Primates in Pinstripes

This month's Wired magazine contains an interesting and fulsome article on the results of recent and ongoing experiments into the effects of testosterone and cortisol on competitive behaviour.John Coates, a senior research fellow at the University of Cambridge, has taken behavioural finance in a new direction, as a former Wall street trader turned neuroscientist. A chance meeting led to an invitation to the animal behaviour lab at Manhattan's Rockefeller University, and Coates began helping out with experiments there. His own research in the City of London recently won the 2012 Wellcome Trust Book Prize for The Hour Between Dog and Wolf. To cut a long story short it's true that women outperform men in the long-term in the financial markets - to find out why, read the article. There are also a couple more pieces relating to Coates from last year - the Guardian article also discusses the gendered nature of the US Government Report on the Financial Crisis of 2008. The Huffington Post article ends with a video clip of a Wall street trader who lost his job, couldn't tell his wife, and tried to fill the gap by robbing 10 banks until he was caught. Funnily enough, he uses exactly the same reasoning as Tom Wilkinson's character in The Full Monty. I hope all this coverage doesn't deter his research subjects from collaborating in the future.


Wired Article              

Businessweek Article

Guardian Article

Huffington Post

Wellcome Book Prize

Women in Hollywood still only shine in front of the camera

Jodie Foster may have recently won a lifetime Golden Globe for her acting and directing, but opportunities for women behind the camera remain rare in Tinseltown compared with the norms for Indie films. As the New York Post puts it..

"Between 2002 and 2012, nearly a quarter of the directors at [the] Sundance [Film Festival] were women, compared with 4.4 percent for the top 100 box office films in the same period. Including cinematographers, editors, producers and writers, women accounted for 29.8 percent of the American films at Sundance, which has become synonymous with indie film. Films directed by women were also more likely to have women in other key roles behind the camera. And breaking it down further, documentaries were rife with female talent – 34.5 percent were directed by women, compared with 16.9 percent for feature films"

Here's the full article from The Mary Sue.

Thanks to my frozen McCorrespondent North of the Border for this one.

Judy Chicago - Feminist Art Icon in the UK

Back in the 1990s I arrived early for a conference at UCLA. With an afternoon to kill before the head action, I stumbled out of the Holiday Inn on Wilshire and into the Armand Hammer Museum, where they were hosting the legendary feminist installation, Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, about which I knew nothing. I didn't even know enough to be ashamed of knowing nothing. But I was blown away. Forget the negative criticism it received from some critics, which along with a good deal of patriarchal defensiveness (it's not really art just craft etc) meant that it was only shown a handful of times - barely into double figures - between 1979 and 2007, when it finally found a permanent home. It kick-in-the-gut affected me, despite its lavishness, its kitsch, its didacticism, its weight, its moralization, its clichés,  its new-ageism, its self-conscious research apparatus. It read history through the body rather than the (patri)archive. It worked. I bought the book. I worked it into my classes. I went to her shop in Belen, New Mexico and bought the video. Her assistant even showed me into part of her house - she said Judy would probably have invited me in had she been there. I won't reproduce what the article - which is substantial -  says about her work, and The Dinner Party especially, which if you don't know you must check out, and really, get on a plane to Brooklyn and see, it's so visceral. But do try and see the small parts of her very considerable oeuvre that are being shown in London and Liverpool over the next couple of months. You won't regret it. Not many artists set out to make history and succeed.

Article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/nov/04/judy-chicago-art-feminism-britain

Dinner Party Site:

http://throughtheflower.org/page.php?p=10&n=2

Thanks (or is it a hat-tip? what's the difference between that and a shout-out?) to Lynne Baxter for alerting me to this.

The New Suffragettes: Should feminism be back on the agenda?

While some women may feel that feminism has become a dirty word, the organization UK Feminista has taken to the streets to demonstrate against the erosion of the hard won rights that have been won since "first-wave" feminism first gained ground over a hundred years ago. Helen Pankhurst, granddaughter of the legendary Emmeline Pankhurst, led the demonstration to Parliament. The demo is covered here by The Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/10/24/suffragettes-storm-parliament-feminism_n_2008361.html

UK Feminista calls itself "a  movement of ordinary men and women campaigning for gender equality". Find out more here:

http://ukfeminista.org.uk/

And in case you don't know who Emmeline Pankhurst was, read here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/pankhurst_emmeline.shtml

The history of the original Suffragettes is summarised briefly here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/53819.stm

and here:

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/suffragettes.htm

A fuller accoount can be found here:

http://www.johndclare.net/Women1_cjbooks.htm

While the Suffragettes campaigned long and hard, especially under Pankhurst's leadership after 1903, but before the First World War they had little success. However, Pankhurst herself along with many other women in factories and fields campaigned for the war effort and it was perhaps this that swung political opinion in their favour. Pankhurst is sometimes remembered for chaining herself to the railings of Downing Street, Buckingham Palace or to a statue in the lobby of the House of Commons (to prevent being hauled off by police before she finished speaking) but although these events happened and chaining was a Suffragette tactic she did not use it herself. She was, however, imprisoned for demonstrating - which deeply affected her. She is also less often mistaken for the tragic Suffragette who threw herself under the King's Horse at the Derby in 1913, but that was Emily Davison. She died shortly after women received equal voting rights with men, in 1928.

Julia Gillard's misogyny speech

You may have heard about the furore over Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard's robust response to a statement made by Leader of the Opposition Tony Abbott on sexism and misogyny. Abbott was accused of hypocrisy over the scandal that led to the forced resignation of Speaker of the House Peter Slipper, who had been sending lurid text messages to a colleague. The video had 2 million hits on YouTube, but was removed for copyrigth reasons at the request of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The full 15 minute speech is available however at the Sydney Morning Herald site:

http://media.smh.com.au/news/national-times/julia-gillards-misogyny--speech-in-full-3701787.html

and if you can't spare 15 minutes, a clip is available from the BBC:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-19896465

On a similar theme, Sky TV is no stranger to sexism after the scandal that led to the sacking of Sky Sports pundit Andy Gray and the resignation of co-presenter Richard Keys in 2011 -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvVXOc0zyOY

Keys and Gray are now Radio Presenters, but sadly don't appear to be much reconstructed

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2012/mar/14/richard-keys-andy-gray-history

So it's perhapsnot surprising to find that an Australian Sky presenter of 25 years' experience, Tracey Spicer, finally exploded with a public letter to a fictional "Mr Misogynist" railing at the sexism she had experienced in her career (just before Gillard's speech, in fact) that also went viral. You can read it and hear Spicer interviewed here:

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/and-heres-the-news-my-bums-got-nothing-to-do-with-the-story-20121025-28837.html

G.I. Jane again? Rape in the military wasn't just fiction

Back in the 1990s, there was outrage at the way in which Ridley Scott included what appeared to be a rape scene in G. I. Jane - the defence of the Master Chief being that this was what the enemy would do to female front-line combatants in order to manipulate their male counterparts into giving up information. The Tailhook scandal suggested that even in the absence of a threat from an imagined enemy, female military personnel may be at risk from unwanted sexual advances from their male colleagues, and particularly from senior officers. This year campaigner Naomi Klein has given this her attention and there has been some press coverage of the extent of cover-ups and intimidation of women who have accused other serving US military officers of rape, and Tuesday's Guardian reports a just-released documentary film on the issue The Invisible War and relates it to evidence from the UK. Prepare to be shocked.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/the-womens-blog-with-jane-martinson/2012/oct/29/rape-military-shocking-truth

More practically, the CIPD has surprising survey results on discrimination at work among HR specialists

http://www.peoplemanagement.co.uk/pm/articles/2012/10/bias-in-the-workplace.htm

and a link to an interesting podcast from 2011 on fairness at work.

http://www.cipd.co.uk/podcasts/_articles/_fairnessatwork.htm?utm_medium=email&utm_source=cipd&utm_campaign=cipdupdate&utm_content=311012_na_textlink_feature2.link3

The Post-men Man

Well, welcome back... I actively run this blog to support my Management and Gender course in the Spring Term, but I will less actively post throughout the year. Since my last post, late Spring and Summer were not only very busy but we lost four close friends and relatives including my mother, who was herself a remarkable gender role model. But having got through a very difficult period (another friend says it has something to do with Saturn) and settled into a new term, I  can at last get back to blogging again. Welcome particularly to those who have enrolled on the course for next term and are getting advance-oriented. This is a link I owe to Saku Mantere, on the "End of Man" proposition that has recently been aired (again).

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/97be2b80-1339-11e2-ac28-00144feabdc0.html#axzz29UCtgDmZ