#gender inequity

Since the dawn of time, or at least the dawn of the GPA, high school students have been hearing that grades matter. Now, a University of Miami study backs up that parental talking point: The better your GPA, the higher your income is likely to be 10 years after graduation.

But as @think-progress points out, this doesn’t mean that girls with good grades earn more than boys with mediocre ones.Quite the contrary, in fact:

A woman who got a 4.0 GPA in high school will only be worth about as much, income-wise, as a man who got a 2.0. A woman with a 2.0 average will make about as much as a man with a 0 GPA.

Other depressing findings: Girls have significantly higher average GPAs, but “men will still end up having significantly higher income later on,” Think Progress says.

And the GPA-gender wage gap continues through college and grad school:

A woman who is one credential ahead of a man will always be worth less in terms of income: a woman with an associate’s degree makes less than a man with a vocational degree, a woman with a bachelor’s makes less than a man with an associate’s, and a woman with an advanced degree makes less than a man with a bachelor’s. Even among recent college graduates with the same grades, majors, and career fields, men will make more in their first jobs.

(Chart via U of Miami)

The federal government has issued new rules aimed at eliminating systemic gender bias in medical research. It’s no longer enough for scientists testing drugs and doing other kinds of research to include women in clinical studies at the end of the process, the National Institutes of Health says. From now on, scientists must begin using female subjects in their very first laboratory experiments — including female animals and female-derived cells.

newyorktimesofficialexplains:

Researchers [have often] avoided using female animals for fear that their reproductive cycles and hormone fluctuations would confound the results of delicately calibrated experiments.

That laboratory tradition has had enormous consequences for women. Name a new drug or treatment, and odds are researchers know far more about its effect on men than on women.

It’s been 25 years or so since gender bias in medical studies emerged as a major women’s health issue. Women now make up more than half the participants in government-funded clinical research, but they are still often underrepresented in clinical trials carried out by private companies.

Partly as a result, women experience more severe side effects from new treatments, studies have shown.

Yet clinical studies are just the last stage of the lengthy process of developing drugs and medical devices. And even in NIH-funded studies, female subjects continue to be hugely underrepresented in earlier stages of lab research, Roni Caryn Rabin reports.

Bias in mammalian test subjects was evident in eight of 10 scientific disciplines in an analysis of published research conducted by Irving Zucker, a professor of psychology and integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley. The most lopsided was neuroscience, where single-sex studies of male animals outnumbered those of females by 5.5 to 1.

Even when researchers study diseases that are more prevalent in women — including anxiety, depression, thyroid disease and multiple sclerosis — they often rely on male animals, Zucker has found.

(photo via Wikipedia)

The NYTimes’ The Upshot takes a look at the behavior gap between boys and girls and how it plays out in the sputtering economy:

By kindergarten, girls are substantially more attentive, better behaved, more sensitive, more persistent, more flexible and more independent than boys, according to a new paper from Third Way, a Washington research group. The gap grows over the course of elementary school and feeds into academic gaps between the sexes. By eighth grade, 48 percent of girls receive a mix of A’s and B’s or better. Only 31 percent of boys do.

Andin an economy that rewards knowledge, the academic struggles of boys turn into economic struggles. Men’s wages are stagnating. Men are much more likely to be idle — neither working, looking for work nor caring for family — than they once were and much more likely to be idle than women.

How, then, do we account for persistent gender gaps in the workplace that continue to favor men, despite the academic gap that favors girls? The Upshot’s David Leonhardt explains what he thinks is going on:

The problems that stem from gender have become double-edged. The old forms of sexism, while greatly diminished, still constrain women. The job market exacts harsh financial and career penalties on anyone who decides to work part time or take time off, and the workers who do so are overwhelmingly female. …

But men have their own challenges. As the economy continues to shift away from brawn and toward brains, many men have struggled with the transition.

Just how difficult is it to be a working parent in the U.S. these days? huffingtonpost has this sobering chart.

The U.S. lags significantly behind other developed countries in key areas such as paid maternity or paternity leave (it’s one of just three countries with no such provision— the other two are Oman and Papau New Guinea), paid family and sick leave, and affordable early childhood education. As a result, notes reporter Laura Bassett, the percentage of women participating in the workforce is relatively low:

In 1990, the U.S. had the sixth-highest female labor participation rate among 22 of the world’s wealthiest countries. Today, the U.S. ranks 17th.

Meanwhile, the White House Council of Economic Advisors has this new report on working families, part of the Obama administration’s ongoing campaign to explore ways of using federal workplace policy to improve the lives (and incomes) of parents and children. Yesterday, the White House hosted a daylong summit on working families, where President Obama told the audience,

“Family leave, child care, workplace flexibility, a decent wage — these are not frills, they are basic needs. They shouldn’t be bonuses. They should be part of our bottom line as a society. ”

Find video of that conference here.

(Infographic by Alissa Scheller for The Huffington Post.)

motherjones:

Silicon Valley’s 10 biggest companies are even whiter and maler than the biggest tech companies were 15 years ago.

The companies in MoJo’s 2012 dataset: Apple, HP, Intel, Google, Cisco, Oracle, eBay, Facebook, Gilead Sciences, and VMware.