Nobel Prize for research in global labor markets, using historical data

Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard, has won the Nobel Prize in Economics. A big part of her studies are rooted in the collection and analysis of centuries-old data:

Women are vastly underrepresented in the global labour market and, when they work, they earn less than men. Claudia Goldin has trawled the archives and collected over 200 years of data from the US, allowing her to demonstrate how and why gender differences in earnings and employment rates have changed over time.

Goldin showed that female participation in the labour market did not have an upward trend over this entire period, but instead forms a U-shaped curve. The participation of married women decreased with the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society in the early nineteenth century, but then started to increase with the growth of the service sector in the early twentieth century. Goldin explained this pattern as the result of structural change and evolving social norms regarding women’s responsibilities for home and family.

Amazing.

The illustrations by Johan Jarnestad that accompany the announcement are also really useful.

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Rarity of songwriters who are women for popular songs

It’s common to see singers who are women, but the people who write the songs that end up in the Billboard Hot 100 are still mostly men. For The Pudding, Chris Dalla Riva, with design by Ashley Cai, highlights the rarity of women on songwriting teams over the past decade.

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More gender-neutral names

Georgios Karamanis plotted the ratio of girls-to-boys over time for all the names in the Social Security Administration dataset. You can see the more gender-specific names at the edges and more gender-neutral names clustering in the middle.

Those dips in 1989 and 2004 are curious. Otherwise, the increase in gender-neutral names seems to match up with my analysis from a while back.

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World Bank’s Gender Data Portal

In an effort to make gender inequalities more obvious, World Bank updated their Gender Data Portal:

The World Bank Group has redesigned its Gender Data Portal with these audiences in mind by offering over 900 gender indicators in different formats, ranging from raw data to appealing visualizations and stories. Making sex-disaggregated data easier to analyze, interpret and visualize will bring into focus gender issues that are frequently invisible, including on topics such as digital development, transport, and water. It will highlight existing gender gaps as well as gaps in the availability of gender data.

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Simulating how just a little gender bias in the workplace can lead to big effects up the chain

Yuhao Du, Jessica Nordell, and Kenneth Joseph used simulations to study the effects of small gender biases at entry level up to executive level. It doesn’t take much to skew the distribution. For NYT Opinion, Yaryna Serkez shows the simulation in action with moving bubbles and stacked area charts for each work level.

The simulation imagines a company where female performance is undervalued by 3 percent. Each dot represents an employee, and they either move up with promotions or stay still. The distribution of men and women start even but end very uneven.

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Words used to describe men and women’s bodies in literature

Authors tend to focus on different body parts for men and women, and the descriptions used for each body part also vary. For The Pudding, Erin Davis parsed a couple thousand books to see the scale of the skews.

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Math gender gap bigger in richer school districts

This is quite the scatterplot from Claire Cain Miller and Kevin Quealy for The Upshot. The vertical axis represents by how much girls or boys are better in standardized tests; the horizontal axis represents wealth; each bubble represents a school district; and yellow represents English test scores, and blue represents math test scores.

The result: a non-trend up top and a widening gap at the bottom.

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He vs. She in film screenplay direction

In screenplays, there are directions that tell actors and actresses what to do or what’s happening other than dialogue. Julia Silge and The Pudding studied which direction is written more often for women and more often for men. More specifically, they looked for the actions that followed “he” and “she” and then tabulated which were more likely for each gender, so you end up with things like snuggle, giggle, and squeal for women and strap, gallop, and shoot for men.

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Gender representation in comic books

Amanda Shendruk for The Pudding analyzed how genders are represented differently in comic books, focusing on “naming conventions, types of superpowers, and the composition of teams to see how male and female genders are portrayed.” The charts are good, but I’m pretty sure the animated GIFs for a handful of female characters make the piece.

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Gender pay gaps for major U.S. occupations

Pay gap

As we all know these days, there exists a gender pay gap across most major professions in the United States. The Wall Street Journal charts the average differences for 446 occupations.

Occupations are charted from least to greatest gap horizontally, and the vertical axis represents salaries. Blue dots represent men’s average salaries and the pink represents women’s, and a vertical line connects the two. So the longer the vertical, the bigger the gap.

There’s an interesting use of the fish eye effect as you mouse over so that you can see the individual lines. There’s also a search box to find an occupation of interest. I just wish the two were closer linked with a zoom on search, instead of only a highlight.

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