Month: January 2022

At long last, some change is coming in the way sexual assaults are handled in the military. Jennifer Steinhauer writes that a landmark agreement has been reached to “strip military commanders of most of their authority to prosecute sexual assaults and myriad other criminal cases.” Under the current law, commanders can protect their subordinates accused of sexual harassment or assault by declining to refer their cases to courts-martial and by selecting the pool of eligible jurors. They also notoriously look the other way when those who file complaints face retaliation, which can damage the victims’ careers. Even General Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, despite having long opposed these changes, had to acknowledge that “junior enlisted troops had largely lost faith that sexual assault cases would be handled fairly,” according to Steinhauer.

While Milley now supports the change, Pentagon leaders, lawmakers, and American presidents have resisted this change for a generation, reports Steinhauer. The new legislation is the result of nearly two decades of efforts by female lawmakers and survivor groups, led by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, democrat of New York, and Representative Jackie Speier, democrat of California. They have met resistance at every turn, and even the new legislation does not go as far as is needed. Under the new law,

• Independent military prosecutors would replace commanders in determining whether those accused of sexual assault, rape, murder, or domestic violence would be prosecuted.
• Sexual harassment would be criminalized.
• Commanders would maintain their authority to conduct trials, choose jury members, grant immunity, and select witnesses.

Gillibrand feels this last item undermines the change that is needed. She notes, “Removing that authority from commanders is critical,” and it represents a setback as a legislative compromise. She and Speier vow to keep fighting for true military justice reforms.

The new law will take two years to implement. In 2019 alone, Steinhauer writes, 7,825 incidences of sexual assault involving service members as victims were reported. Only 7 percent resulted in convictions. This new legislation is a step forward, but more steps are necessary before confidence in military justice for service members filing assault claims can be established.

Photo courtesy of Maryland National Guard (CC BY-ND 2.0)

New data from the largest analysis to date on physician salaries shows that over the course of a career, female physicians make an average $2 million less than their male counterparts, a 25 percent pay gap. This survey of more than eighty thousand physicians, reported by Azeen Ghorayshi of the New York Times and published in Health Affairs, is the first to estimate the cumulative impact of gender pay gaps in medicine. Survey data was collected between 2014 and 2019. The study’s lead author, Christopher Whaley, a health economist at the nonpartisan think tank RAND Corporation, suggests that the gap may be even wider now given that other studies show the pandemic has driven women in many fields out of the workplace.

The self-reported salary data was collected at the social network Doximity, which is similar to LinkedIn and claims to reach 80 percent of doctors in the United States. The analysis compared wages between women and men with the same amount of experience and controlled for differences in specialty, type of practice, and patient volume. The study did not include data on people who identify as nonbinary or transgender, which are factors known to influence physician pay. Racial disaggregation of the data was also not possible because, as noted by Whaley, salary information for physicians by race “is not systematically recorded really anywhere.”

The study findings, as reported by Ghorayshi, include the following sober statistics:

• Female doctors make less than their male counterparts starting from their very first days on the job.
• The salary gaps started at the beginning of doctors’ careers and continued to widen until around their tenth year without recovering. The gap remained stable for the rest of their forty-year careers, with women never catching up to men.
• When comparing wages between men and women with the same amount of experience, male physicians over a forty-year career earned an average of $8.3 million while women earned roughly $6.3 million—a nearly 25 percent difference.
• Even within specialties, the wage gaps were sizable. For example, the highest gap was among surgeons at around $2.5 million and lowest among primary care physicians at nearly $920,000.

Ghorayshi notes that other studies have shown widespread bias against women in both academic and applied medicine, as well as in other fields. She writes that while “almost all professions still pay women less . . . the gap is wider among health care practitioners than among people in computer and engineering jobs.”

According to Ghorayshi, “While roughly the same number of women graduate from medical school as men, women make up only 36 percent of working physicians.” Snigdha Jain, a pulmonary and critical care physician at the Yale School of Medicine, suggests that one source of the “leaky pipeline” might be that women are in the prime of their reproductive years when they start practice, and they experience “insufficient maternity leave, inadequate support on return to work and a disproportionate burden of child care in the subsequent years.” Per Whaley’s suggestion, “Offering more paid family leave and more flexible scheduling,” along with making salary information more transparent, could help women “earn their fair share.”

All women in all professions would benefit from these policy changes. We need to put pressure on our lawmakers to put these policies in place.

Photo courtesy of Army Medicine (CC BY 2.0)

I remember when my high school guidance counselor advised me not to enroll in advanced science and math courses. He told me that girls were just not good at math and science and these courses would be a waste of my time. I kid you not, this really happened. And I believed him and did not consider career paths that required college math and science courses. After I graduated from college, I realized, “Wait a minute! I actually am good in math and science.” In fact, I had taken a number of advanced math and science courses in college for pass/fail grades as elective courses that did not count toward any major. I enjoyed them and did well in them. Once I graduated and realized the discrepancies in my beliefs and experiences, it felt too late to choose a different path, such as medical school, which would require me to start over.

Perhaps this is why a new large study on gender stereotypes in computer and engineering caught my attention. This study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America on November 30, 2021, is authored by Allison Master, Andrew N. Meltzoff, and Sapna Cheryan from the Universities of Houston and Washington. The research reports the combined results of four studies that encompass “a large and socioeconomically diverse sample, across multiple racial/ethnic and gender intersections” from age six through adolescence, from first grade through twelfth. The four studies include large cross-sectional surveys in schools and controlled laboratory experiments to “investigate the presence, correlates, and causal effects of gender-interest stereotypes on interest and participation in computer science and engineering activities and classes.”

The authors explain that “in the United States, the representation of women varies widely across science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Computer science and engineering have among the largest gender disparities in college, much larger than mathematics, biology, and chemistry.” They note that societal stereotypes depict girls as less interested than boys in computer science and engineering. They define societal stereotypes as “shared beliefs linking groups and traits [that can] have numerous negative consequences.” This study investigates a pervasive stereotype: “that women and girls have lower interest in computer science and engineering.” The authors postulate that interest stereotypes may influence the motivation of students to participate and their sense of whether they would belong if they did participate.

The combined findings from four studies demonstrate that gender-interest stereotypes

• Exist among a racially and socioeconomically diverse group of children and adolescents across multiple racial/ethnic and gender intersections.
• More strongly predict girls’ motivation to pursue computer science and engineering courses than gender-ability stereotypes.
• Cause girls to be less interested than boys in pursuing novel and computer science–related activities.
• Cause girls to have a lower sense of belonging, which mediates their lower interest in computer science activities.
• Were endorsed by Black, Asian, Latinx, and White girls and boys.

The real-world implications of gender disparities in computer science and engineering are numerous and contribute to many societal inequities:

• The existence of products and services that overlook and sometimes selectively harm women and children.
• Gender disparities in lucrative fields such as computer science and engineering, which is a significant source of the gender wage gap.
• The stereotype that girls are less interested in computer science, which may send girls a signal that they do not belong and dissuade them from developing an interest in these fields.
• The observed reality that children see, such as the fact that few girls are in optional computer science and engineering classes and few adult women are working in these fields, which might further send a message to girls that they do not belong.

The authors close by noting, “Initial choices to forsake STEM may compound over time and develop into larger disparities in course enrollment, choice of major, and choice of career.” This certainly happened to me. They suggest that “addressing these societal gender-interest stereotypes before they take root in the minds of young children may help remedy disparities and improve educational equity.”

We need to instill a sense of curiosity and belonging to all genders in all fields of study, especially when they are younger.

Photo courtesy of Germanna (CC BY 2.0)

It has been about twenty years since the Los Angeles Fire Department upgraded their fire stations to add women’s locker rooms and restrooms. These changes were intended to reflect a commitment to create an inclusive environment for women to join the LAFD, where they could realize their dreams and add their talents and passions to community service as firefighters. Libby Denkmann, writing for the 19th, reports that twenty years later, female LAFD firefighters still face

• Verbal abuse
• Isolation
• Hostile pranks
• Training exercises designed to humiliate them
• Threats of violence and actual assaults

Unfortunately, reports Denkmann, who interviewed more than twenty sources, speaking out or filing a complaint is rare for women and other minorities because of intimidation and retaliation while “institutions meant to protect them generally look the other way or enable the misconduct.” Denkmann points out that all of this is happening in a highly political context in Los Angeles where “the firefighters’ union remains a key endorsement for local and national politicians, and firefighters enjoy a heroic status in the public’s imagination, which critics say protects the department from lasting consequences.”

The low representation of women in the LAFD is similar to low numbers nationally:

• There are currently 115 female sworn firefighters in the LAFD—roughly 3.5 percent of the force of 3,300.
• These numbers reflect a modest improvement from 2.9 percent women at the department when Mayor Garcetti took office in 2013. He pledged to increase women in the LAFD to 5 percent by 2020 but has fallen short of that goal.
• Nationally, women represent only 4 percent of professional firefighters.
• Both San Francisco and Minneapolis have done much better with about 15 percent of sworn fire personnel being female.
• But in New York and Chicago, women make up only 1 percent of the fire service.

The numbers for female fire service personnel are quite weak overall, especially when compared to the representation of women in the police and military services:

• Slightly more than 18 percent of sworn LA Police Department personnel are women
• The US military’s total force was 16.5 percent female in 2018.

The stories of harassment relayed to the author by the women she interviewed in Los Angeles were disgusting and outrageously abusive. The types of behaviors described were common in many professions in the 1970s and 1980s when women entered a range of male-dominated professions for the first time, but these behaviors have been largely extinguished as organizations took serious steps to create harassment-free workplaces. We know it can be done but not until leaders make a commitment to change the cultures of their organizations and professions and hold violators accountable. These women in the LAFD passed every test and are able to do everything the men can do physically, but pressure to accept women is usually met with arguments that to do so would “lower their standards.” As one female firefighters noted, “They don’t need to lower their standards. They just need to lower the abuse.”

Photo courtesy of Naval Surface Warriors (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The issue of paid family leave has recently resurfaced as a topic of debate in the United States because we are the only wealthy Western country that does not provide it. I have written in previous posts about the possible reasons why it has not been made available in the United States and why paid parental leave is a policy that would benefit both mothers and fathers. Still, the focus in public debate remains on paid leave, and parenting, as a women’s issue, is a private matter not of concern in the public realm even with evidence to the contrary revealed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In an article by Darby Saxbe and Sofia Cardenas, published in the New York Times, a number of new studies, including their own, show the benefits for men and families of paid paternity leave. Saxbe and Cardenas conducted research at the University of Southern California (USC) and found that among six thousand couples followed from when their child was a baby until kindergarten age, even when the father took only a week or two of paternity leave, 26 percent of couples were more likely to stay married compared with ones where the father took no leave. Another study from USC found that when fathers took paternity leave, children reported closer relationships with their dads nine years later.

Saxbe and Cardenas note that several new studies show that parenting transforms men’s brains and bodies in ways that might improve relationships:

Spain—A recent study of Spanish fathers found changes in their brains after the birth of a child that predicted stronger responses to infant images.

Japan—New research in Japan showed stronger brain responses to videos of infants in fathers who worked fewer hours and less changes in the brains of fathers who worked more and spent less time with their infants.

Holland—A Dutch study found that fathers randomized to wear a soft baby carrier for three weeks showed development in the “fathering brain” as stronger responses to infant cries in the amygdala.

Same-sex relationships—A rare study of fathers in same-sex relationships found the “primary caregiver” father’s brain looked more like a mother’s than did that of the “secondary caregiver” dad.

The authors conclude that “time with infants is a key ingredient in building the fathering brain. In other words, policies that support fathers’ time at home after birth may help mold men into more attuned fathers.”

Paternity leave benefits mothers in many ways too:

• The authors report that a new study published in the Journal of Child and Family Studies that measured sleep, stress, and depression in couples found that the mental health of mothers was better when their partners took paternity leave.
• A study of a Swedish policy reform that encouraged fathers to take paternity leave found that mothers who gave birth after the reform were 14 percent less likely to seek care for postpartum medical complications and 26 percent less likely to get a prescription for antianxiety medication.

Saxbe and Cardenas point out that 186 other countries offer paid family leave and 70 percent of adults in the United States support passing legislation to create paid family leave. This policy would benefit everyone, not just women.

US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg took four weeks of paid family leave this year when he and his husband adopted newborn twins. Buttigieg has talked about the importance of taking this time off to relieve stress on his partner and to allow the two fathers to share parenting and bond with their children. The authors note, “As a high-profile leader who is unapologetically taking time off to care for his family, Mr. Buttigieg may be the father figure we all need.”

Jessica Grose writes that if it is up to the private sector, the majority of parents in the United States will never have access to paid family leave. This is not a “woman’s issue.” She suggests, “We need more fathers—and men in general—to be vocal” about the need for legislation to make paid family leave a reality. There may never be a better time than right now for men to step forward and speak out.

Photo courtesy of Lars Plougmann (CC BY-SA 2.0)