In recent years, replacing your car with a Schwinn has become a popular idea for reducing your carbon footprint. However, not everyone has rushed to their local bike store: fewer than 2 percent of the population relies on bikes for transportation.
Women are lighter and thus cost less than men to transport to space, they’re less prone to heart attacks, and they do better in isolation tests, reasoned Randy Lovelace when he founded the Women In Space Earliest program in 1959 to test women for their “qualifications as astronauts,” as this Wired article reports.
Interdisciplinary research can take you to some unexpected places. You may have heard about a paper that Betsey Stevenson and I wrote a while back, documenting that the average level of happiness among women has trended downward relative to that of men. It’s an interesting fact, and we aren’t quite sure whether it tells us about the reliability of happiness data, the women’s movement, or other changes in men’s and women’s lives.
Slate columnist Daniel Gross thinks he’s found the female embodiment of Paul Krugman in Japanese economist Noriko Hama.
A new working paper by Seema Jayachandran and Ilyana Kuziemko offers another explanation for the “missing girls” phenomenon observed in some developing countries. Breast-feeding both improves health outcomes and temporarily decreases fertility. Jayachandran and Kuziemko argue that women with a preference for male children may wean daughters earlier in the hopes of restoring their fertility and conceiving a son, resulting in worse health outcomes for girls. The authors find that daughters are weaned sooner than sons and conclude that the breastfeeding factor explains 14 percent of India’s missing girls.
Once again, Catherine Rampell has an interesting Economix post (“Minority Rules: Sex Ratios and Suffrage”) describing a new empirical analysis arguing that “jurisdictions that granted women the right to vote earlier generally had lower concentrations of women.” Why? [M]en had much to lose by enfranchising women. … The relative scarcity of women in the West may have “reduced the political . . .
| Alison Flood, writing on The Guardian‘s Books Blog, asks why Freakonomics and most other books that make “serious non-fiction subjects accessible and popular” weren’t written by women. She theorizes that either women are better at storytelling (think Factory Girls and The Big Necessity) than “sell[ing] our hypothesis about the world” — or it’s just a “numbers game,” as male . . .
That’s how PMSBuddy.com pitches itself. To wit: PMSBuddy.com is a free service created with a single goal in mind: to keep you aware of when your wife, girlfriend, mother, sister, daughter, or any other women in your life are closing in on “that time of the month” – when things can get intense for what may seem to be no . . .
Larry Summers There is a lot of speculation about whether President-elect Barack Obama will choose Larry Summers to be his Treasury Secretary. But some people are openly opposing Summers’s appointment, in part because of controversial comments he made about women in science. It’s a close question, but I’m hoping that Obama appoints Summers. I have three reasons: First, Summers is . . .
This is a few months old, but still well worth a listen: an NPR interview with Lia Scholl of Star Light Ministries, an outfit in Springfield, Va., that counsels exotic dancers. Here, from Star Light’s Web site, is its mission statement: Most exotic dancers are young women who come from varied socio-economic backgrounds. Their education levels vary — some have . . .
Tips for naming your successful technology company. Does an oil-based economy hurt women’s rights? Why do more disasters seem to occur in election years? Team of physicists capture and store nothing.
I have not seen the film Beyond Belief by Beth Murphy, but I have heard spectacular things about it. The film tells the story of two Sept. 11th widows who are working to help widows in Afghanistan. Here is the trailer. For those of you in Chicago, the local chapter of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) is . . .
Female economist works to found Ethiopian commodities market. (Earlier) Nintendo decides against Wii price cut. (Earlier) Sports fans convinced their actions can bring good luck to their teams. Stanford professor to lecture on “a world without agriculture.”