Blog Post

AEIdeas

2014 was a very interesting year for gender-related issues that included former White House press secretary Jay Carney struggling (squirming?) at a press conference in April to defend the 13% gender pay gap at the White House at a time when Obama was busy signing two executive orders concerning fair pay for women working for federal contractors, a perennial debate about how much gender discrimination contributes to the unadjusted 23% gender pay gap nationally, a media frenzy about an alleged campus sexual assault/rape epidemic, an op-ed about the “supposed campus epidemic of rape” by George Will that stirred up a national controversy and elicited a response from four Democratic senators and resulted in Will’s syndicated column being dropped by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and a horrific, but later discredited, report in Rolling Stone magazine about a gang rape of a female University of Virginia student by seven different men in a fraternity house while the victim was lying on shards of glass. To help summarize last year’s top gender-related stories, I present here my Top Ten Gender Charts of the Year for 2014.

1. US Rape Rate. In November of last year, the FBI released its final report on crime statistics in the United States for 2013, and the chart above shows the rate of rape in the US per 100,000 inhabitants annually from 1973 to 2013. Remarkably, despite all of the media reports about a “rape epidemic” in the US, especially on college campuses, the rape rate fell to a 40-year low in 2013 at 25.2 cases per 100,000 persons (about 1 for every 4,000 persons) — the lowest rate since 1973, and more than 40% below the peak rate of 42.8 rapes per 100,000 persons in 1992.

How much media attention did the decline in the US rape rate to a 40-year low in 2013 generate? If you answered “none,” that would almost be an overstatement. A Google search of the millions of articles and documents available on the Internet for the phrase “falling U.S. rape rate” incredibly finds not a single result. A search for the term “falling rape rate” yields only four results from all of the millions of documents available. Now try a Google search for “rising rape rate” or “rape epidemic” and you’ll get almost 5,000 and more than 100,000 results, respectively. So much for fair and balanced reporting and media coverage on the historic decline in the US rape rate to a 40-year low in 2013.

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2. Department of Justice Report on Rape/Sexual Assault of Young Females. The Department of Justice (Bureau of Justice Statistics) released a report in December titled “Rape and Sexual Assault Victimization Among College-Age Females, 1995–2013.” The report was based on the National Crime Victimization Survey of women ages 18-24 for both reported and unreported cases of rape and sexual assault. Rape and sexual assault include: a) completed and attempted rape, b) completed and attempted sexual assault, and c) threats of rape or sexual assault, so the study provides a pretty comprehensive analysis of rape and sexual assault among young women. The report includes both: a) students (enrolled in college, university, trade school, or vocational school) and b) nonstudents for the 18 to 24 age group, which allows for a comparison of “campus rape/sexual assault” and offenses that take place for that age group among nonstudents. Here are some of the report’s findings:

a. Over the 1995-2013 period, the rate of rape and sexual assault victimization was almost 25% higher for nonstudents ages 18-24 (7.6 cases per 1,000 females) compared to students enrolled in a post-secondary institution in that age group (6.1 cases per 1,000 females), see chart above. So despite all of the media attention on campus sexual assault, women enrolled in colleges and universities are actually significantly safer compared to women in that age group who are not attending a post-secondary institution.

b. Over the 1995-2013 period, the rate of rape and sexual assault victimization for both students and nonstudents has been falling (see chart). For women attending college, the rate of rape/sexual assault has fallen by more than 50% over the last several decades, from 9.2 incidents per 1,000 women in 1997 to 4.4 cases per 1,000 in 2013. According to the media, politicians and gender activists, there is supposed to be a college “rape epidemic” when in fact, the rate of college female victimization has been trending downward for almost 20 years (consistent with the decline in overall US rape rate shown above in the first chart).

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3. About 1 in 52 College Women Have Been Victims of Sexual Assault or Rape. What might be the most important statistic in the December DOJ report (and was not actually provided in the report and was not reported by the mainstream media) is that the data reveal that only about 1 in 41 women were victims of rape or sexual assault (threatened, completed and attempted; and reported and unreported) while in college for four years during the entire period investigated from 1995 to 2013, based on this analysis:

6.1 women per 1,000 = “1 in 163.9 women” per year, and over four years attending college would then be = “1 in 41 women” while in college. Because the victimization rate has been trending downward, that same analysis using data from the last four years (2010 to 2013) reveals that 1 in 52.6 women have been sexually assaulted or raped in recent years (see table above).

Those recent DOJ findings contradict the repeated claims made in the media and by the White House that “1 in 5 women has been sexually assaulted while in college,” based on the questionable results from a DOJ-funded web-based survey of 5,400 college women in 2006 at two undisclosed, large public universities. Another DOJ-funded study, quoted frequently by the White House and media, found that “on average only 12% of student victims report the assault to law enforcement.” As George Will pointed out in his controversial June op-ed (based on my analysis of Ohio State crime data, highlighted in the next item below): “Simple arithmetic demonstrates that if the 12% reporting rate is correct, the 20% assault rate is preposterous.” That is, actual campus crime statistics demonstrate that either the actual reporting rate has to be much, much lower than 12% to mathematically support the 20% assault rate, and/or the actual assault rate has to be much, much lower than 20% to mathematically support the 12% reporting rate assumption. See below for further discussion and analysis.

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4. If 12% of Campus Sexual Assaults at Ohio State Are Reported, Then the “1 in 5” Claim Can’t Possibly Be True Mathematically. As mentioned above, the two assumptions publicized extensively by the White House and the media: a) 1 in 5 women is sexually assaulted while in college and b) only 12% of college women report the assault to law enforcement, can’t both simultaneously be true and are in fact mathematically contradictory when actual college crime data on sexual assaults are analyzed.

For example, over the most recent four-year period from 2010 to 2013, there were 104 cases of “forcible sexual offenses” reported to the Ohio State University’s (OSU) Department of Public Safety, which included incidents that allegedly took place on campus, in university residence halls, on non-campus properties including fraternity and sorority houses, and on public property adjacent to or accessible from the campus. Using the White House claim that only 12% of campus sexual assaults get reported, there would have been 763 unreported forcible sexual offenses at OSU during that period, bringing the total number of sexual assaults (reported + unreported) to 867 (see table above).

The Columbus campus of OSU has a total female student population of about 28,000. Dividing the total 867 estimated sexual assaults (104 reported and 763 unreported) over the most recent four-year period into the 28,000 OSU female students would mean that only 3.1% of OSU women, or about 1 in 32.3, would be sexually assaulted while attending college. Certainly that’s still too high, but not even close to the White House claim that one in five (and 20% of) female students are sexually assaulted while in college.

From similar analyses of campus crime statistics, I showed last year that the rate of sexual assault at various major colleges was: University of Florida (1 in 79), University of Wisconsin (1 in 20), University of Texas (1 in 39), University of Michigan (1 in 18.5) and the University of California-Berkeley (1 in 32).

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5. For the “1 in 5” Claim to Be True at OSU, What Percent of Campus Sex Offenses Would Go Unreported? Continuing with OSU campus crime data, we could ask the question: For the “1 in 5 women” claim to be true, what level of under-reporting would support that claim based on the actual reported assaults over the last four years? If one of every five of OSU’s 28,000 female students had been sexually assaulted during the four years from 2010 to 2013, there would have been 5,600 sexual assaults during those four years – an average of 1,400 sexual assaults every year and almost 4 every single day of the year. For that to be true, fewer than 2% of the actual sexual assaults would have been reported, and more than 98% would have to go unreported as the analysis above shows. Further, that rate of sexual assaults on women at OSU and other colleges (5% per year) would mean that the violent crime rate on college campus is significantly worse than the most crime-ridden cities in America like Detroit, where the violent crime rate for rapes AND murder, robberies and assaults was only 2.1% in 2013!

If we’re to believe the “1-in-5″ claim, then we’d have to wonder and explain why parents continue to send their daughters in record numbers to college campuses that have a higher violent crime rate than some of the worst crime-infested neighborhoods in cities like Detroit. Most of those parents wouldn’t even drive through certain sections of Detroit during the day, but they’ll send their daughters to live on college campuses for four years with violent crime rates that are even higher than the Motor City? If you don’t believe that college campuses are more dangerous than Detroit, then you can’t believe the “1 in 5” claim.

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6. Gender Pay Gap at the White House. The White House released its annual report in early July last year with detailed salary data for the 454 employees who work on the White House staff. My analysis of the 2014 White House Staff Salaries revealed the following (summarized in the chart above):

a. The 230 female White House staffers earned a median salary of $65,650 last year.

b.The 224 male White House staffers earned a median salary of $75,750 last year.

Bottom Line: Using median 2014 White House salaries, female staffers earned 86.7% of the median salary for men last year, or 86.7 cents for every $1 men earn. That would mean that there is currently a 13.3% gender pay gap at the White House. If Obama applied his typical approach of comparing aggregate (median) salaries to detect discrimination (“Women are paid 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men.“), he would have to admit that the 13.3% gender pay gap reflects gender discrimination at the White House. Alternatively, if a 13.3% gender pay gap at the White House can be explained by factors other than discrimination, Obama, feminists, gender activists, and progressives should stop using aggregate salary statistics to lecture us about a gender pay gap crisis at the national level.

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7. Occupational Fatalities by Gender. Every year the National Committee on Pay Equity (NCPE) publicizes its “Equal Pay Day” to bring public attention to the gender pay gap. “Equal Pay Day” last year fell on April 14, and allegedly represents how far into 2014 the average woman had to continue working to earn the same income that the average man earned in 2013. Inspired by Equal Pay Day, I introduced “Equal Occupational Fatality Day” in 2010 to bring public attention to the huge gender disparity in work-related deaths every year in the US. “Equal Occupational Fatality Day” tells us how many years into the future women would be able to work before they experienced the same number of occupational fatalities that occurred in the previous year for men.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released new data last September on workplace fatalities for 2013, and I was able to then calculate a new “Equal Occupational Fatality Day.” As in previous years, the chart above shows the significant gender disparity in workplace fatalities in 2013: 4,101 men died on the job (93.1% of the total) compared to only 302 women (6.9% of the total). The “gender occupational fatality gap” in 2013 was considerable — nearly 14 men died on the job last year for every woman who died while working.

Based on the new BLS data, the next “Equal Occupational Fatality Day” will occur more than ten years from now ­­– on July 31, 2025. That date symbolizes how far into the future women will be able to continue working before they experience the same loss of life on the job that men experienced in 2013 from work-related deaths. Because women tend to work in safer occupations than men on average, they have the advantage of being able to work for more than a decade longer than men before they experience the same number of male occupational fatalities in a single year. To achieve equal pay, do women really want equal representation in the most dangerous occupations (logging, mining, farming, fishing, correctional officers, fire fighter, etc.) if that means that thousands of women will be killed or injured every year while working?

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8. 2014 SAT Math Test Scores by Gender. The College Board released 2014 SAT college-entrance test results in October and confirmed a continuing and uninterrupted trend that dates back to at least 1972 — high school boys outperformed girls on the 2014 SAT math test with an average score of 530 points compared to the average score of 499 for females, see chart above. The statistically significant 31-point male advantage last year on the SAT math test is one point lower than the 32-point difference in 2013, and just slightly below the 34 point difference over the last two decades favoring boys. In terms of percentile ranking, the average test score for male high school students (530) last year represented the 55th percentile of all students. By comparison, the average female test score (499) was slightly below the 45th percentile ranking for all students .

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9. 2014 SAT Math Test: Male-Female Ratios by Test Score. Claims have been made by economist and former Harvard University president Larry Summers and others that men have historically out-performed women at the very high end of mathematical aptitude (2-3 standard deviations above average) and the SAT math test results in 2014 confirm that claim. Male students outnumbered female students for all 2014 math SAT scores of 590 (73rd percentile) and above, and those outcomes are represented in the chart above by all of the blue bars higher than the 1.0 Male:Female ratio (red line). As SAT math scores increased by 10-point intervals from 590 to 800, the male-female ratio gradually increased, reaching a peak male-female ratio of slightly more than 2-to-1 for perfect test scores of 800. At the highest level of math performance on the SAT test last year, there were 203 males achieving perfect scores for every 100 females. Maybe that explains why men are over-represented in highly quantitative degree programs and careers like computer science, engineering, chemistry and physics?

Despite the clear and convincing statistical evidence from the math SAT test results by gender, gender activists like Professor Janet Hyde at the University of Wisconsin continue to claim that “There just aren’t gender differences anymore in math performance.” The SAT math test results for 2014 and for every year since 1972 suggest otherwise and “beg to differ,” Professor Hyde.

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10. College Classes of 2014. Women have been phenomenally successful in higher education, and have earned a majority of associate’s degrees in every year since 1972, a majority of bachelor’s degrees in every year since 1982, a majority of master’s degrees in every year since 1986 and a majority of doctor’s degrees since 2006, according to Department of Education data. For the graduating college classes of 2014, women continued to dominate highest education at all levels, and the growing college degree gap in favor of women was reflected by the fact that women earned almost 62% of associate’s degrees last year, almost 57% of bachelor’s degrees, nearly 60% of master’s degrees, and more than half of doctor’s degrees. Department of Education forecasts suggest that the college degree gap will continue to widen, see estimates above for the College Class of 2022.

Given the college degree gap that reflects the reality that women have been amazingly successful in higher education to the point that men have now become the “second sex,” wouldn’t you think that feminists and gender activists would declare victory and direct their attention to other issues? Well, that’s apparently not exactly how gender activism and the grievance/victim movement work, here’s a statement from former Chancellor Ruth Person at the University of Michigan-Flint in March 2014 that led to the creation of a new Women’s Commission:

At our campus, more than 60 percent of our employees and students are women. It would seem appropriate, given this demographic, that we begin to focus additional attention on the roles women play on and off our campus and how we might enhance future opportunities for leadership and success. The University of Michigan Flint Women’s Commission … will regularly report on the status and needs of women on campus, identify areas of strength and limitation, and provide recommendations that will sustain and enrich our ability to attract and support the most dynamic women leaders. The commission will recommend policies, practices and procedures that strengthen our ability to attract, support, and develop women students, staff and faculty.

So here’s my understanding of the twisted “logic” of feminists/gender/grievance activists: When women are a minority and are under-represented for outcomes like: college enrollment (back in 1950s, 1960s and 1970s), STEM degrees (except biology), and serving on corporate boards, resources must be mobilized to address the under-representation of women. But when women are in the majority like at UM-Flint where women out-number men earning bachelor’s degrees by a ratio of 2:1, the super-majority status of women also motivates the mobilization of resources to further strengthen the institution’s ability to “attract, support and develop women students”? Wouldn’t simple logic suggest that when 200 women earn bachelor’s degree from an institution for every 100 men that the “status and needs” of women are already being met quite successfully, and that no additional taxpayer-funded resources are needed to strengthen UM-Flint’s “ability to attract, support and develop” a group that already maintains a super-majority status?