Noli Irritare Leones

Yalie study links:

Kieran Healy critiques the article at length:

But as usual, the article is steeped with the standard way of framing the issue, viz, only women have work-family choices. It’s up to them to be “realistic”, while of course the male students do not have any work-family choices at all. The subtext of the piece is the indirect vindication of those crusty old bastards in the 1950s who couldn’t see why they should hire, say, Sandra Day O’Connor because she’d only be taking a place away from a man with a family.

Kieran also follows up with Some Data on Families in the Workforce

The timing of the declines in both dual-earner families and mothers’ labor force participation look to me as though they are driven by sensitivity to prevailing labor market conditions rather than any widespread change in attitudes to work and motherhood. But what do I know? At any rate, it’s good to have a resource like the BLS to hand, if only to add a bit of context to your survey of 60-odd Yale and Harvard students.

Matt Yglesias adds:

Because the workforce dropouts seem to largely be women, often mothers of young children, rather than identifying as “unemployed” these women are identifying as stay-at-home moms. The failure of wages to rise (the classic sign of a tight labor market) suggests that many of these women are not, functionally speaking, out of the labor force (the way that, say, severely disabled people are) and that their presence in the population continues to depress wage growth.

I’m enough of a Marxist to lean strongly toward the second interpretation. What people experience as a cultural shift is, in fact, an economic one. People don’t like to think of themselves as unemployed (all the hedonics literature indicates that it makes people very sad, independent of the direct economic consequences) so given circumstances where it’s plausible to consider oneself something other than unemployed, one will be strongly inclined to do so. If the economy started growing faster, this trend would reverse and we’d start hearing about a cultural shift in favor of working mothers and articles about the beneficial effects of day care on childhood social development.

Indeed, I’ve noticed that friends who are laid off and are fathers of young children will sometimes say, if their wives are gainfully employed, that they’re being stay at home dads for a little while.

Mary Garth writes:

These stories–the latest one, as well as the Lisa Belkin’s earlier Times Magazine story and all the drek by Sylvia Hewlett–are important, not because of some objective, representative truth they have identified that exists in the world (because, as Fred and I have both noted in the past, the majority of women with young children are not “opting out”), but because of “truths” of a sort that their authors, and people like them, are in the process of creating.

Who are these people, why do they feel the need to create these “truths,” and why does what they say matter anyhow? They are, for the most part, a small group (in overall population terms) of baby boomer (or early post-boomer) women of tremendous privilege who married hyper-ambitious assholes who never had any intention of sharing parenting equally with them.

Mary’s husband, Fred Vincy, writes:

(1) Is there a trend? I don’t know. And neither does Story, as Ann Bartow, Kevin Drum, and many others have noted. However, Story quotes a senior Yale historian with a specialty in the history of American women, Harvard’s director of admissions, the Dean of Yale College, and the Chair of the Yale Women’s and Gender Studies Studies Program who all seem to think there has been a change compared to the prior generation of students. …

(2) Why might there be a trend? This is a significant point, and one that Story does not address. It seems to me that there is something of a cottage industry out there bashing working mothers. Off the top of my head, I think of Sylvia Hewlett, Lisa Belkin (to whom I will return in a moment), Jane Swift, I Don’t Know How She Does It, and The Nanny Diaries, but feel free to substitute your own favorite examples (Mrs. Doubtfire, Dr. Laura, etc., etc.). ….

Given these messages, and the overarching anti-feminist backlash saturating our culture, I find it unsurprising that there may indeed be the kind of trend Story suggests. Young people, even young people at Yale (or maybe, as Elizabeth suggests, especially young people at Yale) are forming their views of the world and are, naturally, influenced by the culture around them — and the culture around them is telling young women to scale back their professional aspirations.

And Barry reports that a Yale student says she was misquoted in the New York Times story.

Catholic Church hoopla links:

I said I wouldn’t link any more on the alleged document that would bar gay seminarians until it comes out and we all get to see the actual wording, but I’ll break that promise to link this excellent post by David Morrison (Catholic chastely living with same sex attraction, author of Beyond Gay, and member of Courage). Courageman also comments.

Many of you may have already noticed that a grand jury has released a report on sexual abuse in the diocese of Philadelphia. The story is being heavily covered by the Philadelphia Inquirer. Further links:

The usual monster thread at Amy Welborn’s blog.

Archdiocese responses

Rocco, a Catholic blogger from Philadelphia, has been reporting on the situation.

Classical Values, a non-Catholic Philadelphia blogger, points out a Philadelphia Inquirer round up of blogosphere reactions.

My husband is outraged.

And I’m surprised to find that almost nobody except for Joe Cecil jumps on the fact that this particular archdiocese was one that was noted for actually having a rule completely barring gay seminarians. I was actually expecting my secular gay and secular feminist Bloglines reads (or at least the ones that have been getting upset over the Vatican seminary visitation news) to be all over that. I’m reminded of an earlier point when Archbishop O’Malley said something that really upset most of the secular feminist bloggers I read, and everyone commenting seemed oblivious to the fact that the guy had been brought into Boston because he was actually one of the few bishops who had a good record on sex abuse cases (I say this because people at the time seemed to be seeing him as another hypocritical, as well as sexist, Catholic bishop, and while he may be sexist, he’s probably less hypocritical than most). I guess most of the secular blogs aren’t up on the differences (for better or worse) between the various Catholic bishops, and the various diocesan policies. Maybe I shouldn’t expect them to be.

David Morrison, however, publishes two letters to him on the alleged new impending document on gay/homosexual/living with a degree of SSA/pick your word seminarians, and one of these quotes a blog by someone who went and checked the abusers described in the grand jury report, and their offenses, against the year (1988) that Philadelphia instituted the policy of not admitting even celibate gay men (four graduated after 1988).

Other faith-oriented links:

Todd of Catholic Sensibility on The Thread of Charity.

And, because we’ve got to have a Gnostic to balance out a Catholic, here’s Jeremy defending belief in a Demiurge.

Hurricane related links:

How scientists estimate hurricane Rita’s wind speeds.

Here’s what my sister might see if a category 2 hurricane ever comes her way.

Jeanne d’Arc on The “R” word.

Maurice Bernstein of Bioethics Discussion blog complains:

It is worrisome that those in government should be so casual in broadcasting the need for public evacuation of an area by hundreds of thousands or millions of residents in a day or two without doing the most basic analysis of the consequences of that order. With no provision for making the evacuation efficient (allowing travel out on both outgoing and incoming freeway lanes) or practical (providing access to gasoline for vehicles running low on gas) or safe (formally providing sources of water, preventing heat exhaustion, etc), the government again showed a flaw in behavior that is, to me, of concern. What happened was equivalent to a fire in a theater, the audience told to leave, but some of the exit doors had not been unlocked. Is this thoughtlessness, with the consequence of doing harm to the evacuees, an example of even worse inattention and inactions by the government to come?

Local officials across the country try to figure out how not to screw up an evacuation in the ways that New Orleans and Houston did. Living near Los Angeles, and being self-centered, I naturally jumped ahead to the LA part of the article, where I learn that:

Los Angeles, the nation’s second-most-populous city, sits atop a spider web of earthquake faults, several of which could slip with devastating consequences, leveling large parts of the city and touching off widespread fires and explosions. But the city has no plan for moving and sheltering the large number of people who would be made homeless by such a disaster, officials concede.

“What happened in Houston is very significant,” said Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa of Los Angeles. “What they’ve demonstrated is the difficulties in evacuating that number of people. We’re a much larger area. If you’d ever have to evacuate that number of people here, there’s no question it would be problematic.”

But let’s look on the bright side. The Big One will give us no warning at all, so at least we don’t have to worry about the problems of evacuating before the earthquake hits.

Oh, and the real good news is that, last I checked, Rita is now a Category 1 storm. Please continue to dwindle, Rita.

More good news; Lindsay lets us know that the traffic situation is improving around Houston. She also links a site on Best Practices for Road Weather Management. (Now I really wish I could still ask my traffic scientist father about this stuff.) And here are her suggestions of blogs/websites to track the weather situation in the Gulf Coast.

And here’s Slate on evacuation gridlock and what to do about it.

Environment links:

Karen Street on Changing Views of Nuclear Power.

Climate change hurts Africa most: scientists:

Africa contributes least to global climate change, but is bearing the brunt of the phenomenon that is expected to exacerbate food shortages in the long term, scientists warned on Thursday.

Global warming has been blamed for increased cycles of drought across Africa, where millions this year face hunger and starvation.

Africa news links:

From Botswana, a story about a mining company responding to the fact that more than half of its employees are now HIV positive.

Ghana looks to “goat serum” to fight the AIDS epidemic.

In South Africa, Churchmen Move Towards Disclosing Their HIV-Positive Status.

Torture:

Marty Lederman analyzes memos related to torture, from the Office of Legal Counsel, in Silver Linings (or, the Strange But True Fate of the Second (or was it the Third?) OLC Torture Memo).

The Huffington Post on an investigation into new allegations of prisoner abuse.

Science:

Pharyngula has a cute baby octopus picture and an explanation of how cephalopods manage a nasty bite without any skeleton to back it up.

Down’s Syndrome Mice Offer Hope.

Iraq:

Juan Cole and Gilbert Achcar debate how the US should withdraw from Iraq. OK, I lied, I haven’t actually read this one all through yet, but it looked interesting when I skimmed it, and I want to come back and read it later. And here’s a further exchange (which I also haven’t read yet, but mean to) between Juan Cole and Helena Cobban, on the same topic of how to withdraw from Iraq.

Eliminating a bit of sausage pork department:

Atrios notices an interesting cut in Operation Offset.

Bloggers versus censorship:

Wired on Tips for the Crusading Blogger.

Saving this one for later, so I can get around to doing it for myself: How to make sure the Blogs4God aggregator has your latest posts.

UPDATE: Oops, posted just too soon. Brooklyn Quaker has a retraction of his earlier retraction. There really was a doctor in New Orleans who managed to post an account of his heroic efforts.

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