Educational endogamy (a good Princeton word), ca. 2011

Lots of people are pushing marriage on young women. For those with less than a college degree, a group of Christian conservatives is promoting marriage so women won’t be poor (mothers). And for those with elite educations, a Princeton alumna says women her daughters’ age should find a husband before graduation so they won’t be bored by a non-Ivy League dimwit for the rest of their lives.

(All this marriage promotion shouldn’t be confused with marriage rights promotion. Should it?)

Marriage markets are very complicated. People can marry (and divorce) anyone they want whenever they want (subject to legal restrictions), or not. People can move to marry, or marry and then move. They can marry up, down, sideways, or internationally. After divorce, they can repeat the process, with variation.

With the economy the way it is and sequestration threatening the jobs of government bureaucrats and the social scientists who depend on them, demographers are delighted by this complexity, since it assures a steady stream of unanswered questions to generate demand for our profession (another good reason to repeal DOMA).

Anyway: Some information about marriage and education

Take all the people ages under age 50 who told the American Community Survey in 2011 that they got (heterogamously) married for the first time in 2011. Break them down by education and sex, and look at the education of the people they married.

The first thing you notice is the BA / non-BA gap. Of this population, 71% of college graduates married another college graduate. Women college graduates were less likely to hold rank, with just 65% of them marrying above the BA line, compared with 78% of male college grads. This isn’t surprising considering women earn the majority of BA degrees. But it’s not as big a deal as it might seem for gender equality, because – don’t forget – unmarried men earn more at every level of education. When I looked at these numbers for Atlanta 25-34 year-olds, for example, I found that 46% of the women with BAs who married men without BAs still had a husband who earned more than them. That is, marrying down the education ladder didn’t stop them from marrying up the income ladder.

Here is the rest of the breakdown, offered without further comment except a caution that there are a lot of ways to slice these things. The figures show the percentage of spouses at each education level for the under-50s who just got married for the first time, by education level, first for women and then for men. For example, the first graph shows that 25% of newlywed women with PhDs married husbands with PhDs. The colors are intended to highlight the BA / non-BA divide, with non-grads in bluish and grads in reddish.

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Source: My calculations from the 2011 American Community Survey, from IPUMS (which tacked on the spouses’ education for those with a present and identifiable spouse).

Book review: The Rise of Women, by DiPrete and Buchmann

Originally published on TheAtlantic.com.

(Charles Dharapak/AP Images)

The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What it Means for American Schools is both ambitious and modest in its goals: Sociologists Thomas DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann provide an ambitious analysis of why and how girls are outperforming boys in high school and going on to get a disproportionate share of college degrees. However, the authors modestly remain within their subject matter and avoid the unsupported claims about women’s looming social dominance that have inflated much of the conversation about gender dynamics today.

This allows us to have a reasonable, valuable conversation about an important problem: the failure of the education system to help a majority of students to reach their academic potential. We clearly do not have a problem of over-education among women. Even among Whites alone, women as well as men are graduating college at rates lower than those in the most educationally advanced societies (which used to include the United States). Rather, we have a dysfunctional system that underperforms for men more than for women.

Rather than focusing on the full range of educational failures, DiPrete and Buchmann focus on a low-hanging fruit policy question: How can we improve college degree attainment for the approximately one-third of students who are ready to graduate college but do not, because they do not have the resources, they change their minds for some reason, or they are not adequately supported in the endeavor?

Women up

Since the 1980s, women have gotten the majority of bachelor’s degrees. That’s mostly because they also perform better in high school, getting better grades and taking more advanced courses. DiPrete and Buchmann set aside the issue of the potential cognitive advantages of girls, which may or may not be “innate.” Such differences are too small and stable to account for the rapid change and large advantage in educational attainment women now hold. The reasons we do not have more people completing college—and gaining more skills and knowledge to enrich their lives—are not genetic or biological, but rather social and economic. We can do better, for both men and women.

While women have continued their upward historical educational trajectory since World War II, men’s achievement of college degrees stagnated—coinciding historically with the growing necessity of having higher education for economic security. If you ever needed proof that majorities of people do not respond in predictably self-interested ways to economic incentives, it is the stagnation of male college graduation rates even as the returns to a college degree spiked upward.

DiPrete and Buchmann’s sensible policy suggestions draw from this key insight: The difference between men and women, and how it has changed, can best be understood by studying differencesamong men and women—within genders. That means we don’t just study what family, school, and environmental effects matter, but who is most strongly affected by such differences in the social context.

One important lesson: Schools with high overall performance have a smaller female advantage. That leads to the straightforward conclusion that we can address the gender gap partly by increasing the quality of schools across the board. Easier said than done, but no less important—or less true—for it.

Men up

It is important to connect women’s educational rise with the other trends that have upended gender relations in the U.S., and the authors do an admirable job of tying these in. In particular, the rise in women’s employment opportunities, the decline or delay in marriage, and falling fertility rates have all increased the incentives for (and ability of) women to complete college. And, of course, the rise in education has in turn fueled these other developments as well. For example, college graduate women as well as men are more likely to get (and stay) married than those who completed high school only. Maybe by getting a college degree they improve their marriage-market options—and reduce the odds that they will divorce by increasing the educational parity in their marriages.

While the title of DiPrete and Buchmann’s book is overly dramatic, the subtitle is appropriately limited: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What it Means for American Schools. Because although women are more likely to graduate college and get some advanced degrees than men are today, there is nothing in this trend that implies women will surpass men in overall earnings or economic (much less political) power in the foreseeable future.

Education, especially measured at the bachelor’s degree level, is merely one indicator in a whole suite of gender dynamics in which men overwhelmingly dominate. Further, women’s educational advantage is not so great that they will overcome the labor-market advantages that men have at all educational levels, the imbalances within families that persist today, or the tendency of women to end up in less lucrative fields of study and thus occupations.

The biggest problem for gender inequality among the college-educated remains the lack of gender integration across fields of study, which stalled in the 1980s. Men and women still largely educate themselves in different fields, with dramatic implications for their career trajectories and earnings throughout their lives. Segregation in fields of study is closely related to the issue of occupational segregation in the labor market. Both reflect a complex combination of choices and constraints made in varying social contexts—with decisions made early in life producing irreversible effects. In the latest reports, women are just 26 percent of workers in computer and math-related professional occupations and 14 percent of those in architectural and engineering professions.

And DiPrete and Buchmann’s analysis helps understand this stubborn problem. They report that high school is the key location to understand major-field segregation. Among high school boys and girls with strong interest in science and technology fields, there is no gender gap in the likelihood of completing such a major. The difference is in the rates of intention to major in those areas. Between 8th and 12th grade, girls lose interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM fields, for short) much more than boys do.

Women’s desire for people-oriented work, for work that is intrinsically interesting, and for occupations that permit work-family balance cannot fully explain their lower rates of majoring in STEM-related fields. Rather, the major source of the difference is that women do not express interest in STEM-related careers while in high school—and that is not because high school girls are not as good at math and science. Instead, the difference may be that boys believe they are better at math and science, especially math. The key policy insight in this area is that science-intensive high school environments greatly increase girls’ interests in physical science and engineering-related careers.

This is an important book, and although somewhat technical in its analysis sections it deserves a wide readership.

I have two minor complaints about The Rise of Women. The first is over its insistent focus on the four-year college degree and the economic benefits it brings. The fact that women receive more bachelor’s degrees than men but continue to earn less money confirms that a bachelor’s degree is not a first-class ticket to labor-market success. Although this helps to focus the book, it also distracts from the more universal problems we have, including an obsession with the material benefits of education.

DiPrete and Buchman conclude that we need to find ways to motivate students in middle and high school to devote more energy to their studies, by improving the quality of education as well as the quality of information students have to make the connection between what they learn in school and their future career ambitions. Too many boys don’t cognitively grasp that the difference between merely making it versus excelling through high school is measured in higher education success and potential career satisfaction. Finding ways to get this across might really help their motivation to work harder, the authors argue. But truly high-quality education takes students beyond such material calculations into the realm of the intrinsic beauty of discovery, the power of wonder, and the search for knowledge as a key to life, the universe and everything.

My second knock is that the authors seem not to notice the broad trend of slowing advances for women. For example, even though their charts show it, they don’t mention that the share of law and medical degrees earned by women slowed and then peaked in the early 2000s—and has declined since. Naturally, that is not the central concern of a study devoted to understanding women’s advantages. But in the context of the general gender stall, it’s important to realize that women’s progress across many areas is highly interrelated.

Let’s Not Panic Over Women With More Education Having Fewer Kids

Originally published on TheAtlantic.com.

Though the phenomenon has been called “reverse Darwinism,” a look at the facts and figures reveals it’s not as scary as it seems.

AP / Amy Sancetta

Women with more education have fewer children—which is one of the reasons why extending equal access to education for women is so important. Women with more education have more opportunities for productive lives doing work other than childrearing. All around the world, when education levels rise, fertility levels fall.

That doesn’t mean we have to sacrifice the future of humanity on the altar of gender equality, but it does mean we have to figure out how to raise and support fewer children to be happy and productive (as the economist Nancy Folbre explains).

I wrote about fertility last week, and I’m dwelling on the subject because of What To Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster, Jonathan Last’s panic-book about low fertility. The argument and information in the book aren’t new, but he provides a good example of common misperceptions that are worth considering. At first glance, the argument doesn’t seem to have a conservative political impetus—after all, who’s against children? But that only makes it more important to understand fertility in the context of gender equality.

The general relationship between the number of children women have and their relative status in society is clear: Fewer children means higher status. And the relationship is reciprocal: Higher status for women also leads to lower fertility.

Further, the relationship appears at both the individual level and the societal level. Countries with lower fertility levels have, on average, less gender inequality in the realms of education, income, political and social power. Here is the relationship between total fertility (average number of children per woman) and the UN’s gender inequality index, which combines reproductive health, political representation, educational and labor force equality. (I made bigger dots for bigger countries, and colored the U.S. dot blue.)

This shows two things:

• First, there are no societies with high fertility and low gender inequality.
• Second, there is a range of gender inequality among the low-fertility countries.

I interpret the pattern like this: There is a lot that can be done about gender inequality—once fertility rates are reduced.

This can be a confusing subject, and Last provides a good example of that. Along the way to arguing that we need more babies in the U.S. (and almost everywhere else), Last complains that poor people are aping the low-fertility behavior of the modern, liberal, feminist, self-centered middle class. The poor are having too few children. But he also complains they are having all the children. He writes:

The bearing and raising of children has largely become the province of the lower classes.

And he writes:

What we have, then, is a picture of an American middle class that is surprisingly barren … Women who go to college or graduate school are unlikely to have even two children. … It’s a kind of reverse Darwinism where the traditional markers of success make one less likely to reproduce.

Going further than “reverse Darwinism,” Last also said on his Glenn Beck network appearance that we have “survival of the weakest in a way, but even worse.” (In fairness, by that point in the conversation, everyone was getting pretty confused.)

But before debunking this interpretation of the facts, we might first wonder if the facts are even true. In the world of conservative news, it would seem that poor people are sucking the government dry while overpopulating the country with paupers and criminals. Meanwhile, to others—admittedly the set I’m more familiar with—children are seen as the accessories of the narcissistic elite, and rich people are having more kids.

The facts, though, are that poor women have more children (and women with more children are poorer), and that the fertility rates of more-educated women are rising, not falling.

Let’s examine these pieces of data individually.

Fact 1: Women with less education in the U.S. have more children.

From U.S. Census Bureau data, we know that, among women who were finishing their childbearing years (ages 40-44) in 2010, those with less than a high school degree had borne the most children (2.56), and those with advanced degrees had the fewest (1.67). (Last’s comment that “Women who go to college or graduate school are unlikely to have even two children” seems to follow from the fact that college graduates have an average of 1.73 children, but it’s not true. Because about one in every five college graduates have no children, we only get to an average 1.73 because about half actually have 2 or more children.

But this does not mean that, “The bearing and raising of children has largely become the province of the lower classes.” That’s because only 10 percent of these women had less than a high-school degree, while 34 percent had achieved a BA degree or higher. So here is the distribution of children according to their mothers’ education level, next to the distribution of women:

You can see that women with the least education did have more kids than their share of the population: 14 percent versus 10 percent. But there were twice as many children born to women who were college graduates. So women with higher education are almost doing their share in producing the workers of the future. When it comes to childbearing, in other words, the highly educated are almost pulling their weight.

Fact 2: Educational disparities in fertility rates are decreasing

Among women reaching the end of their childbearing years, the last 15 years have seen a decline in the disparity I just described. Completed fertility rates have increased for those with more education, and decreased for those with less, from 1995 to 2010:

Remember that, even though their fertility rates are quite high, high school dropouts represent only 10 percent percent of women ages 40 to 44.

To be sure: There are a lot of different ways of measuring fertility rates. I’m using completed fertility—the number of children even born to women who reach the age at which childbearing becomes rare (the census defined this as ages 35 to 44 until 2002, and ages 40 to44 since). And this shows women with less education having more children. However, in any given year, women with higher education are more likely to have a child. That’s because people spend fewer years with advanced degrees; that is, women who end up with advanced degrees spend years without them first, usually not having children while they advance their educations and careers. So in 2011, women with MA degrees or higher were just 9 percent of women in the childbearing ages, but they had 11 percent of the babies.

The counterintuitive thing here is the rise in fertility among women with more education (which Last might be pleased to be able to call Darwinian). I could suggest a few reasons for this:

• Maybe the advanced degree holders at age 40 in 1995 were trailblazers, who, in their struggle to succeed against the prevailing sexism, chose career over children. Meanwhile, women in law or medicine are more common today—and we’ve learned a little more about combining child-rearing with professional careers. (Which often involves paying poorer women to do more caregiving work, which might lead them to have fewer children).
• Or, maybe post-feminist professional women have come to care less about their careers and choose, perhaps under duress, more childrearing instead. If that is the case, it might be contributing to the stall in progress toward gender equality and the ratcheting upward ofcompetitive parenting.
• Maybe our intractable work-family conflict—no paid leave, no universal preschool, inflexible workplaces and long workweeks, fathers’ inflexibility—has forced women to choose between parenting and professional success, and more have decided parenting is the more fulfilling.

Hello, you (shall we walk in a sample’s shoes?)

I don’t remember who, but someone in my 1980s radio career once advised me to speak as if I were addressing only one person, not the whole audience. So, it’s not, “Hello everybody,” it’s, “Hello, you.”

Today’s science reporters face the challenge of getting through to both editors and audiences, and I don’t envy them (well, I do envy them, but not because their jobs are easy). One tool of the trade is the personalized interpretation of science results. It’s a shame, because it mushes up the science in ways that probably contribute to common problems of scientific illiteracy.

The attention-grabbing “you” in science reporting headlines is the problem I’m concerned with here. It often adds an unrealistic level of certainty to science results.

Case in point is the widely circulated Op-Ed in the New York Times unfortunately titled, “Homophobic? Maybe You’re Gay.” The piece drew from a study that found a positive relationship between “implicit” homosexuality and homophobic attitudes among people who say they are 100% straight. Implicit homosexuality was determined by tripping people up with subliminal messages (“ME”) flashed on the screen

I read it as carefully as I could for a study outside my expertise, and nowhere does it say what proportion of homophobic people are actually driven by such repressed sexual orientations. It’s interesting that it happens at all, and it’s plausible, but does it “cause” any significant amount of the widespread anti-gay attitudes and actions we see? Maybe. For what it’s worth, if I read it right the variation in homophobia explained (R-squared) in the experiments was in the neighborhood of 5%.

Another recent study drew headlines such as, “Why your doctor should be trim.” The actual finding in the study – which is quite dramatic – was this:

physicians with normal BMI were more likely to engage their obese patients in weight loss discussions as compared to overweight/obese physicians (30% vs. 18%, P = 0.010).

But think about it. Weight loss is something that doctors should at least discuss with their obese patients. But the great majority of doctors don’t — 70% or 82% – according to the study, depending on their weight.

This could be a social problem. But should this study be used to advise patients to seek thin doctors? If you want a doctor that discusses weight loss with you, it’s much more efficient to ask a doctor to discuss it with you than it is to shop for a thin doctor (and hope you get one of the few that discusses weight loss). And if your fat doctor won’t discuss weight loss, I recommend finding a new doctor (of any weight), rather than trying to get your doctor to lose weight!

In other words, turning the study results into personal advice ends up turning patients away from what matters — their relationship with their doctor, which they can directly observe and act upon — and toward a superficial feature (weight) that might or might not contribute to it.

Here are some other recent examples:

• “Why your left side is your best side,” from a study showing more positive average reactions to left-sided portraits (even when they’re reversed to look like right-sided portraits) — but the “why” in the analysis is speculative.
• “Why your kid isn’t creative,” about a new book that “synthesizes the latest scientific research into creativity” and concludes that “our education system and social mores discourage creativity.”
• “Back pain on the job? It could be your bad attitude,” from a finding that 1 out of 5 people who went to the doctor for back pain had a “persistent” condition, and those 1-in-5 were more likely to have negative attitudes about it. (The other 4 out of 5 may have just hurt their backs, and their attitudes weren’t discussed.)

Show me the distribution

Part of my frustration is with psychology studies in particular, which often don’t include a simple cross-tabulation or descriptive table that allows the reader to assess the overall pattern and the strength of the relationship. Any statistical association can be pitched as today’s must-read take-home message. But how big a deal is it in individual real life?

Take education and income, which are certainly strongly, causally related. Here is data from 40 random women, drawn from the 2010 American Community Survey:

This variable alone accounts for 17% of the variation in earnings among these 40 women, and the relationship is highly significant statistically. That strong a relationship is unusual in the typical flow of newsworthy social science studies. Yet look how much variation there is around the line.

If you only knew one thing about a woman and had to guess her income, education level would be a good place to start. But when it comes to personal advice — to understanding our own lives — we know so much more than that. Only then — for example, after we have narrowed down the pool to college-educated, professional suburbanites between 40 and 50 years old — do the studies about women’s negotiating ability, shoe style, and so on, make a big difference. Marginal things matter, but for most people they’re not the causal story. Put another way, they matter more for populations than they do for individual readers.

This reminds me of Mitt Romney saying to that college student who was worried about the economy:

What I can promise you is this: when you get out of college, if I’m elected, you will have a job. If President Obama’s re-elected, you will not be able to get a job.

The unemployment rate is 4.9% for people with a BA degree. How much does Romney think it will vary according to the presidential election outcome? Or, put another way: “Unemployed? It could be your president.”

Undoing gender math stereotypes

In my opinion, there is no way to administer a math test that will identify inborn ability. So people who think the greater presence of men in high-end math and science positions is a result of the distribution of inborn abilities generally rely on the observation of (a) big gender gaps, (b) long-standing gender gaps, or (c) widespread gender gaps, to make their case.

Big gaps (a) are only useful for creating a big impression. Long-standing gaps (b) are undermined by the scale of change in recent decades. And a new study does a very nice job weakening type-C support.

In “Debunking Myths about Gender and Mathematics Performance,” in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Jonathan Kane and Janet Mert study variation both between and within countries to test a variety of hypotheses about the sources male math advantage. They look at the distribution and variance in scores, the association with single-gender schooling, religious context and, most importantly, broader patterns of gender inequality. The main message I get is that gender ability in math differs so much across social contexts that any conclusion about “natural” ability is untenable. Also, gender equality is good.

Here’s my favorite figure from the paper, showing the distribution of eighth-grade scores for boys and girls in three countries:

In the Czech Republic there is no difference in either the means or the distributions for boys versus girls, and the average ability is high. Bahrain shows a much greater variance for boys versus girls — which is sometimes used to explain why to many top achievers are men — but women’s average is higher. Finally, in Tunisia the girls have a higher variance but a lower mean. Where’s the natural ability story?

An important consideration in all of these patterns is the role of selective dropouts. That is a potential problem with any school-based test, but also shows the problem with using any test of school-based knowledge to understand underlying “natural” ability (including SATs). Unless you can test populations with no schooling, or identical schooling experiences, you can’t resolve this.

In the meantime, the great social variability shows us that context matters, and since that’s something we can definitely address, there is no reason to get hung up on the biological stuff — at least as far as policy and practice are concerned.

Here’s a previous post from me on how teacher interactions affect gender patterns of learning, and another writeup on the new study from ScienceBlogs.

Divorce by race/ethnicity and education, 2010

Earlier this month I calculated that the divorce rate per 1,000 married people rose slightly from 2009 to 2010, but is still lower than it was in 2008. Now we have more information for 2010 from the National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University.

NCFMR’s new release (in PDF) shows the divorce rate among women married for the first time, by race/ethnicity and education.

Just a quick update.

For my previous posts on divorce, follow the divorce tag.

What it’s all worth, in work-life cash

A Census Bureau research report estimates lifetime earnings by education, race/ethnicity and gender.

The report, by the Bureau’s Tiffany Julian and Robert Kominski, uses national data from the American Community Survey to create “synthetic work-life estimates” of earnings.

The method takes earnings information from one time period — in this case the years 2006-2008 combined (before the recession) — and calculates how much money people would make if they lived through their whole work lives (40 years, from age 25 to 64) during that period. Demographers use the same method to estimate life expectancy. It’s a way of using the most current period to project an image of the future in today’s shape. It’s a better look at the future, for most purposes, than looking back at the lives of people who are wrapping it up today.

Here is a figure they made, using earnings from people working full-time and year round:

That is for people working full-time and year-round at their jobs. That is not reasonable, of course, if people take time out of the labor force, or out of full-time work. So this understates the earnings gaps, especially by gender, since women take more time out of the labor force than men, on average.

They also reported the projected lifetime earnings for all workers — including those working only part-time or part of the year. The figure above showed a ratio of 4.7-to-1 from top to bottom, whereas the all-worker data has a ratio of 5.6-to-1 from White male professional-degree holders to Latina high school graduates.

I turned their all-worker table into this graph with men and women color coded:

This is not a real prediction, just a projection of the present into the future. But the scale is good for the imagination — the gap from top to bottom is 3.65 million dollars in 2008 terms.

Note that in addition to employer discrimination, these gaps reflects the full range of influences on people’s earnings, including sorting into occupations, part-time work, lost tenure and experience from time out of the labor force, and regional variation (which is one reason Asian workers show up high – many live in expensive cities like San Francisco and Honolulu).

Who’s teaching creationism to kids?

…and when did I get so touchy about it?

When someone gave us this chunky dinosaur puzzle, I did a double-take. Yes, that’s a caveman there with the dinosaurs:

The blurb on the company’s website says that, along with the puzzle, “ The accompanying board book teaches young learners about dinosaurs.” Teaches, that is, with lessons like this:

A little harmless fun, or a little creationist indoctrination? (Do sociologists even believe in “harmless fun”?)

According to the Shure company, they deliver these “common threads” in all their products: “Originality and inventiveness; Excellence in design; Attention to detail; Exceptional quality; Educational merit.” So, not just entertainment.

A quick perusal suggests the rest of their products are not creationist — just the usual toy-gendering. They do have a Noah’s Ark puzzle, but it doesn’t claim to be educational. In that Shure is just keeping up Melissa & Doug (whose puzzle is at least Genesis-correct in not naming Noah’s wife):

And anyway, the story of Noah’s Ark is actually not a bad way to talk about reproduction.

But back to dinosaurs and people. Dinosaurs are not really more problematic for creationism than any other creatures that pre-date humans. But maybe because kids love dinosaurs so much, creationists spend inordinate energy trying to place them chronologically with people. Writes one such site:

The idea of millions of years of evolution is just the evolutionists’ story about the past. No scientist was there to see the dinosaurs live through this supposed dinosaur age. In fact, there is no proof whatsoever that the world and its fossil layers are millions of years old. No scientist observed dinosaurs die. Scientists only find the bones in the here and now, and because many of them are evolutionists, they try to fit the story of the dinosaurs into their view.

Up against this kind of propaganda, it is tempting to bring the hammer down on “harmless fun” featuring humans and dinosaurs playing together. That would mean none of these, either:

That is basically the argument of James Wilson, a University of Sussex lecturer, who has a talk on the subject here on Youtube.

For non-biologists, like me, who like evolution and want some ammunition to defend it, I recommend Richard Dawkins’ recent book The Greatest Show on Earth. Some do find it a little dogmatic, and in the grand scheme I prefer Stephen Jay Gould, but it’s good for this purpose. Because rather than block access to dinosaur cartoons, I would rather arm myself – and the surrounding children – with the tools they need to handle them with confidence.

The frailty of gender math and science stereotypes

In our research on gender in the workplace, Matt Huffman, Jessica Pearlman and I have found that the gender gap in pay, and the level of gender segregation, are lower in places with more women in management. We treated this mainly as a question of manager behavior — were women discriminating less? But women might also perform better when their bosses are women. That’s a question that has been raised with regard to role models in math and science, where the small number of female professionals and professors is a big issue.

A new study from psychology tried to see whether interaction with female advanced students and teachers brought benefits to women in college. As is their wont, the psychologists, Jane Stout and colleagues at UMass, described several experiments briefly in one paper.

The gender at the head of the class

First, women in college majoring in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math) were asked to complete a questionnaire and math test by a facilitator posing as an advanced graduate student in math. Half met a female facilitator, half met a male facilitator. Would this brief interaction with a role model make a difference? Yes.

[when] women who were pursuing STEM majors interacted with an advanced female peer who had expertise in math, they expressed more positive implicit attitudes toward math, showed more implicit identification with math, and increased their effort on a very difficult math test compared with others who interacted with an advanced male peer.

Later, the researchers (working with their math department) studied 100 STEM-major students randomly assigned to math courses taught by male professors with male teaching assistants, or female professors with female teaching assistants — in each case teaching the same material with the same exams. The professors — who did not know the purpose of the study — were also matched on teaching skills, career stage and English proficiency.

They found that female students with female instructors had more positive feelings toward math, more implicit identification with the subject of math, and higher self-efficacy (they predicted higher grades for themselves). Women also identified much more strongly with the female professors, not surprisingly, and participated more in class by asking and answering questions. However, neither men’s nor women’s final grades were actually affected by the instructors’ gender (that would be too easy).

These kinds of interventions just scratch the surface of what might be different if girls and women had more exposure to and interaction with women teaching and leading in math and science fields.

Marriage benefits that make you go hmmmm…

Some of the benefits of marriage seem especially arbitrary.

In the U.S. Census project I consult on — which includes focus groups on relationship identification — I noticed some examples of non-married straight couples taking a cavalier attitude toward the privilege of being able to pretend they are married.

One man in a long-term relationship said, for example:

For credit card applications or for medical, we wouldn’t say we’re married.  But to get a reservation at a restaurant, or if someone were to ask me at work if I was married, I would say “yes.”

The symbolic benefits of heteronormativity, then, are realized through the benefits of marriage. That appearance of normalcy, of the accomplishment of married life, is one — just one — of the things so many gay and lesbian couples want with legal homogamous marriage.

In the news now is another case of gratuitous rewards for marriage that make you say hmmm….

According to University of California rules,

U.C. students from out of state must meet three requirements to establish residency — physical presence, intent to stay and financial independence — a complicated process that takes at least two years. The independence test is the hardest to pass. When students marry, they can automatically claim themselves as independent, provided their parents do not claim them as dependents on their taxes. After that, gaining in-state tuition is a breeze.

The Bay Citizen was able to identity nine couples who admitted to marrying to beat the tuition rap. Elaine Davis, from Utah (pictured above), was desperate after her good-faith efforts to establish residency:

When Berkeley still denied her residency (living in an apartment owned by her father disqualified her as independent), Ms. Davis married a childhood friend. She saved $38,000 in out-of-state tuition over two years.

Those nine couples alone have saved (or, from the taxpayers’ point of view, cost), an estimated $350,000.