A Last (I promise) Word about the Global Gender Gap Report
November 15th, 2009 by Robert Franklin, Esq.One last word on the Global Gender Gap Report. I've criticized the Report for being a transparent fraud. To the uninitiated, its title might suggest that it's some sort of dispassionate accounting of the many ways in which men have it better than women and women have it better than men in 134 different nations of the world. That of course would be completely wrong. The Report is nothing of the sort. It very frankly defines as unequal any condition that doesn't favor women, while defining as equal any condition that does. As such, it is in no sense a report on the relative equalities of the sexes; it's what Canadian journalist Barbara Kay might call the Global Women's Interests Report.
But it might be argued that, after all, the report itself makes all of this perfectly clear. It makes no effort to hide its methodology. Anyone who can read knows that the report doesn't claim to be a balanced look at the sexes, but rather advocacy for women, irrespective of their wellbeing vis-a vis men. In short, the report is what it is and makes no bones about it. Criticizing it for not being gender balanced is like criticizing War and Peace because it's not Anna Karenina. It doesn't pretend to be.
That argument would be fine if it weren't for the fact that, somehow, that all gets lost when a document entitled the Global Gender Gap Report produced by the World Economic Forum is itself reported on by the mainstream media. In this article (New York Times, 10/28/09), this article (Time, 10/28/09) and this article (Boston Globe, 11/12/09), the Global Gender Gap Report is characterized not as the pro-woman advocacy it is, but as precisely what its title suggests.
So the New York Times piece quotes the report's self-description that it "tries to assess how well countries 'are dividing their resources and opportunities among their male and female populations.'" That of course is flagrantly false. The report does no such thing. Again, when a country divides its "resources and opportunities" in a way that disadvantages men, the report defines that as equality. The data on longevity and education in the United States, among many others, make that clear.
The Times, then, uncritically passes on to its readers the notion that the Report is a gender-balanced look at the state of men and women in various countries in the world. At the same time it barely mentions the easy-to-understand methodology that leaves no doubt that the Report is anything but gender-neutral.
The result is not surprising. We live in times in which few people in the Western world at least even consider the possibility that men in fact do worse than women on a long list of categories. From longevity to education to incarceration to homelessness, women do much better than men, but is that common knowledge? If it is, I would think you'd see it written or spoken about in a few places other than GlennSacks.com.
When published in a cultural context that readily assumes female victimization, sometimes in the face of obvious facts to the contrary, such a report is easily taken to be just what it seems to be but isn't - a balanced look at the wellfare of the sexes that finds that women come up short. And lo and behold, that's just what happened with the GGG Report. Its title and a few carefully chosen words about division of resources and opportunities between the sexes were all it took to convince incautious writers at major publications of some fundamental untruths. And in so doing, they passed along the false notion, so commonly held in the West, that women uniquely suffer the slings and arrows of societal fortunes.
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November 15th, 2009 at 7:56 pm
Thankyou, Robert,for your efforts in bringing this to light.
November 15th, 2009 at 9:00 pm
What I find interesting is the sleight of hand, or lack thereof in the report. The first few pages of the report openly fess up to exactly what you say are the flaws in its methodology. Over and over the report says how they skewed the various measurements, mostly it says, out of a belief that skewing it that was was somehow beneficial.
And yet, what's the best analogy? Out of this witches brew of mismeasurement comes this pure innocent baby of a report, as reported by the Times and many other sources.
Using Google Scholar you can find who cites the report and how they treat it. I just looked at one or two, and they take the conclusions at face value, seemingly never reading the methodology.
Also with Google, it's informative to google Global Gender Gap Report peer review.
I am so puzzled how anyone can take that report seriously. And shocked that my former Dean has her name on it.
November 15th, 2009 at 11:19 pm
Men are scum who are "oppressing" women at every turn...
November 16th, 2009 at 3:15 am
It's quite ridiculous to assume that the few men reading this blog and the small number of blogs like it are the only ones in the entire world who can see how women are privileged, and men are disadvantaged. Nearly everyone already knows the facts. Everyone knows women live longer. Everyone knows women are doing better in school. Everyone knows women get treated with kid-gloves by the law, and that they hold all the cards regarding reproductive and parental rights. The list goes on.
Ignorance of fact isn't the problem; misandry is. Hatred of the male. It may not take the form of active passionate hatred that everyone can so easily and plausibly deny in themselves, but it is nevertheless provable and omnipresent. It takes the form of those very same statistics I just rattled off - that is the definition of the hatred heaped upon us. That we are so demonstrably persecuted, and that no-one gives a damn, is the heart of the matter.
The GGG report and the 'main-stream' media (it is really a femino-centric media) both reflect the same fundamental attitude that is manifest in broader society. Observing that they are wrong in their claims tells us nothing that we don't already know. The real break-through will come when in some currently inconceivable way, men can be seen as equally human as women, and equally non-disposable. When police beating and kicking prostrate men is seen as being as horrific as beating and kicking a woman.
How we get started in that direction is the toughest task before us, but the one encouraging thing is that we have already established notions of destiny not being a necessary consequence of biology. Whatever logic we may think there is in men being disposable, we can transcend it and relegate it to history. If we don't accept this possibility, but allow women's advocates to make free use of it to fight for their own interests, then we are willingly granting our rivals a weapon that we deny ourselves - and that is madness.
November 16th, 2009 at 7:47 am
mc said it so much better than i could. i saw a tv commercial yesterday during a football game (thus the target audience would be men) where a women uses a staple gun to attach an item to her husbands chest. imagine a role reversal and we can see how far we have to go. most of society understands fully well what is happening, particularily women. lack of knowledge isn't the number one problem here. i say it's materialistic, self absorbing narcissism on the part of the vast majority of women who have a sense of entitlement that transcends their ability to hold themselves accountable for any reason at any time. men have not reached a point, on aggregate, of saturation.
November 16th, 2009 at 8:16 am
The new gender / raunch culture will save the world.
November 16th, 2009 at 9:23 am
mc Says:
November 16th, 2009 at 3:15 am
It's quite ridiculous to assume that the few men reading this blog and the small number of blogs like it are the only ones in the entire world who can see how women are privileged, and men are disadvantaged. Nearly everyone already knows the facts.
Duh... Lot's of women I talk to know the score they are not stupid. Even some christian women I talk to but they don't do crap about it. I think its a combination of "the shoe is on the other foot" and a little apathy and a little don't want to get involved because they do benefit from it indirectly, etc...
November 16th, 2009 at 9:32 am
I would like to add this as a true life example for all to read:
I was dating a Christian girl last year for about 4 months… I talk a lot about feminism and what was going on to men etc… I told her I would never get married no matter what even if we worked out we could just live together but no marriage or kids no way with me.
She talked to her friends about it so the 4 of them sat around their little camp fire…
the 3 other girls were pagans. One told her she liked this guy a lot and when she threw the gauntlet down for him to marry her he dumped her and that now he is with another girl. She complained how much she liked him and that she didn’t blame him for not wanting to get married because he could lose his house etc.. all the reasons he told her.. He told my ex that now another girl has him and what does she have nothing, she hasn’t found someone she really clicked as well as with him.
Another girl told her she didn’t blame me because they knew “look he got screwed in family court and he isn’t going to do that again.”
The other girl in the group told her “you are both in your 30’s he is divorced with a kid out of state he can’t see” Basically it’s like he doesn’t have a kid better with him than another guy and end up being step mom, like those other guys you dated.
She told me all this and all in all you see it all over the conversation they all knew what was going on that family courts are gender biases, and non of them really were doing anything about it.
Eventually, I broke up with this girl she was just plain “emotionally unavailable” and I was pissed that she told me she ran a back ground check on me before we dated. she does that with all guys. Okay, I didn’t do that with you so why do you think all guys are rapists, and molesters, and deadbeats? Argh… See ya!
November 16th, 2009 at 9:34 am
1 more thing after I told her about all the feminist stuff etc.. and what was going on basically legalizing misnadry condensed.. she said "so now that you know all this how is that going to affect us"??????
See its not that they don't know but that YOU know so how is that going to affect them?
Not hey lets do something about it.
all this is 110% true
November 16th, 2009 at 9:37 am
correction that is SHE told my ex that now another girl has him and what does she have nothing, she hasn’t found someone she really clicked as well as with him.
sorry for all the typos
November 16th, 2009 at 10:27 am
that report will no doubt be used to put in countless laws accross the globe.
November 16th, 2009 at 11:23 am
Another report from the Feminist Ministry of Truth.
November 16th, 2009 at 11:47 am
I pointed this out on Reddit when the Report came out, but I think that you should be aware of it.
There are several plots in the Report, namely Figure 7 and Figure 8, that show a linear trend plotted along with the data. These linear trends are meaningless from a statistical point of view and show clear evidence of bias in the report. Of course, a least squares regression can be plotted for any data set, but that does not actually mean that the data is linear. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation for information on correlation coefficients.
I have reproduced the plot myself, following the reports that they do, and find a correlation coefficient value of R^2 = 0.167. This is very low - VERY low, indicating a high probability that the data is not linear. There are 124 countries included in the plot (more on this later), and removing Chad, and the Scandinavian countries results in an R^2 value of 0.085 and a drastically more horizontal slope. The statistical significance of these 5 countries (4% of the total) is huge. In a truly linear data set, 4% of the data points should not have this significant of a contribution.
In addition, I would like to point out that there are 124 countries common to both lists, while each of them show about 133 countries. These other countries, like Taiwan in the Competitiveness list, suggest that the political boundaries of countries may be different. Why is Taiwan on the competitiveness while not on the gender score list? Was it included with China? Questions like this make me wary about whether the information on the two separate data sets correspond to identical groups of people.
Also note that there are other bits of information involved in the Competitiveness report. If we plot Innovation Score versus the Gender Gap Index, there linear relationship is even worse. Could we take this to indicate that improved gender equality has little effect on the innovation quality of a country? I would say no, but I think this issue is purposefully left out of the Gender report.
Overall, I think we all feel that equality among genders will improve the economic status of a country, but I think that the economic status of the country is incredibly complex. The first part of that sentence is my bias - it may be founded on good reason, but it is still bias. In any report, bias should be clearly stated, not glossed over. And I denounce this report as clearly biased. If bias is evident in the presentation of the data and is not discussed, it is clear to me that bias could also be present in the data collection. This makes the entire report null, in my mind.
Anyone can feel free to contact me regarding my findings on this. dar at bolf dot ca
November 16th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
I have some more saddening news. I have repeated the findings of Figure 8, and as far as I can tell it is an outright fabrication. A number of countries must not have been included in this figure, because the figures don't look anything alike.
I went to the IMF website and downloaded the dataset for 2008 and 2009 GDP per capita in US dollars and reproduced the plot. Absolutely nothing alike. I don't know where they got their data from, but it certainly doesn't appear to be IMF.
Putting a linear line on, I find a slope of nearly 0, and a correlation coefficient of R^2 = 0.002. Meaningless.
November 16th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
I would like to publicly note that my last comment was a result of what I later found out to be a bug with Excel 2008. Apparently, if there is an "n/a" in a column that is supposed to be data, it no longer disregards that data point and instead changes all x-axis values to be the row number (ie: Row 50 becomes an x-axis value of 50).
The data plotted in Figure 8 is true, up to the point that the GDP data is projected and has changed since April 2009.
I will reiterate my point, however, that the data is clearly not linear and it is still not appropriate to put a linear slope on it. This may not seem like a big deal to other people, but as someone intimately familiar with statistics - it is.
November 16th, 2009 at 10:25 pm
Ok, this is true, what do we do?
The publisher of the WaPo is a hard core Feminist.
Our Sec. State is a hard core Feminist who just made women's issues the core of our foreign policy.
Our politicians court the women's vote.
We have no strategy, no numbers, no coherent philosophy and no leadership.
Marxist Feminism is becoming the law of the land. Here in Prague the undiluted DV law has been put into place. The Czech men are in for a surprise.
What is the counter measure against GGGR? That's the discussion we need.
November 17th, 2009 at 1:02 am
Although I am squarely on Mr. Dutton's side concerning DV, I think the debate between university intellectuals ( on DV) has gone on far too long. This debate has become so convoluded that it twists, turns and centers on itself rather than the real human beings who suffer from DV. It has become an excercise in indolence paticularly among those who incessantly proffer the biggoted (Diluth) idea of DV.
I can't help but offer a quote from Matt Taibbi's Tabblog. He is one of the most incisive, intelligent news writers I have read in today's crazed news media.
He is the writer who first exposed in great detail, the conniving influence of AIG in government and identified Gates as a former AIG executive. From his blog "Follow Me" he has written a commentrary on GS execs. which includes the following observation of intellectuals:
".....Absolutely the dumbest people in the world, always and without fail, are intellectuals. Anyone who has ever sat in with a bunch of Yalie grad students while they discuss Kafka– ....knows what I mean.
It’s a particular kind of mental disability. This is dumbness that doesn’t know how to connect the information coming in from their other sensory organs, i.e. from the outside world, to whatever flowery kaleidoscope of overwrought h*******it their professors sent hurtling on a permanent lifelong spin-cycle in their empty skulls back when they were eighteen.
.....most all of us fall for more than a few dumb ideas in the same way. The difference is that most of us normal people end up having soon after to go out into the world, where we get rudely introduced to the fact that life is mean and unforgiving and confusing as hell and that if you try to go through it leaning on some neat, gift-wrapped package of intellectual theories given to you by some preening old clown in a cardigan, you will very quickly become ridiculous and incompetent to manage your own life."
Will the ivory tower DV scholars ever realize the reality of Taibbi's invecitve and consider his conclusion as worthy of some thought, paticularly as to DV?
November 17th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
[...] on a Reddit comment for the MensRights subreddit, and I also posted this as a comment on the Glenn Sacks blog. I am reposting here [...]
November 17th, 2009 at 7:34 pm
when will men organize a national organization for men and fight this ?
November 18th, 2009 at 4:07 am
when will men organize a national organization for men and fight this ?
Formal organization of those engaging in social change doesn't normally occur until a critical mass of people reach the point of radicalization - that is, enough men start thinking that no other single issue as as important to their own interests as fighting for their own rights.
It hasn't happened in the past because the legal changes that got us to where we are today have not affected enough men in a personal way, and in a way that they can relate directly to a common cause that they all recognize. Divorce went from being relatively unusual in the 1970s to being more likely than not now - we not only have 2 generations of divorced men, we are also seeing the second generation of young men raised in broken families coming of age. So the critical mass is being reached now, and the internet is making it easy to agree on a common cause, as well as communicate multiple ways of responding.
For all that, a national organization isn't the cure, nor is it essential for change. Men acting on their own initiative, and teaming up with other men in small cells where they see a high likelihood of success in achieving a fixed objective is far more effective. These men will start winning the small battles that signify an emerging movement gathering momentum, and nothing draws further numbers greater than victory.
As soon as we start seeing a national organization of men beginning to take shape, the war is already won.
November 18th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
VERY IMPORTANT:
Robert and everyone else, are you aware of ANY newspaper-published critique of the GGGR on the grounds of the biased formula? I'd like to add a criticism section to GGGR's Wikipedia article but that requires a printed source. For now I could only add the sentence that mentions the methodological bias as admitted in the report itself.
November 18th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Basta - I did some cursory googling, but found nothing that criticized the methodology or assumptions of the report. It doesn't mean it's not out there somewhere, though.