Albanian immigration to Italy

From the New York Times:

In the Italian popular imagination, Albanian immigrants are more often depicted as scofflaws than as upstanding members of society. Anti-immigrant sentiment runs high, and many Italians blame foreigners for what they say is a rise in crime. In recent months, there have been several highly publicized cases of violence against other immigrant groups.

But amid the turmoil, families like the Murrizis are quietly integrating into middle-class life in ways that Italy is only beginning to acknowledge. Like new shoots grafted onto an old vine, they are fast becoming an essential part of the country’s most valued traditions, including winemaking.

The Murrizis work full time for the Salcheto winery, based in nearby Montepulciano, planting in spring, pruning in summer, picking in fall and preparing the vines in winter.

They are the new face of Italy, and Italy is slowly recognizing them.

“At first we didn’t realize they have different needs,” said Salcheto’s owner, Michele Manelli, 33, who has gone out of his way to help the Murrizis navigate the Italian bureaucracy. “When we’d have dinner at the end of the harvest, we’d have a normal menu. But little by little we understood: no pig, no wild boar.”

Individual vs. group rights: virginity testing in South Africa

From the Washington Post:

"They must leave culture aside," Ngobese said. "Human rights are individual rights, which is not the way for us. We live communally."

NYT: Saudi women inspired by Oprah

From the article:

When “The Oprah Winfrey Show” was first broadcast in Saudi Arabia in November 2004 on a Dubai-based satellite channel, it became an immediate sensation among young Saudi women. Within months, it had become the highest-rated English-language program among women 25 and younger, an age group that makes up about a third of Saudi Arabia’s population.

In a country where the sexes are rigorously separated, where topics like sex and race are rarely discussed openly and where a strict code of public morality is enforced by religious police called hai’a, Ms. Winfrey provides many young Saudi women with new ways of thinking about the way local taboos affect their lives — as well as about a variety of issues including childhood sexual abuse and coping with marital strife — without striking them, or Saudi Arabia’s ruling authorities, as subversive.

Some women here say Ms. Winfrey’s assurances to her viewers — that no matter how restricted or even abusive their circumstances may be, they can take control in small ways and create lives of value — help them find meaning in their cramped, veiled existence.

“Oprah dresses conservatively,” explained Princess Reema bint Bandar al-Saud, a co-owner of a women’s spa in Riyadh called Yibreen and a daughter of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to the United States. “She struggles with her weight. She overcame depression. She rose from poverty and from abuse. On all these levels she appeals to a Saudi woman. People really idolize her here.”

Jamais trois sans quatre... (?)

I know I've been posting about this for the past three days, but I just can't get enough! Gender, anthropology and cross-cultural studies, all at once? Love it!

In addition to the article I keep linking to, John Tierney has a post up on his blog (the Tierney Lab Blog) on the topic. The post itself is essentially a paraphrasing of the "Findings" article, but the comments are pretty interesting. The vast majority are insightful and on-point, but the few truly dumb/insane ones are worth quoting:

So, does all this mean that if you answer the door and there’s a woman on the stoop dressed as a police officer with baton and cuffs in hand and a holstered pistol strapped to her waist you can still ask her for a date?

— John Brady

My… There are a lot of angry women out there stuck on all the ways life is unfair… I only wonder when a men’s movement will form to protest the injustices of education and preferential hiring and scholarship for women?

While this research may not be perfect, and like all research may leave more left unanswered than of seems to answer, I’m left feeling glad that despite the efforts of social engineering and feminism men and women are still maintaining some of their unique and special characteristics… maybe even emphasizing them! Could it possibly be that women’ salaries aren’t lower because of the evils of men, but because they took their positions for some other reason than money? Why should women get to be described with all the positive adjectives and get the same salaries as the aggressive and competitive males their forced to tolerate?

Women are women and men are men, for better or worse. As interesting as it is to explore and as enticing as it may be to change, we’re in the process of killing our planet and all the other beautiful forms of life on it… Can we turn our attention to that now?

— carver

What difference does it make? We’re all doomed. Have a nice day.

— Jagdish Collins

Possibly my favorite comment on ANY NYT blog, EVER :)

More on negative correlation between gender equality and gender sameness

Come to think of it, if this stuff about gender differences becoming more pronounced as society becomes more egalitarian is true, that ought to shut up those geezers who are still claiming that women's lib is turning us into men. If anything, it's turning us into girly-girls.

Anyway, I just wanted to link to a few articles I've found on this topic:

Why Can’t a Man Be More Like a Woman? Sex Differences in Big Five Personality Traits Across 55 Cultures

Previous research suggested that sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities equal with those of men. In this article, the authors report cross-cultural findings in which this unintuitive result was replicated across samples from
55 nations (N
17,637). On responses to the Big Five Inventory, women reported higher levels of neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness than did men across most nations. These findings converge with previous studies in which different Big Five measures and more limited samples of nations were used. Overall, higher levels of human development—including long and healthy life, equal access to knowledge and education, and economic wealth—were the main nation-level predictors of larger sex differences in personality. Changes in men’s personality traits appeared to be the primary cause of sex difference variation across cultures. It is proposed that heightened levels of sexual dimorphism result from personality traits of men and women being less constrained and more able to naturally diverge in developed nations. In less fortunate social and economic conditions, innate personality differences between men and women may be attenuated.

Gender Differences in Personality Traits Across Cultures: Robust and Surprising Findings

Secondary analyses of Revised NEO Personality Inventory data from 26 cultures (N = 23,031) suggest that gender differences are small relative to individual variation within genders; differences are replicated across cultures for both college-age and adult samples, and differences are broadly consistent with gender stereotypes: Women reported themselves to be higher in Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Warmth, and Openness to Feelings, whereas men were higher in Assertiveness and Openness to Ideas. Contrary to predictions from evolutionary theory, the magnitude of gender differences varied across cultures. Contrary to predictions from the social role model, gender differences were most pronounced in European and American cultures in which traditional sex roles are minimized. Possible explanations for this surprising finding are discussed, including the attribution of masculine and feminine behaviors to roles rather than traits in traditional cultures.

A Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Behavior of Women and Men: Implications for the Origins of Sex Differences

This article evaluates theories of the origins of sex differences in human behavior. It reviews the cross-cultural evidence on the behavior of women and men in nonindustrial societies, especially the activities that contribute to the sex-typed division of labor and patriarchy. To explain the cross-cultural findings, the authors consider social constructionism, evolutionary psychology, and their own biosocial
theory. Supporting the biosocial analysis, sex differences derive from the interaction between the physical specialization of the sexes, especially female reproductive capacity, and the economic and social structural aspects of societies. This biosocial approach treats the psychological attributes of women and men as emergent given the evolved characteristics of the sexes, their developmental experiences, and
their situated activity in society.

Run, Forrest, run! Forrestina, not so much

As a follow-up to yesterday's post, another interesting finding from the same NYT article:

Competitive running makes a good case study because, to mix athletic metaphors, it has offered a level playing field to women the past two decades in the United States. Similar numbers of males and females run on high school and college teams and in road races. Female runners have been competing for equal shares of prize money and receiving nearly 50 percent more scholarship aid from Division I colleges than their male counterparts, according to the N.C.A.A.

But these social changes have not shrunk a gender gap among runners analyzed by Robert Deaner, a psychologist at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, who classifies runners as relatively fast if they keep close to the pace of the world’s best runners of their own sex. When Dr. Deaner looks at, say, the top 40 finishers of each sex in a race, he typically finds two to four times as many relatively fast male runners as relatively fast female runners.

This large gender gap has persisted for two decades in all kinds of races — high school and college meets, elite and nonelite road races — and it jibes with other studies reporting that male runners train harder and are more motivated by competition, Dr. Deaner says. This enduring “sex difference in competitiveness,” he concludes, “must be considered a genuine failure for the sociocultural conditions hypothesis” that the personality gap will shrink as new roles open for women.

Makes me feel better about my complete lack of interest in competitive sports. Sort of. (PS, apologies for the ridiculous title).

NYT: As Barriers Disappear, Some Gender Gaps Widen

In the NYT's Science section on Monday,

When men and women take personality tests, some of the old Mars-Venus stereotypes keep reappearing. On average, women are more cooperative, nurturing, cautious and emotionally responsive. Men tend to be more competitive, assertive, reckless and emotionally flat. Clear differences appear in early childhood and never disappear.
....
For evolutionary psychologists, the bad news is that the size of the gender gap in personality varies among cultures. For social-role psychologists, the bad news is that the variation is going in the wrong direction. It looks as if personality differences between men and women are smaller in traditional cultures like India’s or Zimbabwe’s than in the Netherlands or the United States. A husband and a stay-at-home wife in a patriarchal Botswanan clan seem to be more alike than a working couple in Denmark or France. The more Venus and Mars have equal rights and similar jobs, the more their personalities seem to diverge.
...
These findings are so counterintuitive that some researchers have argued they must be because of cross-cultural problems with the personality tests. But after crunching new data from 40,000 men and women on six continents, David P. Schmitt and his colleagues conclude that the trends are real. Dr. Schmitt, a psychologist at Bradley University in Illinois and the director of the International Sexuality Description Project, suggests that as wealthy modern societies level external barriers between women and men, some ancient internal differences are being revived.

The biggest changes recorded by the researchers involve the personalities of men, not women. Men in traditional agricultural societies and poorer countries seem more cautious and anxious, less assertive and less competitive than men in the most progressive and rich countries of Europe and North America.

To explain these differences, Dr. Schmitt and his collaborators from Austria and Estonia point to the hardships of life in poorer countries. They note that in some other species, environmental stress tends to disproportionately affect the larger sex and mute costly secondary sexual characteristics (like male birds’ displays of plumage). And, they say, there are examples of stress muting biological sex differences in humans. For instance, the average disparity in height between men and women isn’t as pronounced in poor countries as it is in rich countries, because boys’ growth is disproportionately stunted by stresses like malnutrition and disease.

I remember reading somewhere that gender-specific dysmorphic disorders such as anorexia and the Adonysis complex (ie body building syndrome) tend to be more common in relatively egalitarian societies and groups. Otherwise put, the more men and women are socially equal, the more they try to differentiate each other physically by accentuating their secondary sexual characteristics. I wonder how that all ties in...