by Tom Standage
The court’s ruling binds France, and it suggests that the law in the 20 countries that still insist on sterilisation violates the convention on human rights. But it does not compel these countries to reform. Activists say it is likely to require several similar court cases before the continent reaches any kind of legal consensus. Understanding of transgender people is spreading, though, including the knowledge that many of them do not seek surgery. And in some countries, gender is becoming a less important characteristic for organising society: the Dutch parliament is considering whether official documents should record gender at all.
How opinions on acceptable male behaviour vary by age, sex and nationality
Harvey Weinstein was the tip of a very large iceberg. In the month after multiple allegations of sexual assault against the prominent film producer became public, a series of powerful men were accused of sexual assault and harassment of co-workers. In just a few weeks, the #MeToo hashtag on social media, used to mark posts about similar experiences suffered by ordinary people, was used some 5m times. This avalanche of accusations increased awareness of the prevalence of sexual harassment: 49% of male respondents to a poll by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal in October 2017 said that the news had made them think about their own actions around women. Yet there is no clear consensus on exactly which behaviours cross the line. Instead, people in different countries and age groups appear to use very different definitions.
During October and November 2017 YouGov, a pollster, surveyed people in five Western countries about whether a series of behaviours by men towards women constitute sexual harassment. The questions ranged from actions that are often innocuous, such as asking to go for a drink, to overt demands for sex. The range of views was vast. One consistent pattern that emerged was a generation gap. In general, younger respondents were more likely to think that a behaviour crossed the line than their older peers were. For example, over half of British women under 30 said that wolf-whistling was unacceptable. Less than a fifth of those over 64 felt that way.
Between men and women, differences of opinion emerged for specific questions. Both sexes tended to have similar views on whether a man who places his hand on a woman’s lower back or comments on her attractiveness has gone too far. However, female respondents were much less tolerant of men looking at women’s breasts than their male counterparts were: among Americans 64 and older, for example, half of women but just a quarter of men said they would consider such ogling sexual harassment. A third source of variation was nationality. Swedish men, for example, seem to feel entitled to make sexual jokes around women: only a quarter of them said such behaviour would be harassment. In contrast, three-quarters of American men thought it was unacceptable. Similarly, a quarter of French women under 30 believe that even asking to go for a drink is harassment, whereas almost none of their counterparts in Britain and Germany share that view.
My eyes are up here
“Would you consider it sexual harassment if a man, who was not a romantic partner, did the following to a woman?”
Surveyed Oct–Nov 2017, % stating “always” or “usually”, by age and sex
Sources: YouGov; The Economist
The magnitude of the reaction to the accusations against Mr Weinstein made clear that a reckoning with abuses by men in the workplace was long overdue. But given how little agreement exists about the definition of sexual harassment, employers seeking to ensure a comfortable work environment may need to be more explicit about the boundaries of acceptable behaviour than they may have previously realised was necessary.
What porn and listings sites reveal about Britain’s gay population
Half a century after Britain’s Parliament passed the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, which partially decriminalised homosexual acts, gay life is flourishing more than ever. The country boasts the world’s gayest legislature, according to Andrew Reynolds, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: some 45 of the 650 members of Parliament elected in June 2017 were openly gay or bisexual. Britain is also tied with Sweden as the least homophobic country on the Gay Travel Index, an annual ranking produced by Spartacus World, a gay holiday guide.
Even though Britons see gay and lesbian politicians and fictional characters more and more often on television, there is still a surprising lack of data about where gay life is most concentrated. Polls typically find that about a quarter of people say they feel some attraction to the same sex, but just 2% of respondents to the Annual Population Survey identify themselves as something other than straight – a group too small to give an accurate regional picture. But analysis of two datasets can provide a clearer view.
The first attempts to measure where gay people live, and was provided by the insights team at Pornhub.com, a widely viewed pornography website. The video-streaming service attracts 5m visitors from Britain each day, 5.6% of whom watch gay content (excluding lesbian porn, whose main audience is straight men). When broken down by county, the data show very little geographic variance: 97% of the population lives in a region that is within one percentage point of the national average. Since some groups of people watch more porn than others, the numbers cannot reveal how many gay Britons there are. However, this does imply that gay people are very evenly distributed around the country.
The second dataset aimed to depict gay visibility. This involved scraping records of venues and events from a handful of listings websites, selecting only those that catered specifically to gay or bisexual people. These records are likely to be incomplete, since these lists are mostly user-generated, and gay bars are shutting down at a startling rate. The Economist’s data team found 675 organisations in total, ranging from club nights to cycling teams to church groups. There were many varieties, but their locations were heavily clustered. For example, inner west London had 25 times as many events per person as did Scotland’s highlands and islands. Other busy, liberal cities also tended to have high densities.
Send your location
Britain, 2017
Sources: Eurostat; pinkuk.com; upnorthdownsouth.co.uk;
queersaunas.co.uk; pridesports.org.uk; wikishire.co.uk; lgbtconsortium.org.uk; Pornhub.com; The Economist
Put together, these datasets suggest that lots of gay people live in rural areas without much sign of their presence. But that now seems to be changing. Specialist dating apps have made it much easier to meet partners nearby. Thanks to a gradual decline in bigoted attitudes, older gay people are more willing to move to the countryside, where there is also a fair smattering of gay-run hotels and B&Bs. After London, the next most publicly gay region was found to be rustic Devon, home to five annual Pride events and a queer arts festival at Dartington Hall that took place in September 2017. Ceri Goddard, who helped organise the event, says it “reminded locals that amongst them there are thousands of gay and lesbian people”. As Britain becomes more comfortable with people displaying their sexuality openly, expect to see more such events in rural areas.
Attitudes to same-sex relationships around the world
In the West, few civil-rights movements have prevailed so quickly and comprehensively as the campaign for gay rights. In America, support for same-sex marriage shot up from 27% in 1996 to 64% in 2017 – faster than the rise in acceptance of interracial marriage beginning in the late 1960s. Ireland has gone from having few openly gay public figures to legalising gay marriage and having a gay prime minister. But what about the rest of the world? How do Chinese or Peruvian people feel about gay rights? For that matter, what about the inhabitants of Angola? Figures compiled by the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA) provide some tantalising clues.
Take one straightforward measure – the proportion of people who strongly agree with the proposition that equal rights and protections should be applied to everyone, including people attracted to others of their sex. Not surprisingly, a majority of Americans, Spaniards and Swedes put themselves in that camp. A bit more surprisingly, Amer
icans are somewhat less keen on gay and lesbian rights than are Argentinians, Brazilians, Chileans or Mexicans.
Most astonishing are the results from Africa. Although north African countries like Algeria, Egypt and Morocco are broadly opposed to gay rights, sub-Saharan Africa looks rather liberal. Attitudes in Angola, Ghana, Kenya and Mozambique are comparable to those in America – and much more liberal than attitudes in China or Japan. South Africa, as befits the fifth country in the world to legalise gay marriage, appears to be hotter on gay rights than America or Britain.
Can this possibly be true? ILGA’s figures come from RIWI, a firm that uses an unusual method of soliciting opinion called “random domain intercept”. When somebody types in an incorrect internet domain name, they might land on a site owned by RIWI, which (after checking the user is not a bot) asks them to complete a survey. So this is a poll of fat-fingered internet users, not of people in general. And attitudes to homosexuality in, say, rural Angola are highly likely to differ from attitudes among the connected classes in Luanda. Still, the results are suggestive. If a goodly number of internet-using, middle-class Africans are coming round to gay rights, that is something. The battle for gay rights in Africa and Asia is going to be a long, hard slog. A beachhead, however small, will help a lot.
Straight solidarity
“Equal rights and protections should be applied to everyone, including people who are romantically or sexually attracted to people of the same sex”, % strongly agreeing July to September 2017
Source: ILGA-RIWI Global Attitudes Survey on Sexual, Gender and Sex Minorities, 2017
Why couples do more housework than single people
Single people beware: if and when you move in with someone, you will probably end up doing more housework. Across the rich world, men and women in couples spend more time doing housework than single people. The extra burden is greatest for women in partnerships, who do on average five more hours of housework per week than single women. Men in couples do just half an hour more. For most, household chores are boring and tedious. So why do those in couples spend more time on them – and why is the difference bigger for women?
The answer is not simply that couples are more likely to have children, who create mess. Cristina Borra of the University of Seville, Martin Browning of the University of Oxford and Almudena Sevilla of Queen Mary University of London looked at detailed data on how people spend their time in America, Britain and Australia. When they excluded time spent caring for children and looked at couples without children, the differences remained. Perhaps, they suggest, the difference is down to the type of person who becomes part of a couple. The tidy(ing) sort might be more likely to partner up than the messy. And perhaps women in couples spend less time bread-winning, leaving more time for bread-baking.
The researchers looked at people over time, as they moved into couples, and at the differences between routine housework chores, like cooking, cleaning and tidying; and non-routine housework, like making repairs around the house. Looking at routine housework, they found that almost half the difference for women is driven by the fact that the sort to join a couple does more housework in the first place. But it is different for men. The kind of man who spurns routine housework is more likely to couple up. The extra housework such men do comes in the form of DIY or managing the family finances. The economists debunk the idea that women spend fewer hours on paid work – even when they account for differences, the chore inequality persists. It’s not that women have more time; they just do more housework.
If people in couples choose to do more housework than singletons, that is their business. Perhaps it is harder to be messy when there is someone watching over your shoulder. Well-cooked meals may be more enjoyable consumed as a pair. The gender inequality this research suggests is more concerning, however, not only in itself, but also because it could be holding back women in the workplace. Routine tasks are harder to fit around a hectic work schedule, whereas building a shelf can be done at the weekend. Men might dismiss the difference as a matter of taste, assuming, perhaps, that women prefer doing the housework, or value its fruits more highly. Women might even be responding to their partners’ possible deficiencies, at cooking, say. But women, rather than enjoying housework, may instead be conforming to society’s expectations. An earlier study, published in 2012, found that whereas the amount of housework men did seemed to vary depending on how much they hated it, women experienced no such luxury.
What men and women think about their partners’ careers and housework
Across the Western world, women greatly outnumber men in lower-level jobs, such as clerical and administrative positions, whereas managerial and senior jobs are mostly held by men. This gender gap at work is largely due to the “motherhood penalty” that women’s careers suffer after they have children. But another more subtle factor could be part of the problem.
The Economist and YouGov, a pollster, asked people in eight countries how they balance career and family. Men were on average only half as likely as women to think that, in their family, the majority of household and child-care duties fell on the woman’s shoulders. And they were more likely than women to say that such tasks were split equally. Respondents were also asked which partner had scaled back at work when their first child arrived, by reducing working hours or by switching to a part-time or a less demanding job (for example, a role that required less travel or overtime). Another perception gap emerged. In each country, both men and women were less likely to say that their partner had made adjustments than members of the opposite sex were to say they had made adjustments themselves.
The perception gap
Average of surveyed countries, Feb 2017, %
Sources: YouGov; The Economist
Perceptions in France differed most: 55% of women said that they, and only they, had slowed down at work, twice as high as the share of men who said that only their partners had done so. The difference was smallest in Denmark, the country that had the largest shares of both men and of women saying that neither partner had made adjustments. (Denmark has one of the world’s most generous child-care systems.) Though it is unclear whether men or women are more accurately depicting the situation, many people are obviously ignorant about the reality of their partners’ lives. And even if men are open to doing more at home so their wives can do more at work, the necessity may not occur to them. Gender equality could be boosted by some frank kitchen-table conversations.
How fracking boosts birth rates
The typical family in America is changing. Couples are increasingly reluctant to seal their relationships with the stamp of marriage, or to tie the knot before having children. In 1960 fewer than a tenth of births were to unmarried women, whereas these days around two-fifths of children are born out of wedlock. Economists wonder whether the changing economic fortunes of men might be driving these decisions, but struggle to disentangle the different factors at work. Recently, though, new evidence has emerged on the topic. Did, for example, the fracking boom affect family formation?
It seems plausible that someone might be reluctant to marry a person with poor or worsening economic prospects. And babies are expensive; to an economist, the idea that people might be more likely to have one when they get richer is a natural one. There is some historical evidence to support both hypotheses. In response to the Appalachian coal boom of the 1970s and 1980s, marriage rates went up, as did the share of babies born to married couples. More recently, a study by three economists, David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson, found that workers exposed to import competition from China during the 1990s and 2000s took a hit to their “marriage-market value”. The negative shock seemed to turn people off marriage and children.
Another study, by Melissa Kearney and Riley Wilson, two economists at the University of Maryland, looks at the impact of the recent fracking boom in America, which boosted job opportunities for less-educated men. The economists wanted to see how this affected birth rates, both in and outside of marriage. They com
pared marriage and birth rates in areas where fracking had boosted the local economy with those where it had not had any effect. The researchers found no effect on marriage rates. But fertility rates did rise. On average, they found that $1,000 of extra fracking production per person was associated with an extra six births per 1,000 women.
The result confirms the hypothesis that better economic prospects lead to higher fertility. But it also sheds light on changing social attitudes in America: good times used to mean more wedding bells and babies, whereas now they just mean the latter. The policy prescriptions are not obvious. Whether or not people get married is their own business. But the finding does offer some comfort to those who worry that declining marriage rates are purely the product of worsening economic prospects for men. Clearly, some other factor is at play.
What explains Europe’s low birth rates?
Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks and apparently an amateur demographer, is worried about Europe’s declining birth rate. In a tweet posted in 2017 he posited that “Capitalism + atheism + feminism = sterility = migration”, and noted that the leaders of Britain, France, Germany and Italy were all childless. Never mind that Mr Assange needs a dictionary. “Sterility” means the inability to play a part in conception (often for medical reasons, or because a man has had a vasectomy or a woman has had her Fallopian tubes tied). What he presumably meant was childlessness, or perhaps a preference for fewer children – a preference, moreover, that until the advent of modern contraception women might hold but could not act on.
Mr Assange’s tweet echoed sentiments expressed by RT (formerly Russia Today), a Kremlin-backed news organisation. Russian propagandists have long argued that the West’s declining fertility rate is evidence of its decline. An RT editorial claimed that “Europe has been committing protracted demographic suicide for several decades”. (Russia’s own fertility rate stands at 1.8 births per woman, not much above the western European average of 1.6.) Critics responded sharply to Mr Assange’s tweet, countering that a country’s birth rate depends largely on how rich it is. But is there any germ of truth in what he said?