Tag Archives: women

It’s not a young woman’s world

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Do economics and fiction mix? It’s hard to think of many successful novels of economics – I’ve posted here before about economics/business and culture and here about economists as fictional heroes.

This week I read a novel applying economic principles to a young woman’s analysis of her life. [amazon_link id=”B00B1UUGCK” target=”_blank” ]It’s Saying Goodbye to Verena: What is Your Life Worth?[/amazon_link] by Ivy Turow.

[amazon_image id=”B00B1UUGCK” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Saying Goodbye to Verena: What is Your Life Worth[/amazon_image]

The pseudonymous author’s website indicates that it’s quasi-autobiographical. The heroine is a seemingly accomplished young woman who has discovered that she’s a misfit in the world of work and concludes, using the economic analysis she’s learned at university, that she isn’t economically viable. Her rational solution is that she should end her life. The website pins the blame on corporate capitalism. “I simply don’t have sharp enough teeth to flourish in today’s corporate society. The thing is, I don’t think I’m alone in this predicament. This book is for all of those who find themselves in the same boat,” says Ivy Turow. “It shouldn’t matter who I am and what I look like. Sadly, women’s achievements are often considered less important than their appearance.”

The novel is a book of two halves. The first few chapters describe the heroine’s experiences of work, and her dawning realisation that it’s a man’s world, that diligent application to the job isn’t rewarded, and power games matter in corporate life. The author’s writing style is clunky but lively, and this part is a good read. The passion of real experience shines through. I have every sympathy with her, too. It is a man’s world, and the status and potential of women in the workplace have definitely gone backward since I started work in the 1980s – not that it was great then. What’s more, the UK is low down the international league table for women’s achievement in key positions of power such as politics and the boardroom. The more this is shouted about, the better. While the book emphasises the main character’s struggles because she’s female (at least as I read it), the website emphasises the problems affecting her generation, with a system stacked against them by the voracious baby-boomers. This issue is equally valid.

The second half of the book is less successful. It turns into a kind of Socratic dialogue in which the heroine explains ideas ranging from game theory to Foucault’s analysis of power to her patient friend over lunch. I think the claim is that the economic non-viability of women in modern capitalism can be proven analytically, but the first part of the book trying to demonstrate the point through the emotional power of a good story and sympathetic character actually does a better job of making the point. And actually, I disagree with her claim to be setting out a “proof” because this half of the book omits the sociology of patriarchal power that’s described so effectively in the first half. She could also have made a more interesting point about social norms – having shown that most people are weak and allow an unscrupulous minority to set the standards of behaviour, the interesting debate about why those norms change and whether they can be improved is missing. I would argue that they can change substantially, as attitudes to top pay shifted between the 1970s and 1980s.

Still, the book is quite a digestible way of encountering these ideas. It’s interesting – not great fiction but a passionate and welcome contribution to a debate we should be having on why career structures in particular and society more generally have become once again so heavily stacked against young women.

Turing’s Cathedral, remarkable men and even more remarkable women

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I’ve loved this book, [amazon_link id=”014101590X” target=”_blank” ]Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe[/amazon_link] by George Dyson. It’s a history of the days when computers were so new and rare that they had names – ENIAC, MANIAC, JOHNNIAC, Baby – and of the early history of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, and of bits of the career of John Von Neumann and other mathematicians and engineers. It’s the story of the days when the world had 53 kilobytes of random access memory altogether, a significant proportion of them in Princeton, New Jersey.

[amazon_image id=”014101590X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe (Penguin Press Science)[/amazon_image]

It’s also about the relationship between the Second World War, and subsequent military funding for Cold War atomic research, and digital innovation. Military needs so often drive major technological innovations. Part of the story concerns Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow, researching how to improve the trajectory of anti-aircraft fire during the war, as London was blitzed. My late mother, as she explains in this video, sat outside the gun emplacements in East London during the Blitz shouting instructions to gunners as they aimed at aircraft overhead – she could have done with the innovation a bit sooner. (It was lovely to have this excuse to watch it again and remember her on UK Mothers’ Day.)

One of the things I love about the story is the sense it gives of the atmosphere of the new research establishment and the personalities, and the way invention rests on both a collection of happenstances and a large number of individuals. Turing’s Cathedral has similarities to some other recent histories of innovation, such as Jenny Uglow’s outstanding [amazon_link id=”0571216102″ target=”_blank” ]The Lunar Men[/amazon_link].

Dyson is very good at describing the people involved, all extraordinary, from John von Neumann down. For example, a paragraph summing up Gödel’s famous incompleteness result (which I sometimes think I understand, if I concentrate hard – after all, I did read Douglas Hofstadter’s [amazon_link id=”0140289208″ target=”_blank” ]Gödel, Escher, Bach[/amazon_link] – twice) is followed by this:

“After retreating to the sanatorium at Purkersdorf, where he was diagnosed with nervous exhaustion, he returned to Princeton in September of 1935, where he fell into an even more severe depression, resigning his position and returning to Austria at the end of November. He readmitted himself to the sanatorium in Rekawinkel, and then recovered sufficiently to spend several weeks with his future wife, Adele Nimbursky (nee Porkert), a Viennese cabaret dancer.”

Whoah! Tell me more about the Viennese cabaret dancer! The IAS website tells me he had met her when he was 21, in the Vienna nightclub ‘The Moth’. It was his second relationship with an unsuitable older woman, to the annoyance of his parents.

I also like Bernetta Miller, an administrator at the IAS in its early days. She was the fifth woman to get a pilot’s licence in the US, received the Croix de Guerre in World War I for assisting the injured Allied troops and visiting the front lines to take cigarettes to the men, and then became bursar of the American School in Istanbul. After the war she settled with her partner Betty Faville, and stood between Albert Einstein and the world until fired by Robert Oppenheimer, who didn’t like her. He goes down in my estimation, I must say. Strong women – like Bernetta Miller and indeed Kathleen Coyle – not only helped win the war, but were vital to the far harder task of building post-war society.

Bernetta Miller

There’s so much more, most of it about the construction of the computers. Do, do read it. I’ve not quite finished yet, but this line from the Introduction sums up the book: “In answering the Entscheidungsproblem [David Hilbert’s ‘Decision problem’], Turing proved that there is no systematic way to tell, by looking at a code, what that code will do. That’s what makes the digital universe so interesting, and that’s what brings us here.” We don’t know where we’re going, but it helps to understand the origins.

More on women and economics

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Recently I posted (Do Women and Economics Mix?) about a new initiative to mentor young women in the world of academic economics. This week Karen Schucan-Bird wrote about her research into women in the social sciences, including economics, on the LSE Impact Blog. She found that in the ‘masculine’ social sciences including economics, women published articles relevant to the REF less than in proportion to their representation:

“Whilst women made up 24 per cent of political scientists in the UK, they only contributed 8 per cent of the articles sampled. In economics women constituted 22 per cent of academics whilst writing 13 per cent of the sampled articles.”

She adds that the gap in economics was not statistically significant, but I assume this reflects the small sample size – as [amazon_link id=”0472067443″ target=”_blank” ]Deirdre McCloskey says[/amazon_link], there’s statistical significance and real significance.

The pattern did not hold in psychology and social policy, where more than 40% of the academics are female, and around the same proportion of the papers in the sample were female-authored.

The fact that there are pronounced differences between different social sciences in this respect suggests that the explanation cannot lie in general academic structures but in features specific to economics and political science. The possible explanations for a lower proportion of women in those fields in the first place seem to be either the intellectual character of the subject, and/or the sociology of the subject and in particular peer effects and promotion channels; while the under-achievement of women in terms of publication surely is the result of the specifics of the REF for those subjects and the way the featured journals are edited? Peer review seems to me as an outsider a seriously flawed process.

Having said all this, I’ve not worked in academia and would be interested in better informed perspectives.