Noted Elsewhere on Gender
Hours of Fun
14 Jul 08 U.S. adults spend about five hours a day engaging in leisure activities or playing sports, according to the government's 2007 annual release of time-diary data from the American Time Use Survey. Men have more leisure time than women, and people ages 75 and older have more free time than other adults do. About half of adults' leisure time is spent watching television, which was the most common leisure activity. Four in five adults on average watch TV each day.
(Bureau of Labor Statistics)
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Drinking Laws and Unplanned Pregnancies
30 Jun 08 States with lower minimum drinking ages also have a higher incidence of low birth weight babies and premature births, according to two economists who examined state vital statistics collected between 1978 and 1999. The effect is largest among black women. They suspect that relaxed drinking laws lead to poor birth outcomes because they increase the number of unplanned pregnancies.
(NBER)
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Crowd Control
16 Jun 08 Women tend to rate men as more desirable potential partners when those men are surrounded by women than when they are alone or with other men, according to research in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. But the opposite is true for men: They rate women as less desirable when those women are shown surrounded by men than when they are shown alone or with other women.
(Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin)
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Blame it on Moms
11 Jun 08 Encouraging words bring out the best in fathers while many dads refrain from providing infant care if they are criticized by their wife or partner. A study of 97 couples by an Ohio State University researcher found that fathers do more day-to-day care when they receive active encouragement from mom. But even fathers who wanted to get involved in baby care didn't do so when faced with a judgmental mother. (Journal of Family Psychology)
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What's A Conference Championship Worth?
12 May 08 When a male university graduate's former team wins its conference championship, his donations to the school and to its athletic program go up, according to research by economists from Princeton and Stanford universities. This is not true for female graduates, they found. The researchers also report that male graduates whose teams were successful when they were students also make larger donations than others. (National Bureau of Economic Research)
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