Coronavirus "Truthers" and Men Without Masks

Two articles related to coronavirus crossed my newsfeed this morning. First is an inside look at the various Coronavirus "Truth" sites on Facebook, which peddle a variety of misinformation - from the argument that mask-wearing is a prelude to the imposition of Sharia law to masks as a way to increase child sex trafficking:

Just searching “coronavirus” will take you to a host of legitimate resources: pages for the CDC, the World Health Organization and the American Medical Association. But add a word like “truth” and suddenly you’re on a different planet: groups that exist as safe spaces for coronavirus skeptics to share theories of what’s really going on.

For every post or meme that bears a “False Information” label and links to fact-checking sites, there are dozens that elude this moderation, often as they do not present a debunkable statement. How exactly are you supposed to disprove the notion that face-mask enforcement is a prelude to some requirement that women wear the Muslim niqab?

The misinformation is so diversified (yet interconnected and overlapping) that you are bound to find your personal bogeyman at the bottom of the rabbit hole. These memes and talking points are made to frighten while appealing to your “common sense,” to flatter your intellect as it suckers you in with specious “logic” and emotional whataboutery.

Sadly, I've seen a lot of these memes and specious arguments on the pages of friends and acquaintances.

The second article discusses research that attempts to explain why men are being hit harder with Coronavirus: performative masculinity:

Poll after poll, most recently a Gallup poll from July 13, has found American men are more likely to not wear masks compared to women. Specifically, the survey found that 34 percent of men compared to 54 percent of women responded they “always” wore a mask when outside their home and that 20 percent of men said they “never” wore a mask outside their home (compared to just 8 percent of women).

Tyler Reny, a postdoctoral research fellow at Washington University in St. Louis, found [similar results] by combing through data from the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape project, a public opinion survey that’s been interviewing more than 6,000 Americans about the virus per week since March 19.

“Those who had more sexist attitudes were far less likely to report feeling concerned about the pandemic, less likely to support state and local coronavirus policies, less likely to take precautions like washing their hands or wearing masks, and more likely to get sick than those with less sexist attitudes,” Reny told me. “What I found is that sexist attitudes are very predictive of all four sets of [aforementioned] outcomes, even after accounting for differences in partisanship, ideology, age, education, and population density.”

Stay healthy, stay informed, and please:

I'm More Sad About This Show Ending than Game of Thrones

Like many, I eagerly waited to see how the game of thrones would end. I tore through the books available at the time shortly before the first season of Game of Thrones aired, and look forward to reading how George R.R. Martin himself would write the ending of the story.

And like many, I was disappointed in the turns taken by Game of Thrones that felt inauthentic to the characters. Especially, this was a show that failed many of its female characters. They took Brienne, who we watched grow into a strong, independent, and honorable knight, and reduced her to Carrie F***ing Bradshaw. They justified the horrible things that had happened to Sansa as character-building. (No one can make you be someone you're not. Sansa, the strength was inside you all the time. Littlefinger and Ramsay don't get credit for that. If anyone does, it's the strong women in your life, like Brienne and Arya.)

But while I'm disappointed in how the show ended, and a little sad that it's gone, I'm honestly more sad that this show is over:

Who would have guessed that a musical comedy TV show would take on some very important issues with such authenticity? Here's just a few of them (some spoilers ahead, so read on only if you've watched the show or don't care about being spoiled):

Women's Issues
Just as a short list, this show tackled periods, abortion, women's sexuality, motherhood, and body image in a way that never felt cheap, judgmental, or cliché. It was the first network show to use the word "clitoris." The relationships between the women on the show felt real and the conversations were about more than simply the men in their lives. It didn't glamorize women's bodies - in fact, it pulled back the curtain on many issues related to women's appearance and projection of themselves to the world.

Men's Issues
The show didn't just represent women authentically - the men were fully realized characters too, and never props or plot devices. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend explored men's relationships, fatherhood, and toxic masculinity and how it affects men.

Mental Health
I could probably write an entire blog post just on how this show represents mental health issues. The main character, Rebecca Bunch, is diagnosed with borderline personality disorder in season 3. And in fact, the show was building up to and establishing that diagnosis from the very beginning. The show constantly made us rethink the word "crazy" and helped to normalize many mental health issues - and when I say normalize, I mean show us that these issues are common and experienced by many people, while still encouraging those struggling with mental health issues to seek help.

The show also tackled issues like low self-esteem, self-hatred, suicide, and alcoholism, without ever glamorizing them. Instead, it encouraged us to take better care of ourselves, and recognize when we have a problem we can't handle ourselves.

Bisexuality
When bisexuals show up in other movies or TV shows, they're often portrayed as promiscuous - people who are bi because they want to have sex with everyone. Either that, or they portray it, especially among men, as someone who is actually gay but not comfortable with coming fully out of the closet. Not Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

Race and Ethnicity
This show has a diverse cast. And unlike many shows with "diversity," none of the characters are tokens. In fact, race and ethnicity aren't referenced so much as heritage. Further, the show pokes fun at the token concept. One great episode deals with Heather's ethnicity. Her boss, Kevin, encourages her to join a management training program because she is "diverse." Later, he gives her a gift to apologize for his insensitivity: a sari, because he assumes she is Indian. She corrects him; her father is African-American and her mother is White. The extra layer here is that the actress who plays Heather, Vella Lovell, has been mistakenly called Indian in the media, when she, like her character, is African-American and White. So this episode not only makes fun of the concept of the token, it also makes fun of the media trying so hard to ascertain and define an actor by her race.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, I'm really going to miss you.

On Books, Bad Marketing, and #MeToo

I recently read a book I absolutely loved. Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll really got to me and got under my skin in a way few books have. When I went to Goodreads to give the book a 5-star rating, I was shocked at so many negative reviews of 1 and 2 stars. What did I see in this book that others didn't? And what did others see in the book that I didn't?

Nearly all of the negative reviews reference Gone Girl, a fantastic book by one of my new favorite authors, Gillian Flynn. And in fact, Knoll's book had an unfortunate marketing team that sold her book as the "next Gone Girl." Gone Girl this book is not, and that's okay. In fact, it's a bad comparative title, which can break a book. The only thing Ani, the main character in Luckiest Girl Alive has in common with Amy is that they both tried to reinvent themselves to be the type of girl guys like: the cool girl. Oh, and both names begin with A (kind of - Ani's full name is Tifani). That's about it.

While Gone Girl is a twisted tale about the girl Amy pretended to be, manipulating everyone along the way, Luckiest Girl Alive is the case a girl who was drugged and victimized by 4 boys at her school, then revictimized when they turned her classmates against her, calling her all the names we throw so easily at women: slut, skank, an so on. No one believed her, and she was ostracized. She responded by putting as much distance as she could from the events of the past and the person she was, hoping that with the great job, the handsome and rich fiance, designer clothes, and a great body (courtesy of a wedding diet that's little more than an eating disorder), she can move past what happened to her. She becomes bitter and compartmentalized (and also shows many symptoms of PTSD), which may be why some readers didn't like the book and had a hard time dealing with Ani.

I know what's it like to be Ani. Like her, and so many women, I have my own #MeToo story. And I know what it's like to have people I love react like Ani's fiance and mother, who'd rather pretend the events in her past never happened, who change the subject when it's brought up. It's not that we fixate on these things. But those events change us, and when a survivor needs to talk, the people she cares about need to listen, understand, and withhold judgment.

That marketing team failed Jessica Knoll for what should have been a harsh wakeup call in the age of #MeToo, to stop victim blaming. Just like Ani's classmates failed her. And just like nearly everyone close to her failed Amber Wyatt, a survivor of sexual assault who was recently profiled in a Washington Post article (via The Daily Parker).

Given these reactions, it's no wonder many sexual assaults go unreported. Some statistics put that proportion at 80% or higher, with more conservative estimates at 50%. And unfortunately, the proportion of unreported sexual assaults is higher when the victim knows the attacker(s). They're seen as causing trouble, rocking the boat, or trying to save face after regretting a consensual encounter. It's time we start listening to and believing women.

Statistical Sins: Gender and Movie Ratings

Though I try to feature my only content/analysis/thoughts in my statistics posts, occasionally, I encounter a really well-done analysis that I'd rather feature instead. So today, for my statistical sins post, I encourage you to check out this excellent analysis from FiveThirtyEight that uncovers what would qualify as a statistical sin. You see, when conducting opinion polling, it's important to correct for discrepancies between the characteristics of a sample versus population, characteristics like gender. But apparently, IMDb ratings also show discrepancies, where men often outnumber women in rating different movies, sometimes as much as 10-to-1. And if you want to put together definitive lists of best movies, you either need to caveat the drastic differences between population and raters, or make it clear that the results are heavily skewed by one gender.

The Academy Awards rightly get criticized for reflecting the preferences of a small, unrepresentative sample of the population, but online ratings have the same problem. Even the vaunted IMDb Top 250 — nominally the best-liked films ever — is worth taking with 250 grains of salt. Women accounted for 52 percent of moviegoers in the U.S. and Canada in 2016, according to the most recent annual study by the Motion Picture Association of America. But on the internet, and on ratings sites, they’re a much smaller percentage.

We’ll start with every film that’s eligible for IMDb’s Top 250 list. A film needs 25,000 ratings from regular IMDb voters to qualify for the list. As of Feb. 14, that was 4,377 titles. Of those movies, only 97 had more ratings from women than men. The other 4,280 films were mostly rated by men, and it wasn’t even close for all but a few films. In 3,942 cases (90 percent of all eligible films), the men outnumbered the women by at least 2-to-1. In 2,212 cases (51 percent), men outnumbered women more than 5-to-1. And in 513 cases (12 percent), the men outnumbered the women by at least 10-to-1.

Looking strictly at IMDb’s weighted average — IMDb adjusts the raw ratings it gets “in order to eliminate and reduce attempts at vote stuffing,” but it does not disclose how — the male skew of raters has a pretty significant effect. In 17 percent of cases, the weighted average of the male and female voters was equal, and in another 26 percent of cases, the votes of the men and women were within 0.1 points of one another. But when there was bigger disagreement — i.e. men and women rated a movie differently by 0.2 points or more, on average — the overall score overwhelmingly broke closer to the men’s rating than the women’s rating. The score was closer to the men’s rating more than 48 percent of the time and closer to the women’s rating less than 9 percent of the time, meaning that when there was disagreement, the male preference won out about 85 percent of the time.

In the article, a table of the top 500 movies (based on weighted data) demonstrates how gender information impacts these rankings - for each movie, the following are provided: what the movie is currently rated, how it would be rated based on women or men only, and how it would be rated when data are weighted to reflect discrepancies in the proportion of men and women. Movies like The Shawshank Redemption (#1) and The Silence of the Lambs (#23) would generally remain mostly unchanged. Movies like Django Unchained (#60) and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (#218) would move up to #34 and #50, respectively, while Seven Samurai (#19) and Braveheart (#75) would move down to #59 and #112, respectively. And finally, movies that never made it on to the top 250 list, like Slumdog Millionaire and The Nightmare Before Christmas, would have rankings of #186 and #199, respectively.

Interesting Analysis on Reasons for Congressional Resignations - And the Impact of #MeToo

According an interesting article from FiveThirtyEight, more people are resigning from Congress recently than we've seen at any other point in the last 117 years:

The 115th Congress owes its historic turnover to the confluence of two events, one normal and one abnormal. First, there’s the start of a new presidential administration. Five of the first six members to resign this session did so to accept jobs in President Trump’s administration. That’s not unusual. It’s similar to the seven members who resigned in 2009 to join the Obama administration and the five members who left in 1993 to join Bill Clinton’s.

But in addition, three of the four most recent members to resign from the 115th Congress did so because they were accused of unwanted sexual advances: John Conyers, Trent Franks and Al Franken.

The article features this graph, which shows number of resignations and reasons over time, annotated with major events occurring at that time:

On the Debate Over Consent and #MeToo

When the #MeToo movement first appeared, and many of my friends and acquaintances were using it to share their stories, I hesitated. Not because I didn't have my own story to tell, but because I wasn't completely ready to tell the world I was a survivor of sexual assault and also because I feared it would turn into a competition. I didn't think it would purposefully be a competition, where people respond to a story with challenges that their own story is so much worse. But I feared that would be implied in some of the responses. I know my story is pretty bad, but obviously, there are others that are much worse. That's not important. What happened to me damaged me - I thought for a long time that it had damaged me beyond repair. I didn't want to feel like I had to justify why my experience was painful, or to explain why I still have nightmares about something that happened so long ago. Something I spent time in therapy and self-defense classes dealing with to help me move on.

But sadly, it's happening. And though my heart goes out to the women who are having to justify why an experience was painful, it's resulting in a debate that we absolutely need - a debate about what consent really involves, and the behaviors that, while not criminal, need to stop.

By now, you've probably read about the allegations against Aziz Ansari and "Grace" (not her real name), the woman who went on a date with Aziz that ended with an upsetting sexual encounter that left her crying in the back of a cab. This story is generating many responses, including an article from The Atlantic that left me very frustrated.

In that Atlantic article, Caitlin Flanagan didn't seem to understand what "Grace" was so upset about. She seems to recognize that things have improved since her own sexual awakening:

I was a teenager in the late 1970s, long past the great awakening (sexual intercourse began in 1963, which was plenty of time for me), but as far away from Girl Power as World War I was from the Tet Offensive. The great girl-shaping institutions, significantly the magazines and advice books and novels that I devoured, were decades away from being handed over to actual girls and young women to write and edit, and they were still filled with the cautionary advice and moralistic codes of the ’50s.

But she falls back into problematic logic and victim blaming:

Those magazines didn’t prepare teenage girls for sports or STEM or huge careers; the kind of world-conquering, taking-numbers strength that is the common language of the most-middle-of-the road cultural products aimed at today’s girls was totally absent. But in one essential aspect they reminded us that we were strong in a way that so many modern girls are weak. They told us over and over again that if a man tried to push you into anything you didn’t want, even just a kiss, you told him flat out you weren’t doing it. If he kept going, you got away from him. You were always to have “mad money” with you: cab fare in case he got “fresh” and then refused to drive you home. They told you to slap him if you had to; they told you to get out of the car and start wailing if you had to. They told you to do whatever it took to stop him from using your body in any way you didn’t want, and under no circumstances to go down without a fight. In so many ways, compared with today’s young women, we were weak; we were being prepared for being wives and mothers, not occupants of the C-Suite. But as far as getting away from a man who was trying to pressure us into sex we didn’t want, we were strong.

Is Caitlin right that "Grace" could have just left? Pushed Aziz away? Slapped him and told him to stop getting fresh? Yes, she's right. "Grace" could have done all those things. But this story, and the various responses I've read, all seem to read this particular instance in black and white: either "Grace" wanted to have sex with Aziz, in which case she should shut about calling this misconduct, or she didn't want to have sex with him, and she should have gotten out of there sooner. But that narrative ignores the fact that not only do both parties need to consent to sex, both parties need to consent to the way it is taking place.

"Grace" admits she made the first move, of sorts. She met Aziz at a party, and though he brushed her off at first, she tried to make a connection with him that eventually worked. She gave him her number and they went out on a date. Yes, she was interested in him. Yes, she might have wanted to have sex with him. In fact, that's probably why she didn't leave or slap him. She wanted to have sex with him, but not in the way he was going about it. So she told him to slow down. She pulled away when he shoved his fingers in her mouth. That strikes me as someone who wants to be with him, but not in that way. How many women have been with men where we've had to say, "Hey, slow down"? How many of us have dealt with things getting a little rougher than we want - hair pulling that becomes a bit too hard, what should have been a playful smack that ends up leaving a handprint - but didn't stop because we feared hurting his feelings? It isn't that we don't want to be with that person. We wanted to stay with them, we just don't want to do those specific things they keeps doing.

The story is spun like her only choices are do what he wants or get the hell out of there. And eventually she did, probably when she realized that trying to gently, and then more forcefully, tell him that she didn't like the specific things he was doing wasn't working. That was the point when she had to decide that the man she was very attracted to, that she had really wanted to go out with, was going to keep using her as an object to act out his porn-inspired fantasies. And by leaving in that way, it meant she was closing the door on ever having a relationship with him. It had to get pretty bad for her to get to that point.

He didn't commit any crimes. He shouldn't go to jail, or lose job opportunities, or be labeled as a sex offender. But this case highlights something we need to discuss: that consent isn't as simple as yes or no.

I'm glad "Grace" shared her story, and I'm sorry that, despite her efforts, her interaction with Aziz was so painful. Rather than dismissing it as "not so bad" and saying it cheapens the stories of "real victims," why can't we use this case to help understand this issue of consent? To really think why our initial reaction to "Grace" is dismissal or frustration? If nothing else, Aziz shows us that, even the most progressive and "woke" members of either gender can have some difficulty navigating and understanding consent. Let's use this instance as a way to explore that, and move on as better people.

On that note, I highly recommend you check out this post, which does a great job at discussing the problem of dismissing as "not so bad."

This Response, Dough

I'm sure Mario Batali had no idea that his hastily thrown-together pizza dough cinnamon roll recipe included at the tail-end of his sexual misconduct apology would be such an apt metaphor for double standards and harassment. Check out this post on The Everywhereist:

Last night, I made cinnamon rolls. I’m not a huge fan of cinnamon rolls, per se, but this recipe was included in Mario Batali’s sexual misconduct apology letter., and so I feel compelled to make them. Batali is not the first powerful man to request forgiveness for “inappropriate actions” towards his coworkers and employees. He is not the most high profile, and he is ostensibly not even the worst offender. But he is the only one who included a recipe.

And of course, the glaring question is why? Was his PR team drunk? Is life suddenly a really long, depressing SNL sketch? Do these cinnamon rolls somehow destroy the patriarchy? Does the icing advocate for equal pay?

I figure the only way to answer these questions is to make the damn rolls.

It's one of the most brilliant posts I've read in a long time:

I find myself fluctuating between apathy and anger as I try to follow Batali’s recipe, which is sparse on details. The base of the rolls is pizza dough – Batali notes that you can either buy it, or use his recipe to make your own.

I make my own, because I’m a woman, and for us there are no fucking shortcuts. We spend 25 years working our asses off to be the most qualified Presidential candidate in U.S. history and we get beaten out by a sexual deviant who likely needs to call the front desk for help when he’s trying to order pornos in his hotel room.

Donald Trump is President, so I’m making the goddamn dough by scratch.

I roll out the dough – Batali specifies a thickness, but no dimensions, which is strange if you’re making a rolled dessert. There are pieces missing here, and I’m trying to fill in the gaps. The result will be sub-par because he hasn’t provided all the information, and I will blame myself.

I think about how the last conversation about compensation I had resulted in someone who made more yearly than I ever will telling me I was holding them “emotionally hostage” and then demanding to know, over and over again why I needed the money.

“Just tell me,” they demanded. “Tell me why you need it.” Over and over until it broke me.

If they are edible, I will eat every single one of these fucking rolls myself.

The pizza dough does not mix well with the sweetness. The icing is sickly sweet, the rolls themselves oddly savory. I was right about the texture – the dough is too tough. I hate them, but I keep eating them. Like I’m somehow destroying Batali’s shitty sexist horcrux in every bite.

Reading and Viewing List

Two meetings this morning, so I haven't had a chance to read or watch some open tabs. Today's reading:

• Fallows writes about how actual smart people talk about themselves (and in my favorite response thus far to "stable genius," a friend shared a picture of a stable genius on Facebook - her daughter's horse)
• The Tribune gives us Impossible Tacos - I'll bite
• Also from the Tribune, Medieval Times finally has a queen

And on my watch list:

What the Wrath of Khan's trailer would look like today

Also on the subject of trailers, a recut that makes The Room look like a good movie:

Cracked discusses how 9/11 changed 90s sitcoms:

And Lessons from the Screenplay examines The Fault in our Star Wars:

Roy Moore's Interview

Each day, we're hearing of more men and women coming forward to talk about inappropriate behavior from some of the most powerful men in the country. And while in many cases, those accusations are being treated as serious, in one instance, the reaction is just getting more and more tone-deaf. (Or perhaps I should say "Moore and Moore tone-deaf.")

In a move that I was absolutely certain was satire when I first heard about it, Roy Moore sat down with 12-year-old Millie March for an interview. The interview was arranged by a Pro-Trump group created by former Breitbart staffers. The goal of the move is to show that Moore can be in the same room as a child and not be creepy or assault her, right?

Dear god, where to begin on this one? Sure, Moore is on his best behavior when the cameras are rolling. But the issue brought forward with all of these accusations is a penchant for these powerful men to treat women like objects, to use them as means to an end. Is that any different than what is happening in this interview? Millie isn't being treated as a person; she's a prop. A bargaining chip used to get what Moore and this Pro-Trump group want - for Moore to be elected. Sure, he didn't assault or harass her. But he and everyone else involved in setting up that interview still objectified her.

Thankfully, I'm not the only one who is disgusted by this stunt:

On Twitter and elsewhere, people were quick to point to the uncomfortable decision to use a 12-year-old girl for a campaign push.

Democratic strategist Paul Begala called it “appalling” and “shocking.”

“The fact that he’s accused of sexual assaulting a 14-year-old girl, would sit down and do an interview with a 12-year-old, when he’s not talking to any journalists—it’s like he’s rubbing Alabamians’ noses in it,” he said.

In summation, I leave you with this brilliant tweet by Franchesca Ramsey:

"well i'm a woman & he's never assaulted me" is much like a serial killer proclaiming "i have plenty of living friends!"

— Franchesca Ramsey (@chescaleigh) November 21, 2017

Follow-Up on "Cat Person"

On Saturday, I shared a story published in The New Yorker: Cat Person by Kristen Roupenian. It's an excellent read I highly recommend.

Today, I discovered someone set up a Twitter account that just retweets negative reactions to the story by men. It's glorious.

pic.twitter.com/jtwzc2Fo9N

— Men React to Cat Person (@MenCatPerson) December 11, 2017

pic.twitter.com/2zy77180o1

— Men React to Cat Person (@MenCatPerson) December 11, 2017

And yes, before you say it, I know #NotAllMen hated this story. And I would imagine, many of these men who are responding negatively to the story are self-professed nice guys - in my estimation, probably the ones who say idiotic expressions like YOLO and "nice guys finish last" completely in earnest. But if words like "whore" and "cunt" and "bitch" are right on the tip of your tongue when a woman doesn't respond in the way you'd like, sorry, but you're not a nice guy. And if you find yourself rooting for a guy who calls a woman a whore just because she isn't interested in seeing him, I suggest you take a good long look at yourself: you're part of the problem.

Must Read: "Cat Person" by Kristen Roupenian

A friend and fellow writer shared this story on Facebook: "Cat Person" by Kristen Roupenian, published in The New Yorker. It's excellently written, and captures some feelings I imagine are very close to home for many women, myself included.

The author, Kristen Roupenian

And if you enjoyed the story as much as I did, I recommend also checking out Deborah Treisman's Q&A with Roupenian:

Your story in this week’s issue, “Cat Person,” is both an excruciating bad-date story and, I think, a kind of commentary on how people get to know each other, or don’t, through electronic communication. Where did the idea for the story come from?

Especially in the early stages of dating, there’s so much interpretation and inference happening that each interaction serves as a kind of Rorschach test for us. We decide that it means something that a person likes cats instead of dogs, or has a certain kind of artsy tattoo, or can land a good joke in a text, but, really, these are reassuring self-deceptions. Our initial impression of a person is pretty much entirely a mirage of guesswork and projection. When I started writing the story, I had the idea of a person who had adopted all these familiar signifiers as a kind of camouflage, but was something else—or nothing at all—underneath.

Do you think that the connection that these two form through texting is a genuine one?

I think it’s genuine enough as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far. That Robert is smart and witty is true, but does the fact that someone’s smart and witty mean that he won’t murder you (as Margot wonders more than once), or assault you, or say something nasty to you if you reject him? Of course it doesn’t, and the vertigo that Margot feels at several points in the story is the recognition of that uncertainty: it’s not that she knows that Robert is bad—because if she knew that she would be on solid ground—but that she doesn’t know anything at all.

And the Winner Is...

Time magazine announced the winner of the 2017 Person of the Year: the #MeToo movement:

Time refers to the women behind the movement as "The Silence Breakers." And though this movement has received widespread attention this year, the hashtag was actually started 10 years ago by Tarana Burke.

#MeToo rose to prominence as a social media campaign in the wake of high-profile accusations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. After actress Alyssa Milano popularized the hashtag, thousands of women began sharing their stories about the pervasive damage wrought by sexual harassment and by "open secrets" about abuse.

The movement's empowering reach could be seen in the platform on which Time announced its choice: the Today show. It was just one week ago that NBC fired the morning program's longtime and powerful co-host, Matt Lauer, over a detailed complaint of "inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace."

While the most high-profile #MeToo stories have come from women and men who work in the movies and media, the Time article also features women who work hourly jobs, some of whom want to remain anonymous. The magazine's cover portrait includes strawberry picker Isabel Pascual, lobbyist Adama Iwu and former Uber engineer Susan Fowler along with Ashley Judd and Taylor Swift.

Link Round-Up

Happy Friday, everyone! Here are the tabs I have open, that I've either read or will be reading soon:

• The closest The Room will ever get to winning an Oscar - the "making of" comedy, The Disaster Artist starring James Franco is getting some Oscar buzz
• Matt Lauer has commented on the sexual harassment allegations - my favorite part is where he says, "Repairing the damage will take a lot of time and soul searching and I'm committed to beginning that effort. It is now my full time job." Translation: Look how hard I'm working to make it right. And, oh yeah, I'm reminding you that I no longer have a full-time job. Pardon me while I make the "nobody cares" motion. You guys know the one I'm talking about.
• Speaking of men behaving badly, a friend shared this older article that details the history of Chevy Chase pissing people off, and apparently being racist and sexist. He's Chevy Chase, and I'm not. And for that, I'm thankful.
• Finally, the APS Observer publishes an article about the hidden costs of sleep deprivation

Also: If you've never experienced The Room and don't really want to watch the entire horrible movie, you can check out Chris Stuckmann's detailed review to get pretty much everything you need to appreciate The Disaster Artist:

Stuff to Read Later

Here are my currently open tabs, that I'm hoping to read at some point today:

• Actress and writer Brit Marling talks about why gender inequality feeds into rape culture and complicates the issue of consent
• Kristen Kieffer at Well-Storied.com offers some advice on rocking NaNoWriMo this year, including a great tip - have a back-up story in case you run out of steam on your chosen project; I'm way ahead of you Kristen
• Google engineer, Felix Krause, shows that iPhone apps with camera permission can surreptitiously record or photograph you, with either front or back camera
• In India, a near-complete ichthyosaur (a marine reptile) was found
• The Forté Handbell Quartet plays an incredible handbell rendition of the Hallelujah chorus; considering all the running involved, we'll forgive them for a slightly over-the-top ritardando near the end
• And finally, just for fun, Deschutes offers beer pairings for your favorite Halloween candy

On Victim Blaming, Trust, and the "Me Too" Movement

Yesterday, I finally participated in the "me too" movement, sharing mostly the aftermath of an event from my childhood. It's sad how many people in my life have shared their own "me too" story, and how many of them come from people experiencing a "me too" moment multiple times. In addition to sharing their stories, some have shared their thoughts on the movement in general, and whether (for example) using the same tag for both harassment and assault somehow lessens the experience of survivors. For instance, Kaitlyn Buss writes:

[S]exual harassment and sexual assault are very different things. Even with Harvey Weinstein’s reported abuses, most of the accounts describe uncomfortable advances that women were mostly able to reject.

Conflating harassment and assault insults those who have actually been sexually assaulted. It cheapens the trauma they’ve endured.

But I was a victim of repeated sexual assault as a 4-year-old. I’m someone who should feel empowered by the recent wave of attention. Instead, it feels empty.

Harassment involves words and innuendo. It’s uncomfortable and unfair, and can certainly affect career mobility — as Hollywood’s leading women have now decided to emphasize. But it can be rebutted. It typically doesn’t involve violence or physical force. It takes place on street corners, in offices, bars, movie studios and pretty much anywhere people interact.

Assault, on the other hand, is one of the most brutal experiences a person can endure — at any age and in any situation.

I'll admit, when I first saw the "me too" stories, I was initially frustrated for many of the same reasons Buss highlights. Not because I was disappointed that all these women hadn't experienced an assault - this is something I would never wish on anyone, even my worst enemy - but because I worried that wouldn't understand why my experience of a lewd comment or tasteless joke was so different. Why a street harasser might be an annoying inconvenience for some, but an event that triggers symptoms of years of undiagnosed PTSD for others.

At the same time, the point is not who has had the worse experience. It isn't a competition. What happened to me was horrible. But worse things have happened to thousands of others. Making people justify why their experience is worse than others is nothing more than thinly veiled victim blaming. It's forcing men and women to explain why their experience was most egregious, which usually translates to least preventable and therefore, not the victim's fault. But regardless of what the victim was wearing, consuming, saying, or doing, it isn't the victim's fault that another person took away their autonomy.

And others point out, sexual harassment is a part of rape culture. If we normalize that, it becomes more and more difficult to draw the line between innocuous and offensive. Instead of empowering women that they don't have to stand for that treatment, we're empowering abusers to keep pushing the line until it ultimately breaks.

In light of the movement, a post from 2014 is making the rounds again: Men Just Don't Trust Women. And This is a Problem by Damon Young. I highly encourage you to read the whole thing, but here's one section that really struck me:

The theme that women’s feelings aren’t really to be trusted by men drives (an estimated) 72.81% of the sitcoms we watch, 31.2% of the books we read, and 98.9% of the conversations men have with other men about the women in their lives. Basically, women are crazy, and we are not. Although many women seem to be very annoyed by it, it’s generally depicted as one of those cute and innocuous differences between the sexes.

And perhaps it would be, if it were limited to feelings about the dishes or taking out the garbage. But, this distrust can be pervasive, spreading to a general skepticism about the truthfulness of their own accounts of their own experiences. If women’s feelings aren’t really to be trusted, then naturally their recollections of certain things that have happened to them aren’t really to be trusted either.

This is part of the reason why it took an entire high school football team full of women for some of us to finally just consider that Bill Cosby might not be Cliff Huxtable. It’s how, despite hearing complaints about it from girlfriends, homegirls, cousins, wives, and classmates, so many of us refused to believe how serious street harassment can be until we saw it with our own eyes. It’s why we needed to see actual video evidence before believing the things women had been saying for years about R. Kelly.

If we want to stop the spread of rape culture... If we want to empower survivors to come forward... If we want to weed out the abusers in schools, and churches, and scout troops... We need to believe people's experiences are valid. We need to trust that their feelings are not overreactions.

 

Today's Google Doodle Honoring Asima Chatterjee

Today would have the 100th birthday of Dr. Asima Chatterjee, the first Indian woman to earn a doctorate of science (Sc.D.) from an Indian university. And she's being honored in one of today's Google Doodles.

Wikipedia/Creative Commons, Fair use, Link

In fact, she broke the glass ceiling in many ways:

Despite resistance, Chatterjee completed her undergraduate degree in organic chemistry and went on to win many honours including India’s most prestigious science award in 1961, the annual Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for her achievements in phytomedicine. It would be another 14 years before another woman would be awarded it again.

According to the Indian Academy of Sciences, Chatterjee “successfully developed anti-epileptic drug, Ayush-56 from Marsilia minuta and the anti-malarial drug from Alstonia scholaris, Swrrtia chirata, Picrorphiza kurroa and Ceasalpinna crista.”

Her work has contributed immensely to the development of drugs that treat epilepsy and malaria.

She was elected as the General President of the Indian Science Congress Association in 1975 – in fact, she was the first woman scientist to be elected to the organisation.

An outstanding contribution was her work on vinca alkaloids, which come from the Madagascar periwinkle plant. They are used in chemotherapy to assist in slowing down and halting cancer cells duplicating.

There are actually 2 Google Doodles today. The other celebrates Saudi Arabia National Day.

Is Networking Overrated?

This morning, I received my Friday email from the Association for Psychological Science, which includes links to media coverage of psychological science. The very first headline caught my eye: Good News for Young Strivers: Networking Is Overrated. As someone who dislikes networking, I was pleased to read in the first paragraph that many people find it distasteful - so distasteful that research shows people actually feel physically dirty after visualizing themselves networking. In fact, the column - written by Adam Grant, a professor at Wharton School - argues that networking doesn't help you accomplish great things. Rather, accomplishing great things helps you build a network:

Look at big breaks in entertainment. For George Lucas, a turning point was when Francis Ford Coppola hired him as a production assistant and went on to mentor him. Mr. Lucas didn’t schmooze his way into the relationship, though. As a film student he’d won first prize at a national festival and a scholarship to be an apprentice on a Warner Bros. film — he picked one of Mr. Coppola’s.

Networks help, of course. In a study of internet security start-ups, having a previous connection to an investor increased the odds of getting funded by that investor in the first year. But it was pretty much irrelevant afterward. Accomplishments were the dominant driver of who invested over time.

But as I got farther and farther along in the article, I couldn't help but think that he was making it sound too easy. I don't mean that working hard and being successful is easy. But it felt like he was brushing off all the people who lacked connections and the resources that some people are born into by saying, "Well, just be successful and the network will come to you." I couldn't completely figure out why I was so bothered by his article. Then he said this:

I don’t mean to suggest that success in any field is meritocratic. It’s dramatically easier to get credit for achievements and break into the elite if you’re male and white, your pedigree is full of fancy degrees and prestigious employers, you come from a family with wealth and connections, and you speak without a foreign accent. (Unless it’s a British accent, which has the uncanny ability to make you sound smart regardless of what words come out of your mouth.) But if you lack these status signals, it’s even more critical to produce a portfolio that proves your potential.

And that's when I realized what was bothering me. Sure, it's easy to say that if you don't have any of these privileged characteristics, you just need to work harder - something minorities and women have been hearing for a very long time. The problem is that 1) "success" and "achievement" are very subjective terms, and people may evaluate your achievements differently depending on your characteristics and 2) getting your achievements noticed also depends on your network. It's as though Professor Grant thinks there's a place where the powerful can go and peruse all the portfolios of young and successful people.

And sure, there are situations like that - his anecdote about George Lucas and the national festival is one place where you can go and see young people's work in the hopes of finding an up and coming director. But getting into film school, having the resources and training to create a product that gets attention, and then getting that attention from the judges are influenced by a person's background and privilege.

It feels as though Professor Grant is himself falling prey to the "myth of the self-made man." Anyone who says he (or she) is "self-made" is completely downplaying the influence of an environment conducive to success. Just like Donald Trump likes to downplay the financial help he received from his father to start his business.

In fact, here's a great example of how people evaluate success differently for young and hopeful entrepreneurs. Penelope Gazin and Kate Dwyer created a fake male cofounder to help launch their startup:

“When we were getting started, we were immediately faced with ‘Are you sure? Does this sound like a good idea?’,” says Dwyer. “I think because we’re young women, a lot of people looked at what we were doing like, ‘What a cute hobby!’ or ‘That’s a cute idea.'”

Regardless, the concept seems to be paying off. Witchsy, the alternative, curated marketplace for bizarre, culturally aware, and dark-humored art, celebrated its one-year anniversary this summer. The site, born out of frustration with the excessive clutter and limitations of bigger creative marketplaces like Etsy, peddles enamel pins, shirts, zines, art prints, handmade crafts and other wares from a stable of hand-selected artists. Witchsy eschews the “Live Laugh Love” vibe of knickknacks commonly found on sites like Etsy in favor of art that is at once darkly nihilistic and lightheartedly funny, ranging in spirit from fiercely feminist to obscene just for the fun of it.

After setting out to build Witchsy, it didn’t take long for them to notice a pattern: In many cases, the outside developers and graphic designers they enlisted to help often took a condescending tone over email. These collaborators, who were almost always male, were often short, slow to respond, and vaguely disrespectful in correspondence. In response to one request, a developer started an email with the words “Okay, girls…”

That’s when Gazin and Dwyer introduced a third cofounder: Keith Mann, an aptly named fictional character who could communicate with outsiders over email.

“It was like night and day,” says Dwyer. “It would take me days to get a response, but Keith could not only get a response and a status update, but also be asked if he wanted anything else or if there was anything else that Keith needed help with.”

It wasn't enough to have a good idea. It wasn't enough to prove they had the ability to execute it. It literally took emails with a man's name attached to get their business going. Success is never achieved in a vacuum, and even if it were, those characteristics Professor Grant highlights as making it "easier to get credit" can influence whether that vacuum is beneficent or hostile.

Great Minds in Statistics: F.N. David versus the Patriarchy

Happy 108th birthday to Florence Nightingale David! F.N. David, as she is often known, was a British statistician, combinatorialist, author, and general mathematical bad ass who regularly took on the patriarchy's "This is a man's world" nonsense.

She was named after family friend - and self-taught statistician - Florence Nightingale. She took to math at a very early age and wanted to become an actuary. After completing her degree in mathematics in 1931, she applied for a career fellowship at an insurance firm, but was turned down. When she inquired why she was told that, despite being the most qualified candidate, she was a woman and they only hired men. In fact, she was told by many people who turned her down for a job that they didn't have any bathroom facilities for women and that was used as a reason they couldn't hire her.

But in 1933, she was offered a job and a scholarship at University College in London, where she would study with Karl Pearson. In fact, the way she got this opportunity is pretty awesome:

I was passing University College and I crashed my way in to see Karl Pearson. Somebody had told me about him, that he had done some actuarial work. I suppose it was just luck I happened to be there. Curious how fate takes one, you know. We hit it off rather well, and he was kind to me. Incidentally, he's the only person I've ever been afraid of all my life. He was terrifying, but he was very kind. He asked me what I'd done and I told him. And he asked me if I had any scholarship and I said yes, I had. He said, "You'd better come here and I'll get your scholarship renewed," which he did.

She worked for Pearson as a computer - literally. Her job was to generate the tables to go along with his correlation coefficient, a job that involved conducting complicated (and repetitive) analyses using a Brunsviga hand-crank mechanical calculator:

In her interview, linked above, she estimates she pulled that crank 2 million times.

Because she found Pearson - or the "old man" as she referred to him - terrifying, she was incapable of telling him no:

On one occasion he was going home and I was going home, and he said to me, "Oh you might have a look at the elliptic integral tonight, we shall want it tomorrow." And I hadn't the nerve to tell him that I was going off with a boyfriend to the Chelsea Arts Ball. So I went to the Arts Ball and came home at 4-5 in the morning, had a bath, went to University and then had it ready when he came in at 9. One's silly when one's young.

He also would apparently become very upset if she jammed the Brunsviga, so she often wouldn't tell him it was jammed, instead unjamming it herself with a long pair of knitting needles.

After K. Pearson retired, she worked with Jerzy Neyman (who you can find out more about in my post on Egon Pearson, but look for a post on Neyman in the future!), who encouraged her to submit her 4 most recent publications as her PhD dissertation. She was awarded her doctorate in 1938.

During World War II, she assisted with the war effort as experimental officer and senior statistician for the Research and Experiments Department. She served as a member on multiple advisory councils and committees, and was scientific adviser on mines for the Military Experimental Establishment. She created statistical models to predict the consequences of bombings, which provided valuable information on directing resources, and kept vital services going even as London was experiencing bombings. She later said that the war gave women an opportunity to contribute and believes the conditions for women improved because of it.

She returned to University College in London after the war, first as a lecturer, then as a professor. Of course, that didn't change the fact that she was not allowed to join the school's scientific society because it only accepted men. So, she founded a scientific society of her own, that would accept both men and women. They invited many young scientists and apparently irked the "old rednecks" as a result.

In the 1960s, she wrote a book on the history of probability, Games, Gods, and Gambling - I just ordered a copy this morning, so stay tuned for a review! In the late 1960s, she moved to California, where she became a Professor and - shortly thereafter - Chair in the Department of Statistics at the University of California Riverside.

She passed away in 1993.

In 2001, the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies and Caucus for Women in Statistics created an award in F.N. David's name, awarded every years to a woman who exemplifies David's contributions to research, leadership, education, and service.

There's certainly a lot more to Florence Nightingale David than what I included in this post. I highly recommend reading the conversation with her linked above. She also receives some attention in The Lady Tasting Tea. For now, I'll close with a great quote from the linked interview. She commented that being influential is not her job in life. When asked what is her job in life, she said, "To ask questions and try to find the answers, I think."

Women in the Work Force

Via Bloomberg, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released data showing that the work force participation rate among women has increased by 0.3 percentage points since January, bringing the gap in participation rate between men and women to 13.2 percent.

This is the lowest that gap has been since 1948. However, overall participation in the U.S. is low at 62.9 percent. This is due in part to decreased participation rates among prime-age men:

The declining participation among prime-age male workers has become an area of focus for President Donald Trump’s administration. Trump campaigned on reviving traditionally male-dominated industries such as coal mining and manufacturing that have struggled against greater globalization. Amid record-high job openings, the president has emphasized that Americans need to be open about relocating for work.

You know, like how Trump has relocated for his job, and stopped spending so much time at his penthouse in New York or his resort at Mar-a-Lago.

The reason for the lower participation rate overall, and especially among men, has many potential causes:

Prohibitive childcare costs make parents’ decision to return to work more difficult, and prime-age Americans are feeling the increased burden of caring for an aging population. The opioid epidemic also helps explain why a portion of the workforce is deemed unemployable. And immigration limits imposed by the Trump administration could curb workforce growth in industries such as farming and construction that are dominated by the foreign-born.

The Bloomberg article also highlights some recent work by Thumbtack Inc., which has found increases in women-owned business in traditionally male-dominated professions:

Lucas Puente, chief economist at Thumbtack Inc., sees advances across the industries in which his company matches consumers and professional service workers. While men still make up about 60 percent of the 250,000 active small businesses listing their services on Thumbtack, women are gaining ground more quickly, even among traditionally male-dominated professions. Among the top 10 fastest-growing women-owned businesses on Thumbtack in the past year are plumbers, electricians, and carpenters, according to the company’s survey data.

All the Books!

If you live in the Chicago(land) area, you should definitely check out the Newberry Library Book Sale, in it's 33rd year! Six rooms on the lower level of the library are filled with books and CDs and books and records and books and DVDs and books and VHSs and did I mention books? I decided to walk over there after work, and I had great success in finding some awesome additions to my statistical library (plus a book about my favorite philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir):

And because I love nostalgia (Reality Bites) and was discussing one of these movies (Cry Baby) with my friend over at Is It Any Good?, I had to pick up these soundtracks:

The sale runs through Sunday! You should definitely check it out!