hunter of justice

For women, more authority = more harassment

Data presented at this year's meeting of the American Sociological Association demonstrate that women in management positions are significantly more likely to be harassed than women who do not supervise others. The study also found that effeminate men were susceptible to harassment, an observation borne out by the large number of same-sex harassment cases, almost all filed by male employees who are perceived for a variety of reasons to be weak.

Women who hold supervisory positions are more likely to be sexually harassed at work, according to the first-ever, large-scale longitudinal study to examine workplace power, gender and sexual harassment.

The study, "A Longitudinal Analysis of Gender, Power and Sexual Harassment in Young Adulthood," reveals that nearly fifty percent of women supervisors, but only one-third of women who do not supervise others, reported sexual harassment in the workplace. In more conservative models with stringent statistical controls, women supervisors were 137 percent more likely to be sexually harassed than women who did not hold managerial roles.

While supervisory status increased the likelihood of harassment among women, it did not significantly impact the likelihood for men.

"This study provides the strongest evidence to date supporting the theory that sexual harassment is less about sexual desire than about control and domination,"said Heather McLaughlin, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota and the study's primary investigator. "Male co-workers, clients and supervisors seem to be using harassment as an equalizer against women in power."

McLaughlin and her co-authors examined data from the 2003 and 2004 waves of the Youth Development Study (YDS), a prospective study of adolescents that began in 1988 with a sample of 1,010 ninth graders in the St. Paul, Minnesota, public school district and has continued near annually since. Respondents were approximately 29 and 30 years old during the 2003 and 2004 waves. The analysis was supplemented with in-depth interviews with a subset of the YDS survey respondents.

The sociologists found that, in addition to workplace power, gender expression was a strong predictor of workplace harassment. Men who reported higher levels of femininity were more likely to have experienced harassment than less feminine men. More feminine men were at a greater risk of experiencing more severe or multiple forms of sexual harassment (as were female supervisors).

In a separate analysis examining perceived and self-reported sexual orientation, study respondents who reported being labeled as non-heterosexual by others or who self-identified as non-heterosexual (gay, lesbian, bisexual, unsure, other) were nearly twice as likely to experience harassment.

Researchers also found that those who reported harassment in the first year (2003) were 6.5 times more likely to experience harassment in the following year. The most common scenario reported by survey respondents involved male harassers and female targets, while males harassing other males was the second most frequent situation.

McLaughlin co-authored the study with sociologists Christopher Uggen, chair of the University of Minnesota's sociology department and a distinguished McKnight professor of sociology, and Amy Blackstone, associate professor of sociology at the University of Maine. The multi-method research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Mental Health and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

From Signs of the Times.

Important new study on lgbt parenting

The professional journal Demography has accepted for publication a new paper by Stanford Professor Michael Rosenfeld that, for the first time, bases a study of the outcomes of children with same-sex parents on a large, nationally representative sample.  Using census data, Professor Rosenfeld found that:

1. Children of same-sex couples are as likely to make normal progress through school as the children of most other family structures. The differential between them and children of heterosexual married parents - the group least likely to have children retained in grades - is mostly due to the higher SES of the married straight parents.
2. Children in all families are far more likely to make normal progress through school than children in foster care or other group settings.

These findings have enormous potential to make important evidentiary contributions in marriage challenges, family law cases, and challenges to laws that bar same-sex couples from adopting.

(Pre-publication version of paper available here.)

Census Bureau legal memo drops former DoMA interpretation

The Census Bureau has reversed its former position on whether DoMA prevents it from reporting data on married same-sex couples, and will begin issuing such reports. The Bureau will collect and report marriage data in two versions: tabulations that continue to change responses from gay couples that self-identify as married to count them as unmarried partners; and also tabulations that report "unedited" responses. (See policy change summary.)  The Washington Post reported:

The new guidelines state that software used by Census enumerators will continue to change the answers given by same-sex partners who mark their relationship status as "husband or wife" to "unmarried partner." In late 2011, Census officials will then release the raw state-by-state data on same-sex couples who marked their status as "husband or wife."

The Census will first report same-sex marriage data later this year when it releases the 2008 American Community Survey. The results of the annual housing and population survey will include unedited responses regarding relationship status.

The change is being made pursuant to a formal opinion letter from the General Counsel of the Department of Commerce (of which the Bureau is a part) which concludes that the agency has discretion even under DoMA to collect and report accurate data on same-sex marriages "according to its best scientific judgment." This is another crack in the DoMA wall, and could be used as precedent by other agencies within the Obama administration.

DoMA prohibits including gay couples in the meaning of "marriage" or "spouse" in "any act of Congress, or in any ruling, regulation or interpretation" of federal agencies. The GC's opinion letter finds that neither the bureau's questionnaire nor its data reporting system fall within the definition of "act of Congress, or ... ruling, regulation or interpretation" of federal agencies. The memorandum continues:

The previous application of DoMA ... would require that the Secretary entirely edit out statistical data about same-sex marriages that is accurate information where such marriages are lawful - and in the process disregard an emerging demographic phenomenon...Applying political judgments about marriage to the tabulation of census data could undermine the valuable scientific role of the Census Bureau as a source of definitive and objective data on American society.

Interestingly, the document reveals that Census Bureau staff requested a ruling from the GC's office two years ago, and the GC's office even then stated that DoMA "did not govern how marriage-related information should be collected." However, the GC's office in 2007 also stated that there "was a strong legal basis for a policy decision" to exclude same-sex couples.  In other words, there has been an internal battle over this issue for years, with professional staff seeking authority to make the kinds of changes just announced, and Bush political appointees exercising their discretion to make the "policy decision" to not count gay couples who are lawfully married.

The science behind the ick factor

There's good news in the following tongue-in-cheek column on reactions to french kissing and other public displays of affection -- people can in fact get over it insofar as they are more bothered by observing the same behavior by same-sex couples than by straight couples. HT: Dana Rudolph at Bilerico.

By Jesse Bering, from Scientific American:

While walking through a park in Budapest a few weeks ago, I spied a very strange sight. In that fleeting moment between sensation and perception, when images settle on the retina but aren’t yet processed in a form fully accessible to conscious awareness, what I saw was a multicolored, gyrating mass of vaguely human substance, squirming and twisting on a park bench in animalistic fervor. My brain, unfortunately, was soon able to peel apart what I was actually observing, which was a particularly corpulent young woman devouring a young man half her size in what can only be described as a feast of open-mouthed, public lovemaking. The expression, “get a room,” seemed wholly inadequate for this carnal scene. “Get a porn studio” was more like it.

My partner, Juan, and I witnessed many other public displays of “affection” like this one during our stay in Budapest, which was curious enough from a cross-cultural perspective and a bit counterintuitive for such a socially conservative country like Hungary. It put me in an ethnographic state of mind. Suddenly I became acutely aware of the many American and British tourists who—if not quite as passionate as these lustful Magyars—were similarly expressing their attachments to their partners in, say, an arm casually draped around the shoulder, a hand held or a possessive grip on the waist. And that’s when the sad truth struck me: with the exception perhaps of just a handful of places in the world (and even those are questionable), gay couples are not free to participate in this most basic, mindless and normal exhibition of romantic behavior. In both the UK and the US, for example, I’ve got to first scout out who’s in our immediate vicinity before daring to even brush my pinky finger against Juan’s hand as we’re walking side-by-side. Compared to the issue of gay marriage, gaining equality in the “right” to display such innocent feelings of affection for one’s same-sex partner is an even greater hurdle for gay rights advocates—and, in many ways, it’s an even more important one. This is because recent findings indicate that changing negative attitudes toward gays begins not with education, per se, but instead with exposing people more regularly to same-sex romantic behavior.

... [Even people who would say, if asked, that it’s okay for gay people to kiss in public] nevertheless hold implicit negative attitudes on the subject. At least, that’s what Harvard University psychologist Yoel Inbar and his colleagues reported in a recent study in the journal Emotion.

In one experiment, the researchers randomly assigned 44 undergraduate students from the University of California, Irvine, to one of two different conditions. Half of the participants were asked to read a brief story about the director of a risqué music video which turned out to have the side-effect of encouraging gay men to French–kiss in public. (Think Katy Perry’s homoerotic “I Kissed a Girl” but, for this study, a male-on-male “I Kissed a Boy” equivalent.) The remaining participants read the same story, yet in this other version the video was said to have caused straight couples to French–kiss in public rather than gay men. It was stressed to participants in both conditions that the director knew the video was likely to induce public French–kissing but this was not his primary goal in making the video.

The participants were then asked the following questions: (1) Did the director intentionally encourage homosexual men [or straight couples] to French–kiss in public? (2) Is there anything wrong with homosexual men [or straight couples] French–kissing in public? (3) Was it wrong of the director to make a video that he knew would encourage homosexual men [or straight couples] to French–kiss in public? ... And as predicted, these mostly college-aged participants agreed that there’s nothing wrong with either straight or gay couples displaying this type of affection in public, nor, for that matter, was it wrong for the director to encourage such behavior in either case. Intriguingly, however, in response to the first question, participants viewed the director’s actions as being more intentional when he encouraged gays to kiss in public than straights.

Obama administration to change census policy on same-sex marriages

The Wall Street Journal reports this morning that the Obama administration is exploring substitutes for the Census Bureau's policy of altering "married" responses when the partner is of the same sex.  For years, the Bureau has asserted that DoMA's bar on any federal laws, regulations or policies recognizing same-sex marriages forces them into this approach. Their policy has been to move those responses into the "unmarried same-sex partner" category.  According to the WSJ, the administration has "abandoned" that interpretation of DoMA.

Since last summer, a group of advocates has been meeting with Census officials to find other ways that census data could be reported, without violating DoMA but also without losing important information on the demographics of lgbt Americans. (An example would be not to edit the responses but to report them as "self-identified" married couples, or something to that effect.)

Happily, this spade work seems to be paying off, as the administration scrambles for ways to mollify the community.  HUGE credit here goes to Gary Gates, senior policy fellow at the Williams Institute, who has been working these issues literally since the last census, and whose analysis of census and other data has helped make the Williams Institute the center of empirical research on lgbt issues.

Interestingly, two Census Bureau demographers presented a paper last month at an academic conference, using data that existed - but was not officially reported - on same-sex married couples.

WSJ article is after the jump.

New Pew poll: Independents surge, opinion on gay marriage shows jagged line

A new Pew Research Center report on political values and core attitudes - which Pew has been monitoring for 22 years - shows that more people now self-identify as Independents than as Democrats or Republicans. Over the last six years, most of the new Independents have been refugees from the Republican Party, but in the last five months, both the Dems and the Repubs have dropped by roughly equal amounts, while the number of persons identifying as Independent has surged by almost one-third.

On gay marriage, although there is endless media commentary about the steady upward march in public support for marriage equality, the Pew numbers tell a story of much greater volatility:

The opposition is broadly trending downward, although Pew's numbers show that a smaller percentage of Americans opposed gay marriage last year and even in 2006 than do today.

The same jagged up and down line, though trending generally upward, characterizes the percentage who favor marriage equality. Again, the number in support this year is not the highest in the last 13 years, and in fact shows a small drop from last year. According to Pew, the same percentage of Americans supported gay marriage in 2001 as do today.

Although these are national data and not specific to California, they at least hint at why going back to the ballot box for a repeal of Prop 8 in 2010 - if it happens - is going to be dicey.  Maybe the numbers trend in California is completely different - that's possible, although I doubt it - but there is no sign of voters' remorse in these data.

Nate Silver models marriage by the numbers, or, how to quantify inevitability

The famed numbers geek of electoral projections - Nate Silver over at 538 - has turned his sights on legalization of same-sex marriage. For each state, Silver predicts which year a majority of voters would reject a ban on same-sex marriage (which could come earlier or later than a legislative majority to end the exclusion). My bet is that his analysis will become the new sacred set of numbers for lgbt advocates (which is good since that 10% of the population figure got debunked a decade ago).

How on target are these numbers? If folks in California put an initiative on the 2010 ballot to repeal Prop 8, we'll all find out - Silver says we'll win in '10. No one I've talked to who is on the ground in California agrees with that.

Map Scroll (anonymous) converted Silver's projections into this map:

Following is Silver on the inevitability of same-sex marriage:

I looked at the 30 instances in which a state has attempted to pass a constitutional ban on gay marriage by voter initiative. The list includes Arizona twice, which voted on different versions of such an amendment in 2006 and 2008, and excludes Hawaii, which voted to permit the legislature to ban gay marriage but did not actually alter the state's constitution. I then built a regression model that looked at a series of political and demographic variables in each of these states and attempted to predict the percentage of the vote that the marriage ban would receive.

It turns out that you can build a very effective model by including just three variables:

1. The year in which the amendment was voted upon;
2. The percentage of adults in 2008 Gallup tracking surveys who said that religion was an important part of their daily lives;
3. The percentage of white evangelicals in the state.

These variables collectively account for about three-quarters of the variance in the performance of marriage bans in different states. The model predicts, for example, that a marriage ban in California in 2008 would have passed with 52.1 percent of the vote, almost exactly the fraction actually received by Proposition 8.

Unsurprisingly, there is a very strong correspondence between the religiosity of a state and its propensity to ban gay marriage, with a particular "bonus" effect depending on the number of white evangelicals in the state.

Marriage bans, however, are losing ground at a rate of slightly less than 2 points per year. So, for example, we'd project that a state in which a marriage ban passed with 60 percent of the vote last year would only have 58 percent of its voters approve the ban this year.

All of the other variables that I looked at -- race, education levels, party registration, etc. -- either did not appear to matter at all, or became redundant once we accounted for religiosity. Nor does it appear to make a significant difference whether the ban affected marriage only, or both marriage and civil unions.

So what does this mean for Iowa? The state has roughly average levels of religiosity, including a fair number of white evangelicals, and the model predicts that if Iowans voted on a marriage ban today, it would pass with 56.0 percent of the vote. By 2012, however, the model projects a toss-up: 50.4 percent of Iowans voting to approve the ban, and 49.6 percent opposed. In 2013 and all subsequent years, the model thinks the marriage ban would fail.

Below are the dates when the model predicts that each of the 50 states would vote against a marriage ban. Asterisks indicate states which had previously passed amendments to ban gay marriage.

2009 (now)
Vermont
New Hampshire
Massachusetts
Maine
Rhode Island
Connecticut
Nevada*
Washington
Alaska*
New York
Oregon*

2010
California*
Hawaii
Montana*
New Jersey
Colorado*

Psychology journal focuses on new lgbt-related reseaarch

The current issue of the American Pyschological Association Journal of Counseling Psychology is devoted to new research regarding sexual minorities. Information here. 

Policing procreation: what if the law followed science?

In the midst of heated debates over same-sex marriage, we tend to forget (I certainly do) another threshold eligibility term for marriage that varies among the states: the prohibition in many, but not all, states of marriage between cousins. Following is a provocative review by William Saletan, writing in Slate, of a new study that calls into question the grounds for outlawing cousin marriages. His conclusion: if we are going to police procreation by the scientific risks involved, shouldn't we follow where the data lead us?

Does science support our laws against cousin marriage? If so, does it also support other laws that would restrict sexual or procreative freedom in the name of genetic health?

[B]iologist Hamish Spencer and political scientist Diane Paul, writing in PLOS Biology, have reviewed the history of U.S. laws against cousin marriage, along with their scientific basis. [T[he evidence raises unsettling implications.

They start with the statistical case against restricting cousin marriages:

"[T]he National Society of Genetic Counselors (NSGC) convened a group of experts to review existing studies on risks to offspring and issue recommendations for clinical practice. Their report concluded that the risks of a first-cousin union were generally much smaller than assumed—about 1.7%-2% above the background risk for congenital defects and 4.4% for pre-reproductive mortality—and did not warrant any special preconception testing. In the authors' view, neither the stigma that attaches to such unions in North America nor the laws that bar them were scientifically well-grounded."

But Paul and Spencer point out that the data aren't clear-cut. First, "statistics on the risks associated with cousin marriage are necessarily averages across many traits, and they are likely to be different for different populations." And second, it's

"inappropriate to extrapolate findings from largely outbred populations with occasional first-cousin marriages to populations with high coefficients of inbreeding and vice-versa. Standard calculations, such as the commonly cited 3% additional risk, examine a pedigree in which the ancestors (usually grandparents) are assumed to be unrelated. In North America, marriages between consanguineal kin are strongly discouraged. But such an assumption is unwarranted in the case of UK Pakistanis, who have emigrated from a country where such marriage is traditional and for whom it is estimated that roughly 55%-59% of marriages continue to be between first cousins. Thus, the usual risk estimates are misleading: data from the English West Midlands suggest that British Pakistanis account for only ~4.1% of births, but about 33% of the autosomal recessive metabolic errors recorded at birth."

In other words, the American calculations understate the risk for an already inbred population such as British Pakistanis. And calculations based on British Pakistanis overstate the risk for most American cousin couples. You can't draw a uniform line against cousin marriages based on science.

Researchers find that race was less of a factor in Prop 8 vote

A study by two political scientists released today found that African-American voters in CA did not support Prop 8 to nearly the degree indicated by a much publicized (and here and here and many others) exit poll. According to a survey conducted last month of a random sample of voters, 58% of African-Americans voted for Prop 8, a higher rate that the 52% support it received overall, but far below the 70% figure found by the CNN exit poll. That exit poll result, the authors say, was an outlier - not consistent with their follow-up poll, pre-election polls, or precinct-level analysis, which found 57 to 59% support for Prop 8 in heavily African-American precincts.

The study, by Ken Sherrill (CUNY-Hunter College) and Patrick Egan (NYU), provides the clearest documentation yet of how various segments of the electorate contributed to the outcome, with important ramifications for future campaigns.

What characteristics were most predictive of how an individual voted on Prop 8?

--> Party identification, political views, religiosity and age, in that order.

Religiosity explained much of the difference between African-American or Latino and white voters. Weekly attendance at religious services is far more likely for African-Americans (57%) and a bit more likely for Latinos (47%) than for whites (43%). Among persons who reported attending services at least once a week, support for Prop 8 was close to the same across all racial and ethnic groups.

However, among persons attending services less than weekly, there was a racial difference: in that group, the yes on 8 vote was 48% among African-Americans, 46% among Latinos, 36% among whites, and 33% among Asian-Americans. Therefore it would be wrong to use this new survey as the basis for leaping to the conclusion that there is no serious problem with racial disparity in support for same-sex marriage -- there is. The lgbt movement needs to rethink its race analysis and politics - that lesson from Prop 8 is still quite valid. The level of support for Prop 8 among less religious black and Latino voters is sobering.

Far more significant than race and even more significant than religion was political ideology: 81% of Republicans voted yes, compared to 30% of Democrats; and 82% of self-characterized conservatives were yes voters, compared to 22% of liberals.

Using multi-variate analysis, Egan and Sherrill found that the percentage of votes affected by each characteristic was as follows:

• Party identification        15.2%
• Ideology                        14.6%
• Religiosity                     11.8%
• Age                                 8.7%
• Race/ethnicity                5.5%
• Gender                           4.9%
• Knowing someone gay      0.6%

As is obvious from these figures, by far the least significant factor of those studied was whether the individual knew someone gay or lesbian. Overall, almost 75% of all voters said they had gay family members or friends, which means that most conservative and Republican voters who know gay people voted for Prop 8.

To me, this signals a need to adjust some of the old slogans -- coming out per se is necessary but far from sufficient for achieving change. Milk was a good movie, but we're no longer living in that moment. The society has moved way past the time when only a small number of straight people realized that they knew a gay person. At least for conservative voters, on this particular issue, the impact of having someone they know come out or of seeing appealing lgbt families on tv is probably insignificant. It would be interesting to know whether having gay friends or family members has a bigger impact on voters for issues other than marriage, or whether it's just lost some of its political oomph.

The effect that all those years of coming out has had up to now is quite real, though, and evident from the study. By comparing data from 2008 to data from the 2000 election in California, when voters adopted a statute limiting marriage to heterosexuals by a 61% majority, the authors were able to map the change in voting patterns within birth cohorts. For example, among "boomers" - those born between 1940 and 1960 - support for legalizing same-sex marriage grew by 13 points between 2000 and 2008. For those born between 1960 and 1982, it grew by 4%. A majority in both of those groups voted against Prop 8. For voters born before 1940, however, there has been no shift in opinion.

New research: More child care by dads leads to rebound in childbirth rates

The National Bureau for Economic Research Digest reports on a new study showing that an increase in women's economic and employment status, which initially led to falling birthrates in economically advanced countries, will later produce an increase in fertility rates back up to replacement levels ... if dads do more housework and child care.

That's the conclusion of Will the Stork Return to Europe and Japan? Understanding Fertility within Developed Nations (NBER Working Paper No. w14114). Co-authors of the study, Bruce Sacerdote, James Feyrer, and Ariel Stern find that where men perform relatively more of those chores -- and where female labor-force participation was highest three decades ago - fertility rates rebounded from historic lows. It already appears to have happened in the United States, the Scandinavian countries, and the Netherlands.

This represents a dramatic reversal from initial stages of a demographic transition, in which fertility falls as women have higher relative wages outside the home. In the United States, for example, women in the 1950s and 1960s earned low wages (relative to men) outside the home and were expected to shoulder all the household and childcare duties. In 1955, American women averaged about 3.5 births apiece. But as more women entered the workforce and their job opportunities and pay rose, so did the opportunity cost of staying at home. Fertility plunged. By the 1980s, the U.S. fertility rate had fallen by nearly half from its mid-1950s level -- to 1.8 births per woman.

The rest of the developed world shared the same pattern. By 2005, total fertility rates were as low as 1.3 children per woman in Italy, Spain, Germany, and Japan - far beneath the population's replacement rate of 2.1 children. According to the authors, "this is the first time in recorded history that large populations with high and growing per capita income have failed to reproduce themselves over an extended period of time."

But some nations have seen a rebound, even as women's pay and job opportunities continued to grow and began to rival those of men. The authors surmise that with increased household bargaining power, which comes from more equal wages, women are able to push some (though not necessarily half) of household and childcare duties onto men. This, in turn, removes some of the disincentives to having more children. By 1995, for example, the U.S. fertility rate had recovered from its 1980s lows to roughly replacement levels.

This change in women's status is not just correlated with higher fertility, the authors contend -- it drives it. Other potential fertility drivers, such as population density and housing prices, don't appear to matter much, they find. However, government policies that ease the burden of childcare - such as tax breaks for families with children and publicly provided day care - do appear to play a role.

Such findings could have ramifications beyond Europe. Asian nations undergoing development are seeing their fertility rates fall even further and faster than the West did. Women in South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong average fewer than 1.5 children. "A massive convergence in national fertility rates is leading to a world that looks very much like the low-fertility European countries in terms of the number of children per woman," the authors conclude.

British statistics agency to collect data on sexual orientation

As  American researchers battle with the Census Bureau over the distortions in reporting same-sex couples caused by the refusal to count legal same-sex marriages, Pink News reports that -

The British Office for National Statistics (ONS) has  announced that all of their major surveys on everything from households to the workforce will from January include a question on sexual identity. The added question is linked to a new law that adds sexual orientation and gender identity to an anti-discrimination bill covering allocation of public services.

[For the 2011 census, there will not be a sexual orientation question, but there will be one on civil partnerships.]

From January, all major ONS survey participants will be shown a card and asked: "Which of the options on this card best describes how you think of yourself? Please just read out the number next to the description. Heterosexual/straight, gay/lesbian, bisexual, other."

A new Equality Bill announced in the Queen's Speech earlier this month will extend the existing duty on public bodies to consider how their spending decisions, employment practices, and service delivery can affect people according to their race, disability, or gender to include sexual orientation, gender reassignment, age, and religion or belief.

The argument is that without reliable statistics on how many lesbian, gay, bisexual or trans people are in a specific area, it could be difficult for some public bodies to carry out their new duties under the revised law effectively. The ONS will be able to provide information to government agencies on LGB people in a wide range of settings from the workplace to households. For example, the data will inform a local authority of how many LGB-headed families live in their borough.

Social construction of harassment

A new study in Law & Social Inquiry shows that how people define sexual harassment is directly related to the extent to which they view sexual harassment rules as ambiguous and threatening to workplace norms.

Justine E. Tinkler of Louisiana State University used data from a nationwide study of sexual harassment in the United States' federal workplace to investigate how policy knowledge, attitudes about the legal regulation of sexual harassment, and the social locations and experiences of employees affect their likelihood to label uninvited sexual teasing as sexual harassment.

How men and women define sexual harassment is related to the degree towhich they view sexualharassment rules as ambiguous and threatening to the workplace.

Women, particularly women supervisors, resist defining sexual joking or remarks as harassment. This may be due to the fact that women recognizethat taking less serious forms of unwanted sexual attention too seriously can have negative effects on the way women are perceived.

Men with college or postgraduate degrees were significantly less likely to define sexual jokes or remarks as harassment than were men with a high school degree or less.

Among people whose workplace norms are threatened by anti-harassment enforcement, workplace training magnifies their resistance to defining sexual joking as harassment.

"By locating variation in how people define injurious behavior in both the content of the law, the social status of the groups it aims to protect, and how people think about its regulation, future research may be better equipped to understand why some laws never change the social order while others have an enormous impact," Tinkler concludes.

This study is published in the June 2008 issue of Law & Social Inquiry.

++++++++++++

courtesy of clinicians with not enough to do

Two important reports from American Psychological Association

UPDATE: APA report slows British anti-choice efforts.

The APA convention meeting this week in Boston is hearing two internal reports with important public policy dimensions.

The report of the Task Force on Mental Health and Abortion concludes that no evidence supports the claim that an induced abortion causes mental health problems for adult women. The Task Force reviewed all empirical studies in peer-reviewed journals since 1989. For women who had a single elective abortion, the study found no mental health effects attributable to the abortion; for women who had multiple abortions, the evidence was more uncertain.

This report should help opponents of the ballot initiative in South Dakota, which seeks to all but eliminate abortions in that state by using a "woman protective" argument. (Background in my previous post.)

The Task Force on Gender Identity and Gender Variance also presented a report to the convention. The report encourages support for anti-discrimination protections, more research on these issues, and the development of practice guidelines. Votes by the Council of Representatives will occur Sunday, and the Council is expected to adopt a resolution endorsing anti-discrimination laws protecting transgender people.

"Hot-tubbing" the experts

Adam Liptak has a fascinating article in this morning's NYT about the move in Australia to diminish the opinion-for-hire quality of expert testimony.  In a process called "hot tubbing," or more primly, "concurrent evidence," experts testify in a format that sounds more like a panel at an academic conference than a trial. Both sides' experts apparently are "on the stand" at the same time; they interact with each other and ask each other questions, as well as responding to questions from counsel and the judge. This allows the experts to say what they really think, as opposed to sticking to the script prepared by lawyers, who try to steer them away from mentioning any weak spots in their client's case. Apparently, most trial lawyers hate it. Duh.

[An aside - in what seems like a similar move, congressional committees now sometimes conduct hearings in a roundtable format. The basic idea is the same: less time spent on formal statements, more informal exchange.  See Senate committee hearing on ADA Amendments Act. ]

Hot-tubbing strikes me as an immensely appealing idea, although I have a variety of concerns, most of which I will skip at the moment. Not being a trial lawyer (although I sometimes play one in the classroom), I can't draw on my own war stories here. But one issue that I'm currently thinking about is the frustrating state of the research on the quality of gay parenting. In many of the challenges to marriage and adoption laws, judges have been asked to evaluate competing arguments about whether it is reasonable to base a statutory classification or exclusion on the premise that children are less well off with gay, rather than straight, parents.

I won't even begin to go into all of the issues and problems.  But one big one is, assuming a fair-minded judge, which experts does she believe? Hot-tubbing won't eliminate the situation in which scientific evidence strongly favors one interpretation of reality (tempted to place that word in scare quotes!), but there remains some support for another interpretation. Perhaps two professionals in a given field have a better shot of embarrassing each other by calling out exaggerations than occurs in the standard cross-examination context. And possibly a practice of using only experts who can - and are willing to - engage directly with a professional peer would raise the quality of the evidence. [Of course, there is, as always, a caveat - it could also introduce new incentives not related to quality.]

In situations like the gay parenting field, in which one cannot say that there are no legitimate disputes, but one can say that no scientific evidence supports the belief that the quality of parenting differs based on the sexual orientation of the parents - I wonder if hot tubbing the experts could help force judges to face facts that many of them, apparently, simply want not to believe.

At a deeper level, the proposal raises questions about the relationship between legal facts and social facts, and about how the legal system does or does not seek "truth." In any social change context, lawyers face the challenge of how to get judges to "see" "new" "facts." Suzanne Goldberg has written about this dynamic in an article analyzing "normative facts." Hot-tubbing would do nothing to change the fundamental struggle over re-describing reality that goes on in such litigation, but it might alter the tempo of the underlying dance.