Marriage and the So-Called Gender Pay Gap

This has become something of an old chestnut.  But it is rubbish.  Because of the larger standard deviation of IQ in males, there are far more men than women in the upper ranges of IQ -- and IQ is a strong determinant of income.  So high income, high IQ women in fact have an objective surplus of compatible men to choose from.

So why the beef?  It's just the latest excuse for an old, old problem: Women in their 30s and 40 asking "Where are all the men?"  So where are they?

Women with good juices grab a desirable man in their teens and 20s, while there are plenty of men in their age-range still single.  So fussy women who fail to do that grab in their 20s find that all the desirable men are married.  They are left with other women's rejects.  IQ is not the problem. The lack of a strong sexual motivation is.

A strongly motivated woman will make allowances for the inevitable male inadequacies while the less motivated ones are more fussy and wait for perfection. But perfection seldom comes so all too often that fussiness will lead to a lonely old age.


Highly educated professional women are finding fewer well-suited men available to marry.

In this era of “equity equals justice” radicalism where the gender pay gap is regularly trotted out by leftists as an example of social injustice, a recent study provides an interesting twist. According to a study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, the number of women in higher income brackets is increasing … and these women are running into a shortage of marital partners. In other words, these unmarried women are having trouble find men to marry who match or exceed their own income level.

The study concludes that there are “large deficits in the supply of potential male spouses,” and that “one implication is that the unmarried may remain unmarried or marry less well-suited partners.” The study’s lead author, Daniel T. Lichter, notes that while women do indeed seek to marry for love, “it also is fundamentally an economic transaction.”

Fox Business observes, “It seems many men aren’t getting up to the income level that women prefer in a potential marriage partner.” Evidently, no matter what the social justice warriors may claim, there is an innate expectation in the minds women that values men as husbands who will be the primary bread winner. Who knew that gender roles were so ingrained?

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Media lauded a paper about religious children being mean, less eager to admit it was debunked

Nothing like a good piece of confirmation bias.

Do you remember that paper from a few years back that reported religious children were meaner than their secular peers? It was shared by outlets including the Los Angeles Times, Slate, and the Guardian, none of whom, at the time of this writing, have issued updates to their breathless recitations of the conclusions of this now-debunked paper.

Slate concluded, piously, “Perhaps the thing to take away from this is that studies that tout the moral authority of a certain community should be taken with a grain of salt. Or, more biblically: Judge not, lest ye be judged.”

It was clear all along that something was not right with the paper, published in 2015 by Current Biology. First, it measured altruism through subjective metrics such as how mean children thought actions such as pushing were and how harshly they’d punish the perpetrators. Another one of the tests measured how many stickers they were willing to share with others. On average, nonreligious children gave away four stickers, while religious children only gave away a mere — three.

Some writers expressed an initial skepticism about the findings, but it didn't take long before they were debunked entirely. Azim Shariff, a social psychologist who studies the intersection of morality and religion, found the results particularly odd. They didn’t match up to the findings he’d discovered in his own work. His study had indicated that religious participation typically increased generosity.

Upon looking more closely at the data, Shariff found something wrong. Due to a coding error, the paper’s authors factored in country of origin in a totally nonsensical way. Once that coding error was fixed, the correlation disappeared.

This all happened in 2016, but the journal that published the paper didn’t formally retract it until just last month. Now that the paper has a giant red “RETRACTED” stamped on it, hopefully it won’t continue to be cited as fact, as it was in another article in August.

Some news outlets, though, still haven't changed their reporting. The science journal made the (very belated) right call to formally retract the article, but it’s also important that those who disseminated it correct the widely shared and false findings. The outlets that published the results of the paper ought to update their articles, even if that's painful for their confirmation bias.

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Puberty Blocking Drugs Used On “Trans Kids” Have Killed More Than 6,000 People

Here’s a horror show of a story that you’re probably not going to see on CNN anytime soon. A report emerged on Thursday indicating that the puberty-blocking drug Leuprolide Acetate (Lupron) has resulted in tens of thousands of serious “adverse reactions” in patients, including more than six thousand deaths. That’s bad enough, but it’s even more significant when you consider that this is one of the drugs being administered by doctors to so-called “transgender children” to unnaturally prevent their normal sexual development. And the testing done on the drug by the FDA for such applications appears to be thin at best. (Daily Wire)

More than 6,300 adults have died from reactions to a drug that is used as a puberty blocker in gender-confused children, Food & Drug Administration data reportedly shows.

“Between 2012 and June 30 of this year, the FDA documented over 40,764 adverse reactions suffered by patients who took Leuprolide Acetate (Lupron), which is used as a hormone blocker. More than 25,500 reactions logged from 2014-2019 were considered ‘serious,’ including 6,370 deaths,” The Christian Post reported on Thursday.

“Lupron is being prescribed off-label for use in children who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria despite the lack of formal FDA approval for that purpose,” the outlet explained.

You can do a search of the FDA’s incident reports here and enter the name of the drug (Lupron) to see their data.

Despite the possible adverse side effects, there are approved uses for Lupron, but it tends to be administered only for serious conditions. It’s useful in treating prostate cancer in men and endometriosis in women. For children, it is sometimes used to treat precocious puberty, a condition where children begin puberty at an unusually early age, but only for a short time.

The list of potential side effects for the drug is alarming. It includes breast disorders, malignant neoplasms, and psychiatric and nervous disorders. Stop and think about that for a moment. If you have a child that is already so confused that they are questioning their “gender identity” before they’ve even reached the age where their body is dealing with such issues, do you want to give them a drug that can produce psychiatric or nervous disorders?

To top it all off, the FDA has never formally approved the use of Lupron for treating gender dysphoria in children. Two years ago the agency announced that it was beginning a study of “nervous system and psychiatric events in association with the use of … a class of drugs including Lupron, in pediatric patients.” We don’t know the results of that study yet.

What adults, including transgender individuals, choose to do with their own bodies is their business as long as they’re willing to take responsibility for the results. But the experiments being performed on confused young children who have been convinced that they were somehow born the “wrong gender” are simply monstrous.

Blocking the natural arrival of puberty in otherwise healthy children should be considered child abuse and medical malpractice to begin with. All of the questions raised in this report about one of the drugs being administered to do such things makes it all the worse.

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You DON'T need to cut out red meat: Scientists say official advice on eating less beef, pork and lamb is based on bad evidence and having it four times a week poses 'NO cancer risk'

There is no reason to cut back on red meat for health reasons, according to a controversial claim by a group of leading scientists.

Researchers in Canada, Spain and Poland have cast a shadow over eating advice adopted by health organisations around the world. In a landmark paper, the academics analysed past studies of how eating meat affected the health of more than four million people.

They found no evidence that eating beef, pork and lamb could increase the rates of heart disease, cancer, stroke or type 2 diabetes – despite fears.

And the team also said they found nothing strong enough to signal that people should cut down on red meat, adding that the quality of evidence was too low for findings to be concerning.

Officials have for years tried to encourage diet changes – the NHS suggests people limit themselves to 70g of red meat a day, about 1.5 rashers of bacon.

Scientists in the UK are torn over the research, describing it as 'very good quality' but hesitating to agree with telling people to cut back on meat.

The study was a series of five reviews of past research, carried out by scientists from the Dalhousie and McMaster universities in Canada as well as the Cochrane research centres in Spain and Poland.

It considered 61 studies which had monitored the health of more than four million people, as well as 12 which trialled changing the diets of about 54,000.

The team found the results of past research were of too poor a quality to make any suggestions about the way people lived their lives. As a result, a panel of 14 experts from seven countries said people should continue to eat the current average amount of red meat.

This was between three and four portions per week for North Americans and Europeans, they said.

In an editorial published alongside the papers, Dr Aaron Carroll and Dr Tiffany Doherty, from Indiana University, wrote: 'The overall recommendations, contrary to almost all others that exist, suggested that adults continue to eat their current levels of red and processed meat, unless they felt inclined to change them themselves.

'This is sure to be controversial, but it is based on the most comprehensive review of the evidence to date. 'Because that review is inclusive, those who seek to dispute it will be hard pressed to find appropriate evidence with which to build an argument.'

The Indiana researchers even suggested scientists should stop doing studies trying to work out the effects of meat simply by watching people.

The reason the previous results were so weak, they said, was that studies were so vague there was no way of proving a direct link between meat and health.

Experts are divided on whether to agree with the paper or to err on the side of caution.

Professor Tim Key, from the University of Oxford, said: 'There's substantial evidence that processed meat can cause bowel cancer – so much so that the World Health Organization has classified it as carcinogenic since 2015.

'Today's new publication reports results essentially identical to the existing evidence, but describes the impact very differently, contradicting the general consensus among cancer research experts.

'Recent estimates suggest over 5,000 people in the UK develop bowel cancer due to the consumption of processed meat each year, which is why the government recommends that people keep their total intake of red and processed meat to no more than about 70g per day.'

This amount - 70g - works out equal to about one lamb chop, one pork sausage, half a beef burger, or one-and-a-half rashers of bacon.

Dr David Nunan, also a professor at Oxford, said: 'A recommendation to reduce consumption will at best move more people to the average.

'And if that also means some move from average to below average this is unlikely, for most, to lead to harm in terms of health outcomes.

'But again, that is if we believe the findings, which the authors of the current studies put little belief in.

'All this says nothing about individual risk, as even if we believe that at best 12 out of 1,000 people who consume slightly less red or processed meat will be saved from a bad health outcome, no one can ever predict if you will be one of those 12.'

Dr Marco Springmann, an environment and health expert at Oxford, added: 'The recommendation that adults continue current red and processed meat consumption is based on a skewed reading and presentation of the scientific evidence.

'By presenting the evidence for a change in consumption that is less than half of what is customary (for a change of less than half a serving a day compared to a change of one serving per day as is customarily used), it was perhaps inevitable that the authors would report only small potential health benefits of reductions in red and processed meat consumption.

'Even with this skewed way of presenting the evidence, the reviews clearly indicate the benefits of reducing red and processed meat consumption.'

The research was published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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