Women's Learning Partnership leadership manual

And another one...

New Field Foundation would like to share this leadership manual from Women's Learning Partnership with you. The manual can be downloaded for free from their website here:

Leading to Choices, developed by the Women's Learning Partnership for Rights, Development, and Peace (WLP) in collaboration with its partner organizations in the Global South, is based on a conceptualization of leadership as horizontal, inclusive, and participatory. WLP views leadership as a process that leads to greater choices for all by fostering communication among individuals who learn from each other, create a shared vision, and reach a common goal forged by consensus. The alternative leadership model presented in the handbook responds to the need for leaders who aspire to create egalitarian, democratic, and pluralistic societies based on collaborative decision-making, coalition-building, and gender equality.

A digital library of resources regarding gender is available for free download in pdf or Word format.

Got this email today:

New Field Foundation would like to share the BRIDGE website with you. BRIDGE supports gender advocacy and mainstreaming efforts by bridging the gaps between theory, policy and practice with accessible and diverse gender information in print and online:

NY TImes: Census Data Suggest Asians in U.S. Prefer Having Male Babies

The trend is buried deep in United States census data: seemingly minute deviations in the proportion of boys and girls born to Americans of Chinese, Indian and Korean descent.

In those families, if the first child was a girl, it was more likely that a second child would be a boy, according to recent studies of census data. If the first two children were girls, it was even more likely that a third child would be male.

Demographers say the statistical deviation among Asian-American families is significant, and they believe it reflects not only a preference for male children, but a growing tendency for these families to embrace sex-selection techniques, like in vitro fertilization and sperm sorting, or abortion.

New immigrants typically transplant some of their customs and culture to the United States — from tastes in food and child-rearing practices to their emphasis on education or economic advancement and the elevated social and economic status of males. The appeal to immigrants by clinics specializing in sex selection caused some controversy a decade ago.

Read whole article...

Nobel Peace Prize to Mohamed Yunus

Yunus is founder and chief executive of Grameen Bank, a microfinance entity that has singlehandedly transformed the landscape of thought and practice about how women can be empowered to improve their lives and the lives of their children, and, of yes, the lives of their reluctant husbands... ;-)

See the Nobel press release.

Intrahousehold economics

I just found a very nice introductory paper on bargaining by Abhinay Mutoo, a little technical, but motivates things well. Worth a read.

I told you there was a rabbit in the house...

Enjoy the weekend and see you Monday, ready to discuss intrahousehold issue sand more on marriage.

Dowries in Bangladesh

On the Heterogeneity of Dowry Motives
Raj Arunachalamy and Trevon D. Loganz

Dowries have been modeled as pre-mortem bequests to daughters or as groom-
prices paid to in-laws. These two classes of models yield mutually exclusive
predictions, but empirical tests of these predictions have been mixed. We draw
from historical evidence that suggests a bifurcated marriage market, in which
some households use dowries as a bequest and others use dowries as a price.
The competing theories of dowry allow us to structure an exogenous switching
regression that places households in the price or bequest regime. The empirical
strategy allows for multiple checks on the validity of regime assignment. Using
retrospective marriage data from rural Bangladesh, we nd evidence of het-
erogeneity in dowry motives; that bequest dowries have declined in prevalence
and amount over time; and that bequest households are better o compared to
price households on a variety of welfare measures.

The full paper is here.

"Keep Her Under Control" video

Use the comments section here to comment on the video "Keep Her Under Control". Your comments should be about the specifics of the video, and not about your ethical reactions to the video (those are interesting, but this is not an ethics course).

For example, here is a comment from previous course"

I would just like to say that this video was not about our culture. I do not think that it is fair to other cultures to hold them to our standards. Although I understand where the outrage over this situation stems from, I also am sympathetic towards those people who live this way of life. Who are we to set and enforce our way of life on people across the world?

Again, this course is not a course in ethics, so the questions raised by the commentator, while interesting, are not germane. I do not care very much whether you are outraged or indifferent, I care whether you have watched the video closely enough to understand the nature of the nuanced gender structures in the village. One last thing: the video is of one village in India, so it it most emphatically NOT about something you might want to call "Indian culture". That would be like saying that the all-Goth party you attended over the weekend was "American culture"....

Regression and table hints

1- When it is a table of percentages, nicer to display the percentables as decimals, and indicate in the title or heading that is percent, rather than reproduce % sign for each number. Remember that 43% = .43

2- Be careful with "affect" and "effect". In economics "effect" is used as a noun ("The effect was large." and "affect" is a verb ("The explanatory variable did not affect the outcome.")

3- Whne using dummy variables and interactions with dummy variables, you have to include in the regression both the dummy alone and the interaction; you can;t just include the interaction term and omit the dummy. i.e. time = oxen + bwa + bwa*oxen, and not time = oxen + oxen*bwa.

4- Generally in tables you do not need column or row totals. They clutter and distract!

5- Regression results that are not significant are not "unfortunate"... they just are what they are. (So don't write a sentence like, "Unfortunately, the coefficienct was not statistically significant.")

6- When discussing regression results always use the same, or very similar, formula: "The estimated coefficient was 2.75, which means that a one unit change in xxx would cause a 2.75 change in yyy, and it was statistically significant. This effect (not affect!) is quite large/small."

7- In most economics studies, an R-square of .14 is perfectly reasonable, for example. There is a lot of idiosyncratic variation across individuals and households and nations. There is no "cutoff" R-square.

8- The intercept in a regression is not the average! Draw a scatterplot of the data as we have done in class, then draw a regression line- you will easily see that the intercept cannot be the average of anything.

9- When you are doing crosstabs, it is good practice to do some t-tests in Excel. it will get you in the habit of always checking to see if two means are statistically different. Remember you can only do the t-test when comparing two groups. For other types of comparisons you use ANOVA or more complex tests that you can learn from stats courses.

10- In a regression analysis you cannot include categorical data (generally) as a variable. You have to convert to dummy variables. I.e. Ethnicity= 1 for Mossi, 2 for Bwa, 3 for Djula. Including ethnicity is meaningless- what does it mean to increase your ethnicity by 1 unit? So you have to convert to dummies- 3 dummies, of which you only include 2 (you always exclude one dummy category.)

Assignment 6

Does rapid growth seem to have been correlated with marriage patterns? What about your other variable?

In step three you would have one table with 5 columns (each column reporting the output of the regressions)

In this last part you would three tables- each table with 5 columns. So you are running 15 regressions. The first table has just the gdp growth and the regional dummies. The second table has just the other variable and the regional dummies. The third table has both variables and regional dummies.

Marriage Laws and Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa

Marriage Laws and Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa
Todd Schoellman and Michele Tertilt

Many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa are highly polygynous. The percentage of married men in polygynous unions ranges from 10.2 in Malawi to 55.6 in Cameroon. Polygynous countries are poorer than similar non-polygynous countries, and are characterized by higher fertility, higher spousal age gaps, and lower savings rates (Tertilt 2005).

The economics of polygyny was pioneered by Becker (1974), Grossbard (1978), and Bergstrom (1994). Recently, a small literature has emerged analyzing the link between marriage institutions and economic outcomes (Jacoby (1995), Edlund (1999), Edlund and
Lagerloef (2004), Lagerloef (2005), and Gould, Moav and Simhon (2004)). Tertilt (2005) argues that polygyny might be contributing to underdevelopment in SSA: Polygyny raises demand for wives, which increases the equilibrium bride-price. While men make payments to obtain brides, they are also the recipients of these payments when they sell their daughters. Women thus function as a good investment opportunity. This scheme can crowd out investment in physical assets, lowering the aggregate capital stock. Moreover, the incentives to have children are high. Together, a low capital stock and high fertility lead to low GDP per capita. Based on a calibrated model, Tertilt (2005) argues that enforcing a ban on polygyny might decrease fertility by 40 percent, increase the savings rate by 70 percent, and increase output per capita by 170 percent. If enforcing monogamy raises output, then an obvious questions is: should countries in Sub-Saharan Africa be encouraged to give up their traditions and adopt a law that prescribes monogamy? The United Nations (UN), for example, has been pursuing such a policy. In this paper we analyze the transitional dynamics following a marriage reform. We study how rapidly the economy converges to the new, higher-savings steady state.

We also identify the winners and losers along the transition path. The results may shed some light on recent experiences in countries like Gambia, Togo, and the Ivory Coast that have made polygyny illegal but have found enforcement to be difficult (Tertilt 2006). While some of the resistance may be due to cultural factors, we argue that there are also economic forces that work against moving to a monogamous society. While output might increase in the long run, we find that initial generations of men are clear losers from the marriage reform. Some of the women alive during the reform period benefit from the change in marriage laws; however, their gain is not large enough to compensate the men. Hence, it is di±cult to argue that enforcing monogamy is unambiguously beneficial.

Collusion conundrums...

Nick asked at the end of class the other day about the Nash equilibrium in the collusion game. the idea is that in the collusion game the men are deciding whether to continue colluding to not hire each other's wives, and thus be able to extract monopoly rents from the wife (her husband becomes her only employer, a monopsonist). Each man can, however, cheat on the agreement and hire some of the other wives at the low wage and thus make a temporary profit. if, however, the strategy of the men is to "collude until someone cheats, and then cheat thereafter", once one man cheats, all the others will cheat.

In the collusive game as presented, the payoffs are identical. And, time is not continuous. Time happens in discrete periods, and if you cheat on your mates in one period, and they don't (play is simultaneous) then you get the benefit and they are the suckers. So you evaluate the benefit of cheating compared with continuing to collude. Of course, everyone else is making the same evaluation.

So here is Nick's question. if your discount rate of the future is such that you decide it is worthwhile to cheat, then it must be the case that everyone else has the same calculus, and so everyone will cheat simultaneously. So, Nick suggest, you get no benefit from cheating when you cheat because everyone else will do the same thing. So the condition for colluding is that the discounted stream of profits from colluding be greater than the discounted stream from the competitive equilibrium (which it is by assumption). But... can this really be the Nash equilibrium condition for sustaining collusion? It is an easier condition to have hold that the one we have, where the discounted stream of profits from colluding has to be greater than the one period return from cheating plus the future discounted return of the competitive equilibrium. Suppose that we were in an equilibrium where everyone was colluding, and everyone continued to collude because they though the condition for colluding was this easier condition. but now one person would come along and say:, "Everyone else is going to be a sucker; they think collusion is going to continue, so they will play collude, but I'll cheat and get the one period profits." So that cannot be a Nash equilibrium strategy for he players.

The Folk Theorem says that this repeated game setup of a collusive possibility repeated infinite amount of tie has many different Nash equilibria, involving complex strategies that depend on the history of play. The strategy we looked at is sometimes called the "grim trigger strategy" since when it is played if someone cheats everyone loses forever. A different less grim strategy might be to say that if someone cheats you will cheat for 10 periods after, or until you see them collude, and then you collude thereafter.

One can go a step further and ask, in Nick's question was suggested a problem with the idea of the men being identical- didn't that mean they all had the same thoughts and each knew the other had the same thoughts? But this last part is not quite the idea of game theory, where each actor is independent. While the payoffs may be identical, and the valuation of those payoffs identical also, nobody can exert any kind of "mind control" that "makes" the other person decide the way you want them to. Moreover, in game theory, it is typically assumed that you cannot exercise that mind control over yourself! That is, you cannot commit your future self to behave in a way that your present self would like your future self to behave ("Ill eat the ice cream today because I'll make my future self go to the gym, when tomorrow arrives.")

Nice introduction ot nash equilibrium concept from game theory

A lecture from Yale University.

Reading about the Mossi, why not listen to some music

Some econometrics stuff if you are interested

Colonial Origins of Comparative Development

The econometric technique of instrumental variables is very important in empirical studies, especially in gender economics where social scientists try to determine the relationship between gender equality and subsequent GDP levels and growth. A great paper to start thinking about instrumental variables is James Robinson, Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson's paper on the colonial origins of comparative development. They use settler mortality as an instrument for current institutions of governance (measured by, for example, the risk of expropriation) in order to estimate the effect of good governance on economic growth. The paper has spawned a large literature and commentary, including much critical re-examination of the data. But that is a good thing!

The paper is also interesting as a key component in a long-running debate over the relative importance of economic and political institutions versus natural resources, geography and environment as key detemrinants of economic growth. here's a recent article on the importance of malaria, for example.

A nice introductory Powerpoint lecture on the estimation methods of "difference in difference" and instrumental variables is available from MIT.

Interaction terms

Someone comments, "I'm a little confused on how we use interaction variables for our regression. For instance, if our interaction variable is oxen * ethnicity, how do we interpret the numbers this gives us (since the value attached to ethnicity, 1,2 or 3, is just an arbitrary number used for organizational purposes)? Or something like birth group * married?"

You are right- if you leave ethnicity with multiple categories there is no possible interpretation (even without interacting)! it doesn;t mean anything to be ethnicity 2 and go to ethnicity 3, or to go from ethnicity 500 to 560.

So the ethnicity variable has to be recoded to be a dummy variable- 1=bwa, 0= non-bwa, for example. Then this dummy variable can be interacted (i.e. multipled) by the oxen, to create bwa*oxen.

Then if the regression were y = a + b*bwa + c*oxen + d*oxen*bwa,

the effect of more oxen on outcome y would be
c - for non bwa
c+ d - for bwa households

in other words, the slope differs for the two different groups.

Great example of nash equilibrium

Ezra Klein : [Russell] Shorto... [thinks that in] the Netherlands.... [T]here's "a cultural tendency not to stand out or excel...the very antithesis of the American ideal of upward mobility." But... Americans are in the odd position of fervently believing in upward mobility while not actually having very much of it. Eruopeans, conversely, don't really believe in economic mobility but have plenty of it.... Brookings... examined the relative mobility in other Nordic countries. And the United States doesn't come out that well.... The United States believes itself to be uncommonly meritocratic. But compared to European countries who don't believe themselves very meritocratic, it actually exhibits less income mobility....

If you believe that your country is extremely mobile, you're likely to believe the results of the economic competition are relatively fair. As such, you won't want to slap the rich with particularly high tax rates and you won't be terribly concerned about spreading economic opportunity. After all, anyone can make it! On the other hand, if you don't believe your country is terribly mobile, then you're less likely to believe economic outcomes are fair. And if you don't believe the outcomes are fair, you're likely to tax the winners relatively heavily and plow those profits into things like universal health care and free college. Policies, in other words, that spread opportunity more widely and thus make your society more mobile. Put like that, it sort of makes sense. If you believe your society is already economically mobile, you don't spend a lot of time trying to solve the problem of insufficient economic mobility. if you don't believe that, then you implement policies meant to increase mobility. What's odd is that the public perceptions in Europe and America don't seem to be changing much in response to actual outcomes.

African AIDS widows left without inheritance

An article from Afrol News...

afrol News, 8 March - Due to customary laws, thousands of AIDS widows throughout Africa are denied an inheritance, which leaves them homeless and destitute. Today, on Women's Day, a coalition of women's groups urges the African Commission on Human Rights to urgently address the growing problem.

- On International Women's Day, we call upon the Commission to focus on an important issue that is constantly overlooked, says Birte Scholz, from the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE). This issue, Ms Scholz says, is "the denial of inheritance to thousands of widows throughout Africa, which leaves them homeless, destitute, violates their human rights and adds to the spread of HIV/AIDS in the region."

The women's group coalition, in which COHRE participates, today is urging the African Commission on Human Rights to urgently review customary laws in several African countries "that deny women from inheriting property, endanger their socio-economic security and thereby contributes to the spread of AIDS.

Question on regression

Hi Professor,
On the made up regression study page, how would you interpret the coefficients of the table explaining sex ratios in China? Also why would you take the natural log or square an independent variable in a regression analysis?
A Student

Either ln or sq. would be ways to turn what is a non-linear relationship into something that can be estimated as a linear relationship. So a parabola can be expressed as

y = a + bx + cx^2 for example.

Explaining sex ratios in China- the coefficient estimated for "distance to town" says that the farther from town the higher the male-female ratio (i.e. more men relative to women in the countryside). The Pop ethnic Chines says that Ethnic Chinese have higher ratio of men to women compared with non-Chinese ethnic groups.

Does that help?

Michael Ross and women's status in Middle East

Use this posting to start commenting on the reading by Michael Ross. Try to stick to his methods and arguments, and not your own pet theory, except insofar as you bring to bear evidence related to that presented by Ross.

Stephan Klasen is professor of development economics and ...

Stephan Klasen is professor of development economics and empirical economic research at the University of Göttingen, where he also heads the Ibero-American Institute. Previously he was professor of economics at the University of Munich as well as a fellow at King's College in Cambridge and an economist at the World Bank in South Africa. His research interests are in population, labor, welfare, and development economics. He holds a BA, MA, and Ph.D. from Harvard University. His current research interests include an assessment of the relation between labor market events and demographic decisions at the household level, an analysis of the determinants of undernutrition and child mortality in developing countries, the linkages between inequality, growth, and well-being, and the causes and consequences of gender inequality in developing countries.

His papers are available here.

More readings on CEDAW

Readings on ratification of CEDAW and women's rights in a cross-country perspective:

Wotipka and Ramirez: Event History Analysis of Ratification of CEDAW

Sweeney: Government Respect for Women's Economic Rights

Gray, Kittilson and Sandholtz: Globalization and the Status of Women

Why/when did women get right to vote in U.S. States...

Regression analysis results, in the New York Times...

Minority Rules: Sex Ratios and Suffrage
By Catherine Rampell

The Empire State was the home of the Seneca Falls Convention. Yet New Yorkers lagged far behind residents of Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana and Nevada in actually granting women the full right to vote. As did all of New York’s fellow time-zone occupants.

So why did Western states and territories extend suffrage to women much earlier than their Eastern counterparts did? The answer, two economists say, might have something to do with sex ratios.

The fact that population proportions played a role probably isn’t surprising. One would expect states with a higher percentage of women to be more likely to enfranchise their female residents than states with a lower percentage of women. After all, there is power in numbers. Just ask Lysistrata.

But actually, the reverse was true. The jurisdictions that granted women the right to vote earlier generally had lower concentrations of women, a new study finds. (Some other factors that correlated with earlier adoption of women’s suffrage were: higher female employment levels; the share of Mormons in a jurisdiction; lower percentage of nonwhites; lower percentage of Irish-born Americans; and a smaller manufacturing sector.)

Read more...
Hat tip: Eric Ni

CEDAW is coming up

And there is an amazing set of postings on the topic at Opinio Juris, the top-notch law blog. you have to deovte 2-3 hours of reading to capture the full nuance. Read the postings here (start at the bottom, not with the most recent).

Creating tables

Often in gender economics we want to create complex three-way tables. Excel's Pivottable feature is a nice way to do that with data. A good place for help on how to create a complex table is available through Microsoft.

What does a three way crosstab look like? An example is to the right. Notice that there are three categories making up rows and columns. Cat 1: colums are prior or post
Cat2: row - which jurisdiction - Achorage, Bethel
Cat 3: row - what status of inmate- graduated, active

What does the table say? Mean days incarcerated lower if graduated from program. Higher if dropped out. Does this establish causality? No.

Some web-based resources on the data analysis that is needed for good gender analysis:

Very clear explanation of correlation and regression line for two variable case
Timelines
Introduction to dummy variable (1)
Introduction to dummy variable (2)
Introduction to ANOVA and MANOVA - t-test equivalent for multiple categories

Comment on Uwem Akpan

I posted my comments here. I would be very happy if some of you discussed the stories in the comments section to this posting. I'm curious to know what you thought of the stories. I believe they and films like Monday's Girl offer a very strong "grounding" in the kinds of environments that we are talking about. Real people (even if fictional characters) are the ones we "observe" and "interpret" when we do data analysis.

Blog section for Monday's Girls

Hey all,
Here's the place to post your comments.

This one is so nerdy I love it... the bionic turtle!

Internet explodes with videos explaining regression

Last year there were literally no videos explaining regressions. now there are dozens. here's a nice one by an economist type... he may be a political scientist.

Some other dude's expanation of regression

I like his pointer and flipchart.

First short video on regression

For what it is worth- t-test and comparing two means

Trends in Indonesia

The Human Development Index (GDP, mortality, education) continued climbing rapidly. For details see here.

Regression is hard, so get ready

One way to prepare yourself is by understanding correlation. An super-interesting blog discussion is taking place now in the field of "social neuroscience"...

"Voodoo Correlations" in fMRI - Whose voodoo?
It's the paper that needs little introduction - Ed Vul et. al.'s "Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience". If you haven't already heard about it, read the Neurocritic's summary here or the summary at BPS research digest here. Ed Vul's personal page has some interesting further information here. (Probably the most extensive discussion so far, with a very comprehensive collection of links, is here.)
.....
The essence of the main argument is quite simple: if you take a set of numbers, then pick out some of the highest ones, and then take the average of the numbers you picked, the average will tend to be high. This should be no surprise, because you specifically picked out the high numbers. However, if for some reason you forgot or overlooked the fact that you had picked out the high numbers, you might think that your high average was an interesting discovery. This would be an error. We can call it the "non-independence error", as Vul et al. do.

Read more a the link above

What was Diane Wolf thinking about department...

I mentioned her allusions to debates in Marxist thought about the relationship between peasant production and capitalist production... here's an article current when Wolf was writing...

Capitalist Development and Subsistence Reproduction; Rural Women in India
Journal article by Maria Mies; Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Vol. 12, 1980

All economic systems, modes of production, and all hu­
man history presuppose two types of basic human activities:
production of the means of subsistence and production of new
life or procreation. The first is necessary to satisfy basic human
needs and to sustain life, the second to ensure the continuation
of society from generation to generation. Engels correctly called
both types of human activity production and stated that the
institutions of a particular society or of a particular epoch are
determined by the organization and the development of these
two types of production. 1 as production of the means of subsis­
tence is dependent on human cooperation in labor, so too pro­
duction of new life or procreation is dependent on the coopera­
tion of women and men in the sexual act. Both processes are
closely interlinked, and as Marx noted, in both processes people
enter into a double relationship.

The production of life, both of one's own in labour and of
fresh life in procreation, now appears as a double relation­
ship: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social
relationship. By social, we understand the cooperation of
several individuals no matter under what conditions, in what
manner and to what end. It follows that a certain mode of
production, or industrial stage, is always combined with a
certain mode of cooperation, or social stage, and this mode
of cooperation is itself a productive force.2

Insofar as the production of human life and of living­
working capacity is the necessary precondition of all modes and
forms of production, we shall call this the subsistence produc­
tion and reproduction....

For me you need to look it up in the library! I can't find a copy online.

Averages and percents

In response to a student query:
You want to average- remember that the average of a variable that is 0 or 1 is simply the percent that are 1 (i.e. the percent that are girls, if the variable is female). Remember that a number like .45 is the same as 45%, in this case.

Context for the Indonesia data, and small mistake in assignment 1

The data that you have for assignment 1 comes from the Indonesia Family life Survey (IFLS). The context of the data analysis is the following question:
If you were husband and wife and had a strong preference for sons, what would be possible observable patterns in your fertility behavior?
a) If you had a son, maybe you would wait longer to have another child
b) If you had a daughter, maybe you would hurry to have another child

a) If you had a son, maybe you would not have any further children (holding all the previous children you had constant)
b) If you had a daughter, maybe you would decide to have another child, and hope it was a son

So some of the implications of this "optimal fertility" behavior with son preference would be that the intervals to next children would depend on the gender of the previous child, the size of a family would be larger if a child was a girl, the last (youngest) child in a family would be more likely to be a son.

I noticed that I had a typo in the problem set- in the top I say decadeborn70 should be for decades 50,60,70 and the in the bottom part I wrote
decade born = 1 if 70,80 or 90

Since you are doing the data analysis, you can code it however you like, but make a note on your coding which decades are 0 and which are 1 in the new variable you create.

My apologies for any confusion.

Son preference in the U.S.?

Are there missing girls in the United States?
Evidence on gender preference and gender selection

by Jason Abrevaya
Full paper is here
September 2005
ABSTRACT
Gender selection, manifested by unusually high percentages of male births, has spread in parts of Asia since the introduction of ultrasound technology. This paper provides the first empirical evidence consistent with the occurrence of gender selection within the United States. Based upon fertility-stopping behavior, the aggregate gender preferences among different races in the United States are documented. Analysis of comprehensive birth data shows unusually high boy-birth percentages after 1980 among later children (most notably third and fourth children) born to Chinese and Asian Indian mothers. Moreover, Asian Indian mothers are found to be significantly more likely both to have a terminated pregnancy and to give birth to a son when they have previously only given birth to girls. These findings are consistent with a simple dynamic model of the gender-selection decision in the presence of gender preferences

"Regression analysis my favorite analysis..." Jon Stewart

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Steven Levitt Pt. 2
comedycentral.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

Background: Indonesia and the CIA.... a troubling relationship

Betty Friedan on gender

The article that I alluded to today by Betty Friedan, On Sexual Politics, is reproduced here on feminist.com

Discussion of Factory Daughters

Use the comment thread in this posting to discuss Diane Wolf's book or Indonesia in general.