The XX Factor: What women really think.

Do Radical Professors Produce Radical Students?

Generation Y Is No More Entitled Than The Baby Boomers Before Us

Can Posting Calorie Counts Be Hazardous to Your Health?

The onslaught against obesity continues in New York City. A federal appeals court yesterday rejected a challenge to a 2007 city regulation requiring large chain restaurants to post calorie information on their menus. According to the NYT, the New York State Restaurant Association contended that the requirement that they display calorie information violated their rights, including those protected under the First Amendment. City Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Frieden called the ruling against the Restaurant Association good news for all: “Nearly all chain restaurants are now complying with the law. Consumers are learning more about the food before they order, and the market for healthier alternatives is growing.”

 

But maybe not everyone stands to gain when calories are posted. While this information may help foster a health-conscious environment and alert those who routinely underestimate their caloric intake, posting nutritional values can actually be very harmful in communities in which food obsession cuts the opposite way. I’m thinking here of college campuses, where anorexia and bulimia are often huge problems. In December, for instance, Harvard removed the nutritional information from their dining halls after students voiced concerns that it lead to or worsened eating disorders. Same discussion surfaced at my school, Notre Dame recently for the same reasons, with the school eventually resorting to creating an online nutritional database rather than tacking information directly to the buffet lines.

 

Many universities have long-standing issues with women and eating disorders, and you can be sure these young women who will be tuning into the newly posted information, for the wrong reasons. These food-labeling rules assume that the only problem facing Americans is that we are obese. But there are many young women who very wrongly think they’re obese when they weigh 97 pounds, and they are starving themselves to death.

Do I Have to Be an Astrophysicist?

While I can't answer Melinda's question of whether the bar for mothers-who-do-it-all was always set so high, as a young twentysomething just starting out in my career, I can see that bar vaulting upward among the women of my own generation. With few glass ceilings remaining, the limits to our professional ambitions seem next to nonexistent. But along with our heightened career expectations comes the decision to try to balance both work and family life. For all the inspirational value of Hillary Clinton's historic campaign, even she got choked up trying to explain how she did it all.

About a year and a half ago, I heard Linda Hirshman speak about her book, Get to Work ... And Get a Life, Before It's Too Late, at the women's college I attended. I remember vividly her assertion that women in college should not waste their time studying subjects such as art history. Now, I was an art history major at a liberal arts college, and among the audience were a number of art majors who had emerged from the print-making and painting studios down the hall to hear Hirshman speak. Needless to say, none of us were thrilled with her advice. We were all passionate about the subjects and challenged and fulfilled by our work. Why should we have felt guilty for pursuing our interests?

With the opportunity in recent years to disprove the stereotypes about women's aptitude (or lack thereof) in math and the hard sciences, I often felt in college that I was letting down women everywhere by taking art and literature courses instead of math and physics. Studying at a women's college, I didn't have to contend with gendered expectations about the classes I should take; test tubes and equations just didn't excite me. Still, Hirshman and others like her made me feel that there were fields into which I should venture simply because they remained unconquered by women. It's taken me some time to realize that this can't be right. Can it? Just because a woman can be an astrophysicist, doesn't mean she ought to be one, and just because female art historians are not venturing into male-only territory doesn't mean they should feel guilty about studying Picasso's cubist paintings or Bernini's sublime sculptures.

What Would Smith Do?

Depressing findings from the Chronicle of Higher Education: Even though well-off colleges say they're trying hard to recruit low-income students, the numbers are going in the wrong direction. At the 75 schools with endowments over $500 million, the share of students who received Pell grants, which means they come from families that make less than $40,000 a year, dipped from 14.3 percent in 2004-05 to 13.1 percent in 2006-07. The trend is the same at the 39 tippy-top richest schools: 19.6 percent of students there were low-income in 2004-05, compared with 18 percent two years later.

The time frame under study is short, to be sure. But it also matches a period in which colleges have been talking up class diversity, and in which the idea has been floated as an alternative to race-based affirmative action. The falling numbers show that well-qualified poor applicants don't submit applications in droves to the well-endowed schools, and that the schools haven't really figured out yet how to find them. A few campuses have shown that it's possible to improve at that task. The Chronicle noted schools that are exceptions to the rule because they have posted small gains: Amherst, Holy Cross, Williams, Princeton, and the Universities of Richmond and Texas at Austin. At Smith, 25 percent-plus students are low-income; at UCLA, 35 percent. What are those schools doing differently?

That's the big question, I think. I'd love to hear other people's thoughts, but my own sense is that the answer is not the big feel-good initiative that Harvard and Yale announced this winter: expanding financial aid so that it covers families that earn up to $180,000 or $200,000 a year. As this persuasive NYT op-ed points out, most schools don't have the money to give aid to upper-middle-class families (I hope that $200,000 a year still gets you into that category) as well as truly needy ones. And so, as the op-ed by former Columbia Dean Roger Lehecka points out, the Harvard and Yale move "sets an example that is likely to make it even harder for low-income students to attend the best college for which they are qualified." So forget Harvard and Yale—among the private colleges, what's Smith doing? Or Princeton or Williams or Holy Cross or Amherst?

(Cross-posted at Convictions.)

Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, etc.

Torie,

You and Jezebel are right that Heather Mac Donald goes off the rails with her rant against drunk college girls. Which is too bad, because before that, she was making an important point. At first I wondered, why is she rehashing this now? Because I thought so many others, including Christina Hoff Sommers in her excellent Who Stole Feminism more than 15 years ago, had cast significant skepticism on the 1-in-4 trope. But, despite all the back and forth on the study by Mary Koss back in the 1980s that gave us this statistic, and despite all the healthy debate about what the real numbers are (anywhere from 2 percent on up), this number that should be controversial is still bandied about as accepted fact. (Even the CDC uses it. And my alma mater, too.)

No doubt that the activists and counselors who cite it are well-meaning and want women to be aware of what can happen to them. But it still peeves me to no end. This inflated statistic is actually harmful, because it trivializes the women—whatever percentage that may be—who actually are raped. If one in four of us is brutalized and we're all walking around just fine, then, hey, it must not be a big deal, right? It happens to everyone, so just get over it already, why don't you?

There will probably always be gray areas in defining rape. And such crimes will probably always be under-reported—it's unfortunate but true. But there have to be ways to address those problems that involve neither trumpeting a flawed statistic or attacking young women for being irresponsible.  

College Girls Are Easy?

In a Sunday column for the Los Angeles Times, Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute questions the incidence of campus rape, which is reported to affect 20 percent to 25 percent of college women. (Penn State, the college I attended, is among the schools Mac Donald scolds for repeating the statistic. I say “college I attended” because alma mater’s a little highfalutin for my state school.)

She argues that the statistics are flawed because some of the women counted as being raped did not, in fact, consider themselves to have been raped. She writes, “A 2006 survey of sorority women at the University of Virginia, for example, found that only 23% of the subjects whom the survey characterized as rape victims felt that they had been raped.” That means either A) college women are woefully uneducated about what constitutes rape or B) the stats are inflated. Mac Donald, of course, believes the answer is B, though I suspect it’s a combination of the two.

It’s fair to question the accuracy of the numbers and to debate the definition of rape. The real problem with Mac Donald’s piece is, as Jezebel puts it, that she “descends into a Laura Sessions Stepp-like rant against drunk sluts.” Feministing also slams Mac Donald for “think[ing] girls who dare to leave the house and socialize are getting what they ask for.”

The article concludes primly, “College is for learning.” I’m always confused by that admonition. Of course college is for learning. But learning and partying (that all-encompassing term for drinking, hooking up, eating greasy pizza at 4 a.m., singing along to “Livin’ on a Prayer”—sorry, getting a wee bit nostalgic here) aren’t mutually exclusive. I graduated in 2006 and had a good time in college. I partied my fair share and also managed to learn, land internships, work, and take part in extracurriculars. I guess she was just looking for a pat way to wrap up the piece, but scolding college women for spending too little time with books and too much time with booze isn’t the cure for any of the ails Mac Donald bemoans. It won’t keep women from being raped or make statistics more accurate. She seems more disturbed by girls getting drunk than the prospect of sexual assault.