differenceblog, posts by tag: economics - LiveJournal

Tim Harford (2007) reports for Slate.com that women tend to order "fancy" coffee drinks more often than men. Economist Caitlin Knowles Myers (2007, PDF) sent undergraduate researchers to eight coffee shops in the Boston area, and found that even controlling for drink fanciness, men still got served quicker -- 20 seconds quicker on average. Although Myers acknowledges that there may be degrees of drink fanciness that were not controlled for, she concludes that discrimination is likely be to blame for this difference in service times. This finding is supported by the analysis that women waited even longer when shops were busy and longer when being served by male employees than by female employees.

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We've discussed coffee before, in terms of caffeine-seeking behavior (possibly higher in men) and neuroprotective effects of caffeine (probably higher for women). While looking for additional evidence of women ordering fancier coffee drinks, I tripped over this article from the New York Times (1899) on "the intemperance of women" in regards to caffeinated beverages, which I hope you'll enjoy for some historical perspective.

Thanks to cabanasloth for pointing out Myers (2007).

EDIT: Actually, it occurs to me that this is probably apropos of my Flickr post from yesterday about occasional cravings for convenience store "cappachino."

MSNBC reports that men are happier than women (video). MSNBC makes the uncited claim that women enjoy time with friends and family less than their male counterparts. The New York Times gives more detail, claiming that this is a shift from 20 years ago, when women reported more happiness than men.

Both studies sparking recent coverage are by economists. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers at University of Pennsylvania compared general quality of life assessments. Alan Krueger at Princeton used time survey data (Krueger, 2007, pdf) to suggest that women are unhappy for 90 more minutes per week than men. Krueger notes that men are spending less time doing "unpleasant" things and more time relaxing than 20 years ago, whereas this shift has not occurred for women.

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Oh, those busy, busy women. Seriously, I would really like to see more studies that compare single, childless men to single, childless women. Maybe I'll make a point of finding more of those next week. Yes, I know it's valid and generalizable to the human experience, but the whole "women are like X because of child-rearing responsibilities" bit is starting to get really old. Now, maybe my complaint is with fathers for spending less time contributing to the well-being of the family unit. Maybe my complaint is with mothers for setting unreasonable achievement goals. But I feel like my real complaint is with the use of the words "men and women" to mean "father and mothers."

Much of evolutionary psychology appears to hinge on the idea that men were hunters and women were gatherers, and that gendered traits evolved in response to the different needs of these goals. Hunter-Gatherer economies are thought to be the only mode of subsistence for humans for 2 million years, ending somewhere between 5,000-10,000 years ago.

Burton, Brudner, and White (1977) suggest that gendered division of hunter/gatherer patterns came about because "constraints of nursing and the effect of supplementary feeding of infants" restrict female participation in many activities (such as hunting). Goodman et al (1985), however, points out that the Aeta (or Agta) women in the Phillipines are able to actively participate in group and individual hunting "without detriment to normal fertility and child care." Lyn Wadley (1998) notes several examples of female hunters in Africa, as well as citing the Agta bow-women*.

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I am reserving judgment, for the time being, on hunter-gatherer gender differences. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me that women would not participate in hunting (since many early hunting strategies required many hunters), and even less that men would not gather. It's difficult to find sources that are not either "superiority of men" texts from the 1950's and earlier, or "feminist response" texts from the 1970's and 1980's. It does appear that female hunters may be an exception, rather than a majority, but it's hard for me to know what to think, given the strong bias on both sides of the debate.

Thanks to astrogeek01 for finding the Wadley article.

In the "ultimatum game", player 1 offers a division of a pool of money, and player 2 accepts or rejects the offer. If rejected, neither party benefits. The game is played only once, so relationship building and reciprocation are (theoretically) not factors. Terence Burnham (2007) suggests that men with higher testosterone are more likely to reject "stingy" offers, as described in The Economist (July 2007). Burnham suggests that this is related to status-seeking behaviour. Sara Solnick (2001), using a different variation of the ultimatum game, found that men received higher offers, especially from women, when the gender of the players was available (based on first-name gender). In an earlier study, Solnick and Schweitzer (1999) had found that men were offered more, and rejected less often for lower offers, while attractive people of both sexes were offered more, but rejected more often for lower offers.

Differences other than gender have also been identified. Oosterbeek et al's (2001) cultural meta-analysis found that people in the Western U.S. made fairer offers and rejected offers less often than people in Eastern U.S. states. Paraguay had the highest average offer rate, while Peru had the lowest. Guth et al (2007) in a three-person variant of the game, found that older people and women were more likely to offer "fair" shares, and that internet users were more selfish than people using fax or mail to respond.

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The sort of take-it-or-leave-it proposition created by the ultimatum game reminds me a lot of the no-haggle situations discussed last week in terms of salary negotiations. If Burnham's suggestion is correct, men will be more prepared to "leave it" than women will, at least under current social conditions. As for myself, I have to admit that I've always been deeply aware of rank and status. This awareness didn't make me uncomfortable prior to transition, but does now. I think the discomfort is more a factor of age, sanity, and social class than gender. I haven't really been able to shake the tendency, but I feel better keeping these judgments to myself now.

The Prisoner's Dilemma is an economic/altruism game model popular for testing gender differences in cooperation. John List (2006) studied the results of the game show Friend or Foe? which had a Prisoner's Dilemma-type premise, and found not only that all-male groups cooperated less than all-female groups, but that males tended to cooperate less with females than with other males. Ortmann and Tichy (1999) guessed that women would be more cooperative than men, and that this was true in the first round, but in subsequent rounds, men and women reacted similarly to the other players. Boone et al (1999) also found that women were slightly more cooperative than men, but found that all groups got more cooperative as the game was repeated. It is worth pointing out, however, that Frank et al (1993) found that the effect of studying economics was stronger than the effect of gender.

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The Prisoner's Dilemma game needs another option, which seems to be the one I see exercised most often. Rather than "I betray you to benefit myself" there needs to be a third option for "I betray you at a cost to myself, because it may hurt you more than it hurts me." I call it "revenge" and I see it crop up in men and women in real-life scenarios all the time.

Ichino and Moretti (2006) suggest that a substantial portion of the wage gap between men and women can be tied to menstrual cycles. Ichino and Moretti conclude that 11.8% of the earnings gap can be explained by absenteeism on a 28-day cycle. Slap's 2003 review suggests that 75% of adolescent girls suffer from problems associated with menstruation as well, and that this is a leading cause of doctor's visits among this group. In contrast, Hardie (1997) found no differences in absenteeism or work performance between women pre- during-, or post-menstrually and men.

Whether menstruation can or should be optional has been under investigation for some time. Loudon et al (1977) reported "enthusiastic" tolerance of an oral contraceptive regimen that reduced the number of periods nearly 30 years ago. More recently, Kaunitz (2000) pointed out that in modern society, women menstruate up to 3 times as often as in "primitive societies." Archer et al. (2006) reported this month that continuous oral contraception has similar safety and efficacy rates to cyclic oral contraception, a result that Reuters reported as meaning that ending periods was safe for most women (although this interpretation may be too broad).

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Patri Friedman drew my attention to Ichino and Moretti. I am interested to see how their research translates cross-culturally, since I can't speak to working conditions in Italy. Hardie's study, which focused on actual reported cyclic data, as opposed to Ichino and Moretti's 28-day assumption, feels more likely to be accurate to me, but I'm aware of a bias in my own thinking, since my menstrual symptoms were rarely severe. Hardie did find that "self-diagnosed" PMS did correlate with health and work problems, so these results obviously require closer scrutiny.

It's worth noting that in the last post about menstruation, it seemed that women were at their closest to male responses during their periods, which makes it seem odd that avoiding it would decrease the gender gap.

In "How Big is the Wage Gap" (8/15/2006), we looked at how differences in priorities led women to accept less pay for similar jobs, in exchange for more flexibility in hours or more time off. An alternative theory, such as that proposed by Groshen (1991) suggests that "sexual segregation", or the tendency for certain lower-paying fields to be female-dominated, was the primary reason for the wage gap. However, many recent studies suggest that this theory holds little promise.

Bayard et al (1999) concluded that even within female-dominated fields, women still tended to be paid less than men in the same jobs. Camille L. Ryan's analysis of 2001 data (published 2005) also confirmed the conclusion that women earned about 73% as much as men in the same fields, and that this gap was consistent across fields and levels of education. However, Ryan notes that women's labor force experience is more variable than men's within fields, and that the variability in women's earnings is partially explained by this, which points back to the "greater time away from work" hypothesis.

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Even before I was ready to admit to myself that I needed to live as a man to be happy, I joked that "if I had been born a man, I'd probably be a nurse or a teacher." I find it fairly amusing that in the same year that I transitioned from female to male, I also transitioned from a male-dominated job (theatre technician) to a female-dominated one (administrative assistant). My mother often insisted that I had a strong desire to be in the minority. I hope there's more to it than that.

Dittmar, Beatty, and Friese (1995) examined the differences in impulse buying between men and women. They found a much smaller gender effect than anticipated, and instead found that the greatest predictor was self-esteem at time of purchase. A 2006 report on internet buying habits reported by Lynn Russo found much larger differences in the way that men and women shop, as have Brunel University's Charles Dennis and Tamira King (2005). Both studies draw the hunter/gatherer parallel, but using opposing arguements.

The Resource Interactive study examined by Russo reported that men prefer to make deeper comparisons and prefer to read about the specifications of an item. Drs. Dennis and King found that women are more likely to comparison shop, whereas men will favor a trusted store or brand. How could these contradictory results both lend themselves to a hunter/gatherer metaphor?

The easy answer is that this was the easy answer. By tying in different buying habits to an accepted evolutionary model, the researchers were able to validate their hypothesis without deeper examination. The hunter/gatherer roles are so vaguely defined that any behavior could be matched to either role. Both studies seem to make valid suggestions as to the correct way to take advantage of the gender differences (based in their results), but the apparently irresistible urge to match the results to a caveman metaphor weakens, rather than reinforces, their credibility.