The Glass-Ceiling Index

The Economist created the Glass-Ceiling Index in 2013 to commemorate International Women�s Day (March 8th).  Since then, it has been updated every year around this date, using data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD),  European Commission and the International Labor Organization (ILO), among other organizations.

The index covers 29 OECD countries and considers 10 indicators, such as women�s access to higher education, labor force participation, wage gap, business-school applications, representation in senior management and the cost of child care. The higher the overall score a country receives, the better the environment is for working women. The index rates countries on a scale of 0 to 100.

As one can see in the chart, this year the leading positions in the ranking are occupied by Nordic countries (Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Finland) where one can find similar levels of labor participation among men and women. Some common characteristics in these nations are large percentages of women with higher education degrees, lower gender wage-gaps, and higher female presence in company boards and in the Legislative chambers.

On the opposite side of the ranking there are countries like Japan, Turkey and South Korea, where women tend to have less higher education degrees than men, lower workforce participation and less presence in senior positions. The difference of wages for men and women is larger, too.

In 2016, a new indicator has been added to the index: paternity leave. Several studies have shown that as new fathers use this benefit, mothers tend to return to the labor market after giving birth, contributing then to reduce the earning gap between men and women. Of the countries considered in this index, paternity paid leave is generally short (eight weeks on average). Even though they show poor environments for working women in the overall index, Japan and South Korea stand out among OECD countries for having the longest paid leave for fathers and mothers (more than 50 weeks of paid leave). Countries like Canada, Italy and Britain don�t have this type of benefit for fathers and the U.S is the only country on this ranking that doesn�t have paid maternal leave.

As no country has the maximum score in the index, there are plenty of opportunities for improvement, even among top-ranked nations. For example, even though OECD women are more likely to have a degree than men, they have fewer opportunities to participate in the workforce and receive lower salaries. Some variables that explain this problem are the careers women are choosing and the costs associated with childbearing.

With this interactive chart you can create your own Glass Ceiling Index, varying the weights of each indicator http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/03/daily-chart-0

Support For The Death Penalty Lowest In 40 Years In The US

A new Pew Research Center survey indicates that while a majority of Americans continue to favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder, the number who support the use of the death penalty is the lowest it has been in 40 years.  Support for the death penalty was highest in the 1980s and 1990s, peaking at 78 percent in 1996 before declining steadily to 56 percent in 2015.  The decline can be seen in all political groups, but has been steepest among Democrats, only 40 percent of whom now support the death penalty.  Women and minorities are significantly less likely to support the death penalty than men and Whites.

Overall, Americans tend to think that the death penalty is morally justified in cases of murder, but they express doubts about how the death penalty is applied and whether it deters serious crime.  They are also concerned about racial disparities in the application of the death penalty.

Perhaps as a reflection of this public opinion shift, death sentences are becoming rarer and death row populations are declining.

"Most of the 32 death-penalty states have fewer people on their death rows now than they did in the peak year of 2000. The big exception is California, where dozens of convicted criminals have been sentenced to death in recent years (25 in 2013) but no one has been executed since 2006, when court rulings forbade the state from using its three-drug lethal-injection protocol. [...] The other notable exception to the trend of smaller death rows: the federal government. In 2000, only 20 prisoners were facing federal death sentences. That figure has more than tripled since, to 62 as of the beginning of this year, according to the NAACP report."

Read more:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/04/22/americas-death-row-population-is-shrinking/#more-269108
http://www.people-press.org/2015/04/16/less-support-for-death-penalty-especially-among-democrats/
http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=5156

TeachingwithData.org resources:
The Death Penalty (http://www.teachingwithdata.org/resource/3114)

Beauty Bias In Hiring Decisions: It Depends On The Context

A large body of research has shown that attractiveness confers many advantages: we tend to see attractive people as healthier, friendlier, more intelligent, and more competent, which means that attractive people are more likely to be hired and promoted than average-looking candidates, more likely to receive a loan from the bank, less likely to be convicted by a jury, more likely to be elected if running for office, ...   This bias toward attractiveness is pervasive and leads to "attractiveness discrimination"--the differential treatment of individuals based on their physical appearance.

But a new study by Sunyoung Lee (University College, London), Marko Pitesa (University of Maryland), Madan Pillutla (London Business School), and Stefan Thau (INSEAD, Singapore), suggests that attractiveness is not always an asset in the workplace.  They argue that a job candidate's perceived competence is tied to:

• diffuse status characteristics such as gender (men are generally seen as more competent than women) and attractiveness (more attractive individuals enjoy higher status in society, and are therefore seen as more competent).
• the organizational context: when one employee's success positively affects another employee's success (cooperative interdependence), the person making hiring decisions will be motivated to select the candidate seen as the most competent because this candidate would be the most instrumental to personal outcomes.  However, when one employee's success negatively affects another employee's success (competitive interdependence), the decision-maker will be motivated not to select the most competent candidate, because such a person would represent the most capable competitor to the detriment of the decision-maker's interest.

Using four experiments using different samples, selection tasks, manipulations of candidate attractiveness, and manipulations of interdependence, they tested the following four hypotheses:

1. Decision makers perceive attractive male, but not female, candidates, as more competent.
2. When decision makers expect to cooperate with the candidate, they prefer an attractive to an unattractive male, but not female, candidate.
3. When decision makers expect to compete with the candidate, they prefer an unattractive to an attractive male, but not female, candidate.
4. Higher perceived competence of attractive male candidates leads to a higher (lower) relative perceived instrumentality of the attractive candidate to the decision maker when cooperation (competition) is expected, in turn resulting in a higher (lower) selection preference for the attractive candidate.

The results of the experiments support the researchers' hypotheses: "Decision-makers associate attractiveness with competence in male, but not female candidates."  In addition, "cooperative and competitive interdependence result in opposing patterns of attractiveness discrimination.  When decision-makers expect to cooperate with the candidate, they perceive attractive male candidates as more capable cooperators and discriminate in their favor.  When decision-makers expect to compete with the candidate, they perceive male candidates as more capable competitors and discriminate against them."

Read more:
http://www.npr.org/2015/04/20/400929847/why-handsome-men-may-be-at-a-disadvantage-when-it-comes-to-hiring
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749597815000096