I probably shouldn't have gone straight from the nightmare of trying to secure an appointment with a brand-new primary care doctor to read the backflips that admittedly well-intended Andrew Ladd goes through in his attempts to explain why there's a cultural belief that women aren't as funny as men. It only meant that I had to double my aspirin intake to handle the stress headache that erupted, and it's hard to tell if it's from the hold music that I was recently subjected to or Ladd's assertion that men don't think women are funny because women's sense of humor is so different. I will say that Ladd did prove one of his arguments—that what is considered "funny" varies wildly—by simply calling the sitcom Friends a comedic powerhouse. If a woman's sense of humor is different than that, thank the comedy gods for it.

Ladd's backflips are impressive in both height and complexity. He argues that men tend to go for a more quick, punchy sort of humor, and women are more interested in what he calls "anecdotal" humor. Never mind that the punchiest, most quick-witted sitcom on television is the brainchild of a bona fide Vagina-American, Tina Fey. 30 Rock is all about absurdity, maximizing the jokes per minute, broad caricatures, and dick jokes—the very things that Ladd claims are "male" humor and not "female" humor. For all his good intentions, Ladd is being kind of sexist here. He's so eager to paint women as the more mature, evolved sex that he can't look past Fey's gender to see that she's the kind of person you who thinks "your mom" jokes are funny. (As do I, another woman who refuses to go kicking and screaming into the gentle comedy night.)

Ladd gets the closest to the truth of why women are characterized as "not funny" when he bemoans how funny women are considered skanks or bitches. I'd say the whole problem is actually quite simple. Our culture does believe there are female and a male senses of humor that differ. We tend to say that men have a sense of humor when they say funny things, and that women have a sense of humor when they know when best to laugh when men say funny things. This sense is so ingrained that I had a few occasions when I was younger where I'd say something funny and get blank stares, only to find a man stealing my joke a half hour later and getting giant belly laughs for it.

That doesn't happen to me anymore, because once you get paid a couple times to write funny stuff, people start to put you into the category of exceptional, funny women who get to join that boy's club. But even then, I suspect the reason it's so hard for comedy shows to remember to hire women is that we have trouble recognizing jokes for what they are when they come out of female mouths.

Photograph of Tina Fey by Andreas Rentz/Getty Images.

Tags: feminism, humor, mom jokes, Tina Fey

—House speaker Nancy Pelosi may push for a "deem and pass" measure rather than a vote on the Senate health reform bill. Citing a 1998 Supreme Court ruling, some Republicans say the tactic would be unconstitutional. [Washington Post]

—Expanding on Katrin Bennold's New York Times article on women in the sciences, Latoya Peterson blames video games, in addition to social conditioning and historical misconceptions about female intelligence, for the decreased number of female scientists. [Guardian, New York Times]

—Last night Jon Stewart mocked elephants and asses alike for their sex scandal hypocrisy: Boehner, who defended Hastert for not outing Foley, lambasts Pelosi for protecting Massa. Ha! And that's just the House ... [Gawker]

—Studies show that prospective employers and even physicians are biased against the overweight. Is Michelle Obama's campaign against childhood obesity just teaching kids early that fat people are unacceptable? [New York Times]

—A new study suggests that women are better than men at almost every three-minute task, including winning an argument and rewiring a plug. The Daily Mail's conclusion? See, women really should do all the ironing! [Daily Mail]

Tags: boehner, gender differences, hastert, health care reform, Larry Summers, mark foley, massa, Michelle Obama, Nancy Pelosi, we're talking about, women in science

—Is this Planned Parenthood ad more effective than the much-hyped Superbowl spots from Focus on the Family it responds to? Mid-tackle, Tebow and his mom never explicity mentioned abortion or "pro-life." Sean James and Al Joyner's message includes this line: "Only women can make the best decisions about their health and their future." [Washington Post]

—Meghan McCain (explicitly, on the View) and Cindy McCain (indirectly, by appearing in the NOH8 campaign) accuse the GOP of bigotry. Just one more reason John is "on the tea party's shit list." [Salon]

—Does it matter that the judge on the Prop. 8 case, Vaughn Walker, is gay? A Republican appointment, a record of fairness, and the defense's inevitable appeal if he doesn't rule in its favor, suggest no. [Gawker, San Francisco Chronicle, WSJ]

—A U.K. poll finds that many husbands are in the dark about the details of their wives' lives. Her clothing size? Natural hair color? Birthday?! Not a clue. And the guys readily admit that their wives probably know these things about them. [The Telegraph]

—Researchers are getting a better sense of when your kid begins to feel your pain. Recently scientists have linked the development of empathy to the acquisition of sophisticated language. [Babble]

Tags: child development, Cindy McCain and Prop 8, gender differences, marriage, Meghan McCain, parenting, planned parenthood, spouses, theory of the mind, tim tebow pro-life ad, vaughn walker

Amanda,

It’s certainly tempting to believe the Stanford and University of Chicago researchers who concluded that women make better legislators because we have to work harder and overcome more obstacles to attain such heights, and so only the best of us sneak through.

But I tend to be skeptical of research like this. And so I took a closer look at the study, and I’m not convinced. For one, the researchers use quantitative measures—how much money? How many bills?—to make a qualitative judgment. It’s like saying the best doctor is the one who sees the most patients, or the valedictorian is the student who does the most homework.

I’m also troubled by the assumption that bringing more money to one’s district or sponsoring more legislation necessarily makes one a good legislator. Perhaps if the Capitol building sat at the end of a rainbow, right next to a bottomless pot of gold, that would be all fine and good. But all that money that legislators bring back to their districts has to come from somewhere. From taxpayers, actually. Where’s the congresswoman who’s working to put my tax dollars back in my wallet, not in my district? And I might have missed something, but the study doesn’t seem to factor in whether women are sponsoring health care reform legislation or No Child Left Behind or TARP, or rather if it’s the Belated Thank You to the Merchant Mariners of World War II Act of 2009. Wouldn’t it be easier to get more co-sponors, as the bill credits female pols for doing, if you’re sponsoring run-of-the-mill legislation?

I do agree with you that we need more female politicans out there to make a better comparison. In both parties. I just don’t think there’s much takeaway from this particular study.

Tags: female politicians, politics, sexism

Ann Friedman of Feministing has written a fine review/analysis of Arianne Cohen’s new book Tall: A Celebration of Life From on High. Ann is tall. And technically, so am I, at 5’9". So I love the idea that, as Friedman writes:

Much of the book focuses on the undeniable advantages that come with being tall—I'd venture to call it height supremacist, even. Because height is a product of not just genetics but good childhood nutrition, there's a strong correlation between height and intelligence, and therefore height and wealth.

Yes, I suppose milk does “do a body good.” But it’s an interesting suggestion that “nurture” can amplify or suppress what I’d thought to be mostly genetic predetermination. This opens a Pandora’s box for tinker-happy parents, especially given widespread social beliefs about the gender dynamics of height, and the disadvantages that accrue to tall women:

Cohen describes how, as early as age 8, she was offered the option of taking estrogen to stunt her growth so she would not reach her projected height of 6'5". This practice developed in response to parents' fears their daughters would not be able to find a husband if they grew too tall. Cohen said no to the estrogen, and today she's 6'3". It was a good choice—growth-stunting estrogen has been linked to fertility problems later in life. Yet some doctors continue to prescribe this "treatment" for tallness. A 2002 survey of 411 endocrinologists found 137 still offered height-reduction treatments. How fucking archaic is that? Cohen writes, "In the United States boys are rarely treated, because height is considered beneficial."

Though I spent my ‘tween years in a steady hunch—the better to hear my wee male classmates—the idea of taking hormonal treatments to squelch normal growth seems medieval. In the intervening years, I have learned to straighten up and enjoy my stature, and to be honest, now yearn for an extra inch or three. Perhaps Alicia Silverstone’s classic “just say no to coffee” line from Clueless still resonates. (Sidenote: What happened to Stacey Dash?)

Friedman walks through the interesting relationships of women to height, and tall women to social beliefs they might not even recognize as disordered. As in, “I'm 6'1", and I'm at the cut-off height. I don't know if I would feel as confident if I were 6'5”." Replace “height” with “weight” and you see how this sneaky prejudice would be completely unacceptable if it pertained to other social and physical differences.

However, if it’s testosterone that correlates to height, are there social benefits to the masculine traits that height might suggest? I don’t mean to suppose that male tendencies are always beneficial (it’s men, Feministing writes, who “don't like being looked down on by a woman,” and find tall women less attractive), but if height imports confidence, security, and liberation from high heels, I’d call it a fair trade.

Cohen’s book no doubt reveals all—but even anecdotal evidence suggests this might be the case. Take one scene in the charming Julie and Julia, in which Julia Child and her (equally tall) sister laud their height as a free pass out of convention and surburban mores. Though Child once asks her husband Paul, quite fearfully, “What if you hadn’t loved me?” I suspect, had Julia Child been 5’6” and not 6’3”, you might not have Mastering the Art of French Cooking on shelves today.

Tags: arianne cohen, dating, estrogen, genetics, height, social prejudice, tall women, testosterone

What are the factors that help women win national and statewide political races? Nate Silver of 538 fame adds to the conversation on this important topic—generations of K School graduates want to know!—with his latest analysis, "The Palin Paradox: Women More Likely to be Elected in Male-Dominated Districts":

Although women are still having a relatively tough time getting elected in general—they represent just 17 percent of the members of the U.S. Congress—Congresswomen, as opposed to Congress men, are more plentiful in areas where the male-to-female ratio is higher...

Nine of the 25 most male-dominated districts (36 percent) most recently elected a woman to office, as compared with 4 of the 25 most female-dominated districts (16 percent). This alone is somewhat interesting—however, it actually conceals the strength of the relationship because female-dominated districts are more likely to vote Democratic, and Democratic-leaning districts are more likely to elect women to office regardless of their sex ratios ...

The most male-dominated from among these strongly Democratic districts elected women in 10 out of 15 instances. The 15 most female districts elected just 3 women.

Intriguing, to be sure. But as we all know, correlation is not causation. Silver, of course, also knows this and says the effect held even after he controlled for a wide variety of demographic factors. But what if the issue is not demographics, but geography? We also know that women do better in political districts that don't have strong machine-style Democratic political organizations. As Harold Meyerson observed in 2008:

When we look across the nation to ascertain which states have elected the most women to political office and which the least, it turns out that states once (or still) dominated by party machines don't create a political culture in which women can thrive. Where entry into politics depends entirely on who sent you—on winning the backing of the boy—women often end up outside the clubhouse, the legislature, and the Congress.

Looking back at Silver's analysis, it's worth noting that of the top 15 Democratic-leaning, male-dominated, woman-electing districts, only two are not in Western states, where political machines are weaker. Meanwhile, of the top 15 Democratic-leaning, female-dominated, male-electing districts, none are Western, and many are well known for having a history—and even present—of robust Democratic political machines. As between Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey and Alaska, Arizona, Texas and Colorado, the states with the more liberal political reputations also have the more entrenched associational networks for promoting individuals for public office.

Silver hints in the direction of a geography effect, writing, "Perhaps in male-dominated areas, women are more likely to violate traditional sex roles including something like running for political office, which has traditionally been a male-dominated occupation—the Sarah Palin frontierswoman caricature works well here." His commenters take it a step further, noting that women's suffrage was acheived earlier in the Western states than back East.

The frontierswoman caricature arose not because of—or not just because of—gender imbalances in frontier populations, but also becuase the demands of life in the emerging states required women to cast aside many behaviors typical of women of their day back East.

Tags: 538, congress, elections, female, frontierswomen, Nate Silver, politics, Sarah Palin, suffrage, women

Over on Slate, there's a really interesting piece by Ray Fisman about the importance of female mentorship. Apparently, a recent working paper from the NBER found a way to measure the effects of female vs. male teachers on students at the Air Force Academy. It can be hard to distinguish among various complicating factors when studying how teachers influence students, but rigid protocols at the Academy apparently make it easier to isolate these factors. As Fisman puts it, the study found that "replacing a male instructor with a female one has such a strong effect on female achievement as to erase the gender gap entirely." That's a pretty powerful finding, and the study is persuasive. Check out the whole piece; lots of interesting stuff in it. Now the $64 million question is: How do we make sure that women encounter the mentors and teachers they need—especially in those fields where women are scarce?

Tags: gender gap, math, Science

In the wider world, Oprah Winfrey is vastly more influential than Ashton Kutcher. But Ashton trumps Oprah in the male-dominated Twitter-verse, where men have 15 percent more followers than women do. New research from Harvard Business School has shown that not only are men more likely to follow other men on Twitter, but women are also more likely to follow men. According to the study:

These results are stunning given what previous research has found in the context of online social networks. On a typical online social network, most of the activity is focused around women—men follow content produced by women they do and do not know, and women follow content produced by women they know. [bold is theirs] Generally, men receive comparatively little attention from other men or from women. We wonder to what extent this pattern of results arises because men and women find the content produced by other men on Twitter more compelling than on a typical social network, and men find the content produced by women less compelling (because of a lack of photo sharing, detailed biographies, etc.).

Unlike the authors of this study, I don't wonder whether there is a major difference between the type of content created by men and women on Twitter when compared to other social networks. I think the difference is due to the sorts of people who use Twitter frequently. As the study also notes, 10 percent of Twitter users account for 90 percent of Tweets, and I would imagine that Twitter-lovers disproportionally come from the tech field, which is notoriously male-dominated.

I checked the people whom I follow on Twitter, and apparently I am an equal-opportunity follower: Of 98 individuals I follow, 48 are women (I follow 102 Twitter feeds in total, but because four are gender-neutral organizations like Newsweek, I didn't count them). How many women are you following? If you follow more men than women, why do you think that is?

Tags: Ashton Kutcher, gender differences, Harvard Business School, men, Oprah Winfrey, twitter, Twitter habits, women

Yesterday, Playboy.com posted a provocative story: "So Right It's Wrong." The piece was written by Guy Cimbalo, and its premise was to target those conservative women that he would like to, as he put it, "hate fuck." But if you click on that Playboy.com link, you'll find the piece is no longer there. And that's because the blogosphere went crazy after Playboy published it, going so far as to call for a boycott, and Playboy pulled it.

If you want to read the piece in full, conservative blogger Caleb Howe has reproduced it in a series of screenshots here. The piece begins thusly:

Obama promised us the dream of post-partisanship—a cuckoo land where party affiliation and factional animosity were forgotten. Turn on cable news or open any newspaper, however, and you’ll quickly discover that the dream has yet to materialize. But there is a way to reach across the aisle without letting principles fall by the wayside. We speak, naturally, of the hate fuck. We may despise everything these women represent, but goddammit they’re hot. Let the healing begin.

What follows isn't, well, pretty. It's a listicle that eviscerates every conservative female that crossed Cimbalo's radar as someone who was at least in some regard physically attractive and yet whose personal politics he found to be utterly loathsome. The list includes Michelle Malkin, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Laura Ingraham, and Peggy Noonan.

On Malkin: "Worse than fucking Ava Braun." On Ingraham: "Vagina dentata would be an improvement." On Noonan: "Imagine fucking your grandmother. Now imagine your grandmother coined the phrase 'a thousand points of light.' It's worse than that."

In response, the female blogosphere had a collective seizure, converting Cimbalo's "hate fuck" wish list into a rapist's screed: "

Writer Guy Cimbalo Shares Top 10 Republican Women He'd Like to Rape." Male bloggers weighed in with mixed sympathies. Salon: "Cimbalo managed to get one or two guilty smiles out of me, but the overall effect is beyond creepy." The Sundries Shack: "I Don't Know Guy Cimbalo, but I'd Enjoy Punching Him in the Mouth." Meanwhile, Politico's Anne Schroeder Mullins linked to the Playboy post and listed the names of the women but reposted none of the attendant raunchy prose, a move for which she was trounced; in response, she altered the post and added an apology. For once, it seemed, women on the left and the right were in agreement. "***** FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE *****": "Conservative Women's Group Condemns Hate-Filled Playboy Article."

Apparently, free speech is so over when the masses rule the media: "It's only OK if I think it's funny. It's only OK if it fits my politics. It's only OK if I say it is." I wish Playboy hadn't pulled it. Censoring the piece doesn't make it any less real, any less politically incorrect, any less true. Attempting to police human nature is the real joke here.

Tags: Guy Cimbalo, misogny, Playboy

Dahlia, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would surely agree with you that it's long past time to rub out the equation that a woman justice equals a second-rate one. To make the case for why she needs a female colleague (or colleagues), she took the unusual step of talking about a case that's just been argued and not yet decided—the one involving the strip search of 13-year-old Savanna Redding. You wrote vividly about Ginsburg's apparent distress at the clueless reactions of some of the men on the court at oral argument. This week Ginsburg said as much to Joan Biskupic of USA Today. "They have never been a 13-year-old girl," the justice said. "It's a very sensitive age for a girl. I didn't think that my colleagues, some of them, quite understood."

Ginsburg also remembered being ignored by male lawyers at meetings in the 1960s and 1970s, only to have a man present repeat her point, and get a response. And incredibly, she feels the same way even now: "It can happen even in the conferences in the court. When I will say something—and I don't think I'm a confused speaker—and it isn't until somebody else says it that everyone will focus on the point." Biskupic writes: "It was a revealing observation from a justice who generally praises her male colleagues, some of whom are close friends." No kidding.

Ginsburg also directly addressed the question of what women bring to the bench, as women:

"You know the line that Sandra [Day O'Connor] and I keep repeating … that 'at the end of the day, a wise old man and a wise old woman reach the same judgment'? But there are perceptions that we have because we are women. It's a subtle influence. We can be sensitive to things that are said in draft opinions that (male justices) are not aware can be offensive."

The differences between male and female justices, she said, are "seldom in the outcome." But then, she added, "it is sometimes in the outcome."

PS: Ann Althouse (U. Wisconsin law prof, blogger extraordinaire) discusses diversity on the court.

Tags: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, savanna redding, strip search, Supreme Court