differenceblog, posts by tag: statistics canada - LiveJournal

A Canadian article leads with the headline: "Women offenders more likely to commit property crimes than men" (Prince George Citizen, 2008). The article is based on a new report from Statistics Canada (2008)) which found that 47% of females accused of a crime by Canadian police were accused of property crime, compared to 39% of males accused by police. One in five persons accused by police were female in this study.

In Green Bay, Mick Hager (2008) comments that "Income gap, not gender gap, explains differences." Differences in men's and women's income is based on differences in work habits (according to "research"), claims Hager, a "business author and professional speaker." Hager says he'd like to join in the lawsuit when employers "openly discriminating" against women are found.

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While looking for a topic this morning, both of these small-time pieces caught my eye - the first because the headline was so misleading, and the second because the premise was just wrong and offensive. First: the StatsCan study shows that female offenders are more likely to be property criminals than male offenders. Or at least, that they're less likely to be arrested for non-property crimes. I suspect there's a serious reporting bias. How many men are going to call the cops when their girlfriend threatens them?

As for Hager, long-time readers of Difference Blog will recognize that I'm a big fan of pointing out alternate explanations for income disparities. Negotiation skills are a major factor (7/31/07, 4/13/07), and absenteeism explains some of the gap, too (12/18/06). However, the most damning evidence in favor of a pay gap, in my mind, is that women earn 80% of what men as soon as 1 year out of college (4/24/07)

The U.S. Census report "Journey to Work: 2000" (pdf) reported that men spent an average of 27.2 minutes getting to work, while women spent an average of 23.6 minutes. Statistics Canada (Marshall 2006, pdf) reported a bigger gap: 36 to 24 minutes. McGuckin and Murakami (1999) suggest that women's greater household responsibilities lead them to choose jobs closer to home. They also point out that women are more likely to run household errands during their commute. Heather MacDonald's 1999 review also ties differences in household responsibility to women's commuting decisions. Singell and Lillydahl (1986) suggested that the (usually male) breadwinner's job location was given more weight in residential moving decisions than the (usually female) secondary earner's job location.

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Singell and Lillydahl state "traditional theory ... postulated that males (or primary earners) view their job location as fixed and decide on a utility maximizing residential location while married women view their residential location as fixed and decide on a utility maximizing job location." I've suggested a similar theory myself, in "Take this job and keep it" (2/28/2007), but the evidence that women's commute times are shorter is making me question my perception on this.

Time spent on homework, according to Hofferth et al (2001) has "substantial variation by age": as children get older, they tend to have greater workloads. Hofferth et al found that "girls read less per week than boys, but, with age, their reading time increased relative to that of boys," but this included both reading for pleasure and homework reading.

In the current issue of Perspectives on Labour and Income by Statistics Canada, Katherine Marshall (2007) discusses the results of a recent survey of Canadian teens: girls did 10.3 hours of homework per week, on average, compared to 8.1 hours for boys. Marshall says this is consistent with results in most industrialized countries. For example, Statistics Netherlands reported about 1.75 hours daily for girls, versus about 1.50 hours daily for boys, according to CBS Netherlands (2001).

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I did very little homework as a kid, or in college. I was one of those really annoying kids who did the bare minimum and still did decently well, although I was hardly valedictorian material. Oh, wait, I still am. My study habits have improved slightly with age, but I suspect that's more related to the fact that I pay for my own education now, so I'm more determined to get value out of it. However, I have learned in my night courses that if I need to miss a class and want to get notes from someone, I ought to ask a woman, and the older, the better. When I've attended study sessions, the gender balance is far more female-skewed than the classes themselves.

Zhang (2007), in a report for Statistics Canada reported that Canadian women were now no more likely to quit a job than men. The data analyzed were from the Longitudinal Worker File (LWF), an ongoing survey of a 10% sample of Canadian workers. In 1984, 5.5% of Canadian men quit their jobs, compared to 7.0% of women, but by 1994, the women's quitting rate had dropped to 5.6% while men's quit rate remained stable. In 2002, 7.6% of men and 7.7% of women had quit their jobs. While the study suggests that maternity leave is a major factor (4.2% of women took temporary maternity leave in 2002), it does not say whether Canadian legislation has changed the availability of maternity leaves during the period studied. The study also does not attempt to explain the dramatic rise in both men's and women's quit rates between 1994 and 2002.

In the United States, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has a similar tool to the LWF, the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth (NLSY). NSLY data is collected from a "nationally representative" cohort. (12,686 in 1979, and 9,000 for the 1997 cohort). Royalty (1998) concluded from NLSY-79 data that gender differences in voluntary job-to-job and job-to-unemployment mobility were due to the behaviour of less-educated women. The differences in job mobility were significantly different for less educated women than from more educated women, and men in both categories.

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I never quit a job for pregnancy and never missed a day of work or school due to menstrual issues, but thinking about this article, I realize that I did quit a job to follow a lover. It seems like many of the heterosexual couples I know relocate based on the man's job prospects more readily than they do for the woman's job prospects. When the man is making more money than the woman, increased priority to his job seems to make financial sense, but if the woman's income is hampered by increased job leaving, then what does that prove?