Queen's Speech summary

So, the proposed legislation for the (short) session before the general election is announced.

• Child Poverty Bill: the only substantial bit from the summary seems to be the duty on local authorities, which if not backed up with funding isn't going to help much.
• Children, Schools and Families Bill: requiring some SRE is good (though the SRE curriculum is not great, which is something I need to find time to write about). On the other hand, it also proposes some unnecessary and counterproductive restrictions on home education.
• Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill: "Repeals legislation limiting protests around Parliament." Now there's a sign the government expects to lose the next election.
• Crime and Security Bill: again, mixed. "Gives police the power to bar suspected domestic violence offenders from their homes for a period, even when not charged." could be very helpful. Reducing the paperwork requirements for stop and search - when it's already got a massive racial bias in who it gets used on - not good at all.
• Equality Bill: carried over from the previous session. It's another mixed - the anti-sexism and class-based provisions are pretty good, but there's concern that it's weaker than the anti-racism legislation it replaces, and its provisions for trans people are a mess. Then there's how much the Lords will fight it and how much the Commons will let them have in an attempt to get something passed.
• Personal Care at Home Bill: Good idea, but the implementation might be insufficient
• House of Lords Reform Bill: Still a draft, but it looks like it could be very good for democracy if it passed. Of course, the Lords might strongly object, so not much chance of it passing, especially if it's only in draft stage.

My overall impression from this is on balance positive, but only just, and there'd be some very unpleasant compromises involved in passing everything as-is: as I get time I'll examine the bills in a bit more detail and see if my overall impression holds up and if there's any obvious places to ask for amendments.

Lost in translation

So, the BBC report on research about what skin tones are considered healthiest (for young white people, that is). It must be a time for another instalment of "bad reporting of science". Here's the article's lede.

A golden glow is the healthiest and most attractive look for Caucasian skin, researchers have claimed.

This isn't (of course) actually what the researchers claim in their article (full text, DOI 10.1007/s10764-009-9380-z). For once, it's open-access publishing, so you can read the paper yourself. The distinction between what the researchers say and what the BBC thinks they say is more subtle than usual, but there's a lot to unpack in that difference.

The paper examines what the effects of changing redness, yellowness and lightness on perceptions of health are. (Note that strongly increasing lightness makes the red and yellow changes hard to tell as the whole image becomes oversaturated). There are pictures of this process in the paper, which show the extreme endpoints of the range they considered.

The volunteers providing the face pictures used for the sample, and the volunteers assessing the apparent health after colour transformation, were all white and young. Looking at the ages and colours, I'd guess that they just did the typical academic shortcut of grabbing a bunch of students (and St Andrews, where the research was carried out, is one of the whitest universities in the UK).

The study showed that increasing redness to an amount associated with the reddest end of the sample, increasing yellowness beyond the amount any of the sample actually had in their faces, and increasing lightness (whiteness, in many ways) to approximately the top end of the sample, were all associated with increased perceived health.

So this is where the BBC article first falls down: failing to clearly draw a difference between health and perceived health. The article repeatedly confuses the two (in a way that the paper itself largely avoids) - saying that redder/yellower skin is considered healthier-looking, but then going on to look at reasons why things considered healthy might make skin that colour, which misses out the important step - which the paper doesn't do, but also doesn't claim to do - where a correlation between "skin tone assessed as healthy" and "actually healthy" is looked for.

The second failing is not long after that: the researchers say that health perception is linked to attractiveness (and reference a lot of previous research there). They don't say that the colour range assessed as most healthy is also assessed as most attractive. It's an obvious jump, but it's not one supported by this experiment because it's not what they looked for.

The researchers noticed, unreported on, a significant gender-based difference: female skin was made lighter; male skin was made redder and yellower. This apparently is a pre-existing (statistical) difference in (possibly only white, the paper doesn't say) male and female skin, but the effect of the changes to make the skin appear healthier expanded this difference above its real extent.

There's an unexamined possibility here, too. Perceived health is considered attractive. But there's a lot of socialisation in other ways about what's considered attractive - for women, very to impossibly thin, very white (again, impossibly so for most people) - and a lot of explicit connection between this beauty ideal and health from the diet industry and "beauty" magazines. So, were the sample just pushing the faces towards what they thought of as attractive, because they assumed that correlated more strongly with health? Certainly plenty of things that go with perceived health don't go with actual health (weight, for instance)

There's a collision of a lot of stereotypes around health and disability, sexism and racism here (with a bit of heteronormativity hanging around too, as every study of "mate choice" seemingly has), that I think the study accidentally exposes, and it would be interesting to see if the study was duplicated with different skin colours, or in societies with different cultural views about what "looks" healthy, or even with a wider age range of both faces and assessors.

You shouldn't be able to make a study finding how lighter (whiter) skin is considered healthier-looking and so more attractive without looking at how society considers whiteness more valuable and more attractive and examining how this might be a different cause than simple perceptions of healthiness. But they do, and the BBC doesn't question it either.

The scale of the problem

In the UK, according to Home Office figures, approximately 8.75 million people are currently in prison worldwide (slightly larger than the population of the South East England region). In the UK, 139 per 100,000, or roughly 85,000 in the country as a whole, are imprisoned - approximately the population of a single Parliamentary constituency. This proportion is In the US, the most imprisoning country, the figure is 686 per 100,000, or roughly 2,000,000 in total, roughly the population of West Yorkshire (or in US terms, New Mexico).

The UK proportion is above the median, and one of the highest in Europe. It's also widely considered by various liberal and left groups to be too high, and not doing any good. While I agree that in many cases people are being imprisoned unnecessarily, I think those cases are far outnumbered by those people who should be imprisoned but aren't.

[trigger warning]

Let's assume that, as a minimum, serial violent offenders should be imprisoned. They're not people who "lost control in a moment of madness", they're not people who could make up the harm they've caused to their victims and to society by paying a fine or doing a bit of community work: they're people who need to be temporarily removed from society for everyone else's safety. Most of them won't be imprisoned indefinitely, but they will be there for a while (and yes, a lot more work needs to be put in to rehabilitating them so that when they are released, they don't start again).

From this Shakesville post, I got to this post which references various studies. They're US studies, but since the proportion of people who will be raped is similar in the UK, I feel reasonably confident in assuming that the proportion of people who are rapists is also similar.

The more conservative estimate, from Lisak and Miller (2002)¹, is that 76 of 1882 male college students (including mature students and postgraduates, looking at the details), had committed multiple rapes (and/or attempted rapes, and/or sexual assaults), none of which they had been punished already for: about 4% of the sample, and around 2/3 of the rapists in the sample. Other research finds a figure where between 5% and 15% of men are rapists depending on methodology and sample, so Lisak and Miller is definitely at the conservative end.

So, assuming that the 2/3 ratio holds generally, and McWhorter's study (McWhorter 2009²) on a different sort of sample has a similar ratio, that means that between 1 in 30 and 1 in 10 of the male population are repeat undetected rapists (who will admit to it if asked in the right terms, too). McWhorter's study found no variation in these figures for any demographic group.

These are exactly the sort of unrepentant serial violent criminals that should be imprisoned... it's just not practical to do so. Doing so would - with the most conservative estimates - require increasing the prison population to more than 1 in 60 (assuming that at least some of the people already there should remain) - and possibly as high as 1 in 20.

For the UK, this would require increasing the prison population - assuming all these serial rapists were caught in a relatively short timeframe, and imprisoned for an appropriately long time, to between 1 and 3 million - roughly the population of Wales.

This is not a reasonable proportion of the population to imprison: it would require twenty times as many prisons and staff as there currently are. There is no prison system in the world that could cope with that, and I'm not sure that any society that didn't orient itself primarily around providing imprisonment could construct one - it would, for instance, mean providing 10 to 20 times more prison cells than current NHS hospital beds, but with the greatly added security needed to protect staff and inmates from the high-risk prisoners. Of course, leaving that many serial rapists free in society means a rapidly increasing number of victims, and so is also completely unacceptable.

The fact that we - quite literally - cannot capture and imprison all serial rapists (and other sexual offenders), despite the fact that we should, means that a focus on prevention: specifically on preventing men³ from becoming serial rapists in the first place, through education, through weakening or removal of the influences that cause them to become serial rapists, and through doing a far better job of capturing them earlier.

I'm not for a moment arguing that the work done in convicting rapists at the moment is not worthwhile. It is undoubtedly necessary. It's not, in itself, however, a sustainable solution, because at some point it would become too successful to support itself. Prevention is the only sustainable solution - and genuine prevention, not the worse-than-useless "be safe" advice that's currently popular, but research by Lisak and others has shown that the majority of these serial rapists have strong anti-women attitudes and a strong lack of empathy and ability to express (most) emotions. So by the time they get that far, it's probably too late: one of the figures in the government documents below is that 70% of men responded usefully to government advice on the need for consent - I'd guess that there's no noticeable overlap between that 70% and the 5-10% of serial rapists, however.

So, any prevention needs to start very early in children's education, and be reinforced continually at all levels. This is something that has not been a major focus so far. This is the 2007 plan from the government, and a recent consultation. Given the context that the studies above provide, there seem on a quick read to be some major gaps in the prevention strategy: I'll look at that more closely later.

There are a number of opinion poll results in those documents - all of which have been mentioned before - which make the scale of the problem even clearer: it is of course not just the rapists, but their apologists, who need to be considered when thinking about eliminating this crime. The rape culture is very pervasive and supportive of rapists.

¹ Repeat Rape and Multiple Offending Among Undetected Rapists by David Lisak and Paul M. Miller, published in Violence and Victims, Vol 17, No. 1, 2002. I'm relying on the abstract and Thomas Millar's summarising (which I am summarising even further now).

² Reports of Rape Reperpetration by Newly Enlisted Male Navy Personnel by Stephanie K. McWhorter, et al., published in Violence and Victims, Vol, 24, No. 2, 2009 (McWhorter 2009) - again, abstract and Millar's summary is all I have access to

³ The research concentrates on men raping women, which is by far the most common scenario (around 90% of cases). The majority of the remainder are cases where men rape other men. When a tiny reduction in the proportion of men who rape would reduce the number of victims by more than the complete elimination of rape perpetrated by women, there seems very little point in considering it. (This differs from the reasoning behind not ignoring male victims of rape, obviously)

Advice men never get

The Times Education Supplement reports on comments made by Jill Berry, president of the Girls' Schools Association, which represents the self-proclaimed leading independent girls' schools.

The advice is the usual "don't expect to have it all", with a secondary strand of keeping ambitions high anyway. It would probably do her pupils good if boys were also taught that "having it all" was not realistic without putting a lot of effort in to balance work and family life, too, but this doesn't get a mention in the article. The independence and ambitions she wishes her pupils to achieve would come more easily if the part of men in making it difficult wasn't ignored.

So that's the gendered differentiation in expectations, which was obvious just from the headlines this story got in the news. There's also a bit of heteronormativity, too. Less obvious just from the headlines is the classism.

A few examples:

[...] said it was "healthy" for girls to aspire to a "flash sports car with a baby seat in the back" [...]

I don't think it's unreasonable to have as an aspiration "have enough money that you can afford the things you need and still have some spare". A "flash sports car" - not even an ordinary everyday sports car - requires a lot more money than that.

They will need to realise that there may be times when they might not want to work, or they might want to take a lesser job because their priorities have changed. [...]

Or, most girls, when they grow up to be women, won't have the luxury of "not working because they don't want to" for much of their lives (and neither will most men, for that matter). They might end up in that "lesser job" (by which I assume she means "less well-paid" as opposed to "less satisfying", though both are true) because it was what was available, rather than because they wanted to do.

"Most women cannot keep all the plates spinning," she said; "sometimes the plates crash."

The dirty secret she refuses to reveal and so implies through omission isn't the case, is that most men can't, either. The difference is that women are expected not only to spin their own plates, but to catch any that fall off the men's poles.

When men are told not to expect it "all" either, then I'll be less critical of this sort of thing.

It doesn't surprise me that the head of an expensive private school doesn't consider the class privilege inherent in their statements. It does show how little critical journalism there is, however, that all the major news sources I've found reporting on this - TES, BBC, Reuters, Independent, Daily Mail so far - have presented her advice as advice applicable to girls in general, rather than the upper-class and possibly upper-middle class girls that Mrs Berry considers representative (conversely, of course, the advice is more applicable to boys than either Mrs Berry or the news organisations think)

Is there any major news organisation out there that doesn't just spend most of the day rewriting and reprinting press releases for the vast majority of its articles?

Well, that wasn't trying to be subtle

An advert for a purple V-neck jumper (this one, but purple, I think) in a typically laughable "gifts for him" piece of advice in the local advertising paper, described the article of clothing as "masculine but sexy" (the linked page does not make this claim).

The implication is that being sexy - presumably in a visually attractive way - is not normally a masculine trait. However, this jumper is so special that it somehow is both really manly but also decorative. It's in a (heteronormative, of course) article aimed at partners of men, so presumably the motivation is "get your partner to wear this and they'll look sexy to you, but they'll think they're really masculine [for wearing a V-neck jumper?!] and so being decorative for you is not going to offend their fragile male ego."

It startled me slightly how many assumptions about gender roles and masculinity could be revealed in a few words about a V-neck jumper.

Weekly links

• The power of teaspoons - people can be made to change their minds. [Trigger warning: mentions details of Polanski's crimes]
• Why restrictions on abortion, as well as being inhumane in themselves, set a dangerous precedent for what the state can require of people.
• The privilege of being the default, and the difference between being marginalised and being an ally, in "Ignoring or not being emotionally affected by marginalisation is a privilege."
• Yet another case where, no surprise, virtual interactions are just as racist as real ones despite everyone involved knowing that physical virtual appearance is entirely arbitrary.
• Another trans woman, Destiny Lauren, is murdered
• A few links on women in Parliaments - The IPU tables of overall representation, Commonwealth MPs being unimpressed with the so-called "mother of Parliaments", and Canadian research on women in Parliament.
• Links to research by Dr Lisak on rape, prevention, and criminal justice [trigger warning]
• Research on representations of women in the media
• Some, but not enough, movement by the government on "no recourse to public funds"
• Cowardice and laziness in comedy
• And after everything that's happened this week, an indefinite supply of cute kitten photos via Ethyl in Shakesville comments

Sexuality and hate speech

The BBC reports that the government will be taking anti-hate-speech legislation to a fifth vote in the Commons, to remove so-called "free speech" protections that the Lords keep putting back.

The fourth time this came up in the Commons, the vote was almost entirely on party lines: Labour and Lib Dems in favour, Conservatives opposed. There were a few Labour MPs and 1 Lib Dem MP against it. The votes in the Lords were on a similar basis.

The nature of this debate is that the Lords can keep putting them back in and the Commons can keep taking them out more-or-less indefinitely. The principle that the Lords do not have the right to indefinitely overrule the Commons is in the Parliament Act, but this sort of shorter-term delay is allowed and probably sufficient to block the bill. The question then is whether the Lords is willing to block the bill as a whole, which they are presumably mostly happy with, over this small bit of it, and whether the Commons is willing to take that risk or just abandon this amendment to pass the rest of the bill.

As it happens, the Commons backed down first. LGB rights are not sufficiently important to them to risk the Lords blocking the bill as a whole.

As for what was being argued over here, it's quite complicated to determine, because the Statute Law database hasn't been completely updated, so the relevant bits of legislation are scattered all over the place, and the media doesn't go into enough detail. I'll try to summarise:

• The Public Order Act 1986 contains Section 3 which makes creating racial hatred illegal.
• The Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 inserted this amendment to the Public Order Act 1986, making religious hatred (which includes hatred over a lack of religious belief) illegal to stir up.
• The Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 modified this insertion to give sexual orientation equivalent protection to religious preferences.
• In the religious hatred section, there is the language: (section 29J) "Nothing in this Part shall be read or given effect in a way which prohibits or restricts discussion, criticism or expressions of antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse of particular religions or the beliefs or practices of their adherents, or of any other belief system or the beliefs or practices of its adherents, or proselytising or urging adherents of a different religion or belief system to cease practising their religion or belief system.". Summarised: you can insult religions and belief systems as much as you like, but you can't attempt to get people to hate them. You can also try to convert people.
• When the sexuality hatred amendment was made, an equivalent section (29JA) "In this Part, for the avoidance of doubt, the discussion or criticism of sexual conduct or practices or the urging of persons to refrain from or modify such conduct or practices shall not be taken of itself to be threatening or intended to stir up hatred." was added.
• The Commons would now like to remove 29JA. The Lords would like to keep it.

The Lords/Conservative argument is that removing that part, while not removing 29J, creates an inconsistency between the two forms of incitement to hatred which they do not wish to support. (They also, presumably, think 29J is good, since they're not proposing to remove that). They also don't think it's a problem, or if they do, they haven't mentioned it, that a similar provision to 29J or 29JA isn't in the original racial hatred language.

This might be clearer with a table:

Legislation	Groups	Behavior or written or spoken words must be	Exceptions "for the avoidance of doubt"
Public Order Act 1986	Races, colours, nationalities, citizenships, national or ethnic origin	Threatening, abusive or insulting	None
Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006	Religions, beliefs, or lack thereof	Threatening	Abuse, insults, conversion explicitly allowed, provided it isn't threatening.
Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008	Sexual orientation (Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Het)	Threatening	Criticism, conversion explicitly allowed, defined as not threatening.

The debate is whether the highlighted table cell should be changed to 'None'

Even with this amendment, the protections against sexuality-based hate speech are considerably weaker than the protections against racist hate speech. You can be abusive and insulting about LGB people, provided you somehow do this without being threatening, without breaking the law.

The clauses, despite the Lords/Conservatives stance on them, are not particularly equivalent to start with. The religious hatred one states that insults, abuse and conversion, in the absence of a threat, are legal. The sexuality-based hatred clause states that criticism of sexual conduct and practices and calls to refrain from them² are not in themselves threatening or intended to stir up hatred.

Of course, they are, no matter how politely they're phrased, because you can't say that people shouldn't be LGB without it being a threat to those who are, because of the high levels of violence from other people who also say that, and because it's a denial of a basic part of someone's identity. There are good reasons that no similar clause is in the racial hatred legislation³, and these reasons apply to the sexuality-based hatred legislation too.

These clauses are not equivalent to start with. The Lords added it to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act, and the Commons backed down rather than lose the rest of the bill. Yet again, the Lords have delayed the bill up until the end of the Parliamentary session, and the Commons have been unwilling to see if they were bluffing about killing the bill entirely.

There won't be another chance for a while, since the next Parliamentary session will be a short one, truncated by the inevitable general election. At the moment, it looks likely that there won't be the Commons majority necessary to try again after that happens.

As an aside, from the BBC article: "But some comedians have criticised the plans, saying they could stifle creativity and even lead to the threat of people being arrested over jokes." If your 'joke' counts as homophobic hate speech, it wasn't very creative, since that sort of joke has been around for centuries. If it was so hate-filled that it gets you arrested, then it probably wasn't funny either. Going after easy targets and relying on prevalent stereotypes is not "creative humour", it's unwarranted laziness. Since abuse and insults are still allowed, and since I presume comedy doesn't intend to actually threaten people, I doubt many acts will need to change. The presence of the racial hatred legislation, which is far broader, hasn't prevented racist jokes being made by comedians, after all.

¹ I use a restricted initialism because the amendment being debated doesn't address transphobic statements or those made about gender identity. As far as I can tell, that is still legal. The language added in 2008 defines sexual orientation "whether towards persons of the same sex, the opposite sex or both", so asexual people are also still legal targets for hatred. As far as I can tell, since the Public Order Act seems to be the place for hate speech legislation to live, you can also threaten people for their gender more generally, any disabilities they have, or their weight, with complete impunity. Comedians relying on bigotry for their act needn't worry about running out of material any time soon. Everyone else probably should worry.

² Pre-emptive note: there is nothing at all in this legislation, with or without 29JA, that would prohibit criticism or prevention of non-consensual sexual activities. Take that slippery slope elsewhere.

³ While the racial hatred legislation is stronger, it's fairly clearly still not strong enough.

The variability of the gender pay gap, and intersections

The Fawcett Society provides a breakdown by local government area of the gender pay gap. (It doesn't say in that document, but I assume it measures the difference in full-time mean annual pay)

It varies more than I'd expect, from East Renfrewshire, where women are paid 32.6% more than men on average, to West Somerset, where men's mean wage is 52.7% more than women's. The regional pay gap varies between 9.5% in Northern Ireland, to 25.4% in London (both in favour of men, of course). There are very few local government areas where women earn more, and it's usually by a small single-figure or even sub-percentage amount. There are far more where the pay gap is in the high twenties in favour of men.

County Durham, at 15.5%, has become a unitary authority, and so the variation within it will soon be hidden - from 2.8% in favour of women in Teesdale, to 26.8% in favour of men in Chester-le-Street, the variation reflects that across the country.

It's hard to tell exactly how many of these differences from the general trend are just statistical effects - the document doesn't give the error bars, but the sampling error for a district council will be much larger than the sampling error for a region. Nevertheless, the variation between regions is still large, and probably larger than statistical error would imply.

Part of the regional difference may be that the really high-paying jobs: senior managers at big corporations, bankers, lawyers, etc. are mainly available in the South East and London (both for where the jobs are and where people doing those jobs live: I'm not sure which this document measures), and mostly held by men. There seems to be a general trend that the pay gap is higher in the richer parts of the country.

The substantial differences at least show that the pay gap is not inevitable, but it's possible that the skewing effect of the highest paid jobs means that imbalances in the lower-paid jobs could be hidden. Quixotess looks at this for a different set of equal pay data that explicitly focuses on the payment to organisation heads (in this case, of US Jewish organisations).

While the headline figure for the mean pay gap may be interesting for showing that there's a problem, the breakdowns of the data might be more useful - how many men and women are in particular pay bands. Comparing only the full-time pay gap also hides class differences.

Infidelity as a partial defence for murder

The BBC reports on the difference of opinion between the Commons and the Lords on whether infidelity should be a partial defence for murder (and so make it manslaughter rather than murder, for instance).

What's happened is that the Commons passed this particular bit of legislation a while ago, so it went on to the Lords. The Lords amended it to take out the clauses that prevented infidelity from being a partial defence. The Commons have now put those clauses back. It's a small victory.

[trigger warning]

In the (short) Lord's debate, the voting was very much on party lines, with all the Lib Dem and Conservative Lords voted for the amendment, as did most of the independents. All but one Labour Lord voted against it.

In the Commons, the vote split slightly differently, with all (present) Labour MPs voting to put the clause back, all Conservative MPs voting to keep it out, and the Lib Dems largely abstaining. David Howarth (Lib Dem MP for Cambridge) proposed an amendment that would have changed the terms but not significantly. The debate in the Commons has Claire Ward (Labour MP for Watford) setting out the reasons this is necessary very clearly.

It will mainly be a symbolic victory if this stays in the final bill: after all, a judge who agrees despite the letter of the law that infidelity should be a defence can always impose a lighter sentence, and many will. The arguments against its inclusion that were made in the Commons and Lords, however, expose an unstated assumption: the claim by the Conservatives and the Lib Dem Lords is that whether infidelity is a partial defence should be up to the jury for that case, but for that to be true requires that there should be a significant number of existing cases - not just a "it might happen" - where infidelity is a legitimate reason for "losing control"¹ to the extent of murder.

This is what most of the Lords believed, and the Conservative MPs in the Commons. It may well be an attitude shared by many jurors, but that doesn't make it right. It essentially is preserving an existing expectation that infidelity is (and should be) punishable by death in at least some circumstances: an attitude that we're very quick to condemn in other countries if it's the state rather than the partner (despite Lord Gresford's claim based on the sample of cases he remembers, it is usually the male partner) that carries out the execution.

Let's not pretend either that most of these cases of murder won't have been preceded by some other forms of abuse, including violence. This isn't usually going to be someone who "just snapped", it's going to be someone who has been previously violent. (and because of the victim-blaming culture around abuse and domestic violence, which the [...] are trying to reinforce, and the extents to which abusers conceal their activities, and other people try not to notice them, this fact may only be known by the now dead victim). Jack Straw points out that the existence of a murder charge in the first place implies intent to cause serious harm.

¹ Now, everyone handles anger differently, but I think that if someone gets angry enough to kill or seriously injure someone, in a situation that was not before their violence a threat to anyone's life or safety, then future public safety is best served by their incarceration - one of the few cases where imprisonment is necessary. "losing control" implies that they had as much control over their actions as someone who skids their car on an invisible patch of ice and runs into a pedestrian before they can stop, and is not an appropriate phrase.

Gender gap report

The World Economic Forum Gender Gap report for 2009 is out. Interesting 'headlines' from the rankings:

• The UK has slipped a few more places. This is other countries improving rather than the UK getting any worse, but the UK isn't getting better either.
• Iceland, Sweden, Finland and Norway are still the top four, and then there's a significant gap to the fifth-placed country.
• They don't assess Rwanda, which is a pity, since as the only country with a majority-female parliament, they should end up near the top in political empowerment. They have been extending their survey to more countries each year, so maybe next year.
• Their "educational attainment" category is fairly narrow in scores: lots of countries have parity, and dropping from 100% to 99% parity goes from (joint) 1st to 75th out of 134. All this seems to be doing is pulling up the overall average for a lot of countries. The "health and survival" category, similarly - almost all countries are in a narrow 96-98% range
• The lowest scoring category, by a long way, is "political empowerment". The best score is 59% parity (Iceland). The worst is 0% parity (Saudi Arabia).

It's interesting that the forms that gender inequality takes nowadays don't appear to have much effect on education or health, though I wonder how much of this is to do with women having a naturally longer life expectancy, for example. Girls also do better than boys at almost all levels of education in the UK, which raises a lot of questions regarding the education figures that I don't have the information to answer.

The report measures outcomes, not routes, too, which may be why the figures don't seem as bad as they might be expected to: women are used to the second shift and needing to work harder than an equivalent man to get the same recognition, so this may be hiding a lot of discrimination: not because it doesn't have an effect, but because women are determined to overcome it.

It's an interesting starting point for thinking about things, and in many respects it's a useful cause for optimism - if countries as diverse as Denmark, Ecuador, Mozambique, and the Phillipines can all do better at gender equity in political empowerment than the UK, there's clearly no reason that the UK couldn't do better. On the other hand, concentrating solely on outcomes risks missing things - many countries have equal outcomes in education, but that doesn't mean that there isn't sexism in the education system that if removed would improve absolute educational achievement.

Weekly links

Busy week, so I'll have missed lots.

• Vigils for the dead in London from Penny Red
• Child labour in Michigan from bfp
• A system set up to distrust people is not healthy
• Racism and ableism in the treatment of refugees.
• Meloukhia at FWD: The intersection between ableism and sizeism.
• Melissa McEwan on centre-left parties, the inevitable disappointments from supporting them, and the flaws in the "but at least they're better than [other party]" argument. The Democrats in the US are much like the Lib Dems and Labour in the UK.
• Worrying: informal censorship by the West Midlands police.

They're inviting the Pope.

A "consortium of university and religious leaders" is hoping to get Pope Benedict XVI to come to Durham as part of his planned visit to Britain. It would be the first ever visit by a Pope to the North-East, and is supported by local political leaders including Durham's MP and the County Council.

Let's file this under "things that they thought everyone would be joyously happy about because their definition of 'everyone' was lacking".

Here's the letter I wrote to my MP: [trigger warning]

You recently said, as published in the Northern Echo and elsewhere,

"The possibility of a papal visit to Durham and to Durham Cathedral, a site of unparalleled beauty, would be of tremendous benefit to the North East. I'm sure the people of Durham would feel great pride in welcoming Pope Benedict and the world's media. Durham is a very important ecumenical centre including our cathedral and the university and it would be wonderful if the Pope was able to visit. I have written to the Foreign Secretary to encourage him to promote Durham as a possible site for a Papal visit and I look forward to hearing more about the Pope's plans in the coming weeks and months."

Pope Benedict XVI, as you are aware, has strong views on a range of political and social issues. For example, he is strongly against the use of contraception (including claiming that the use of condoms in Africa has made the AIDS epidemic on that continent worse), strongly against abortion (including giving his support to the excommunication of the doctors who allowed a 9 year old rape victim to obtain an abortion for a pregnancy that would otherwise have killed her), has referred to homosexual relationships and transgender identities as being against nature, and disapproves of men or women who step outside their "traditional" gender roles.

Inviting him to visit Durham as a high-profile honoured guest gives the implicit support of Durham to his views. Durham has previously been supportive of the LGBT community, recently hosting an International Day Against Homophobia conference at County Hall. I find it very difficult to reconcile this stated support with extending an invitation to someone who actively promotes homophobia and transphobia.

The consequences of homophobia and transphobia can be extremely severe. There have been vigils across the UK within the last week to remember the victims of violence. This October, Ian Baynham in London and Andrea Waddell in Brighton lost their lives as a result of homophobic and transphobic hatred. To invite Pope Benedict to Durham is to condone the views that led to their deaths.

I would feel no pride in welcoming Pope Benedict, and I feel that whatever temporary media attention Durham benefits from as a result could never outweigh the message this would send about how important Durham really considers the lives of its LGBT citizens, women needing abortions, and other groups that he wishes to marginalise or punish.

I hope that you will consider the message that inviting the Pope to Durham would send, withdraw your support for this invitiation, and encourage the other groups involved in it to do likewise.

Weekly links

Links from the week:

• Why routine armed police patrols are a bad idea
• Defining Disability, from amandaw at FWD
• Gender in the playground, an F-Word article by Kate Townshend about gender (in)equality in schools
• Meloukhia considers some of the issues around reclaiming words.
• A question, that because of the way society works, can be very ableist to ask.
• Umbrella terms from Anna at FWD. People who aren't the default are far more diverse than the default, but often get thought of as all the same.
• An off-duty police officer is the latest reported victim of homophobic attacks [trigger warning], which left him in a critical condition in hospital.
• A horrific example of the consequences of rape culture - strong trigger warning for these reports and comments: Shakesville, Abyss2Hope, Flip Flopping Joy.
• An essay by Penny Red on Painful Privilege.
• Age discrimination in mental health treatment (BBC)
• The BNP on question time, by Ayaan Hassan
• The BBC puts out an article essentially asking whether fat people deserve abuse. Sadly, it's one of their better articles on the subject, despite its numerous obvious flaws. It starts with a "headless fatty" photo, and doesn't get much better. I don't have time right now for a proper dissection, though.
• An article at Liberal Conspiracy about what works and what doesn't to get people back to work. Unsurprisingly, studies have found that treating people badly doesn't help, but that's what the government policy is.

Bad science, lazy reporting, and a side order of heteronormativity

Some articles, you can read the first paragraph, or maybe the headline, and get an instant sense that it bears no relation to the real story.

So, the BBC is reporting on a recent paper in the European Journal of Operational Research. First mistake: the paper is described as being by a Bath University team. Of the five authors, only one (Fragnière, the second author), is from Bath, so this seems to be stretching the definition a bit. The others are from various Swiss institutions. So, no prizes for guessing the source of the press release.

Second mistake: the BBC says:

The researchers studied interviews of more than 1,500 couples who were married or in a serious relationship.

Five years later, they followed up 1,000 of the couples to see which had lasted.

The paper itself says:

We use data from the 1999 Swiss contemporary family survey by Widmer et al., 2003. This is a representative random sample of 1534 couples, married or unmarried, ages 18–75, residing in the three linguistic areas of Switzerland. In 2004, the authors did a follow-up study on 1074 of those couples to determine how many had separated (Widmer et al., 2006 E.D. Widmer, J. Kellerhals and R. Levy, Types of conjugal interactions and conjugal conflict: A Longitudinal Assessment, European Sociological Review 20 (2006), pp. 63–77.Widmer et al., 2006).

Someone else did that research. They used that research as a basis for their own work. There's a huge difference there.

Both the paper and the BBC, unnaturally, say "couples" when they mean "male-female couples".

The BBC then says:

They found that if the wife was five or more years older than her husband, they were more than three times as likely to divorce than if they were the same age.

If the age gap is reversed, and the man is older than the woman, the odds of marital bliss are higher.

The latter "finding" isn't statistically significant, however.

Add in a better education for the woman - Beyonce has her high school diploma, unlike husband Jay-Z - and the chances of lasting happiness improve further.

The paper really doesn't imply this at all. It finds statistically a significant difference where marriages between people at different educational levels are more likely to last the full five years than marriages between people at the same educational level. The paper doesn't give the 95% significance range, only the value and whether this is significant at the 95% level, so while the five-year stability is increased more for marriages where the female partner is more educated than for those where the male partner is more educated, both are increased above the baseline.

Back to the BBC

Those who have never divorced fare better too. But couples in which one member has been through a divorce in the past are less stable than those in which both members are divorcees.

The only case that is statistically significantly different to the baseline case they chose (neither divorced) is where the male partner is formerly divorced but the female partner is not.

That's three of the four factors discussed. Here's the fourth, which is larger than the age one and doesn't get a mention. From the paper:

Wife and husband are both Swiss (REF)    -

Wife and husband are both from Western countries    3.451*

So, yes, if you want a stable marriage, the best approach is to be Swiss and marry someone else who is Swiss. British readers of BBC news are somewhat out of luck. (Note: this result may not generalise outside Switzerland, but then, the others might not either)

This, incidentally, has all been drawn from the first three chapters of the paper. The press release, and the BBC, seem to have stayed away from the fourth chapter onwards, probably because it then starts to get very strange. There's a slight hint of it in Fragnière's quote in the BBC article.

The researchers constructed a model where they'd take the demographics from the study, and their found weightings for the data, and then swap people around between couples to produce the set of couples with the lowest predicted divorce rate. That didn't make it into the news article, did it. I bet it didn't get as far as the press release before someone in Bath Uni's marketing department thought "this sounds a bit creepy".

To create our optimization model, we assumed a central matrimonial agency with knowledge of all the characteristics of all potential mates, whose mission is to optimize romantic matches.

Okay, maybe more than a bit.

The researchers acknowledge that this swap (99.81% of the couples were found to be "incorrect") is based on a whole bunch of limitations, and might not actually give the same result in reality (they don't suggest trying it, but they do suggest using these factors to give hints in matchmaking services)

There are several practical issues related to our model that we would like to address at this point. This study refers to married, or formerly married couples, and this does not take into account the odds of initially liking each other. In a real case of “marriage agency” the quality of the allocation must also include high probability of liking each other from the beginning. Moreover, in the real world the size of the men and women sets is different, which obviously is not represented in the model since our sample solely contained information about couples. These certainly represent limitations of our model

(emphasis mine)

A major limitation that they've not addressed is the sexuality of these couples. There are probably enough bisexual people within these couples that a straightforward swap of one man for another won't always be "optimal. Of course, that would complicate the mathematical model significantly, so it's not surprising that they didn't try it, but it is disappointing (and also not surprising) that they didn't notice and/or acknowledge this as a limitation.

It's not the first painfully heteronormative study around relationships, and it won't be the last.

So yes, a study of already dubious value, combined with some even worse reporting. Specifically, I think, "copying the press release without verifying it", since the New Zealand Herald, the Daily Mail, and the Telegraph all make similar mistakes (and all use one or both of the same two celebrity couples as examples). I wonder how many of the journalists bothered to use their news organisations subscriptions to check out the original paper (since none of them mentioned the last three chapters, I guess none)

"False" allegations in schools

[trigger warning]

The Association of Teachers and Lecturers has recently released the results of a study about "false allegations" made against its members. Reading the reports in the news, I couldn't help feeling the discussion was moving in an all too familiar direction.

The comparision with allegations of false allegations of rape seems rather obvious, not least because there's going to be an unpleasant range of overlap between "allegations of misconduct by school staff" and "allegations of rape and sexual assault", and it seems to be attracting much the same dubious lines of argument.

So, similarities. The teachers are in a position of power, the pupils are not. The consequences of reputation for false allegations are strongly emphasised (and I don't dispute, incidentally, that it would be very stressful to be in that position), whereas the effect on the children of incidents that lead to true allegations are barely mentioned: in the ATL press release (1250 words), only these 25 mention the possibility that accusations might be true: "We all accept the protection of children is paramount, but that should not be at the expense of natural justice - school staff have rights too."

Their statistics seem rather dubious, too (which is another similarity). Ignoring the "don't know" responses (which is being generous, I think), the ratio is 50:18 believe that a false accusation has taken place in their school.

28% say that they have a false allegation made by a pupil against them personally, and 17% say that they have one made by a family member. We can assume some overlap between these two categories, though the results don't say how much. 368 of 1155 responded to the question asking how the allegation was treated, which is 32%.

Let's assume, for internal consistency, that everyone who had an allegation made against them answered 'yes' to "someone in my school has had an allegation made against them".¹

So, if we take these figures at face value, about a third of staff have had a false allegation made against them. Of those who have not, then about a quarter know that someone else at their school has been the subject of one, about a quarter are confident enough that no-one has to say so, and half don't know for certain.

Let's take a large primary school with around 24 teaching and teaching-related staff. On average, 8 of those staff will have had a false allegation made, and 4 of the other staff will know of at least one of these cases. For a secondary school with around 120 staff, 40 will have had a false allegation, but only 20 others will be aware of any of these. (Incidentally, if these figures are accurate, then the confidentiality around the cases must be holding really well, which makes reputational damage less likely)

This seems somewhat unlikely. The press release doesn't say anything about how the survey data was gathered, but there's no polling/survey company named, which suggests it was internal, which makes me suspicious. ATL has 160,000 members, so 1155 is less than 1% of them. Looking around their website, it seems that their normal survey method is to rely on voluntary responses.

This, of course, means that there's no attempt at getting a representative sample, and there's far more incentive for people who have been the subject of a false allegation to reply to the survey. I think it's incredibly likely that the survey is going to significantly overstate the scale of the problem.

Similarly, the quoted situations in the press release are presumably near to the worst case (for the teachers - the worst case for a pupil makes most of those seem mild), rather than a representative sample of what actually happens.

The BBC article also includes the following, presumably from a previous press release:

Last year, the union, which has 160,000 members across the UK, said pupils who made malicious false allegations about teachers should be placed on a school register to protect other staff.

The union said these records should be forwarded if a pupil moves.

It also called for charges to be brought against children as young as 10 who made false allegations.

Given that schools do not have a good record on dealing with bullying, and given that there's already a significant inevitable power imbalance between teacher and pupil, I don't think it's at all a good idea to place more risks and obstacles in the way of someone wanting to report misconduct. Seriously, charges?

The ATL claims from the survey that 50% of false allegations were dismissed instantly. I wonder what percentage of true allegations are also dismissed instantly and mistakenly.

¹ The survey asks about their current school in one, and them personally in another, so if the allegation happened to them at a previous school and they didn't know of any at their current school, they could answer "inconsistently". On the other hand, the strict wording of the question is not "has this taken place at your current school" but "has it happened to anyone working at your current school".