Yesterday’s post got me thinking about crime, and I remember a stat I saw somewhere that I had never seen any details on…namely that women tend to get shorter jail sentences than men for the same types of crime.

I took a look around and found that the definitive study on this seems to be this one by David Mustard.  He analyzed over 77,000 convictions and sentences for 41 different types of crime, to see if he could come up with how much race, gender, education and socioeconomic status effected sentences.

It appears that the difference in length of sentences between genders is 5.5 months, when comparing similar crimes overall.  This is an issue because the guidelines specifically prohibit discrimination based on gender.  I got curious though….if the only criteria was “similar crime”, could we be losing some detail here?  Interestingly enough Mustard actually did delve in to some additional detail that made a difference.  Apparently sentencing guidelines are set by the USSC guidelines, which require that criminal history and the particular offense be taken in to account, and ban certain characteristics from being taken in to account (gender included).  Everything else that goes in to a crime is fair game, and if a judge overrides the standards, he has to provide a reason why he felt these standards shouldn’t apply (an appellate court must agree).  If you exclude those cases where the judge believed there was an extra level of egregiousness, the sentencing difference drops to 1.8 months.  

I thought that was interesting….are judges more likely to see things men did as particularly awful, or are men more likely to add an extra layer of awful to some crimes?

I started wondering what would happen if you got several people to weigh in on particular offenses with gender removed (okay, this wouldn’t work for most rape cases….but everything else would likely be fair game).  This could be an interesting comparison study to see where the  differences were coming from.

Also, I can’t dig up the study at the moment, but there is some evidence that suggests the more emotional the accused seems to be about what they’ve done, the lighter the sentence.*  It strikes me that since women generally cry more easily/frequently than men, this might play a part.  Another interesting “is this discrimination against a gender or against a characteristic that is linked to gender” question.   I’d love to see a study that took in to account who cried at their sentencing.

As for me, I’m headed to Salt Lake City in the morning.  I’ll try not to get arrested.

*This is why people with Aspberger’s tend to get stiffer sentences.

Edit before I hit post:  I wrote this whole post and then decided to google a few more things to make sure I had everything straight….only to come across this article that clarifies that Dr Roth was misquote by the Daily Mail in the article I start with.  I’m still posting this though because I think that the criticisms I make below are a good framework for assessing any study that looks at the biology of criminals, and because assessing it like this had already led me to believe something was amiss (see my footnote I wrote before I found the clarification).  What can I say, when in doubt, blame the journalist.

I saw an interesting link over at Maggie’s Farm the other day about  a German scientist who claims to have found a “dark patch” in the brains of people who have committed violent crimes.

In the article, the scientist, Gerhard Roth is quoted as saying this:

When you look at the brain scans of hardened criminals, there are almost always severe shortcomings in the lower forehead part of the brain…. 

…But when I will look at young people, and I see there are developmental disorders in the lower forehead brain, I can say that there is a felon in the making with 66 per cent probability. 

What interested me as I read this was that his credentials and studies were being touted only as they related to his work with the criminal population*.  This can seem insignificant, I mean, if we want to predict criminal behavior, go take a look at the criminals right?

I’m not so sure.  It depends what he means by “66% probability”.  At first glance, I’d assume he means that have the “dark patch” in question will go on to become felons.  But that sort of assertion would mean he’d have to start with a young, non-incarcerated population, identify those with this particular brain abnormality, and then see how many of them became felons.  The study the article describes does nothing of the sort.  It’s one thing to say that criminals have a different brain from non criminals, but to say something’s predictive you have to actually, you know, see if it can predict things.  It’s possible he meant that 66% of felons have this patch and something got lost in translation?

Prison populations are really interesting to study, because they’re literally captive audiences.  However, finding commonalities between criminals are fairly useless unless you have a sense of how prevalent the same thing is in the general population.  If we know this, we can know exactly what we’d do with those 33% up there who are okay and got swept up in the mess.

Some of this is covered at length in Barbara Oakley’s Evil Genes.  There are a lot of issues with trying to predict violent behavior, and while I certainly think that linking genes or brain damage to evil is quite reasonable, we always will have to carefully weigh pros and cons of doing so proactively.  Even if you disregard ethical concerns, violent criminals always need to be compared to something to make sure you’re not just picking up on a characteristic lots of people happen to have.

*Other weirdness in the article: Roth’s not actually a neurologist, he’s a neurobiologist, I’m pretty sure the “scans” Roth’s referring to and that are pictured are not X-rays, you don’t measure brain waves with either of those, and there’s no such thing as a “central lobe”.  None of this seems to be Roth’s fault, but this reporter could use a little work.

I was actually looking for something totally serious on Youtube when I found this video, a statistical tribute to Far East Movement’s epic “Like a G6”:

I then went looking for the original so you’d have some context, if desired, but instead found a little somethin somethin for my religious readers….”Like Jesus”:

Now if those two didn’t wear you out, here’s the original:

And since we’ve come this far together, here’s a poll so you can rate the experience:

That was fun, thanks for coming by!

Well the storm’s all done, and it’s officially the 5th largest snow fall in Boston since they started keeping records.

Snowstorms are a really interesting test of how people perceive data.  For example, the blizzard of ’78  is absolutely legendary in these parts.  And yet, it’s not the biggest snow storm on record.  Here’s the list:

1. Feb. 17-18, 2003 27.6 inches

True story: Yesterday I went to Weather.com to try to get an update on the snow situation for Boston, and after about 30 seconds I turned to my office-mate and said “You know, I feel like Weather.com has started employing 16 year old girls to write their forecasts”  She looked at me like I was crazy until she came over and took a look.  There WERE WEIRD CAPITALIZATION THINGS HAPPENING. Some random sentences were in bold. There were far, far too many exclamation points!!!!!  Anyway, I felt a little crazy, like maybe this was just how things were being done these days, until Gawker put up this article this morning.

Not only did other people notice that the weather.com website appeared to be six kinds of high, but they cataloged how bad it was.  In case you’re curious, the current headline there is LIVE – LIFE THREATENING STORM CLOSES IN along with this chart:

No, wait, I wouldn’t want to do that either.   That would suck.  According to an article in Jezebel though, my feelings on that put me in the minority of women: “Most Women Would Rather Kick Their Husband to the Curb Than Be a Housewife” the headline blares.

Seriously?  That doesn’t even sound remotely correct.

This assertion, which is based on this article, is apparently based on a statement in this book “The Unfinished Revolution” by Kathleen Gerson.  From the article:

 80% of women and 70% of men when asked say that they would prefer an egalitarian marriage where the partners share responsibility for housework, taking care of children and breadwinning. 

….Unfortunately, an egalitarian marriage sometimes works more in theory than it does in practice (especially when kids are involved), so Gerson also asked her subjects what kind of family they’d prefer if an equal partnership became impossible. For the most part, men resolved themselves to a traditional division of labor with 70% of them saying that they would hope to convince their wives to give up their careers and focus on homemaking. 

The majority of women on the other hand — nearly 75% — say that they would rather divorce their partners, continue to work and raise their children alone than become a housewife. 

That’s some strong language right there.  But seriously….75% would seek divorce?  Here’s the graph:

So, the first thing I noticed is that the chart isn’t labeled “divorce” but rather “self reliant”.  This made me suspicious, so I took a look around.  Well, I did a little digging, and there’s a few things that weren’t really made clear here.  In this review of the book, it’s explained that all of this data is based on interviews with 120 young people (average age 24)….so presumably most of them (if not all) are currently unmarried.  So that means that women were not answering “if the man you’re married to right now wanted you to stay home what would you do?” but rather “if you couldn’t get the hypothetical you wanted, what would be your next preference for a hypothetical choice?”.  That’s why the data is labeled “self-reliant” as opposed to “get a divorce”.  There is no divorce.  There is no marriage.

In fact, here’s what the reviewer said about women’s answers to this question:

If equality is difficult to attain, most women would rather secure social and economic autonomy through a paid job than fall back into a neo-traditional relationship. Their self-reliant strategies include: seeking a position in the workplace; postponing marriage; considering marriage as optional and reversible, redesigning motherhood by postponing parenthood; separating marriage and motherhood; and, becoming a provider as well as a caretaker.

Certainly “viewing marriage as optional and reversible” points to divorce, but there’s a few other options there.

At the end of the day though, I’m not sure I would take the musing of a few college students as gospel over what they would decide in the real world.  I think it’s really easy to say you’d never pick staying at home with your child over a career when the child (and the father) are both hypothetical….but once you’ve got an actual smiling, laughing adorable baby in your arms, I’m guessing staying home wouldn’t actually seem like such a terrible fate.  I mean, I’ve got a pretty fantastic job that I’ve worked hard for, but if I got laid off tomorrow I’m sure the munchkin and I could find a million ways to have a good time.

Still though, they weren’t responding “what if you got laid off”, they were responding to “what if you couldn’t find anyone to have an equal relationship with?” or “what if you married someone who you thought would split things equally with you and he didn’t?”.

For the men respondents, I’m also confused why this got skewed this way.  It never clarifies if equality was hard to obtain because of circumstances, or because their wife asked to stay home.  These are men who said they wanted something egalitarian.  If that didn’t work out for them, it means it was beyond their control.  They’re not asking their wife to stay home in a vacuum, they’re either responding to her request or an external pressure.  Sexism isn’t at play here, because we already determined that’s not what they want.

This all of course misses the point that marriages with a stay at home mother can be egalitarian.  I’ve touched on this before, but there’s a lot of stats that show that many women would rather work part time or stay at home, especially when the kids are young.  Reverting to a male breadwinner setup during those years is likely a mutual decision.

Anyway, I think studies about aspirations are great, but they should be kept in context.  Life gets messy.  People make trade offs.  Sometimes life only offers you mediocre options, and you just make it work.  You can’t always know what you’d do ahead of time, and that’s okay.  Aspirations studies say more about the way we presume life works than the way it actually does.

All of my engineer readers are probably quite familiar with the Bernoulli family, or at least their principle and equation.  For those of you who aren’t, they were a Swiss family of mathematicians who sat around and came up with all sorts of interesting stuff, including a large part of fluid dynamics.

Anyway, I knew a lot of things carried the name Bernoulli (Bernoulli principle, Bernoulli numbers, Bernoulli’s equation, Bernoulli distribution…they ran a damn franchise), but I didn’t know until researching today’s problem that it wasn’t just one really prolific guy, but rather a family affair.  That made me feel a bit better about things.

This all relates because today’s problem apparently was a favorite of Nicolaus Bernoulli (1695-1720), who I take it was the looker of the family:

Recently, a male friend of mine got accused of sexism at work.  It was during an exit interview, and he was a bit flummoxed by the whole thing, so he asked me to play gender referee and talk it through with him.

Now to be clear, I don’t think he’s sexist…..but three years worth of therapy school render me pretty incapable of responding to something like “hey an employee on her way out the door accused me of being sexist” with anything other than “hmmm…..how do you feel about that?”*

Anyway, we were talking it out, and I mentioned that in feminist theory, there are really a few different types of sexism.  I’ve covered the benevolent vs hostile sexism issue before, but the kind I was thinking of in this case is direct vs indirect sexism.**

Direct sexism is pretty obvious: treating men and women differently in the same situation.  Indirect sexism however is a little more subtle, especially in the workplace.  One of the types of behaviors it includes is when people discriminate against those who have a particular characteristic/set of behaviors, but those characteristics/sets of behaviors tend to be possessed largely by one gender.*** The example would be say, someone who hates everyone over 5’10”.  In theory it’s equal opportunity dislike, but in practice it will cover a lot more men than women.

Now I’m not aiming to be a women’s studies class here, so you can ponder for yourself if you feel that indirect sexism is an issue or not.****  However, I bring this up not to talk about the workplace, but rather so I can pivot 90 degrees to talk about education.

Recently I’ve seen some good stuff talking about gender and education.  A few weeks ago, James (who does some great dives in to various studies and you should read his stuff, btw) at I Don’t Know, But… did an interesting post about the use of non-cognitive measures in education, and if that ended up biasing things against boys vs girls (non-cognitive measures being things like being neat, orderly and helpful).

Today, Althouse linked to this piece talking about the same study and some perspective on how non-cognitive skills could actually quite accurately play in to grades (example: the ability to pass in legible homework).

Both posts address some interesting questions on research related to my description of indirect sexism above.  In either case, are we studying sexism, or are we studying discrimination against traits that are linked to gender?  Does it make a difference in how we study or approach these things?

There’s some evidence that teachers discriminate across gender lines against behavior that disrupts orderly classrooms, but with classroom management being part of their job, would this really be discrimination?  If a woman cries***** during a tense meeting at work, is losing respect for her discrimination or just a reaction to unprofessional behavior?

I’d be interested to hear what some of my teacher readers think.  Is there a problem with education for boys, or there just a set of unhelpful traits?

*The instance of me using some variation of the phrase “how does that make you feel” shot up over 1000% over the course of getting my master’s degree.
**I may have these names wrong, or be missing a nuance.  Third wave feminism makes me sleepy.
***This relates to a running joke of mine that I’ve said on the few occasions when I’ve been in discussions about my preferred gender for my obstetrician “I don’t care if they’re male or female…I just want one who’s actually been through childbirth”
****My brilliant answer?  It depends.
*****When I worked in the ER, crying at work was something that actually happened to both genders.  Even the men had to occasionally lock themselves in the bathroom for a bit of a time out/regroup.  The child abuse cases tended to do everyone in.

The Washington Post had an interesting headline today about the ridiculously long waits veterans in Maryland are facing when they try to file disability claims.  Apparently the average wait is over a year….429 days, which is also 162 days longer than the national average.  Also, their accuracy sucks.  Yikes.

“The ability to attract talented candidates was challenging due to the high cost of living in the Baltimore commuting area,” VA said in a statement.

Now maybe it’s just because I’ve lived in Boston for so long, but I thought it was a little strange to see someone in Baltimore complain about a high cost of living.  I was pretty sure this was just normal bureaucratic excuse making, but I decided to take a look around the internet and see if I couldn’t figure out if there was some legitimacy to it.

It turns out there are a lot of different ways to measure how pricey a city is.

Kiplinger’s seemed pretty comprehensive…they factor in housing, transportation, groceries, health care and “miscellaneous”.   They rank Boston as #8, Baltimore doesn’t make the top 10.

CNN money provides a cost of living calculator that claims that if you made $100k in Boston, you’d only need to make $86,774 in Baltimore to keep your standard of living.  They even give you a break down of which categories make the biggest difference (health care and utilities are much less in Baltimore compared to Boston, groceries and transportation slightly less, and housing equal).

It appears that what you count as a city makes a big difference too….for example the Council for Community and Economic Research split up New York City, and thus has Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens as 3 of the top 10 most expensive cities.

This list struck me as a little odd, until I realized they played an interesting semantics game….this isn’t “most expensive” it’s “least affordable”.  The report it linked to clarified that they counted housing and transportation costs, and then compared them to median incomes in the area.  Cities that had high costs but also high incomes were not included…they were targeting cities with low incomes but high costs.  That puts Boston and Baltimore as almost identical.

Overall, I thought the different ways of counting were pretty interesting.  I’m still not buying that Baltimore’s facing any particularly unique challenge of cost, but more likely that those interested in living in the area and working for the government would rather go a few miles down the road to DC.  Also, I’ve been to Baltimore, and I got a little curious what would happen if you priced out the good areas of Baltimore.  Once you get outside the inner harbor and a few other areas, things go downhill in a hurry, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the average costs were a bit skewed.

Ah well, at least they have the Lombardi trophy for the year.  You know, once they found it.

Now that the lights are back on at the Super Bowl, I thought I’d take a minute to highlight some research I’m actually pretty excited for.  Harvard University and the NFL are teaming up and dedicating $100 million to study brain injury in players over the next 10 years.

I’m happy about this research not just because I think we owe it to players who may be living with consequences they never realized they could have (especially the non-super stars), but also because I think brain injuries are a seriously under recognized issue in every day people.  Even if the research starts with football players, I have a feeling we’ll all benefit from research around how injury harms the brain.

As a wrestling fan and a BU alum, I’ve been following the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy  for a while now.  It’s a collaboration between the BU med school and the Sports Legacy Institute, which was founded by former professional wrestler Christopher Nowinski (he was the WWF’s first Harvard grad).  They’ve been doing good work in this area, in part by getting athletes to sign on to donating their brains post-mortem.

The research here could be truly stunning, since your control group is huge but your study group is motivated.  Between these two groups, it’s going to be interesting to see what they come out with….and what the game looks like 10 years from now.