanism of natural selection for peaceableness, one prominent behavioral biologist criticized the experiment saying, “Unfortunately, their results just don't support their conclusions” But he did concede, “There seems to be something there, and they're probably right about what it is.”

The Flat Decade

Another in a series of paradoxes:
Decades ago, in principal at least, we committed to equal pay for women for equal work and equal representation in leadership positions. But U.S. women’s progress toward equality so far in the new century can be called the flat decade. It’s as if feminism hit a societal glass ceiling.

The average gender pay gap for workers without a four-year college degree has slightly narrowed since the mid-1990s, in part due to effects of the Great Recession that began in 2007 described below. Surprisingly, the gap has widened for those with degrees. For example, a study of doctors’ salaries in New York State in first jobs after residency eliminated the effects of inflation, hours worked, practice settings, and specialty choices. It found a $3,600 annual gap between men and women in 1999, but a much larger gap of $16,819 in 2008.

Although the aggregate effect of these opposite trends narrowed the average gender pay gap across all occupations by a few percentage points in the first decade of the new century, the median annual gender pay gap for full time workers reduced by less than one percentage point, despite much greater progress in earlier decades. The median is the income of that man or woman whose income is greater than the lowest half of those workers in his or her respective gender, and also less than the higher half. (Given that a relatively small number of those at the top of the income ladder earn very high wages, the average income is higher than the median.) One explanation for the stagnation in the median gap is that even though women made up fifty percent of the total workforce in 2010, they remained stuck at sixty percent of those in low wage jobs.

One might see some progress in the fact that while women lost the most jobs in the recession of 2001, men held more than three-quarters of the jobs lost during the Great Recession. But a New York Times’ analysis gave feminists little cause for comfort. First, it said the Great Recession hit male dominated industries such as finance and construction the hardest. The Times’ second explanation went straight to the heart of the earnings paradox: because of the wage disparity between men and women, women were in greater demand in the Great Recession because they are willing to work for less than similarly qualified men. Public sector layoffs caused by the recession subsequently increased women’s overall unemployment even as private sector jobs began to recover, because women hold a large majority of public sector jobs. In addition, opposite trends in unemployment rates by gender combined with public sector pay cuts and freezes exacerbated the wage gap rather than narrowed it.


In 2010, a General Accountability Office study examining the most recent data found that between 2000 and 2007 the percentage of women managers grew by only one percent. And growth at the top was flat in the first decade of the new century. In 2002, fewer than sixteen percent of corporate officers in Fortune 500 companies were women, and women held just ten percent of the positions with direct responsibility for profit and loss. In 2008, it was the same.

Although there was some progress in the number of women on boards of directors in the first half of the decade, there was nearly none in the last half. As of 2006, women remained less than fifteen percent of the board directors for Fortune 500 companies. Nearly half of these companies had just one woman or no women on their boards. Stung by criticism for their lack of diversity, by 2008 only thirteen percent of Fortune 500 companies had no women on their boards. But the overall percentage of women on boards barely changed, so this was not progress but rather merely reshuffling the deck. The total number of board positions decreased slightly during this period, which means that for every company that added a woman, another with at least two on its board dropped one. By 2010, women broad members still were less than sixteen percent of the total.

It’s probably not a coincidence that law firm management shows similar percentages. A survey in 1999 found that only sixteen percent of the equity partners in the one hundred largest American law firms were women. Another survey in 2009 found the equity partner percentage had not changed.

Because of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin’s historic bids in the Presidential race, and Nancy Pelosi’s ascendency to Speaker of the House, some believe that women made significant gains in elective politics in twenty-first century America. But the sad truth is that women’s hold on political power in the U.S. seems by some measures to no longer be increasing and may even be declining. The percentage of women in elected statewide offices in 2008 shrunk to its lowest level since 1994, at twenty-three percent. It fell half a percent lower still in 2010. In 2008, women were mayors in only eleven of the one hundred largest American cities, a drop of four percentage points from just a few years before. The percentage of women mayors in American cities of at least 30,000 persons was less than sixteen percent in 2008, down five percentage points from 1999. Female representation in state legislatures basically flatlined at twenty-three percent starting in 1999.

In 1997, the U.S. ranked forty-first internationally for female representation in national legislatures. By 2008, the U.S. had fallen to seventieth. At this rate, the U.S. could be at the bottom of the rankings in just two decades.

It’s ironic that in the fourth decade of the modern women’s movement many indicators of women’s participation in government and business are flat, and some are negative. Building on prior efforts, nearly all these indicators should at this point be climbing. But they’re not. A decade from now, will we be looking back at another ten years of zero or minimal growth? Without determined national effort, it’s a distinct possibility.

What would happen if we turned our thinking upside down and:

• Oprah gave all of her billions to journalist and women’s rights crusader William Kristof to spend on projects to help women?
• Bill Gates announced that the other half of his foundations’ billions not devoted to vaccines henceforth would go to projects to help women and girls?
• Every member of the NBA making over one million dollars a year made a public service spot against domestic violence or rape and paid to air it on TV shows aimed at the young male demographic?
• The U.S. ratified the international treaty banning gender discrimination, the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)?
• The Federal government and all companies and organizations receiving federal funds were required to offer flexible workplace policies and reduced schedule options to all employees?
• The U.S. went from seventy-fourth in world rankings of women’s percentages in national legislatures, where it is in the company of Albania and Turkmenistan, to fourth?