Have you heard about the dangerous, rising cost of not going to college? In the last 30 years, the typical college tuition has tripled. But over the exact same period, the earnings gap between college-educated adults and high school graduates has also tripled. In 1979, the wage difference was 75%. In 2003, it was 230%.
Over the last three decades, the cost of going to college has increased at nearly the exact same rate as the cost not going to college. How can the price of getting something and not getting something both rise at the same time?
You want to say Hi to the cute girl on the subway. How will she react? Fortunately, I can tell you with some certainty, because she’s already sending messages to you. Looking out the window, reading a book, working on a computer, arms folded across chest, body away from you = do not disturb. So, y’know, don’t disturb her. Really. Even to say that you like her hair, shoes, or book. A compliment is not always a reason for women to smile and say thank you. You are a threat, remember? You are Schrödinger’s Rapist. Don’t assume that whatever you have to say will win her over with charm or flattery. Believe what she’s signaling, and back off.
If you speak, and she responds in a monosyllabic way without looking at you, she’s saying, “I don’t want to be rude, but please leave me alone.” You don’t know why. It could be “Please leave me alone because I am trying to memorize Beowulf.” It could be “Please leave me alone because you are a scary, scary man with breath like a water buffalo.” It could be “Please leave me alone because I am planning my assassination of a major geopolitical figure and I will have to kill you if you are able to recognize me and blow my cover.”
On the other hand, if she is turned towards you, making eye contact, and she responds in a friendly and talkative manner when you speak to her, you are getting a green light. You can continue the conversation until you start getting signals to back off.
The fourth point: If you fail to respect what women say, you label yourself a problem.
There’s a man with whom I went out on a single date—afternoon coffee, for one hour by the clock—on July 25th. In the two days after the date, he sent me about fifteen e-mails, scolding me for non-responsiveness. I e-mailed him back, saying, “Look, this is a disproportionate response to a single date. You are making me uncomfortable. Do not contact me again.” It is now October 7th. Does he still e-mail?
Yeah. He does. About every two weeks.
This man scores higher on the threat level scale than Man with the Cockroach Tattoos. (Who, after all, is guilty of nothing more than terrifying bad taste.) You see, Mr. E-mail has made it clear that he ignores what I say when he wants something from me. Now, I don’t know if he is an actual rapist, and I sincerely hope he’s not. But he is certainly Schrödinger’s Rapist, and this particular Schrödinger’s Rapist has a probability ratio greater than one in sixty. Because a man who ignores a woman’s NO in a non-sexual setting is more likely to ignore NO in a sexual setting, as well.
So if you speak to a woman who is otherwise occupied, you’re sending a subtle message. It is that your desire to interact trumps her right to be left alone. If you pursue a conversation when she’s tried to cut it off, you send a message. It is that your desire to speak trumps her right to be left alone. And each of those messages indicates that you believe your desires are a legitimate reason to override her rights.
For women, who are watching you very closely to determine how much of a threat you are, this is an important piece of data.
How much is it worth when you “favorite” a tweet or “like” a comment on Facebook? What does it mean to you when someone does it to something you’ve posted?
Dustin Senos wrote an excellent post on the how he believes “our online personas inhabit worlds of false value.” But is that value really false?
I don’t think they make a whit’s worth of difference. Millions more people will see the ad than will ever see the political fact check.
Rick Tyler, senior adviser to Winning Our Future, a Super PAC that backs Newt Gingrich, on the role (or lack thereof) political fact checking organizations such as FactCheck.org, PolitiFact.com and others have on adding truth to political discourse.
“Truth does not win over lies just because it’s truth,” adds Craig Silverman, who writes the Poynter Institute’s media accuracy blog Regret the Error.
And just to keep things depressing: “What political admakers also know — and rely on — is that repetition of a claim increases people’s belief in it.”
1. Go through your piece and flip the gender of your descriptive phrases’ subjects. Are there any that sound ludicrous as a result?
Descriptions of musicians looks are just the tip of the iceberg here. Let’s play a game: Could you imagine the following phrase being written, never mind getting through an editor and being published in a major newspaper:
Without straying too far off the indie grid, he’s the perfect antidote to Bon Iver-Radiohead overload—dare we say, a skinnier Damian Abraham, a more stable Kurt Cobain?
The Facebook activity may be a little misleading. Perhaps people are commenting more because they believe a) a story has been posted to a national audience (since it’s come through their feed via NPR not KPLU) and b) that they have valuable insight to add to a national topic because they’re from the city being mentioned.
In other words, I wonder if the activity would have produced the same results if those people knew they were getting a regionally-filtered feed.
Andy Carvin on how NPR uses Facebook. “We use the lens: Will our friends want to talk about this?” Via: This article on how NPR is experimenting with member station content on Facebook.
Interesting Komen comparison: JC Penney (via @msmagazine). Both are classic brands with a considerable base but one will never get my money again and the other has me trying to figure out what I want to purchase from it (dress socks? a hand mixer?) for the first time since they had the Talkboy in their Christmas catalog.
“Leaving out any direct issues of morality or politics (I know, I know, go with me for a minute here), what’s basically happened is that on account of $700,000 worth of grants, the Susan G. Komen Foundation in just one week wrecked a billion-dollar brand identity that took decades to develop. Solely from the point of view of policy and brand strategy, it’s impressive in an entirely horrifying way.”
A short but heavy-hitting 2010 TED talk from Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg above and some good commentary I stumbled upon while looking up some of her points below.
I’m sharing the entirety of Rachel’s post on Sheryl Sandberg’s talk about success and women professionals (see below). Many people have already seen this talk, but if not, stop reading here and take fifteen minutes to watch this video. Women and men. Especially men. A couple of my own notes:
1. On her point that women systematically underestimate their own abilities. Anecdotally, I and my professionally diverse (medicine, finance, marketing, real estate, consulting, journalism, law) group of girlfriends notice this time and again among ourselves and the other women we work with. Another post on this sometime…this tendency is, I think, is one of the big reasons that female entrepreneurs have a harder time getting funding.
2. Success vs. Likability = positively correlated for men but negatively correlated for women. As a professional woman, you hear this so often that you start tuning it out; or worse, thinking, well, maybe it’s true about her—it’s not like there are no unpleasant women in the world, and maybe that particularly successful woman deserves her pushy or political reputation—but I’m different. I was astounded that I had never heard of the Heidi/Howard Roizen study that Sandberg mentions and Rachel expands below. Even more shocking—I graduated from Columbia Business School, the very place the study was conducted! A travesty that it is not required core material there and at all business schools.
Anyway. Watch the video.
And Rachel, you’re fighting the good (if sometimes unpopular) fight.
Sheryl Sandberg’s TEDWomen talk. It’s excellent and inspiring, of course - I am far behind in posting it - but it is also very saddening. Two anecdotes stuck out: (1) The time she went to a tony private equity firm and they couldn’t direct her to the ladies room, because they didn’t know where it was, because they had not hosted any ladies to so direct; (2) Her account of the case of Heidi vs. Howard. It is important, so I’ve pulled an account here, taken from Stanford’s GSB site, and an address by Prof. Joanne Martin on the subject of gender-related material as critical to the core business school curriculum. Here it is below:
“Last fall I taught three sections of the OB core. We first introduced the topic of gender stereotypes in our second class session, particularly how these stereotypes can impact subjective performance appraisals and promotions. To provide fodder for our discussion, I presented students with the results from Rouse and Goldin’s symphony study published in AER (American Economic Review) (in which women (musicians) who auditioned “behind the curtain” were 50 percent more likely to get picked). I taught three cases in the core, only one of which focuses on a single protagonist. That case involved a female entrepreneur/venture capitalist named Heidi Roizen. In addition to discussing this case in class, I invited Heidi to visit the class (she spoke to all six sections). During her visit, Heidi commented extensively on the difficulties of being a woman in Silicon Valley.
To support this discussion, I presented to students the results from a study I did a couple years ago involving the Heidi Roizen case. Specifically, with Harvard’s permission, I changed the original materials so that one section of the class received a version of the case called “Howard” Roizen (same case, just different pronouns) and the other section received the original case. Before class, I had the students go online and rate their impressions of “Roizen” on several dimensions. As you might expect, the results show that students were much harsher on Heidi than on Howard across the board. Although they think she’s just as competent and effective as Howard, they don’t like her, they wouldn’t hire her, and they wouldn’t want to work with her. As gender researchers would predict, this seems to be driven by how much they disliked Heidi’s aggressive personality. The more assertive they thought Heidi was, the more harshly they judged her (but the same was not true for those who rated Howard).”
As a woman who has been told more than once to watch her tone (in the course of setting out a professional agenda), I feel this. And it feels lousy. I was expected to feel uplifted and energized by Sandberg’s talk but this left me with a feeling of weariness. But if you’ve gotta push a rock uphill, you won’t get very far sagging in defeat at the bottom. So, onward.
Actually, pushing feels sorta good. Nice in the triceps, and I can feel it in my glutes. The good news is, despite the challenges, onward and upward ultimately leaves you feeling great.
Harvard’s Healthy Eating Plate exposes some interesting deficiencies in the USDA’s MyPlate: “whole grains” vs. “grains,” “healthy proteins” vs. any “protein,” drinking water instead of dairy, thinking about the benefits of healthy oils and activity.
If you didn’t think the government’s large agricultural alliances affected food policies on even a basic level, this should give you some pause. Guidelines like these act as the foundation for programs like the National School Lunch Program.
![The Rising Cost of Going (and Not Going) to College -
theatlantic:
The Paradox of College: The Rising Cost of Going (and Not Going!) to School
Have you heard about the dangerous, rising cost of not going to college? In the last 30 years, the typical college tuition has tripled. But over the exact same period, the earnings gap between college-educated adults and high school graduates has also tripled. In 1979, the wage difference was 75%. In 2003, it was 230%. Over the last three decades, the cost of going to college has increased at nearly the exact same rate as the cost not going to college. How can the price of getting something and not getting something both rise at the same time? That is the paradox of college costs.
Read more. [Image: Reuters]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2qw3m2XBt1qcokc4o1_400.jpg)
