You need to show that you are not a robot. Leopoldina Fortunati et al. New Media & Society, March 14, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819831971
Abstract: Given that today 60% of Internet traffic is generated by bots, ‘CAPTCHA’ (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) tests that are supposedly impossible to be done by robots have been introduced. What are the cognitive and emotional effects of these tests on Internet users? Does this request to demonstrate they are not a robot affect users’ identity as human beings? To answer these questions, we selected two groups (117 and 116 respondents, respectively). An online questionnaire that differed only in the task was proposed: we asked the first group to complete some CAPTCHA tests, and the second group to complete some logic tests. In addition to other questions in both versions, we introduced the TLX scale (NASA). Preliminary results show that CAPTCHA execution is associated with feelings of alienation and that the user’s self-perception of humanity is influenced by the execution of the two different types of test.
Keywords Bots, CAPTCHA, human identity, TLX scale, Turing test
Thursday, March 14, 2019
Effects of boardroom gender diversity on CEO compensation & dismissal decisions: Largely disappear when we account for geographic distance (more remote from HQ & more reliant on hard info)
Alam, Zinat S. and Chen, Mark A. and Ciccotello, Conrad S. and Ryan, Harley E., Gender and Geography in the Boardroom: What Really Matters for Board Decisions? (December 18, 2018). SSRN, https://ssrn.com/abstract=3336445
Abstract: Recent literature has shown that gender diversity in the boardroom seems to influence key monitoring decisions of boards. In this paper, we examine whether the observed relation between gender diversity and board decisions is due to a confounding factor, namely, directors’ geographic distance from headquarters. Using data on residential addresses for over 4,000 directors of S&P 1500 firms, we document that female directors cluster in large metropolitan areas and tend to live much farther away from headquarters compared to their male counterparts. We also reexamine prior findings in the literature on how boardroom gender diversity affects key board decisions. We use data on direct airline flights between U.S. locations to carry out an instrumental variables approach that exploits plausibly exogenous variation in both gender diversity and geographic distance. The results show that the effects of boardroom gender diversity on CEO compensation and CEO dismissal decisions found in the prior literature largely disappear when we account for geographic distance. Overall, our results support the view that gender-diverse boards are “tougher monitors” not because of gender differences per se, but rather because they are more geographically remote from headquarters and hence more reliant on hard information such as stock prices. The findings thus suggest that board gender policies, such as quotas, could have unintended consequences for some firms.
Keywords: Board of Directors, Gender, Geography
Abstract: Recent literature has shown that gender diversity in the boardroom seems to influence key monitoring decisions of boards. In this paper, we examine whether the observed relation between gender diversity and board decisions is due to a confounding factor, namely, directors’ geographic distance from headquarters. Using data on residential addresses for over 4,000 directors of S&P 1500 firms, we document that female directors cluster in large metropolitan areas and tend to live much farther away from headquarters compared to their male counterparts. We also reexamine prior findings in the literature on how boardroom gender diversity affects key board decisions. We use data on direct airline flights between U.S. locations to carry out an instrumental variables approach that exploits plausibly exogenous variation in both gender diversity and geographic distance. The results show that the effects of boardroom gender diversity on CEO compensation and CEO dismissal decisions found in the prior literature largely disappear when we account for geographic distance. Overall, our results support the view that gender-diverse boards are “tougher monitors” not because of gender differences per se, but rather because they are more geographically remote from headquarters and hence more reliant on hard information such as stock prices. The findings thus suggest that board gender policies, such as quotas, could have unintended consequences for some firms.
Keywords: Board of Directors, Gender, Geography
For women, sex economy has some poor, some middle class, & some millionaires; for men, there is a small number of super-billionaires & huge masses with almost nothing
Attraction Inequality and the Dating Economy. Bradford Tuckfield . Quillette, March 12, 2019, https://quillette.com/2019/03/12/attraction-inequality-and-the-dating-economy/
[...] The economist Robin Hanson has written some fascinating articles that use the cold and inhuman logic economists are famous for to compare inequality of income to inequality of access to sex. If we follow a few steps of his reasoning, we can imagine the world of dating as something like an economy, in which people possess different amounts of attractiveness (the dating economy’s version of dollars) and those with more attractiveness can access more and better romantic experiences (the dating economy’s version of consumer goods). If we think of dating in this way, we can use the analytical tools of economics to reason about romance in the same way we reason about economies.
One of the useful tools that economists use to study inequality is the Gini coefficient. This is simply a number between zero and one that is meant to represent the degree of income inequality in any given nation or group. An egalitarian group in which each individual has the same income would have a Gini coefficient of zero, while an unequal group in which one individual had all the income and the rest had none would have a Gini coefficient close to one. [...]
Some enterprising data nerds have taken on the challenge of estimating Gini coefficients for the dating “economy.” Among heterosexuals, this actually means calculating two Gini coefficients: one for men, and one for women. This is because heterosexual men and heterosexual women essentially occupy two distinct “economies” or “worlds,” with men competing only with each other for women and women competing only with each other for men. The Gini coefficient for men collectively is determined by women’s collective preferences, and vice versa. If women all find every man equally attractive, the male dating economy will have a Gini coefficient of zero. If men all find the same one woman attractive and consider all other women unattractive, the female dating economy will have a Gini coefficient close to one. The two coefficients do not directly influence each other at all, and each sex collectively sets the Gini coefficient—that is, the level of inequality—for the other sex.
A data scientist representing the popular dating app “Hinge” reported on the Gini coefficients he had found in his company’s abundant data, treating “likes” as the equivalent of income. He reported that heterosexual females faced a Gini coefficient of 0.324, while heterosexual males faced a much higher Gini coefficient of 0.542. So neither sex has complete equality: in both cases, there are some “wealthy” people with access to more romantic experiences and some “poor” who have access to few or none. But while the situation for women is something like an economy with some poor, some middle class, and some millionaires, the situation for men is closer to a world with a small number of super-billionaires surrounded by huge masses who possess almost nothing. According to the Hinge analyst:
Quartz reported on this finding, and also cited another article about an experiment with Tinder that claimed that that “the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men.” These studies examined “likes” and “swipes” on Hinge and Tinder, respectively, which are required if there is to be any contact (via messages) between prospective matches.
Another study, reported in Business Insider, found a pattern in messaging on dating apps that is consistent with these findings. Yet another study, run by OkCupid on their huge datasets, found that women rate 80 percent of men as “worse-looking than medium,” and that this 80 percent “below-average” block received replies to messages only about 30 percent of the time or less. By contrast, men rate women as worse-looking than medium only about 50 percent of the time, and this 50 percent below-average block received message replies closer to 40 percent of the time or higher.
If these findings are to be believed, the great majority of women are only willing to communicate romantically with a small minority of men while most men are willing to communicate romantically with most women. The degree of inequality in “likes” and “matches” credibly measures the degree of inequality in attractiveness, and necessarily implies at least that degree of inequality in romantic experiences. It seems hard to avoid a basic conclusion: that the majority of women find the majority of men unattractive and not worth engaging with romantically, while the reverse is not true. Stated in another way, it seems that men collectively create a “dating economy” for women with relatively low inequality, while women collectively create a “dating economy” for men with very high inequality.
[...]
There are no villains in this story. Nobody can or should be blamed for his or her honest preferences, and if women collectively believe that most men are unattractive, what grounds does anyone, male or female, have to argue with them? We may pity the large majority of men who are regarded as unattractive and who have few or no romantic experiences while a small percentage of attractive men have many. Just as much, consider that we live in a monogamous culture, and so the 20 percent of men who are regarded as attractive can only be in committed relationships with at most 20 percent of women. We may just as well pity the rest of the women, who are destined to be in committed relationships, if they pursue a relationship at all, with someone who they regard as unattractive. The only villain in this story is nature, which has molded our preferences so that this tragic mismatch of attraction and availability occurs.
To those who study nature, the various gender gaps in romantic life will not come as a surprise. Evolutionary biologists have seen these types of patterns many times before and can explain each of them. The relative perceived attractiveness of younger women vs. older can be explained by the higher fertility of younger adult women. The libido gap can be explained by the different mating strategies instinctively pursued by the distinct sexes.
As for the different Gini coefficients consistently reported for men and women, they are not consistent with a monogamous social structure in which most people can pair with someone of comparable perceived attractiveness. However, this is not surprising: monogamy is rare in nature. The revealed preference among most women to attempt to engage romantically only with the same small percentage of men who are perceived as attractive is consistent with the social system called “polygyny,” in which a small percentage of males monopolize the mating opportunities with all females, while many other males have no access to mates. Again, this will not come as a surprise to scientists. The evolutionary biologist David P. Barash wrote an article in Psychology Today titled “People Are Polygynous,” citing extensive biological and historical evidence that throughout most of history, our species has practiced “harem polygyny,” a form of polygamy.
There are many animals of all kinds that practice polygyny in one form or another, including many of our primate relatives like gorillas and lemurs. For animals, social structures are not an object of reflection or systematic attempted reform—they just do what their instincts and upbringing dictate. But it is the destiny of humans to constantly fight against nature. We light fires for warmth, build air conditioners for cooling, invent soap and plumbing and antibiotics and trains and radios in an effort to conquer the constraints of nature. But when we turn on our smartphones built on ingeniously developed transistors that show we can overcome nature’s entropy, we log on to dating apps and enter a world that is built on shadows of the social structures of our primeval savanna ancestors. Technology has not enabled us to escape the brutal social inequalities dictated by our animal natures.
This is not to say that we haven’t tried. The institution of monogamy is itself a “redistributive” type of policy: like capping the income of billionaires, it caps the total allowed romantic partners of the most attractive, so that unattractive people have much better chances to find a partner. The marriages that we read about in historical accounts that are based on prudence and family arrangement make more sense when we realize that basing marriage on mutual attraction leads so many—both men and women—to be unsatisfied with the outcome, since most women find most men unattractive. All of the world’s great religious traditions have extolled chastity as a great virtue and taught that there are higher goals than sexual satisfaction—these teachings add meaning to the otherwise “poor” lives of the majority of people who are regarded as perpetually unattractive.
Even in centuries-old fairy tales like The Frog Prince and Beauty and the Beast, we see our culture’s attempt to come to terms with the paradigm of a woman regarded as attractive pairing with a man who she regards as unattractive. The differing Gini coefficients faced by men and women guarantee that this will be a common—or even the most common—romantic pairing in a monogamous culture. In these fairy tales (depending on which version you read), the beautiful woman first accepts or even loves the hideous man. The sincere love of a woman transforms the unattractive man into something better: more handsome, richer, and royal. Allegorically, these stories are trying to show men and women a way to relate one-on-one even though most women find most men unattractive; they are trying to show that sincerely offered love, and love based on something other than sexual attraction, can transmute ugliness to beauty and make even a relationship with unmatching attractiveness levels successful.
[...]
The result of these cultural changes is that the highly unequal social structures of the prehistoric savanna homo sapiens are reasserting themselves, and with them the dissatisfactions of the unattractive “sexually underprivileged” majority are coming back. It is ironic that the progressives who cheer on the decline of religion and the weakening of “outdated” institutions like monogamy are actually acting as the ultimate reactionaries, returning us to the oldest and most barbaric, unequal animal social structures that have ever existed. In this case it is the conservatives who are cheering for the progressive ideal of “sexual income redistribution” through a novel invention: monogamy.
[...]
[...] The economist Robin Hanson has written some fascinating articles that use the cold and inhuman logic economists are famous for to compare inequality of income to inequality of access to sex. If we follow a few steps of his reasoning, we can imagine the world of dating as something like an economy, in which people possess different amounts of attractiveness (the dating economy’s version of dollars) and those with more attractiveness can access more and better romantic experiences (the dating economy’s version of consumer goods). If we think of dating in this way, we can use the analytical tools of economics to reason about romance in the same way we reason about economies.
One of the useful tools that economists use to study inequality is the Gini coefficient. This is simply a number between zero and one that is meant to represent the degree of income inequality in any given nation or group. An egalitarian group in which each individual has the same income would have a Gini coefficient of zero, while an unequal group in which one individual had all the income and the rest had none would have a Gini coefficient close to one. [...]
Some enterprising data nerds have taken on the challenge of estimating Gini coefficients for the dating “economy.” Among heterosexuals, this actually means calculating two Gini coefficients: one for men, and one for women. This is because heterosexual men and heterosexual women essentially occupy two distinct “economies” or “worlds,” with men competing only with each other for women and women competing only with each other for men. The Gini coefficient for men collectively is determined by women’s collective preferences, and vice versa. If women all find every man equally attractive, the male dating economy will have a Gini coefficient of zero. If men all find the same one woman attractive and consider all other women unattractive, the female dating economy will have a Gini coefficient close to one. The two coefficients do not directly influence each other at all, and each sex collectively sets the Gini coefficient—that is, the level of inequality—for the other sex.
A data scientist representing the popular dating app “Hinge” reported on the Gini coefficients he had found in his company’s abundant data, treating “likes” as the equivalent of income. He reported that heterosexual females faced a Gini coefficient of 0.324, while heterosexual males faced a much higher Gini coefficient of 0.542. So neither sex has complete equality: in both cases, there are some “wealthy” people with access to more romantic experiences and some “poor” who have access to few or none. But while the situation for women is something like an economy with some poor, some middle class, and some millionaires, the situation for men is closer to a world with a small number of super-billionaires surrounded by huge masses who possess almost nothing. According to the Hinge analyst:
On a list of 149 countries’ Gini indices provided by the CIA World Factbook, this would place the female dating economy as 75th most unequal (average—think Western Europe) and the male dating economy as the 8th most unequal (kleptocracy, apartheid, perpetual civil war—think South Africa).
Quartz reported on this finding, and also cited another article about an experiment with Tinder that claimed that that “the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men.” These studies examined “likes” and “swipes” on Hinge and Tinder, respectively, which are required if there is to be any contact (via messages) between prospective matches.
Another study, reported in Business Insider, found a pattern in messaging on dating apps that is consistent with these findings. Yet another study, run by OkCupid on their huge datasets, found that women rate 80 percent of men as “worse-looking than medium,” and that this 80 percent “below-average” block received replies to messages only about 30 percent of the time or less. By contrast, men rate women as worse-looking than medium only about 50 percent of the time, and this 50 percent below-average block received message replies closer to 40 percent of the time or higher.
If these findings are to be believed, the great majority of women are only willing to communicate romantically with a small minority of men while most men are willing to communicate romantically with most women. The degree of inequality in “likes” and “matches” credibly measures the degree of inequality in attractiveness, and necessarily implies at least that degree of inequality in romantic experiences. It seems hard to avoid a basic conclusion: that the majority of women find the majority of men unattractive and not worth engaging with romantically, while the reverse is not true. Stated in another way, it seems that men collectively create a “dating economy” for women with relatively low inequality, while women collectively create a “dating economy” for men with very high inequality.
[...]
There are no villains in this story. Nobody can or should be blamed for his or her honest preferences, and if women collectively believe that most men are unattractive, what grounds does anyone, male or female, have to argue with them? We may pity the large majority of men who are regarded as unattractive and who have few or no romantic experiences while a small percentage of attractive men have many. Just as much, consider that we live in a monogamous culture, and so the 20 percent of men who are regarded as attractive can only be in committed relationships with at most 20 percent of women. We may just as well pity the rest of the women, who are destined to be in committed relationships, if they pursue a relationship at all, with someone who they regard as unattractive. The only villain in this story is nature, which has molded our preferences so that this tragic mismatch of attraction and availability occurs.
To those who study nature, the various gender gaps in romantic life will not come as a surprise. Evolutionary biologists have seen these types of patterns many times before and can explain each of them. The relative perceived attractiveness of younger women vs. older can be explained by the higher fertility of younger adult women. The libido gap can be explained by the different mating strategies instinctively pursued by the distinct sexes.
As for the different Gini coefficients consistently reported for men and women, they are not consistent with a monogamous social structure in which most people can pair with someone of comparable perceived attractiveness. However, this is not surprising: monogamy is rare in nature. The revealed preference among most women to attempt to engage romantically only with the same small percentage of men who are perceived as attractive is consistent with the social system called “polygyny,” in which a small percentage of males monopolize the mating opportunities with all females, while many other males have no access to mates. Again, this will not come as a surprise to scientists. The evolutionary biologist David P. Barash wrote an article in Psychology Today titled “People Are Polygynous,” citing extensive biological and historical evidence that throughout most of history, our species has practiced “harem polygyny,” a form of polygamy.
There are many animals of all kinds that practice polygyny in one form or another, including many of our primate relatives like gorillas and lemurs. For animals, social structures are not an object of reflection or systematic attempted reform—they just do what their instincts and upbringing dictate. But it is the destiny of humans to constantly fight against nature. We light fires for warmth, build air conditioners for cooling, invent soap and plumbing and antibiotics and trains and radios in an effort to conquer the constraints of nature. But when we turn on our smartphones built on ingeniously developed transistors that show we can overcome nature’s entropy, we log on to dating apps and enter a world that is built on shadows of the social structures of our primeval savanna ancestors. Technology has not enabled us to escape the brutal social inequalities dictated by our animal natures.
This is not to say that we haven’t tried. The institution of monogamy is itself a “redistributive” type of policy: like capping the income of billionaires, it caps the total allowed romantic partners of the most attractive, so that unattractive people have much better chances to find a partner. The marriages that we read about in historical accounts that are based on prudence and family arrangement make more sense when we realize that basing marriage on mutual attraction leads so many—both men and women—to be unsatisfied with the outcome, since most women find most men unattractive. All of the world’s great religious traditions have extolled chastity as a great virtue and taught that there are higher goals than sexual satisfaction—these teachings add meaning to the otherwise “poor” lives of the majority of people who are regarded as perpetually unattractive.
Even in centuries-old fairy tales like The Frog Prince and Beauty and the Beast, we see our culture’s attempt to come to terms with the paradigm of a woman regarded as attractive pairing with a man who she regards as unattractive. The differing Gini coefficients faced by men and women guarantee that this will be a common—or even the most common—romantic pairing in a monogamous culture. In these fairy tales (depending on which version you read), the beautiful woman first accepts or even loves the hideous man. The sincere love of a woman transforms the unattractive man into something better: more handsome, richer, and royal. Allegorically, these stories are trying to show men and women a way to relate one-on-one even though most women find most men unattractive; they are trying to show that sincerely offered love, and love based on something other than sexual attraction, can transmute ugliness to beauty and make even a relationship with unmatching attractiveness levels successful.
[...]
The result of these cultural changes is that the highly unequal social structures of the prehistoric savanna homo sapiens are reasserting themselves, and with them the dissatisfactions of the unattractive “sexually underprivileged” majority are coming back. It is ironic that the progressives who cheer on the decline of religion and the weakening of “outdated” institutions like monogamy are actually acting as the ultimate reactionaries, returning us to the oldest and most barbaric, unequal animal social structures that have ever existed. In this case it is the conservatives who are cheering for the progressive ideal of “sexual income redistribution” through a novel invention: monogamy.
[...]
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