Women Are Not Men (Rebroadcast)

In many ways, the gender gap is closing. In others, not so much. And that's not always a bad thing.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:27Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:10Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey, podcast listeners. The episode you're about to hear is a rebroadcast, one of our favorite and most popular episodes called Women Are Not Men. Now, usually, when we put out a rerun, we make up some story about how it's particularly relevant to something going on in the world right now. But this week, honestly, I'm on spring break with my kids. We're eating crepes, touring a beer factory, watching some soccer. We'll be back next week with a new show on Bitcoin, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Talk to you then.

• 3:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  More than half of all college students in the US, about 57%, are female. As of January 2013, women were no longer barred from combat positions in the United States military. The male-female income gap is tightening. Women hold about 20% of the seats in both the US Senate and the House of Representatives, the highest proportion ever. Three of the last five Secretaries of State were women, and one of them, Condoleezza Rice, recently became one of the first female members of Augusta National Golf Club, one of the oldest and goodest good old boy clubs in America.

• 4:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Equality of the sexes has long been a goal, and in many ways, that goal is being met. But as you'll hear on this program, the variance between men and women on some dimensions is still large. In other words, women are not men.

• 4:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  In some ways, obvious.

• 4:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  And, in other ways, less so. Patents, for instance. Women file only about 7.5% of all patents.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Well, I was amazed because in many other areas, women are really closing in on men, and this gap is just so enormous.

• 4:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Jennifer Hunt. She's an economist at Rutgers. She argues that if more women were to patent, it would add nearly 3% to our per capita GDP. And why, we asked her, do so few women patent?

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Men are more likely to be in jobs involving design work or development work. So the D in the R and D.

• 5:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let's see. What else can I tell you about the differences between women and men? Did you know that women are far less likely to get struck by lightning?

• 5:23Speaker 02

  Typically, 80 to 85% of the lightning fatalities across the United States are men.

• 5:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's John Ginsinias, a lightning specialist at the National Weather Service.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  We think the reason for that is that men tend to be outside more than women, and they also tend not to go inside when lightning threatens.

• 5:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Men are also more prolific at drowning.

• 5:50Speaker 03

  Males have almost four times higher drowning rates than females.

• 5:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Julie Gilchrist from the Centers for Disease Control. It's not just that men spend more time in the water. They also overestimate their swimming abilities, and they drink more. All right, what else? Women are half as likely as men to become alcoholics, but twice as likely to have a phobia. And women are more likely to kill off a bad marriage. They file for roughly 2/3 of divorces. And here's an amazing statistic I'm sure you don't know. We uncovered one thing that women and men do in exactly the same proportion.

• 6:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  They listen all the way to the very end of each episode of Freakonomics Radio.

• 6:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  So have a seat.

• 6:48Speaker 04

  From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 7:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  On today's show, we're talking about the ways in which women are not men, for better and worse. We'll start online. Here's John Riedel. He was a professor of computer science at the University of Minnesota.

• 7:22Speaker 05

  We know that women have been increasing dramatically as a percentage of participation on just about any internet site you can imagine.

• 7:31Speaker 06

  The retweet, it's like viral gold.

• 7:33Speaker 07

  I'm going to go through a couple of things that you need to know as a new member of Tumblr. Pinterest, the hottest social media site going right now.

• 7:43Speaker 05

  So for instance, females now outnumber males on Facebook and Twitter. And that's been true just about across any aspect of the internet you can imagine, including, much to many people's surprise, online games.

• 7:57Speaker 06

  Here are a few completely incorrect stereotypes about female gamers. We are ugly. We don't like violent or scary games. We're only playing games because we lost our way to the kitchen.

• 8:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  But there's one online realm where women are not so well represented. Beray Lamb, the editor of Freakonomics.com, has a story.

• 8:26Speaker 08

  Wikipedia is by far the largest encyclopedia in history. It has more than 24 million articles in 275 languages. Launched in 2001, it's run by volunteers who call themselves Wikipedians. Now, what does this have to do with women? For years, not much. But in 2011, a New York Times article by Noam Cohen argued that only 1 in 6 Wikipedia editors were women. John Riedel was a bit skeptical, so he decided to run a study.

• 8:58Speaker 05

  Much to our shock, we found out that not only was his overall message right on, but that the best data we could get suggests that things were even worse in terms of the amount of female contribution. He had reported that about 16% of the editors were women, and we found that to be true. But we found that those females only made about 9% of the edits, which was even more surprising and disappointing.

• 9:29Speaker 08

  It might help to explain how editing on Wikipedia works. As a volunteer, you can click on any article, and unless it's a controversial gated article, you can edit it and add new information. But later, other Wikipedians can delete your edits if they don't like your changes. That's called reversion. And if your article is deemed irrelevant, it can be deleted.

• 9:50Speaker 09

  When I started editing Wikipedia, I never really thought that I was the only woman.

• 9:55Speaker 08

  That's Sarah Sturch. She's been a Wikipedia editor for nine years. Back then, it had a mere 1 million articles. Sturch remembers the first article she edited.

• 10:05Speaker 09

  My first article was deleted. I can proudly say that. I wrote it about a guy in a band that I knew and that's no longer on Wikipedia.

• 10:16Speaker 08

  This past year, Sturch has been serving as a community fellow for the Wikimedia Foundation. She's been working on the gender imbalance. She's trying to get more women involved by hosting meetups, like this one not too long ago in Oakland.

• 10:31Speaker 09

  Does anybody have any missions tonight? Any specific goals in mind? I'm taking my shoes off and getting comfortable.

• 10:36Speaker 06

  You put these two equal signs, and then you write references? You're making the reference section, basically?

• 10:42Speaker 09

  I don't know any HTML, and I'm about to make my first article. Booyaka!

• 10:51Speaker 08

  But why are women so underrepresented on Wikipedia? Especially when that's not the case on other big sites like Facebook and Twitter? John Riedel says that the Wikipedia imbalance bothers him because...

• 11:03Speaker 05

  The first place we all go these days is to Wikipedia. And it really worries me to think about half of all of humanity being left out of creating this information resource, which is the greatest encyclopedia in the history of humanity. And half of humanity's been left out of writing it. And we know for a fact that that half of humanity is getting short shrift.

• 11:30Speaker 08

  It turns out that men even dominate the Wikipedia articles that would seem to be of greatest interest to women. Sarah Sturch again.

• 11:37Speaker 09

  There's the more trivial subjects. Friendship bracelets and women's films.

• 11:43Speaker 10

  There's brassiere measurement. Oh, wow. This is not what it should be.

• 11:48Speaker 09

  But then there are the things that women know the most about, next to our doctors, so to say. Pregnancy, abortion. I just looked at miscarriage.

• 11:57Speaker 11

  That's opening. That is a huge can of worms. Talking about the pregnancy article, whatever we do. I don't want to talk about that either.

• 12:03Speaker 09

  Those articles are mainly written by men. And they're a contentious subject. Oddly enough, pregnancy, yes, is a contentious subject.

• 12:10Speaker 08

  So that seems odd, especially because 1 in 4 American doctors is female, along with half the medical school population. So why aren't women editing Wikipedia?

• 12:22Speaker 09

  When I've spoken with women around the world, the biggest reason I hear is often, "I don't have time." And that always intrigues me. I mean, I get it. I just wrapped up a full-time masters, working two jobs. You know, I'm busy. People who have children, you know, we're all busy people.

• 12:39Speaker 08

  Men do, in fact, typically have more daily leisure time than women. In the US, it's about 40 minutes a day. And women tend to do more housework, so maybe that's taking up their time. But John Riedel has another explanation.

• 12:53Speaker 05

  We know from a bunch of psychology studies that women tend to be made more uncomfortable by conflict than men are made uncomfortable by conflict. And so one of the ideas is maybe in Wikipedia, where the fundamental nature of the site is that if you want to correct what someone else has done, the way you do that is you delete it and write them a really mean message. Well, maybe that's creating a culture of conflict that is driving women away. They just don't find it a place that they enjoy being. And so they go places where they're happier.

• 13:27Speaker 08

  I remember you told me that there were some backlash to your report.

• 13:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, when we put the report out, one of the things we noticed was a bunch of bloggers, all male, we should say, came out and said, "Well, this is a waste of time. No one needs to be told that there aren't women editing Wikipedia. They should just suck it up and be tougher and come in and join. There are no technological limitations. And so it's their fault for not participating more."

• 14:02Speaker 08

  But Riedel says there's something else built into the structure and ethos of Wikipedia that might be discouraging women.

• 14:08Speaker 05

  It's not a model that everybody has to agree on the content of any one piece of information on Facebook. And I think that on Wikipedia, by contrast, there's this very different ethos, which is the job of the community is to make sure that these articles are as high quality as they can. I think that's a very good thing. And the way we get there is we delete each other's work when we don't like it. And that creates a very different style of site, a place where people are constantly being engaged by other people rejecting their work.

• 14:46Speaker 10

  I'm not super into it, to be perfectly honest. I find it not as, perhaps, rewarding as other people do. But, you know, it's cool.

• 15:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  So John Riedel's evidence suggests that women and men may have very different appetites for conflict, which might keep some women away from a place like Wikipedia. Hmm, wouldn't it be nice to know if somebody out there had looked at this in the context of, well, of men and women competing against each other?

• 15:30Speaker 12

  We looked at competitiveness.

• 15:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Ah, there you go. That's Uri Ganesi.

• 15:36Speaker 12

  I'm Uri Ganesi. I'm a behavioral economist at the Ray D. School of Management in UC San Diego. My main research interest is around incentives, how they affect people, and gender differences, some deception, anything that someone can find interesting.

• 15:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics producer Susie Lechtenberg has a story.

• 16:02Speaker 13

  Uri Ganesi has three kids, two girls and a boy.

• 16:05Speaker 12

  We really tried to raise them in a gender-neutral environment. So we bought our daughter's dolls and trucks, and they were very happy. They put the dolls on the trucks, so the truck was used as a stand. My son was also very happy to get the dolls. He smashed them to the wall and ran them over with the car.

• 16:27Speaker 13

  But it was unclear to Ganesi how much of this gender difference is nature and how much is nurture.

• 16:32Speaker 12

  When we drove back from the hospital with the babies, I drove and my wife sat near the baby. So socialization starts at the hospital or when you leave the hospital, when the baby is few days old. And it's almost impossible to disentangle this from actual behavior.

• 16:50Speaker 13

  Ganesi began to think about the salary gap between women and men. It's well-known that women earn less. The Labor Department says about 82 cents for every dollar a man earns. But why? Well, there's a lot of research out there. It suggests that, yes, there is discrimination, but also that women have different preferences than men, in work and in family. But what if there was another overlooked factor that could help explain the gender gap?

• 17:15Speaker 12

  We thought that maybe... A big and important difference is how willing men and women are to compete and how do they react to competitive incentives.

• 17:26Speaker 13

  To test if men are more competitively inclined, Ganesi and some economist colleagues wanted to do a field study. They wanted to get away from Western society to see how much culture is a factor in how competitive we are.

• 17:38Speaker 12

  We wanted to go to real cultures in the real world and see how they behave. So we took two very extreme cultures. The first one was the Maasai in Africa, in Tanzania.

• 17:51Speaker 13

  Ganesi and a group of researchers traveled to Arusha, in Tanzania. Arusha is near the Kenyan border, not far from Mount Kilimanjaro. From Arusha, they planned to travel to two Maasai villages. The Maasai are cattle herding nomads. They're perhaps the archetypal African tribe with their beaded jewelry and brightly colored robes. And as Ori Ganesi says, Maasai culture is very unkind to its women.

• 18:18Speaker 12

  A Maasai is a very extreme patriarchal society in which if you ask a man how many kids he has, he will tell you how many boys he has. Women cost about 10 cows, so they are the property of their husband. If the husband doesn't like what the wife is doing, he can beat her, he can abuse her.

• 18:40Speaker 13

  The men are usually in their late 20s to 30s when they marry, and they often have multiple wives. Their brides, generally teens, undergo female genital mutilation before marriage. Women do much of the hard labor. As one woman said, "Men treat us like donkeys."

• 19:01Speaker 13

  Ori Ganesi has studied competition before. Once, he and some colleagues had people compete solving mazes on computers. He planned to do something similar with the Maasai, except he'd have them solve the mazes on paper, using pens. Right from the start, though, things didn't go according to plan. The very first Maasai woman wasn't having it.

• 19:20Speaker 12

  She said, "Look, I'm 30. I've never held a pen in my life. I don't see a reason to start now."

• 19:25Speaker 13

  Clearly, they needed a plan B.

• 19:28Speaker 12

  The wooden maze that we came up with was the next solution.

• 19:32Speaker 13

  They spent 12 hours building a maze out of salvaged wood.

• 19:35Speaker 12

  But I'm not a very good carpenter. I'm happy I'm not a carpenter because that would have been really bad.

• 19:40Speaker 13

  And were you able to solve your own maze?

• 19:41Speaker 12

  No, no, no. It had a mistake. It was unsolvable.

• 19:46Speaker 13

  So this was a little bit stressful. Here, the researchers were 10,000 miles from home.

• 19:51Speaker 12

  We have hundreds of people waiting for us in the field, and we don't have a task. On the way to the hotel, I see tennis balls in the bucket. Now, who would have imagined that in Russia, you'll see tennis balls and the bucket in a store? But I did. I bought in those tennis balls and the buckets, and it turned out to be a perfect task.

• 20:17Speaker 13

  This is what they'd have people do. Participants were asked to toss a tennis ball, underhanded, into a bucket about 10 feet away. They had 10 chances. They were matched with another unidentified person playing the same game on the other side of the building.

• 20:31Speaker 12

  The experimenter explained to them the task, you know, throwing the ball into the bucket, and asked them a very simple question. Do you want to be paid, say, $1 per every success? It wasn't $1, but it was equivalent to that. Or you can be paid $3 for every success that you have, every ball that lands in the bucket, but only if you do better than the person behind the corner.

• 20:59Speaker 13

  Basically, if the player picked the more competitive option, they could get paid three times the amount of money. Ganesi says it wasn't long before word got around that these "ridiculous Americans" were paying villagers to throw tennis balls into buckets. People came from all over the village to play. And what happened?

• 21:19Speaker 12

  Many more men chose to compete than women. About twice as many men chose to compete than women did, which is very much in line with what we observe when we run it in the US or in any Western society.

• 21:34Speaker 13

  50% of Maasai men chose the more competitive option, meaning they chose to be paid more money if they made more baskets than the person around the corner. The women had less appetite for risk. 26% of the women chose the more competitive option. Now, this may not come as a huge surprise that men raised in an extreme patriarchy are more competitive than women.

• 21:55Speaker 12

  So the next step was to go to our anthropologist friends and ask them, "What's the other extreme? Where can we find a society in which women are in charge?"

• 22:07Speaker 13

  All of these anthropologist friends pointed to the Kasi in northeast India. The Kasi are one of the world's few matrilineal societies, where the youngest Kasi daughter inherits the family's money and property. Men move into their wives' houses when they marry, and children take their mother's family name. Overall, life for the Kasi women is pretty good.

• 22:36Speaker 12

  In the Kasi hills where they live, they clearly have a much higher stand than probably anywhere else in the world. The women are in charge. The women decide what kind of crops they're going to raise. They're in charge of deciding how to spend the money, the family's money. The household decisions are theirs. They go to the market to sell the items. You know, when you go to visit their home, they will greet you. They are just used to being considered equal to the men.

• 23:07Speaker 13

  The Kasi hills are really rainy. The region holds the world's record for the most annual rainfall. There's something else unusual about the place that Ori Ganesi noticed when he arrived.

• 23:18Speaker 12

  As an economist, I tried to quantify everything and tried to say, "Oh, they are nice seven," or something like that. You can't, I don't know how to do that. But they were just, the feeling was very nice. So we walked around in the nights in the middle of the rice fields, and people are just nice to each other.

• 23:33Speaker 13

  "People are so nice to each other," he says.

• 23:36Speaker 12

  At one point, I had $60,000 in cash in my suitcase, and I left them with the cook over there in the house that we rented in the village without any worry. You know, the guy could have taken the money, that's like taking $60 million from me and disappear somewhere in India. I didn't have to worry about that.

• 23:56Speaker 13

  And so, in this place where prize money left untended in a suitcase is fine, and the kindness is unmeasurable, the study began.

• 24:06Speaker 12

  Same experiment as we did with the Maasai. Everything is the same. We took the same buckets, the same bowls from Tanzania all the way to India.

• 24:14Speaker 13

  They started with two opposing hypotheses.

• 24:16Speaker 12

  The first one is that culture is not really important. It's the same story as my kids. You know, we are born differently and we just react to this. And the alternative hypothesis is that when women are brought in a culture in which dealing with money, making decisions is part of their daily routine, and that's what they observe as girls, they're going to be just as competitive as men.

• 24:41Speaker 13

  And what did they find?

• 24:43Speaker 12

  And that's what we found. We found that culture was extremely important.

• 24:49Speaker 13

  Before we delve into the results, remember how the game worked. Players had two options. They could get paid X amount for every time they made a basket, or they could pick the more competitive option and get paid three times the amount if they did better than their anonymous opponent. So how did the Kosai people do? Fifty-four percent of Kosai women picked the more competitive option. Thirty-nine percent of Kosai men made the same choice. Kosai women were more likely to choose to compete than even the super patriarchal Maasai men we heard about earlier.

• 25:21Speaker 12

  So the implications are clear. It's not that men and women are not born differently. I'm sure they are. And you can come up with good evolutionary stories why men are more competitive than women. What we showed is that that's not the only factor that goes in, which again is not a big surprise, but the other factor, the culture is so big, can be so big that it can just overturn the results. So if you grow up in a matrilineal society, women are actually more competitive than men. So it can completely override any evolutionary explanation, any nature kind of reason. Nurture could be that big. And I think that that's the main result of this study, that in the right environment, women are going to be just as competitive as men.

• 26:08Speaker 13

  In other words, as Ori Ganesi and his co-author John List say, nurture is king. Or in this case, nurture is queen. So what's the solution? How do we begin to resocialize our girls? Ganesi says, not so fast.

• 26:24Speaker 12

  I'm not convinced, for example, that I want my daughters to be more competitive. I'm not sure that it's actually good. Maybe we should concentrate on making boys less competitive.

• 26:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, we take a look at something puzzling that's happened to women's happiness. Why?

• 26:53Speaker 14

  First of all, we call it a paradox because we don't know the answer.

• 26:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  And later, if you're rooting for women and men to become totally and completely equal, should you root for women to commit more crimes?

• 27:07Speaker 14

  If you look at all different types of crime that the police enforce, 75% to 80% of those offenders are male.

• 27:33Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 28:38Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 29:43Speaker 04

  From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 29:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Today's program is called Women Are Not Men. Now, there are about a million ways to think about that simple sentence, a million ways to argue with it. We're not trying to start any arguments. We are just trying to look at the data that show differences between men and women, try to figure out why those differences exist, how meaningful they are. What you need to know for this next story is that there's a lot of research that ties income to happiness. Generally, more money means a higher level of happiness or well-being. Over the past 30 years, women have made big gains in education and in the workforce, which means they're making more money than ever before. And so the thinking goes, women should also be happier than ever before.

• 30:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  Shouldn't they? Betsy Stevenson is an economist who shuttles between university and government jobs. Along with Justin Wolfers, her domestic partner and fellow economist, Stevenson wrote a paper exploring female happiness.

• 30:59Speaker 15

  Women are reporting life satisfaction levels that are lower than they were in 1970. Now, there's a couple of things to note. One is that women told us that they were happier with their lives in the 70s than men were. So we had a happiness gap in the 70s where women reported greater well-being than men. And what we have now is a new gap where men report greater life satisfaction than women. The magnitudes here aren't huge, but it's the fact that the directional shift is the exact opposite of what we would have expected, given that it's women's lives that have really

• 31:42Speaker 15

  become more expansive, more options, and a greater ability for them to choose the type of life that would make them best off.

• 31:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  So how do you explain it, Betsy? I mean, women were given a larger choice set, which economists tell us larger choice sets to a degree are really good. Women were given and accomplished in a lot of other areas that we would associate with, you know, benefits of different kinds: financial benefits, psychic benefits, and so on. How do you account for the decline? How do you account for the paradox? What are the mechanisms by which that paradox exists?

• 32:16Speaker 15

  Well, you know, first of all, we call it a paradox because we don't know the answer. What we found was this decline in women's well-being relative to men was seen, not just in the United States, but was seen in Europe. It was seen in every country where we were able to get a long enough time period to be able to look at several decades of trends in well-being. And it occurred in countries where the gains for women differed substantially. So I know a lot of people would like to say, "Oh, well, this just goes to show that, you know, women entering the labor force has been very difficult for them, and it's reduced their well-being."

• 32:58Speaker 15

  But, you know, our research doesn't make that case because we saw the declines in well-being relative to men in countries where women had very little change in their labor force participation, and similar changes in countries where women had very large gains.

• 33:14Speaker 15

  In their labor force participation.

• 33:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  You make the point that women's happiness declined as they entered the workforce in greater and greater numbers and started to earn more money relative to men, although still less relative to men. And the gains from women yielded greater happiness for men relative to the women. Could it be in some way that men get happier, for whatever reasons, because there are more women in the workforce?

• 33:42Speaker 15

  Well, let me be clear. We put that out as a hypothesis. Not that there's evidence that that's definitely what's happening. I mean, what we know is that the correlation is that over a time period where women have gained more autonomy, more financial power, more market power, more responsibility and power within their families, that they have become less happy and men have become slightly happier. And so one possibility is that somehow, you know, this sort of revolution in our lives has actually benefited men more than it's benefited women.

• 34:22Speaker 15

  And, you know, the comment that Steve Levitt made to us was, of course, women have become less happy. They're living their lives like men, and now they're just as happy as men, which is not as happy.

• 34:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right. So, Betsy, no offense, but this is a little bit depressing. So, do you have any good news or at least advice about what can be done? What are some things that women can do to recapture or get more happiness in the modern world?

• 34:59Speaker 15

  You know, I agree with you that the whole conversation's a little bit depressing. And I think that, you know, trying to be maximizers in everything might not lead to the greatest happiness. And so trying to figure out what it is that's really important to us and letting other things slide and feeling OK about that, feeling like it's OK that I'm doing the thing that's most important to me, or that, you know, I'm not giving my all at work because I'm splitting my energy between work and my kids, and I'm OK with that. You know, but I also... You know, I also hesitate to say that there's definitely a problem here.

• 35:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah. What about earning more money, though? Would that be a good idea? Would the median woman become a bit happier if she were able to earn more money?

• 35:47Speaker 15

  I think sometimes people get a little bit confused about the data on this. But what we see really strongly in every dataset you look at is that richer people are happier than poorer people. And what we see is that, over time, when countries get richer, their citizens get happier on average. And so, women putting themselves in positions where they have a greater ability to earn income is really important. Now, you know, there is this other thing which I think I should mention, which is that often, women are underpaid. And they're underpaid because they simply don't ask. You know, they don't ask for the raise they should get. And there's really compelling research on this, that women tend to not negotiate as

• 36:32Speaker 15

  hard, tend to be less likely to ask for a raise. And so, if you could be earning more doing the exact same job that you're doing, I think you'd be better off. So you should go out there and ask for that raise.

• 36:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  That was The Economist Betsy Stevenson on the gender gap in earnings and in happiness. Now, there's one more difference we want to look into today, an activity that we should be very, very happy that women do much, much less frequently than men.

• 37:10Speaker 14

  So where we see the starkest gender differences are for homicide, rape, robbery, those sorts of major felony types of violence.

• 37:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Jennifer Schwartz. She's a sociologist at Washington State University.

• 37:23Speaker 14

  And I study gender and crime, and mainly, I'm interested in why females offend, why they don't offend, if they have changed the types or amount of offending that they do.

• 37:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, then. How much offending do women do?

• 37:40Speaker 14

  If you look at all different types of crime that the police enforce, 75% to 80% of those offenders are male.

• 37:48Speaker 16

  There are only two crimes in the United States today for which women get arrested more than men.

• 37:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  Steve Levitt is my Freakonomics friend and co-author.

• 37:57Speaker 16

  One of those is prostitution. And it turns out the other one is being a runaway. If you're a juvenile and you run away from home, you can get arrested for that. And it turns out, girls get arrested more than boys for running away from home. Other than that, men run the table on women when it comes to crime.

• 38:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  For Jennifer Schwartz, the idea of thinking about women and crime was a natural outgrowth of thinking about the feminist movement.

• 38:23Speaker 14

  I think the hook for me was, you know, taking the common sense, or what seemed like common sense, that as women gained more freedoms and as women had more access to opportunities, that they would engage in more crime. And that seemed to be what the common sense notion was. But once I started looking at the data, it seemed the opposite was true, or at least there was no support for this idea that women's liberation would increase their offending. And so I think that sort of puzzle made me want to know, well, why are women offending in the first place? And why aren't they offending anymore, given that we think that women have come so far and have so many opportunities? What's holding them back from offending? If they're making, you know, gains in other avenues and, you know, legitimate work, why aren't they making gains in the underworld, I guess? And so that was the hook for me,

• 39:07Speaker 14

  trying to figure out that puzzle of, why aren't women offending more, given that their status in society has, you know, bettered for the most part?

• 39:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, to be fair, women have started committing some crimes more often: forgery, embezzlement, even autotheft a little. But compared to men, their rates are still very low.

• 39:33Speaker 14

  I know I have a little bit of mixed feelings because that's what, you know, I think about it. I say, oh, I'm not rooting for women to become more criminal or to have more criminal opportunities. I guess it's just another forum or another context in which women are blocked from, you know, achieving at high levels. But, you know, it's a, you know, sort of a difficult thing to unpackage, I guess.

• 40:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  It may be difficult to unpackage, but let's be clear. It's a good thing that women, having closed a lot of gender gaps over the past few decades, aren't rushing to close the crime gap. There are other gaps that one might hope will be preserved, or better yet, closed, but in the opposite direction. In other words, men should aspire to get to where women already are. Did you know, for instance, that a man is much less likely than a woman to do you a favor? Men are much worse at washing their hands, which, if you're thinking about a hospital setting in particular, can be bad news. There's also research showing that men, if you ask them a question, are thoroughly incapable

• 40:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  of simply saying, "I don't know," even if, in fact, they don't know the answer. Now, why is that? Let me betray my gender here for a moment and simply say this: I don't know.

• 41:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey, podcast listeners. Next week's episode is in response to the millions of emails that you wrote asking for a show on Bitcoin.

• 41:22Speaker 17

  It's a little bit like dogs watching TV. It's like, it's all very interesting, but like, whatever, until another dog shows up on the screen and then the dog freaks out. Economists, like, this stuff is all like, whatever, technology, geek, nerds, whatever. And then currency is the flag, right? And so, the minute the word currency shows up, like, all the economists perk up. Because if there's one thing economists are all experts on, it's currency.

• 41:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Why, everybody who doesn't hate Bitcoin loves it. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio.

• 41:49Speaker 04

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC and Dubner Productions. Our staff includes David Herman, Greg Rosalsky, Greta Cohn, Borey Lamb, Susie Lecktonberg, and Chris Bannon. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or go to Freakonomics.com, where you'll find lots of radio, a blog, the books, and more.

• 42:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by EverPure. Is the value of AI not living up to the promise? The problem is probably your data, not your AI models. When it's scattered across different systems, getting your data AI-ready is a challenge. You keep your AI waiting and everything slows down. EverPure unifies your data so you can see it, understand it, and control it all from one simple place and get it AI-ready fast. Unlock the true value of your AI at everpuredata.com. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Ozempic. Innovation happens through rethinking what's possible, and when it comes to GLP-1s, Ozempic pill does just that.

• 43:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Learn more about Ozempic semaglutide tablets, 4 and 9mg, by calling 1-833-OZEMPIC or visit ozempic.com to view the medication guide and ask your doctor what's possible with FDA-approved Ozempic pill. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Southern Company. The world and its energy needs are always changing. Southern Company's commitment to meeting this demand stays the same. That's because Southern Company believes energy is more than a utility, it's what powers possibilities. So they are looking ahead and investing $80 billion in infrastructure upgrades and are committed to fueling growth in ways that benefit all customers so that reliable and

• 43:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  affordable energy is accessible for generations to come. Go to southerncompany.com to learn more. Southern Company, building the future of energy.

• 44:04Speaker 18

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