Rand Paul: Sessions' sentencing plan would ruin lives

Listening to reporting of the results of court cases involving attempts at voter suppression (by republicans), I realized another effect of Trump's attorney general instructions for prosecutors to charge suspects with the most serious provable offenses, "those that carry the most substantial guidelines sentence, including mandatory minimum sentences." would be to further entrench republicans in office even when the majority does not want the. I see that others have noticed this too.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/15/opinions/sessions-is-wrong-rand-paul-opinion/

By Rand Paul
Updated 1:09 PM ET, Mon May 15, 2017

The attorney general on Friday made an unfortunate announcement that will impact the lives of millions of Americans: he issued new instructions for prosecutors to charge suspects with the most serious provable offenses, "those that carry the most substantial guidelines sentence, including mandatory minimum sentences."

Mandatory minimum sentences have unfairly and disproportionately incarcerated a generation of minorities. Eric Holder, the attorney general under President Obama, issued guidelines to U.S. Attorneys that they should refrain from seeking long sentences for nonviolent drug offenders.

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The attorney general's new guidelines, a reversal of a policy that was working, will accentuate the injustice in our criminal justice system. We should be treating our nation's drug epidemic for what it is -- a public health crisis, not an excuse to send people to prison and turn a mistake into a tragedy.
And make no mistake, the lives of many drug offenders are ruined the day they receive that long sentence the attorney general wants them to have.
If I told you that one out of three African-American males is forbidden by law from voting, you might think I was talking about Jim Crow 50 years ago.
Yet today, a third of African-American males are still prevented from voting, primarily because of the War on Drugs.

The War on Drugs has disproportionately affected young black males.
The ACLU reports that blacks are four to five times likelier to be convicted for drug possession, although surveys indicate that blacks and whites use drugs at similar rates. The majority of illegal drug users and dealers nationwide are white, but three-fourths of all people in prison for drug offenses are African American or Latino.

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Why are the arrest rates so lopsided? Because it is easier to go into urban areas and make arrests than suburban areas. Arrest statistics matter when cities apply for federal grants. It doesn't take much imagination to understand that it's easier to round up, arrest, and convict poor kids than it is to convict rich kids.

The San Jose Mercury News reviewed nearly 700,000 criminal cases that were matched by crime and criminal history of the defendant. Their analysis showed that whites of similar situation were far more successful in the plea bargaining process and "virtually every stage of pretrial negotiation" than their African-American and Latino counterparts.

I know a guy about my age in Kentucky who was arrested and convicted for growing marijuana plants in his apartment closet in college.

Thirty years later, he still can't vote, can't own a gun, and, when he looks for work, he must check the box -- the box that basically says, "I'm a convicted felon, and I guess I'll always be one."
He hasn't been arrested or convicted for 30 years -- but still can't vote or have his Second Amendment rights. Getting a job is nearly impossible for him.
Mandatory sentencing automatically imposes a minimum number of years in prison for specific crimes -- usually related to drugs.

By design, mandatory sentencing laws take discretion away from judges so as to impose harsh sentences, regardless of circumstances. Our prison population, meanwhile, has increased by over 700% since the 1980s, and 90% of them are nonviolent offenders. The costs of our prison system now approach nearly $100 billion a year. It costs too much, in both the impact on people's lives and on our tax dollars.

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The injustice of mandatory minimum sentences is impossible to ignore when you hear the stories of the victims.

John Horner was a 46-year-old father of three when he sold some of his prescription painkillers to a friend.

His friend turned out to be a police informant, and he was charged with dealing drugs. Horner pleaded guilty and was later sentenced to the mandatory minimum of 25 years in jail.
As I testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Edward Clay was an 18-year-old and a first-time offender when he was caught with less than 2 ounces of cocaine. He received 10 years in jail from a mandatory minimum sentence.

Weldon Angelos was a 24-year-old who was sentenced to 55 years in prison for selling marijuana three times.

Former federal judge Timothy Lewis recalls a case where he had to send a 19-year-old to prison for 10 years for conspiracy. What was the "conspiracy"?

This young man had been in a car where drugs were found. I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure one of us might have been in a car in our youth where someone might have had drugs. Before the arrest, according to news reports, this young man was going to be the first in his family to go to college.

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Mandatory minimum sentencing has done little to address the very real problem of drug abuse while also doing great damage by destroying so many lives, and most Americans now realize it.

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Pew Research found that 67% of Americans want drug offenders to get treatment, not prison, and over 60% want an end to mandatory minimum sentences.

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Physics teachers grade girls harder than boys

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-01/ez-gse011116.php

Public Release: 11-Jan-2016
Girls should expect poorer physics grades
ETH Zurich

Imagine that you are a female student and give the exact same answer to a physics exam question as one of your male classmates, but you receive a significantly poorer grade. This is precisely what happens on a regular basis, as concluded in a study by Sarah Hofer, a researcher in the group led by ETH professor Elsbeth Stern.

Hofer asked secondary school physics teachers in an online test to grade an exam answer. She presented 780 participants from Switzerland, Germany and Austria with the same question from the field of classical mechanics and the exact same fictitious - and only partially correct - student answer. The only thing that the ETH scientist varied in the experiment was a short, introductory written statement: half of the trial participants were led to believe that they had to grade an answer from a "male student", the other half "a female student". Hofer left the participants in the dark about the purpose of her study, and instead pretended it related to a cross-comparison of two different methods for correcting exams.

The participants graded the physics task differently. In her analysis, Hofer compared the range of grades of the supposed female students with those of the supposed male students. The good news: for teachers who had taught for at least ten years, the gender of the student had no influence on the grade. The bad news: teachers in Switzerland and Austria who had taught for less than ten years gave the girls a significantly poorer grade than the boys. As an example: teachers with five or less years of professional experience discriminated girls by a grade of 0.7 (Switzerland) and 0.9 (Austria) on average.

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Earlier studies have already provided evidence that girls have to work harder for the same grades in science-related subjects, but most of those studies looked at the field of mathematics.

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The results of the new study are curious for German secondary school teachers with less than then years of teaching experience: the male teachers graded the girls and boys the same, while the female teachers behaved like their Swiss and Austrian colleagues and graded the girls more poorly. German female teachers with five or less years of experience discriminated the girls by a grade of 0.9 on average.

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The False Promise of Meritocracy

In most of the companies I worked for, people told me I was the best computer programmer/analyst there, sometimes the best they had ever met. But every time I found out how much a male co-worker was paid, it was always significantly more than I was paid.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/12/meritocracy/418074/

Marianne Cooper Dec 1, 2015

Americans are, compared with populations of other countries, particularly enthusiastic about the idea of meritocracy, a system that rewards merit (ability + effort) with success. Americans are more likely to believe that people are rewarded for their intelligence and skills and are less likely to believe that family wealth plays a key role in getting ahead. And Americans’ support for meritocratic principles has remained stable over the last two decades despite growing economic inequality, recessions, and the fact that there is less mobility in the United States than in most other industrialized countries.

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Some companies even justify not having diversity policies by highlighting their commitment to meritocracy. If a company evaluates people on their skills, abilities, and merit, without consideration of their gender, race, sexuality etc., and managers are objective in their assessments then there is no need for diversity policies, the thinking goes.

But is this true? Do commitments to meritocracy and objectivity lead to more fair workplaces?

Emilio J. Castilla, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, has explored how meritocratic ideals and HR practices like pay-for-performance play out in organizations, and he’s come to some unexpected conclusions.

In one company study, Castilla examined almost 9,000 employees who worked as support-staff at a large service-sector company. The company was committed to diversity and had implemented a merit-driven compensation system intended to reward high-level performance and to reward all employees equitably.

But Castilla’s analysis revealed some very non-meritocratic outcomes. Women, ethnic minorities, and non-U.S.-born employees received a smaller increase in compensation compared with white men, despite holding the same jobs, working in the same units, having the same supervisors, the same human capital, and importantly, receiving the same performance score. Despite stating that “performance is the primary bases for all salary increases,” the reality was that women, minorities, and those born outside the U.S. needed “to work harder and obtain higher performance scores in order to receive similar salary increases to white men.”

These findings led Castilla to wonder if organizational cultures and practices designed to promote meritocracy actually accomplished the opposite. Could it be that the pursuit of meritocracy somehow triggered bias? Along with his colleague, the Indiana University sociology professor Stephen Bernard, they designed a series of lab experiments to find out. Each experiment had the same outcome. When a company’s core values emphasized meritocratic values, those in managerial positions awarded a larger monetary reward to the male employee than to an equally performing female employee. Castilla and Bernard termed their counter intuitive result “the paradox of meritocracy.”

The paradox of meritocracy builds on other research showing that those who think they are the most objective can actually exhibit the most bias in their evaluations. [
See previous post.] When people think they are objective and unbiased then they don’t monitor and scrutinize their own behavior. They just assume that they are right and that their assessments are accurate. Yet, studies repeatedly show that stereotypes of all kinds (gender, ethnicity, age, disability etc.) are filters through which we evaluate others, often in ways that advantage dominant groups and disadvantage lower-status groups. For example, studies repeatedly find that the resumes of whites and men are evaluated more positively than are the identical resumes of minorities and women.

This dynamic is precisely why meritocracy can exacerbate inequality—because being committed to meritocratic principles makes people think that they actually are making correct evaluations and behaving fairly. Organizations that emphasize meritocratic ideals serve to reinforce an employee’s belief that they are impartial, which creates the exact conditions under which implicit and explicit biases are unleashed.

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GapJumpers, a Silicon Valley start-up, is focused on making meritocracy a reality by taking a skills-first approach to identifying the highest-performing talent. Modeled after research showing that blind auditions block biased evaluations, GapJumpers developed an online technology platform that enables hiring managers to hold blind audition challenges. In the challenges, job applicants are given mini assignments that are designed to assess the applicant for the specific skills required for the open position. All submissions are evaluated and ranked, and the top-performing submissions (minus any applicant identifiers) are then reviewed by the hiring manager who selects candidates to bring in to interview. The result: About 60 percent of the top talent identified through GapJumpers’ blind audition process come from underrepresented backgrounds.

Hiring managers do not expect this outcome. “The high percentage of underrepresented applicants that make it through the skills-first screening process is often met with suspicion,” says Sharon Jank, a social psychologist and Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University, who is conducting her doctoral research with GapJumpers. In her work, Jank has observed that “hiring managers tend to be surprised that the top performing submissions they pick to advance very often come from applicants without an elite education, training, or experience. This suggests blind performance auditions are a powerful tool to manage bias and address the pervasive and incorrect assumption that elite pedigree best predicts performance of on the job skills."

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“I think it, therefore it’s true”: Effects of self-perceived objectivity on hiring discrimination

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749597807000611

Eric Luis Uhlmann, Geoffrey L. Cohen
Nov. 2007

Abstract

A sense of personal objectivity may prompt an “I think it, therefore it’s true” mindset, in which people assume that their own beliefs and introspections are, by definition, valid and therefore worthy of being acted on. In the present studies, priming a sense of personal objectivity increased gender discrimination, particularly among decision-makers who endorsed stereotypic beliefs or who had stereotypic thoughts made cognitively accessible through implicit priming.

Three Georgia counties suing financial institutions for violating FHA

http://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/news/2015/11/24/three-georgia-counties-suing-financial.html

Phil W. Hudson Staff Writer Atlanta Business Chronicle
Nov. 24, 2015

Cobb, DeKalb and Fulton counties filed a lawsuit against Bank of America Corp. (NYSE: BAC), Bank of America N.A., Countrywide Financial Corp., Countywide Bank, FSB, and Merrill Lynch & Co “seeking damages and injunctive relief” for violating the federal Fair Housing Act.

According to the law firm representing the counties Harris Penn Lowry LLP, the lawsuit alleges the defendants violated the FHA by engaging in a discriminatory housing practice known as "equity stripping."

“There were two key, interrelated, components to the scheme: a predatory and discriminatory mortgage loan-making component and a loan servicing/foreclosure component,” Harris Penn Lowry reported.

According to the complaint, beginning in the early to mid-2000s the institutions targeted African-American and Latino borrowers for, or steered them into, higher cost, non-prime mortgage loans. At the time, the banks knew many of the loans were likely to fail or were not in the borrowers' best interests, the suit alleges. They either originated such loans directly or assisted other brokers and affiliates – including Accredited Home Lenders, AmeriQuest Mortgage Company, First Franklin Financial Corp., New Century Mortgage Corp., Option One Mortgage Corp., and Ownit Mortgage Solutions -- to originate them.

The loans were intended to generate higher profits and mortgage servicing income for the banks, including through higher loan interest rates, increased mortgage servicing charges over the life of the loan, loan pre-payment penalties, expensive added fees, and increased default interest rates and fees charged to late-paying or defaulting borrowers, Harris Penn Lowry claims.

Freedom of choice: When rejection and discrimination hinder minority entrepreneurs

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-06/uocp-foc062514.php

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 25-Jun-2014
[ Print | E-mail ] Share Share [ Close Window ]

Contact: Mary-Ann Twist
JCR@bus.wisc.edu
608-255-5582
University of Chicago Press Journals
Freedom of choice: When rejection and discrimination hinder minority entrepreneurs

When it comes to The American Dream, freedom of choice is a central value for entrepreneurs. According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, when a person's choices are limited due to rejection and discrimination, they are more likely to fail at business and in their personal lives.

"Not only does restricting a person's choices threaten the success of a new business, it also has swift and damaging effects on the individual's self-esteem and their personal sense of control and power in the world," write authors Sterling A. Bone (Utah State University), Glenn L. Christensen (Brigham Young University), and Jerome D. Williams (Rutgers University).

In their research, the authors studied the experiences of racial and ethnic minority entrepreneurs and compared them with white majority entrepreneurs. Results revealed that the experiences of ethnic minority entrepreneurs were often remarkably different and worse than those of their white counterparts.

In one field study, white, Hispanic, and African American participants were asked to apply for small business loans using identical application data and wearing the same clothes. While all applicants were otherwise identical in appearance and "on paper," the Hispanic and African American applicants were given different information than the white applicants. They were also asked to provide more financial background information, were given significantly less encouragement, and were less likely to receive help in the loan application process.

The authors also examined how a person's self-esteem and sense of autonomy are threatened after rejection. Comparing the impact of being rejected for a student loan, results showed that minority respondents took a harder emotional hit than their white counterparts.

"For public policy stakeholders and consumer welfare activists, our research offers evidence against the general assumption in the United States that choice is equally distributed, democratized, and available to all," the authors conclude.

Bisphenol A (BPA) at Very Low Levels Can Adversely Affect Developing Organs in Primates, MU Researcher Finds

http://munews.missouri.edu/news-releases/2014/0227-bisphenol-a-bpa-at-very-low-levels-can-adversely-affect-developing-organs-in-primates-mu-researcher-finds/

Feb. 27, 2014
University of Missouri
Story Contact(s): Jeff Sossamon

Bisphenol A (BPA) is a chemical that is used in a wide variety of consumer products, such as resins used to line metal food and beverage containers, thermal paper store receipts, and dental composites. BPA exhibits hormone-like properties, and exposure of fetuses, infants, children or adults to the chemical has been shown to cause numerous abnormalities, including cancer, as well as reproductive, immune and brain-behavior problems in rodents. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri have determined that daily exposure to very low concentrations of BPA by pregnant females also can cause fetal abnormalities in primates.

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“The very low-level exposure to BPA we delivered once a day to the rhesus monkeys is far less than the BPA levels humans are exposed to each day, which reflects multiple exposures,” vom Saal said. “Our findings suggest that traditional toxicological studies likely underestimate actual human exposure and show, unequivocally, that biologically active BPA passes from the mother to the fetus. Additionally, our latest study shows that BPA causes damage to developing systems of monkey fetuses, and this is of great concern for human fetuses.”

The study, “Bisphenol A (BPA) pharmacokinetics with daily oral bolus or continuous exposure via silastic capsules in pregnant rhesus monkeys: relevance for human exposures,” was funded in part by the NIEHS and was published in Reproductive Toxicology in collaboration with Catherine A. VandeVoort with the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the California National Primate Research Center at the University of California, Davis; Julia A. Taylor and Wade V. Welshons with the University of Missouri; Pierre-Louis Toutain with the Univesite de Toulouse; and Patricia A Hunt with the School of Molecular Biosciences at Washington State University.

American Bar Association awards lower ratings to women and minorities

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-02/uor-aba022714.php

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 27-Feb-2014
Contact: Susan Hagen
University of Rochester

American Bar Association awards lower ratings to women and minorities

For more than half a century, the American Bar Association has vetted the nation's judicial nominees, certifying candidates as "well qualified," "qualified," or "not qualified" and in the process rankling conservatives and liberals alike when nominees earn less than stellar marks.

Now a new study suggests that the sometimes-controversial ratings could be tilted against minorities and women. An analysis of 1,770 district court nominations from 1960 to 2012 finds that the ABA systematically awards lower ratings to minorities and women than to white or male candidates. However, a candidate's political ideology and whether they are a Republican or Democrat have no bearing on the influential seal of approval, the research shows.

The study finds, for example, that African Americans are 42 percentage points less likely to receive a high rating from the ABA than are whites trained at similarly ranked law schools, with similar legal experience, and nominated by the same president. Women, likewise, are 19 percentage points less likely to be highly rated than men with comparable educational and professional qualifications.


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Many factors can affect a judicial nomination, but the analysis documents that the ABA ratings are one of the most significant. "Receiving a rating of 'not qualified' is more or less the equivalent of an 'F'," says Sen. Those candidates are 35 percentage points less likely to be confirmed than their more highly-ranked peers, according to the study. During the Obama administration, of the 14 judicial nominees who were given a "not qualified" rating, nine were women and eight were racial or ethnic minorities, Sen reports.

"Low ratings do keep judges out of the federal courts and over time and on average women and minority judicial nominees get more of these lower ratings," she says.

But do the ratings help to weed out individuals who truly would be unsuited for the bench? After all, according to the ABA, the evaluation is based on such laudable criteria as integrity, professional competence, and judicial temperament. Perhaps these difficult-to-quantify qualities introduce important factors into the considerations.

To test this question, Sen examined how often a judge's rulings were overturned, an indicator many scholars agree is a good measure of judicial performance. Using a variety of statistical controls and comparisons, she found no meaningful difference between judges who were rated highly or poorly by the ABA.

"A judge who receives the 'F' is actually no more likely to be reversed than a judge who receives the 'A+' rating of well qualified," says Sen.

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Nobody's perfect

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-12/wtsi-np120512.php

Public release date: 6-Dec-2012
Contact: Aileen Sheehy
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute

Researchers produce a catalog of the deleterious and disease-causing genetic variants in healthy people

Researchers at Cambridge and Cardiff have found that, on average, a normal healthy person carries approximately 400 potentially damaging DNA variants and two variants known to be associated directly with disease traits. They showed that one in ten people studied is expected to develop a genetic disease as a consequence of carrying these variants.

It has been known for decades that all people carry some damaging genetic variants that appear to cause little or no ill effect. But this is the first time that researchers have been able to quantify how many such variants each of us has, and list them. This figure of 400 is likely to increase as more and more powerful genetic studies discover rare genetic variants more efficiently. Such research brings to the fore ethical questions surrounding anonymous studies and incidental findings.

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Antibiotic-Eating Bug Unearthed in Soil: Newly Discovered Bacterium Degrades an Antibiotic Both to Protect Itself and Get Nutrition

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/12/121207090752.htm

ScienceDaily (Dec. 7, 2012) — It's well known how bacteria exposed to antibiotics for long periods will find ways to resist the drugs -- by quickly pumping them out of their cells, for instance, or modifying the compounds so they're no longer toxic.

Now new research has uncovered another possible mechanism of antibiotic "resistance" in soil. In a paper published on Dec. 6 in the Journal of Environmental Quality, a group of Canadian and French scientists report on a soil bacterium that breaks down the common veterinary antibiotic, sulfamethazine, and uses it for growth.

Certain soil bacteria are already known to live off, or "eat," agricultural pesticides and herbicides, says the study's leader, Ed Topp, a soil microbiologist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in London, Ontario. In fact, the microbes' presence in farm fields can cause these agrichemicals to fail.

But to Topp's knowledge, this is the first report of a soil microorganism that degrades an antibiotic both to protect itself and get nutrition.

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Equal Rights Spurred Productivity

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2012/05/equal-rights-spurred-productivity.html

Friday, May 18, 2012

Chrystia Freeland highlights research showing that reduced discrimination over the last 50 years gave the economy a substantial boost -- increased fairness gave us increased efficiency. Unfortunately, however, it appears that new barriers may be emerging:

Equal rights and the U.S. economy, by Chrystia Freeland: Are equal rights good for the economy? ... A draft paper by four U.S. economists makes the strong empirical case... Fairness, they contend, has made the economy more productive. Chang-Tai Hsieh, Erik Hurst, Charles Jones and Peter Klenow argue that as much as 20 percent of the growth in productivity in the United States over the past 50 years can be attributed to expanded opportunities for women and blacks. ...

Few women or blacks would describe the United States today as a perfectly color- or gender-neutral economy. But ... female and black workers have felt the change directly in their paychecks. According to the paper, the reduction in frictions since 1960 increased real wages for white women 39 percent; those of black women, who suffered double discrimination and therefore got a double boost, 57 percent; and those of black men 44 percent.

But while the economy as a whole benefited, there was one group that lost out. The paper calculates that the “reduced friction” for women and blacks meant that the real wages of white men were 4.3 percent lower than they would have been without the increased competition. That result explains a political reality that we often don’t like to admit: Gains for women and blacks have come at a price for white men, and that is surely why some of them still resist the rights revolution. ...

Hurst made sure I understood that this final point was just a hypothesis. The economists plan to run it through their model over the next few months and report on their results later this year. But if their theory pans out, their work will tell a story about America over the past 50 years that many of us intuitively will feel to be true – a country that discriminates less and less on the basis of gender, race and now sexual orientation, but where the class divide is becoming so stark as to constitute a new form of discrimination.

Increased inequality and the associated decrease in mobility are usually presented as as issues of fairness, but when barriers prevent people from realizing their potential that has implications for efficiency as well. It hurts both individuals and the economy as a whole when some groups of people face "external barriers."

Bush birth control policies helped fuel Africa's baby boom

If people think that birth-control is thwarting God's will, then they should avoid thwarting God's will by using other medical intervention, like immunizations and treatment of cancer.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/80331.html?storylink=omni_popular

By Shashank Bengali | McClatchy Newspapers

SIRAKANO, Uganda — At age 45, after giving birth to 13 children in her village of thatch roofs and bare feet, Beatrice Adongo made a discovery that startled her: birth control.

"I delivered all these children because I didn't know there was another way," said Adongo, who started on a free quarterly contraceptive injection last year. Surrounded by her weary-faced brood, her 21-month-old boy clutching at her faded blue dress, she added glumly: "I fear we are already too many in this family."

On a continent where fewer than one in five married women use modern contraception, an explosion of unplanned pregnancies is threatening to bury Adongo's family and a generation of Africans under a mountain of poverty.

Promoting birth control in Africa faces a host of obstacles — patriarchal customs, religious taboos, ill-equipped public health systems — but experts also blame a powerful, more distant force: the U.S. government.

Under President George W. Bush, the United States withdrew from its decades-long role as a global leader in supporting family planning, driven by a conservative ideology that favored abstinence and shied away from providing contraceptive devices in developing countries, even to married women.

Bush's mammoth global anti-AIDS initiative, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, poured billions of dollars into Africa but prohibited groups from spending any of it on family planning services or counseling programs, whose budgets flat-lined.

The restrictions flew in the face of research by international aid agencies, the U.N. World Health Organization and the U.S. government's own experts, all of whom touted contraception as a crucial method of preventing births of babies being infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

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More women in finance, a more sustainable economy

http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20090624/cm_csm/ybasch;_ylt=AniJKsdmG9Bexhz_.Tggp0qs0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTFlanM1YThlBHBvcwMxOTMEc2VjA2FjY29yZGlvbl9vcGluaW9uBHNsawNtb3Jld29tZW5pbmY-

By Linda Basch Linda Basch – Wed Jun 24, 5:00 am ET

New York – The amount of taxpayer dollars that has gone into cleaning up our top financial institutions' collective mess is staggering. Bank of America received $15 billion as part of the federal Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo each received $25 billion. But here's a cost-effective solution: Hire more women.

As has been pointed out with increasing frequency, a certain groupthink has been widely blamed for the economic crisis we find ourselves in today.

Barnard College president Deborah Spar dubbed our predicament a "one gender crash," and The New York Times's Nicholas Kristof wonders if we might all have been better off had it been "Lehman Brothers and Sisters."

Studies indicate that women are more comprehensive thinkers and less attracted to excessive risk than are their male peers. It seems we have reached a fairly broad consensus on the meltdown: Guys were the ones flying too close to the sun.

Now that we've landed back on earth with a mighty thud – a little humbler and a whole lot poorer – it's time to deal with the most important question of the day: How do we get more women into the good-old-boys network at the highest levels of the financial sector?

Recently, the Financial Times (not exactly a bastion of feminist ideology), called for a gender quota for corporate boards – sparking floods of outraged responses from readers.

Such recommendations usually unl­eash a swift and vigorous backlash against rocking the status quo. Arguments are made about how diversity somehow degrades the talent pool – irrelevant, of course, because women are just as talented as men and in abundant supply.

The Financial Times is spot on. It's time that the financial sector – at all levels, but especially at the top – institutes what we at the National Council for Research on Women are calling the "critical mass principle." Explicit quotas may be illegal, but research has found that to have significant impact on decisionmaking, women, or any other underrepresented group, need to attain a critical mass of 33.3 percent.

The bottom line is that, because of advances in women's education and careers, there are sufficient numbers of qualified women in every area of specialization and expertise. Research bears out the fact that if you get this mass of women and others from underrepresented groups in leadership positions, whether in the boardroom or the corner office, the decisionmaking dynamic changes for the better.

Examples from across the business sector show that applying a "critical mass principle" is a powerful force for positive change. Research shows that for corporate boards, a core of three or more women leads to greater collaboration and inclusivity. And companies with more gender-diverse boards outperform companies with nondiverse boards by 53 percent according to Catalyst, a nonprofit organization that tracks women in business.

Moreover, companies with the most gender diversity among employees bring in nearly $600 million more in sales revenue than companies that lack gender diversity.

Beyond the corporate sphere, a Stanford University study of women's suffrage demonstrated a national policy shift and improvements in public health and services in the wake of women's political participation.

Within one year of women gaining the right to vote, local public-health spending increased by 35 percent, averting what researchers estimated would have been some 20,000 child deaths per year.

Norway's law requiring listed companies to make sure 40 percent of directors are female has been called a tentative success. Instituting such quotas in the US might present legal challenges and resistance from management.

Voluntary campaigns to recruit and retain more women and people from underrepresented groups, on the other hand, would not only benefit businesses but the economy as a whole.

Shifting the lack of diversity in the top echelons of the financial sector is not just about finance, nor is it about boosting women for their own benefit. This is about men and women working together to create a more sustainable and stable financial system.

Women represent a scant 10 percent of all traditional mutual-fund managers and a mere 3 percent of the approximately $1.9 trillion invested in hedge funds, according to recent research. The needed shift in financial and other circles won't happen as long as we settle for a few token "skirts" at the nation's most entrenched boys' clubs.

Study after study confirms that men and women bring different and complementary sensibilities and leadership styles to the table.

A 2005 study from the Center for Financial Research at the University of Cologne in Germany documented differences between male and female fund managers: Women managers tended to take fewer extreme risks and to adopt more measured investment styles (which perform well over time).

And according to research published in 2002 in the International Journal of Bank Marketing, women tend to make investment-related decisions with a detailed, comprehensive approach, while men are more likely to simplify data and make decisions based on one overall strategy.

We have to work together – risk-averse and risk-prone, detail-oriented and big-picture thinkers – if we are going to participate in the global market strategically and wisely.
.....

Study finds segregation decreases access to surgical care for minorities

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-06/wsw-sfs061109.php

Public release date: 11-Jun-2009
Contact: Sally Garneski
Weber Shandwick Worldwide

CHICAGO (June 11, 2009) – New research published in the June issue of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons reveals that in counties with the highest levels of segregation, an increase in the African-American or Hispanic population was associated with a decrease in the availability and use of surgical services and an increase in the number of emergency room visits. This research supports prior studies that have shown that minority groups in the United States have comparatively poorer access to a range of health care services, often resulting in late diagnosis of illness and delayed treatment.

African Americans are the most segregated racial group in the U.S. Studies have shown that segregated African-American communities have higher infant mortality rates, decreased access to appropriate cancer care and worse outcomes from organ transplantation than other racial groups experience. Both African Americans and Hispanics living in counties with a higher proportion of African-American population report that they experience difficulty obtaining health care as compared with African Americans living in counties with a smaller African-American population. Through the National Institutes of Health and Healthy People 2010, the federal government has set forth goals to explore, account for and minimize these disparities. However, despite these goals, improving access to health care continues to pose a considerable challenge to health policy makers in their attempts to establish equity in the provision of care.

"In the most segregated counties, we found that an increase as small as one percent in the African-American or Hispanic population was associated with a significant decrease in the availability and utilization of surgical services, a difference that was not present in counties with the least segregation," said Awori J. Hayanga, MD, MPH, Administrative Chief Resident, Department of General Surgery, University of Michigan Health System. "We hope this report will guide budgetary decisions and incentives by health policy makers in their bid to close the racial health disparity gap and increase access to surgical health care across racial lines, particularly in the most segregated areas."
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Diversity Linked To Increased Sales Revenue And Profits, More Customers

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090331091252.htm

ScienceDaily (Apr. 3, 2009) — Workplace diversity is among the most important predictors of a business' sales revenue, customer numbers and profitability, according to research to be published in the April issue of the American Sociological Review.

n one of only a few studies to empirically examine the implications of organizational diversity, sociologist Cedric Herring found that a workforce comprised of employees of both genders and varying racial backgrounds resulted in positive business outcomes.
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Herring found that companies reporting the highest levels of racial diversity brought in nearly 15 times more sales revenue on average than those with the lowest levels of racial diversity. Gender diversity accounted for a difference of $599.1 million in average sales revenue: organizations with the lowest rates of gender diversity had average sales revenues of $45.2 million, compared with averages of $644.3 million for businesses with the most gender diversity.

For every percentage increase in the rate of racial or gender diversity up to the rate represented in the relevant population, there was an increase in sales revenues of approximately 9 and 3 percent, respectively. Herring found racial diversity to be a better determinant of sales revenue and customer numbers than company size, the company's age and the number of employees at any given work location.

Companies with a more diverse workforce consistently reported higher customer numbers than those organizations with less diversity among staff. In terms of racial diversity, companies with the highest rates reported an average of 35,000 customers compared to 22,700 average customers among those companies with the lowest rates of racial diversity. The difference is even larger for gender diversity rates. That is, companies with the highest levels of gender diversity reported an average of 15,000 more customers than organizations with the lowest levels of gender diversity. Herring also found that the smallest incremental increase in levels of racial or gender diversity resulted in more than 400 and 200 additional customers, respectively.

Although a corporate workforce's gender composition did not have a significant impact on a company's relative market share, Herring found that racial diversity was among the most important predictors of a company's competitive positioning relative to other firms in its industry.

According to the research, as racial and gender diversity levels increased in a company's workforce, its profits relative to those of its competitors also increased.

Gender Bias Found In Student Ratings Of High School Science Teachers

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090202174953.htm

ScienceDaily (Feb. 8, 2009) — A study of 18,000 biology, chemistry and physics students has uncovered notable gender bias in student ratings of high school science teachers.

Researchers at Clemson University, the University of Virginia and Harvard University have found that, on average, female high school science teachers received lower evaluations than their male counterparts even though male and female teachers are equally effective at preparing their students for college.
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The authors were able to show that while a few differences in teaching style do exist between male and female teachers they had no correlation with the gender-bias ratings.

The authors also found evidence that male and female teachers are equally effective at preparing their students for college. Students in the survey performed equally well in college science whether they had a female or a male high school science teacher. Also, the rate at which female teachers produce students bound for college-level science study appeared to be identical to the rate of their male counterparts.