Inductivist

Feminism is a form of liberation that should make you happy, right? Wrong. Here is the relationship among white women between being happy and voting for Hillary in 2016 (GSS data):























Women who voted for Trump are significantly more likely to be very happy. Marriage is probably the reason why: married white women tend to vote Republican, and married women are happier. Look:




















Gloria Steinem famously said, "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." A fish doesn't need a bicycle unless she likes being happy. 

A piece in the Guardian reported that women are happiest if they stay single and childless, according to research done by London School of Economics professor Paul Dolan.

Dolan is wrong. The graph below displays 2000-2018 data from the General Social Survey (sample size = 12,254).  The bars indicates mean happiness (1 = not too happy, 2, = pretty happy, 3 = very happy).

 















Childless, never-married women are less happy than married women at all nine levels of family size.  A married women with eight or more kids is happier than a single, childless woman.  The difference between between the latter and married women as a whole is close to half a standard deviation, a good-sized gap.

Dolan claims married women only say they are happy when they are interviewed with their husband in the room.  I compared women who were interviewed in person with those who completed a self-adminstered questionnaire.  The results were the same for both groups. 

The General Social Survey asks participants, "Taken all together, how would you say things are these days - would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?"  I calculated the mean happiness for gay males over the past four decades.  Here is the graph:
















In terms of liberation, life has been good for homosexuals since 1980. Approval of homosexual sex by the general public has skyrocketed.  When I was an undergraduate, gay marriage was not even on the radar for progressives. Now it is the law of the land.  An openly gay man -- Buttigieg -- is a popular Democratic presidential candidate. In my department meeting Wednesday, a colleague boasted that her son now identifies as gay, making us all feel inferior because our kids are straight.

All this progress and liberation has really delivered on gay happiness, right?  Actually, mean happiness has dropped in every decade. Homosexual men are less happy than they were at the height of the AIDS epidemic. 

This reminds me of female liberation. Women are also less happy. Look at the graph.

















Liberation has not delivered.

I analyzed General Social Survey data a few years and showed that liberal women are more likely than conservatives to report being victims of sexual harassment. My take at the time was that liberal ideology makes women define normal sexual advances as inappropriate and abusive. But now I'm wondering if liberal women simply work around many liberal men, and liberal men simply lack the old-fashioned chivalry found more often among conservatives.


Here's a replication:

Percent reporting sexual harassment over past 5 years

Extremely liberal  23.7
Liberal  18.9
Slightly liberal  19.5 
Moderate  16.7  
Slightly conservative  19.3
Conservative  15.9
Extremely conservative  10.3

Using MIDUS data, I regressed waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) onto race/ethnicity and body mass index (BMI). (I figured fatter people have higher WHRs.) Here are the results for 1,974 women:

Standardized OLS regression coefficients

Hispanic .06*
Black -.02
Asian .01
BMI .32*

*statistically significant relationship with WHR

Fatter women do indeed have fatter waists compared to hips. The three minority groups are all being compared with non-Hispanic whites. Latino women have higher WHRs than their white counterparts. The other two racial groups do not differ from whites.

Consistent with my casual observations, Hispanic women are less curvy. Waist size is more similar to hip size. The curvaceous woman is more of a white thing.

A reader asked if I could post the graph for marriage trends for women in their 20s. You can see that the percent married has dropped dramatically over the past 40 years. The norm was reversed in a historically short period of time. The rate is higher than for men of the same age, but women experienced a sharp drop in just the last two years: The percent married fell from 26.0 percent in 2008 to 22.5 percent in 2010.

It's my impression that religious women are more oriented toward family than irreligious women. Traditional religion focuses on the importance of motherhood over worldly ambition.

How do we measure occupational ambition? Let's look at occupational prestige and number of hours worked per week. I'll throw in IQ as a control:

Standardized OLS Coefficients, DV = Job prestige (sample size = 7,841)

Church attendance .08*
IQ .32*

Standardized OLS Coefficients, DV = Hours worked last week (sample size = 7,208)

Church attendance -.07*
IQ .00

* statistically significant

Interesting. Religious women work more prestigious jobs, but they tend to work fewer hours. They work smarter, not harder.

Looking at my students today, I wondered if any girls make it all the way through college still virgins. The General Social Survey (GSS) has 129 girls ages 21-22 who were asked sometime in the past decade about sexual partners. Unfortunately, they were only asked about partners since age 18. I eliminated any girls who reported no sex with males but some with females, and I limited the analysis to the never-married. The percentage I came up with is 15.5.

So roughly 1 in 6 make it through graduation age maintaining their virginity (perhaps some of them slept with someone before age 18, but I doubt there are many). God bless 'em. You might be thinking they must be the fat, ugly ones, but when did that ever stop a guy? 

In a recent study of young white women, researchers found that subjects were more likely to plan to vote for Obama for president if asked around the time when they were ovulating. This was only true, however, if the women perceived Obama to be lighter-skinned than he actually is. If they perceived him to be darker than he is, closeness to ovulation lowered the chance of voting for him.

The authors interpreted this to mean that women become sensitive to men as potential mates around the time when they are most fertile; if a man seems dangerous (in this study blackness is thought to be associated with dangerousness) they are repelled by him out of fear of sexual assault; if a man seems powerful, attractive, and safe, they will be attracted to him. The study also found that these tendencies were particularly strong among conservative women (liberal women planned to vote for Obama, regardless). 

The authors also suggest that, since Obama won the election, many whites do not perceive him as black. They imply that people look at more than skin color when determining race, and Obama's education, career, demeanor, Waspishness, and restraint communicate whiteness.

The message here for Republicans for 2012 is that a few percentage points might be gained among women if the nominee is a powerful, attractive yet safe candidate. Of the current prospective men, I suspect that Romney best fits the description, which is not saying much. Most of the candidates seem weak or unattractive: politics attracts many weasels. 

Women participating in the Midlife Development in the United States Study (2004-06) were measured for waist-to-hip ratio (WHR). A ratio of 0.7 is considered to be ideal for health and attractiveness. Here are means by race/ethnic group (N = 1,891).  

Mean waist-to-hip ratio

Mexican .88
Amerindian .88
French .87
Black .86
Scottish .86
Swedish .86
English .85
Irish .85
Polish .85
Russian .85
Norwegian .84
German .84
Asian .84
Jewish .84
Italian .83

The differences seem small, but the gap between Italian and Mexican Americans is sixth-tenths of a standard deviation. The groups are roughly 1 1/2 to 2 standard deviations above the ideal--they're all fat--but keep in mind that this is a sample of middle-aged women, with most of the sample between the ages of 40 and 60. 

Controlling for height, Asian women are still the lightest by far: Continuing the topic of fatness, I thought a close look at how much women weigh would anger any feminists passing through, so I decided I had to do it. I looked at the National Health Interview Survey to calculate the mean weight of American women by ethnic group. Here's what I got:


Women's mean weight (without shoes):

Black 160.0
American Indian 150.3
White 143.4
Hispanic 143.1
Asian 122.3

Not surprisingly, the Black mean is a lot higher and the Asian mean a lot lower than the others, but this is an unfair comparison because of height differences. So what do the means look like if we focus on the modal height--5'4"?

Black 156.9
American Indian 149.7
Hispanic 142.6
White 141.7
Asian 125.3

A thirty pound difference between blacks and Asians, but again this is not really fair because of frame differences.

I also wanted to look at the age curve of women's weight:

age 18, 134
age 22, 137
age 26, 140
age 30, 143
age 37, 147
age 43, 150
age 51, 153
age 57, 156

From age 18 to 30, it only takes 4 years of aging to add an average of 3 pounds. So the 20s are the real weight gaining years, some of it due, I'm sure, to pregnancy.

After 30 the weight gain slows: it takes around 7 years to gain an additional three pounds until the peak weight of 156 is reached at age 57. After this age, the weight declines gradually and by age 82, women have fallen to the same weight they had at age 18. Some of this reduction is due to the higher mortality rates of obese women.