Half Sigma

Maureen Dowd complaining about something

Maureen Dowd’s is complaining about something, but I can’t figure out quite what. Makes me kind of wish that the NY Times never made her column free.

We also found that women got more dates when they won high marks for looks.

Stop the presses! Scientists discover that men prefer women who are good looking!

It turns out that men avoided women whom they perceived to be smarter than themselves. The same held true for measures of career ambition — a woman could be ambitious, just not more ambitious than the man considering her for a date.

I think the above quote has something to do with what she’s really complaining about, but it seems to be mutually beneficial, because a past NY Times article revealed that women dump men who don’t have an expensive enough apartment. It’s best for everyone if they never start dating in the first place.

Note that “ambition” is just a euphemism for money. Ambitionless rich men seem to have no problems in the dating market. If anything, not having to sit in a soulless cubicle for 40 hours a week adds to their desirability--it makes them seem more free spirited.

Or, to take a quote from yet another NY Times article:

“I love traveling, going to the opera and good restaurants,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be Per Se, but good food is important in my life. It’s sometimes hard to maintain the lifestyle I’m used to when I’m in a relationship with a guy who makes less than me, since I don’t want to be paying for the guy I’m with all the time.”

Once again, men just seem to be showing good common sense to avoid women like the one from the quote above.

What's Wrong With Cinderella?

The second most popular article at the New York Times this morning is What's Wrong With Cinderella?.

The author, a feminist, is mad about the Disney princess themed toys marketed to young girls. And there's lot of whining about girls body images and stuff like that. She seems to think that boys have it better. The fact that boys are more likely to end up in prison, dead in Iraq, or a non-college graduate who dies from a heart attack at an early age, doesn't seem to enter into the discussion.

Online dating research

Tyler Cowen has a blog post about an online dating paper (found here), "Mate Preferences and Matching Outcomes in Online Dating."

I learned the following form reading the paper:

(1) The ideal BMI for men is 27, which is higher than the average BMI of the online dating population and is considered to be "overweight." I previously found in the National Health Interview Survey that men who weigh 205 lbs earn the most money. The conclusion here is that men who weigh a little more than average have better social and economic outcomes.

(2) Women have three major criteria when looking for men: looks, height, and income. Women don't care as much about education (which is a proxy for intelligence). Women dislike men who have less education than themselves, but don't seem especially interested dating men with more education.

(3) Men primarily care about how women look. They don't care much about anything else. I previously wrote about how Maureen Dowd is wrong in her claim that men don't like smart women. Men like women who are good looking, they don't care about the other stuff.

(4) Everyone has observed that in white-Asian interracial couples, it is far more common that the man is white and the woman is Asian. This paper reveals the reason for this. White women aren't interested in Asian men. All races have a preference for their own race. The race preferences for white women, in declining order, are: white, Hispanic, black, Asian. Asian men are ranked at the very bottom of the average white woman's preferences. However when looking at preferences for Asian women, white men have only a very slight dispreference compared to Asian men.

(5) The best looking men benefit from a superstar effect. Men in the top 5% of looks get far more first contact emails from women than men in the top 10% but not the top 5%. This isn't the case for women. I suspect that men figure they have no chances with the hot women so they also send emails to a lot of average and even below average women. Women are more fussy when sending out first contact emails. They only want the cream of the crop. This is demonstrates the female preference for alpha males.

Are men more logical than women?

The General Social Survey contains a vocabulary test, and women outperform men on this test except in the highest score category:

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Column percent -N of cases		SEX
		1 MALE	2 FEMALE	ROW TOTAL
WORDSUM	0	.7 49	.7 67	.7 117
	1	1.4 103	1.5 150	1.4 252
	2	2.9 220	2.9 290	2.9 511
	3	6.4 481	4.9 494	5.6 975
	4	11.1 828	9.4 944	10.1 1,772
	5	15.9 1,187	16.6 1,668	16.3 2,855
	6	21.5 1,607	22.7 2,281	22.2 3,888
	7	15.5 1,158	16.7 1,685	16.2 2,843
	8	10.6 790	10.7 1,080	10.7 1,870
	9	8.0 596	8.2 826	8.1 1,422
	10	6.0 448	5.7 574	5.8 1,023
	COL TOTAL	100.0 7,468	100.0 10,060	100.0 17,528

But just because women are slightly more adept at vocabulary doesn’t mean they think as logically as men.

I believe someone who thinks logically would reject religion because, frankly, it just doesn’t make any sense. This is why we see that smarter people are less religious.

However, when we compare men and women, we see that women are more likely to believe in the religious superstitions, demonstrating that they are less logical than men:

GOD 369. Please look at this card and tell me which statement comes closest to expressing what you believe about God. 1. I don't believe in God. 2. I don't know whether there is a God and I don't believe there is any way to find out. 3. I don't believe in a personal God, but I do believe in a Higher Power of some kind. 4. I find myself believing in God some of the time, but not at others. 5. While I have doubts, I feel that I do believe in God.. 6. I know God really exists and I have no doubts about it.

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Column percent -N of cases		SEX
		1 MALE	2 FEMALE	ROW TOTAL
GOD	1: DONT BELIEVE	3.4 108	1.6 66	2.3 174
	2: NO WAY TO FIND OUT	6.1 195	2.5 105	4.1 300
	3: SOME HIGHER POWER	10.8 346	6.1 258	8.2 604
	4: BELIEVE SOMETIMES	4.7 152	3.4 142	4.0 294
	5: BELIEVE BUT DOUBTS	19.1 610	15.3 645	16.9 1,255
	6: KNOW GOD EXISTS	55.9 1,790	71.1 2,988	64.5 4,778
	COL TOTAL	100.0 3,201	100.0 4,204	100.0 7,405

BIBLE 120A. Which of these statements comes closest to describing your feelings about the Bible? READ FIRST THREE STATEMENTS [(a)-(c)] ONLY. CIRCLE ONLY ONE CODE.

a. The Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word

b. The Bible is the inspired word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally, word for word

c. The Bible is an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by men

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Column percent -N of cases		SEX
		1 MALE	2 FEMALE	ROW TOTAL
BIBLE	1: WORD OF GOD	28.5 2,226	38.0 3,809	33.8 6,035
	2: INSPIRED WORD	51.2 4,006	48.9 4,896	49.9 8,902
	3: BOOK OF FABLES	19.4 1,515	12.2 1,225	15.4 2,740
	4: OTHER	.9 74	.8 82	.9 157
	COL TOTAL	100.0 7,821	100.0 10,013	100.0 17,833

Astrology is something that has no scientific basis, and we see that more intelligent people reject astrology:

SCITEST3 1224. For each statement below, just check the box that comes closest to your opinion of how true it is. In your opinion, how true is this? ... C. Astrology - the study of star signs - has some scientific truth.

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Column percent -N of cases		WORDSUM
		0-5	6-7	8-10	ROW TOTAL
SCITEST3	1: DEFINITELY TRUE	14.1 73	8.2 50	5.6 21	9.6 144
	2: PROBABLY TRUE	54.1 280	41.4 253	23.3 88	41.2 621
	3: PROBABLY NOT TRUE	19.5 101	28.3 173	31.8 120	26.2 394
	4: DEFINITELY NOT TRUE	12.4 64	22.1 135	39.3 148	23.0 347
	COL TOTAL	100.0 518	100.0 611	100.0 377	100.0 1,506

It’s shameful that such a large percentage of people think that astrology has scientific truth, but women have more to be ashamed about than men:

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Column percent -N of cases		SEX
		1 MALE	2 FEMALE	ROW TOTAL
SCITEST3	1: DEFINITELY TRUE	8.8 92	10.3 140	9.7 232
	2: PROBABLY TRUE	34.4 359	47.9 650	42.0 1,009
	3: PROBABLY NOT TRUE	27.8 290	23.7 321	25.4 611
	4: DEFINITELY NOT TRUE	29.0 303	18.1 246	22.9 549
	COL TOTAL	100.0 1,044	100.0 1,357	100.0 2,401

The conclusion is clear. Men are, on average, more logical than women.

Women on Wall Street

A NY Times article from yesterday concerns the paucity of women on Wall Street. The long hours required by Wall Street firms push women out because they aren't consistent with raising children. When women who move to the slow track to have time with their children want to return to the fast track, they discover that once you leave the fast track there's no going back.

I suspect that one of the reasons for the long hours on Wall Street is to limit the number of people in the profession and thus maintain high incomes for the lucky few (as I previously blogged about in my post on labor force cartels). Perhaps if all the artificial barriers to entry and constraints on free trade were removed from Wall Street, the salaries would drop so much that no one would really care that if women weren't represented in the profession.

It's hard to have much sympathy for women who are making probably more than $200,000/year on the slow track in a profession that never opened its doors to me at all.

It also seems clear that women, on average, don't have the same desire as men to do whatever it takes in order to be financially successful.

One of the primary motivations for men to be financially successful is becuase it also makes them more successful with women. As Maureen Dowd observed, men don't care if women are successful, so women don't have the same motivation to be successful. Women could easily erase most of the gender income gap by deciding, en masse, to give their sexual favors to men who earn less money. Then men would no longer put so much effort into trying to make money.

Unmarried Men

From today's NY Times article with the headline "Facing Middle Age With No Degree, and No Wife":

Once, virtually all Americans had married by their mid-40’s. Now, many American men without college degrees find themselves still single as they approach middle age.

About 18 percent of men ages 40 to 44 with less than four years of college have never married, according to census estimates.

WHITE MEN VS. BLACK MEN

The article pretends that this is some special problem faced by men with only high school degrees. However, according to the 2000 U.S. Census, for non-Hispanic white men ages 40 to 44, 14% of men with less than a 4 year college degree, and 12.8% of men with a four year degree or greater, have never been married. I don't think that a 1.2% difference is that big of a deal.

Because black men are far less likely to be married than white men (26.4% of black men ages 40 to 44 have never been married), and because black men are less likely to have a college degree, mixing up blacks and whites together creates the impression there is some special problem facing men without college degrees.

MARRIAGE AND INTELLIGENCE

I have previously blogged about how more intelligent men are less likely to get married. On the surface the data above seems to conflict with that, but it doesn't. There are two forces working in opposite directions. Men with better careers are more likely to get married because they are more attractive to women. Men with higher intelligence are less likely to get married because they are less attractive to women. Men with higher intelligence are more likely to have better educational attainment which in turn causes better careers.

I looked at the General Social Survey for years 1996 to 2004, and it reveals that among white men ages 40 to 44, 15.9% without college degrees and 16.0% with college degrees were never married, based on a sample size of 395 respondents without degrees and 169 with. The GSS seems to be biased in favor of a higher percentage of never married respondents compared with the U.S. Census. In the same sample, of the 38 men with Wordsum 9 or 10, 28.5% were unmarried, demonstrating again that the curse of high intelligence is far less attractive to women than the minor problem of not having a college degree.

THE WOMAN SHORTAGE

The above discussion aside, there is a very real trend in which people of both sexes are less likely to be married, but it's worse for men. 9.2% of white women ages 40 to 44 have never been married according to the 2000 U.S. Census, compared to 13.7% of men. That's a pretty big difference. The NY Times article did not mention The Woman Shortage.

One important cause of the Woman Shortage, which I failed to mention in previous blog posts, is the declining birthrate. Because men tend to marry younger, a declining birthrate means there's a smaller pool of younger women than if the birthrate were steady. Other factors causing the Woman Shortage include 105 boy babies being born for every 100 girl babies, and older divorced men re-marrying younger never-married women.

COLLEGE GENDER GAP

The NY Times article seems influenced by the notion that increasing college enrollment for women is causing a marriage problem. I don't buy into this. A lot of the marginal female students are older women who are married or divorced, and their post-college income is, on average, lower than the cream of the blue collar male crop.

DECLINING REAL INCOME OF MARRIAGE AGED MEN

One woman in interviewed in the article said that for a man to be "marriage material" he has to have his own apartment. I previously blogged about the fact that more men are living with their parents. Surely, the declining real income of young men combined with the increasing real cost of housing makes them less attractive to women during the ages when men normally get married.

Marueen Dowd's semi-bogus claims about IQ and marriage

In her famous NY Times essay What's a Modern Girl to Do?, Maureen Dowd writes about how men don't like smart women. She backs this up with supposed facts, such as "A 2005 report by researchers at four British universities indicated that a high I.Q. hampers a woman's chance to marry, while it is a plus for men."

Maybe the United Kingdom has a completely different culture than the U.S., or maybe the study is bogus. But it certainly doesn't apply to men in the United States.

I've prepared two charts below which comparing the marital categories of General Social Survey respondents with their score on the 10 item Wordsum vocabulary test (a good proxy for I.Q.). The charts are restricted to white respondents, born in the United States, aged 45 or older (because it's extremely rare for people to get married for the first time after the age of 45), and to survey years 1990-2004 (in order to show modern trends).

Statistics for SEX = 1(MALE)
Cells contain: -Row percent -N of cases		MARITAL
		1 Married	2 Widowed	3 Divorced	4 Sep- arated	5 Never Married	ROW Total
Wordsum	0	.0 0	19.8 0	39.1 1	.0 0	41.2 1	100.0 2
	1	57.1 12	4.8 1	28.6 6	.0 0	9.5 2	100.0 21
	2	56.2 25	9.0 4	21.3 10	.0 0	13.5 6	100.0 44
	3	59.2 45	12.0 9	21.9 16	1.1 1	5.9 4	100.0 75
	4	59.8 99	14.8 24	17.5 29	1.8 3	6.0 10	100.0 165
	5	71.3 175	8.3 20	13.0 32	1.8 4	5.6 14	100.0 246
	6	67.9 236	6.7 23	17.4 61	2.1 7	5.8 20	100.0 347
	7	73.6 182	5.4 13	10.9 27	1.7 4	8.3 21	100.0 248
	8	68.1 147	7.9 17	15.0 32	1.4 3	7.6 16	100.0 216
	9	69.5 120	4.6 8	15.2 26	2.3 4	8.3 14	100.0 172
	10	60.9 73	5.0 6	17.9 21	4.2 5	12.0 14	100.0 120
	COL TOTAL	67.2 1,113	7.7 127	15.8 261	1.9 32	7.4 123	100.0 1,657

Statistics for SEX = 2(FEMALE)
Cells contain: -Row percent -N of cases		MARITAL
		1 Married	2 Widowed	3 Divorced	4 Sep- arated	5 Never Married	ROW Total
Wordsum	0	25.0 1	50.0 2	25.0 1	.0 0	.0 0	100.0 4
	1	23.2 5	59.1 13	13.3 3	.0 0	4.4 1	100.0 23
	2	28.7 13	55.5 25	11.4 5	2.2 1	2.2 1	100.0 46
	3	42.0 34	39.4 32	11.1 9	1.2 1	6.2 5	100.0 81
	4	43.0 70	37.8 62	16.1 26	.6 1	2.4 4	100.0 164
	5	49.9 156	33.0 103	14.0 44	1.1 4	1.9 6	100.0 313
	6	52.1 237	23.3 106	18.4 84	2.3 11	3.9 18	100.0 455
	7	53.5 210	24.1 95	15.2 60	2.3 9	5.0 19	100.0 392
	8	48.7 153	25.6 80	15.4 48	3.0 9	7.3 23	100.0 314
	9	49.9 136	20.6 56	22.5 62	1.0 3	6.0 16	100.0 273
	10	52.4 105	13.4 27	24.0 48	.5 1	9.7 19	100.0 201
	COL TOTAL	49.5 1,121	26.6 602	17.2 390	1.7 39	5.0 113	100.0 2,265

Although Maureen Dowd is correct that smart women are less likely to get married, she's completely wrong about smart men. In fact, smart men are even less likely to get married than smart women. As much as men are turned off by smart women, women are even more turned off by smart men (which explains why smart men are the most likely to have paid for sex).

According to the GSS, men are more likely than women to go through life without ever getting married. This is an expected result of the fact that there are 105 boy babies born for ever 100 girl babies. There aren't enough women to go around for every man to have a wife. (See my post on The Woman Shortage.)

One interesting difference between the sexes is that smart women are more likely to be divorced than smart men. The charts don't tell us who's at fault for the divorce. Are men divorcing smart women because they make for bad wives? Or do smart women leave their husbands because smart women are picky and find more faults with their husbands?

Another double standard

If a man has an affair with his secretary, then he's a lowdown dog.

But there's a NY Times article about women having affairs with their contractors, and the article has nothing bad to say about it. "It’s fast, sexy, hot, but it doesn’t mean a lot — it’s like sexual chocolate, like sneaking out and getting that double scoop of ice cream in the afternoon."

Sexual double standard

If men in their late forties and fifties go to Thailand to have sex with teenage girls, this means the men are disgusting sexual perverts.

But there's a movie about women of the same age bracket who go to Haiti to have sex with teenage boys, and the NY Times speaks glowingly of how it "affirms the sexual reality of women" and how "hedonism without judgment" results in "liberation."

The Woman Shortage

Dennis Mangan has some posts about the Woman Shortage.

I've known about this phenomenon for a long time, but this is the first I knew that it had a name with capital letters.

There are 105 boy babies for every 100 girl babies (at least I assume this based on the male to female ratio of ages 0 to 5 in the US Census).

The ratio of single (defined as separated or not married) men to single women in lower age brackets becomes even larger because of serial polygamy, which is the tendency of some older men to divorce and marry a lot younger.

Using the 2000 U.S. Census data, and looking only at respondents who claimed to be white, in the age bracket of 18-29, there are 119 single men for every 100 single women.

It doesn't get much better for men in their thirties. For white people aged 30-39, there are 117 single men for every 100 single women.

As we see, dating life is much harder for under-40-year-old men than it is for women.

College is for girls

The two major points of an article in tomorrow's NY Times are (1) only 42% of college students are men; and (2) women get better grades in college than men.

A third point, crucially important to understanding the situation is that "[i]n the highest-income families, men 24 and under attend college as much as, or slightly more than, their sisters."

Despite higher female college attendence, men, on average, earn more money.

This trend is interesting but not really that mysterious:

(1) College is usually seen as preparation for a career, and once upon a time women weren't encouraged to have a career. Today that is not the case and women and men are nearly equally likely to want to have a career.

(2) Women have higher conscientiousness compared to men. Conscientiousness is one of the Big Five personality factors. This causes women to spend more hours studying and to be more likely to obey the rules. Thus they obtain better grades.

(3) At the lower end of the social spectrum, men see skilled blue collar jobs as more financially lucrative than low wage and low prestige white collar jobs available to graduates of bottom tier four year and two year colleges. Indeed, a plumber or an auto mechanic can earn a higher salary than a school teacher. But men from higher social classes have no desire to be a plumber so they are as equally likely to go to college as women.

(4) Men are better at math, and math-oriented majors tend to lead to better paying careers, probably because skills such as engineering and computer programming add more value to the economy, but maybe because such skills are merely scarcer.

Why are more young men living with their parents?

The author of this article at the Washington Post makes a huge mystery out of a question that's pretty easy to answer:

According to the Census Bureau, fully one-third of young men ages 22 to 34 are still living at home with their parents -- a roughly 100 percent increase in the past 20 years. No such change has occurred with regard to young women. Why?

The obvious reason why young men are living at home is because the cost of housing has been increasing faster than starting salaries. More and more young men can't afford to live on their own.

The salaries of young women have been increasing relative to men. Here's an article I found on the web which has a chart showing the steady increase of women's wages, and this increase is probably even more pronounced for younger women. So while the cost of housing has increased relative to young men's salaries, it may not have increased relative to young women's salaries, or at the very least it has increased at a much slower rate.

Huge mystery solved! Too bad the bar for getting an article published in the Washington Post is so low.

UPDATE

Read my followup post, Median income for young men is declining. Also read my comment, below, which further explains my point.

More women than men in college

There is a Weekly Standard article about the lack of male college students. By 2010 there will be 60 female graduates for every 40 male graduates, a pretty skewed ratio.

Now on the one hand, one can easily get outraged by the lack of outrage. When men outnumbered women in college, the feminists were up in arms. Stuff had to be done to fix the gender imbalance! But when the gender imbalance favors women, no one seems too concerned.

But I would like to look at the issue more deeply and ask if this really matters. One problem mentioned in the article is that educated women won't be able to find educated men to mate with. This seems like a non-problem. When more men than women attended college, this wasn't such a big deal, so I doubt it will be a big deal with the gender ratios reversed.

Those who read my blog regularly know that I believe that too many people are going to college. The changing gender ratio may simply reflect the fact that young males perceive correctly that college won't help them make more money. A job as a bus driver in New York City will pay a lot more money than the types of white collar jobs one would typically get with a college degree from a mediocre school.

This is a trend I've already observed in my days of working for the U.S. government. I saw many not very bright women with degrees from bogus schools like Northern Virginia Community College working at low paying dead end white collar jobs who were hooked up with non-college educated men with better paying blue collar jobs.

Blue collar men have it better than most college graduates. They have no student loans to pay off, they don't have to buy expensive clothes to wear to work, and generally they don't have to commute as far because the blue collar jobs are more often located closer to affordable housing.

Compare this to a guy with a law degree who has $100,000 of loans to pay off, has to buy expensive suits to wear to work, and has to pay high rent to live close to downtown where his office is. The blue collar guy actually has the higher standard of living.

Elite educated women likely to give up their careers

The most emailed article in the New York Times at the moment is this one about how women at elite colleges expect to give up their careers to be mothers.

A 2000 survey of Yale graduates in their forties showed that 90% of men worked but only 56% of women, and the article says there are similar numbers for the 2005 survey.

Young women in college are, therefore, just being realistic about how they expect their life to proceed. I'm a big fan of realism.

There are more than enough resources in the United States for a substantial portion of the population not to work, and the fact that less women work than men reflects the different inclinations of the sexes. But women's organizations should not be complaining that women earn less than men if women with the greatest potential to earn a lot of money are voluntarily abandoning the workforce to raise children.

The issue that's only alluded to in the article is whether education at an elite school is being wasted on students who don't intend to "use" it in their careers. My answer is no, it's not being wasted, because I don't believe that the real purpose of an elite education is to give students skills to use in their careers that they couldn't have obtained at a second tier school. Elite education is all about status, and it's mathematically impossible for more than 1% of the people to be in the top 1% of the status bell curve.

Businesses might be wasting resources if they hire a woman in her early thirties with the intention of grooming her for a higher level role, because there is a high chance that she'll abandon her career in a few years. But as far as I know, most hiring decisions are made to fill an immediate need without much regard for what the person being hired will be doing in three years. The days when hiring decisions were made with a long term view are pretty much over.

Marketing to women. Logical?

At WonderBranding, Michele writes:

When approaching the topic of marketing to women, stop thinking feminine. Instead, focus on the logical

This advice surely flies in the face of what seems to work. For example, no serious photographer would ever use a Kodak camera, digital or otherwise, but Kodak has been very successful marketing their cameras to women by creating feminine cameras. If you visit this link, you will see all the pretty colors that the Kodak cameras come in.

Where to meet women over 40

According to the Washington Post, they’re online playing games.

When it comes to online games, women over 40 play the most often and spend the greatest number of hours doing so, even beating out teenage boys, according to a study conducted by Digital Marketing Services.

But they’re not playing stuff like Final Fantasy XI (a game which I shamefully admit I’ve wasted time playing), but rather are to be found at Pogo.com.

I’ve previously blogged about chess at Pogo.com (when I was in my nerdy blogging phase), but I don’t think that the women are playing chess. I’ve given up on chess myself because I finally figured out that I suck at it.

In case you want to read my other chess posts:

Yahoo Chess sucks
Chess Genius for the PocketPC, a review
The $100 chess set I bought online