Op-ed plus: Check the facts edition

Truth-O-Meter

Without making direct comparisons across the several outlets at which I’ve published, I will say that nothing compares with the fact-checking I got at the New York Times for the op-ed published this week. In addition to two careful editors, the piece was thoroughly checked out by Kevin McCarthy (whose name I use with permission). It began with a fully annotated version of the piece, and continued with several rounds of follow-up queries. As far as I can tell he followed up on every one of the factual assertions I made, including gaining access to pay-walled material and verifying content within books (I know this because of the errors he discovered there).

Delighted as I am that they published the essay, I’m not used to publishing without the footnotes, and I would like to provide all the information. So here I took the final, online version from the Times, and added footnotes for all the sourcing, and put it in a PDF: How Can We Jump-Start the Struggle for Gender Equality?

5 thoughts on “Op-ed plus: Check the facts edition

  1. Unfortunately, fact checking isn’t particularly useful for absent facts.

    Here is a list of “non-traditional” (i.e., less than 25% female) occupations.

    As it turns out, there are quite a lot of them, with an average female participation rate of roughly 10%. It is hard to imagine how work-family policies, no matter what they might be, differentially impact nursing and being a mechanic. Yet nursing remains overwhelmingly female, and any occupation with the word “mechanic” attached is at least 96% male.

    Maybe something more than stalled attitudes is involved. Maybe a great many women are concluding that, given a choice, they would far rather be nurses than mechanics. And just as many men are wondering why they would want to be primary school teachers when they could be working on cars.

    If that is so, and the list of still “traditional” occupations suggests it is, then perhaps evolution didn’t stop at the neck line, and, consequently, equality of opportunity should not be expected to yield anything remotely resembling equality of outcome.

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  2. Thanks for the annotated version. I had a similar experience when I pulished an iop-ed in the LATimes. It was actually fun because i got to talk to people at international health organizations and other really cool people as we went through the verification process. But in that case, I was also criticizing a powerful industry, and I know the paper was nervous about liability.

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