Rich and Strange Aeons

I'd wondered why child care is so expensive yet pays the workers so little. I spent part of yesterday reading articles and watching videos; the answer seems pretty simple.

Average US fees are like $10,000 per kid. So say a worker is caring for 3 kids. That's $30,000, to pay for everything. Even if overhead is very low, so that 80% goes to compensation, that's just $24,000 to pay salary and payroll tax and (ha ha) benefits. If labor gets just 60% (still high compared to most other retail business), we're down to $18,000.

If there are 5 kids, those numbers become $50,000 gross, $40,000 at 80% labor, $30,000 at 60%. But quality of care is thought to drop, and many states require 3-4 kids per carer.

Mississippi allows 5 to 1, though it seems workers get paid the same low rate; instead parents only have to pay $5000 for child care. (Source) Of course rents matter for overhead -- Massachusetts requires 3 to 1, and the average fee is more like $16,000. (Though some quick searches claim pay is more like $30-35k, of course that has to pay MA, largely Boston, rents as well.)

Do the numbers check out? MS: 5x$5000 = $25,000. Searches claim $17,000, $22,000, $25,000 -- latter may be *teacher*, vs. an aide; one video suggested 40 kids might have 3 teachers and 6 aides. MA: 3*$15,000 = $48,000, allowing $28-38,000 in labor.

Going the other way: if a worker makes $30,000/year ($15/hour minimum wage, we'll ignore what daycare hours are actually like), and has 4 kids, and overhead is 25%, fees have to be 30/0.75/4 = $10,000/year. Except I forgot payroll taxes, so probably more like $11,000.

So yeah. it's pretty intrinsically expensive. How do other countries offer free child care? It's possible they skimp on the ratios, but mostly it must be because the government spreads the cost over all taxpayers. Instead of a family paying $10,000 for a few years, everyone's paying like $1000 (*very* averaged) every year.

(If a kid needs care for 5 years, $50,000 total, and pays taxes for 40 years, as an adult they pay $1250/year of paying taxes.)

I was musing idly on why fanfic is in largely part M/M, and on how part of that is the source material mostly having developed male characters interacting, e.g. Sherlock Holmes, Star Trek, or LotR. And then Harry Potter:

* The holy trio is Harry, Ron, Hermione

* The Weasleys are Molly and Ginny vs. Arthur and five additional sons.

* The teachers who spring to mind are Dumbedore, Hagrid, Snape vs. McGonnagall.

* The DADA teachers are mostly male: Quirrel, Lupin, Lockhart, Moody vs. Umbridge. (We already counted Snape).

* Even the Dursleys are 2 male, 1 female.

* I can easily think of James's male school friends who are concerned about Harry, Lupin and Sirius, but who were Lily's friends?

I'm not going to try counting the students.

And this is a female-authored series in a high magic setting where there's no particular reason for male dominance. Harry being a boy could skew his peer experience male, but wouldn't explain the Weasley birth ratio or a lack of mom-friends.

Writers? Trivial for me.

Singers? Not hard.

Instrumental composers? Uh no, though I don't know that many composers period, especially living ones.

Visual artists? If comics and webcomics count, I can do it.

Painters? Haha no.

Speaking of Star Trek novels... I had a thought. Fanfic's reputation is of heavy dominance by women, as both writers and readers. F&SF published authors in general tend to be male, especially in SF. James Nicoll has a f/m tag bean-counting this for various publications.

But what about tie-in stuff? It's basically officially approved (not necessarily canonical) fanfic that's been contracted by a publisher. It's also lower status, which could mean "we let women do it because it's low status" or "it's low status because women do it". So, if I count lots of authors, will I find demographics more like fanfic, original fic, or something in between? I see no point to making a prediction, since I'm about to go count.

Methodology: so there's two variables of interest: number of unique authors of either sex, and books by either sex. I'll give both. For the record, it's easier to count books. If co-authorship was split between a man and a woman I counted it as half for each.

Star Trek novels

Source

Bantam original 1970-1981:
Authors: 3 f, 8 m. Doesn't include the New Voyages collections. f/t 0.375
Books: 4 f, m 9, f/t 0.31. (0.40 if we counted the mostly-female story collections:)
New Voyages: stories authors 8 f, 0 m, f/t 1.0
New Voyages 2: stories authors 8 f, 2 m, f/t 0.8

Wanderer + Archway 1982-1984:
Authors: 1 f, 3 m. f/t 0.25
Books: 0.5 f, 5.5 m. f/t 0.0833

Pocket Books 1979-present:
Authors: 34 f, 45 m. Not counting ST:TMP by Roddenberry. f/t 0.43

So majority male. But what I noticed going down the list is that there's been a huge surge of men in recent books. The most recent 26 books are all by men, and the last one by a woman is Unspoken Truth in 2010. That period contributes ten new male names; before it, the ratio is 34 f, 35 m. f/t 0.49

I picked the 20 year period from 1981 to 2001 as a likely breakpoint. There was apparently some editorial change: most of the books before 2001 are numbered, only the first one after it is.

Authors -2001: 33 f, 25 m, f/t 0.57
So there's been only one new female author since 2001, and 20 male ones.
Authors 2002-: 1 f, 20 m, f/t 0.04
Books -2001: 67.5 f, 42.5 m, f/t 0.61
Books 2002-: 11.5 f, 44.5 m, f/t 0.20

Yeaaahhh, that's a pretty big change.

E-books: Mere Anarchy (2006–07)
Authors: f 1, m 6. f/t 0.14
Books: 1 f, 5 m; f/t 0.17

The Next Generation 1987-present:
Authors -2001: 21 f, 31 m, f/t 0.40
Authors 2002-: 3 f, 11 m, f/t 0.21
Books -2001: 26 f, 59 m, f/t 0.31
Books: 2002-: 4 f, 35 m, f/t 0.10

Deep Space Nine (1993-present):

Authors -2001: 11 f, 22 m, f/t 0.333
Authors 2002-: 5 f, 8 m, f/t 0.38
Books -2001: 15.5 f, 23.5 m, f/t 0.40
Books: 2002-: 11.5 f, 19.5 m, f/t 0.37

Not much change here, and better than the other lines in the 2002- period.

Voyager 1995-present:

Authors -2001: 11 f, 12 m, f/t 0.49
Authors 2002-: 2 f, 2 m, f/t 0.50
Books -2001: 19.5 f, 12.5 m, f/t 0.61
Books 2002-: 14 f, 2 m, f/t 0.88
Worth noting that 12 of the later books are "post relaunch" and by two authors.  But, not surprising that the series with a female captain gets -- or is allowed -- more female attention.

Enterprise:

Enterprise starts in 2001 so I'll just count it as one.

Authors: 3 f, 6 m, f/t 0.33
Books: 3.5 f, 14.5 m, f/t 0.19

There's also New Frontier, 21 books by Peter David, and the Titan (2005-) series following Riker, which is 14 books entirely by male authors, and Vanguard (2005-), 9 books by male authors, and Seekers (2014-), 4 books by male authors.

I refuse to do the work to find the set of all the unique authors, but it's easy to combine books for the whole franchise:
Books -2001: 133 f, 152 m, f/t 0.47
Books 2002-: 45.5 f, 169.5 m, f/t 0.21

Babylon-5 from here

Authors 4 f, 7 m, f/t 0.36
Books 6 f, 12 m, f/t 0.333

Doctor Who: Virgin New Adventures Source

The featuring the Doctor list:
Books: 5.5 f, 55.5 m, f/t 0.09

Welp.  And it's just one woman, Kate Orman.  "Featuring Bernice Summerfield" isn't much better, one other woman gets in as a co-author, out of 23 books.

Some articles on democracy (pluralist and feminist) among Syrian Kurds: NYTimes, FT, scribd copy of FT.

If we kept DST all year, or got rid of it.

A Madoka fanfic I'm reading. It's like Starship Troopers or Old Man's War crossed with Madoka crossed with transhumanism and Culture ship Minds. Kyubey said we'd go to the stars, and we did. Many fans think magical girls are potentially immortal, and here they are. I've been enjoying it a lot. Could have used some more editing passes, but generally fun to read, often funny, I'm engaged with the show characters and the original one. Downside: it's longer than Lord of the Rings and still ongoing, last update Oct 6.  I've read 34 chapters out of 44 and am thinking I should pace myself, maybe go read Ancillary Mercy while I still sort of remember what happened in Ancillary Sword.

Funny panel from the Fate/zero manga.

Japan is actually doing quite well per capita: low unemployment, very high employment to working-age-population ratio, inflation is back.  Abenomics, and Keynesianism, works.  GDP is shriking... because the population is, especially the working-age population.

James notes that Heinlein's first story is closer to Dickens' last novel than it is to us.  This will be more interesting when his *last* book is closer to Dickens than to us, but still.

Polio is judged to be even closer to eradication.

Portugal's Left Bloc, a party run by women.

Secret gardens and numinous fantasy

SF written in 1666 by Margaret Cavendish

History of their presence, also horrifying sexism. http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/senate-women-secret-history-113908_full.html

"She was the first senator to take to the floor to denounce Senator Joe McCarthy’s tactics in his communist witch hunt during the Cold War"

"Even McCaskill, who lauds the progress made over the past three decades, has stories to tell. The first time she tried to venture onto the Senate floor after taking office in 2007, she was barred by a doorman who told her there were no floor passes for staffers. "

"So notoriously predatory was Thurmond that when Susan Collins came to the Senate in 1997, she was warned to avoid getting on an elevator alone with him."

"The modern history of Senate women really begins in the 1980s with Barbara Mikulski" -- who became the second sitting woman Senator at the time.

"The Thomas hearings were the catalyst that brought four new women, all Democrats, to the Senate in 1992. " -- up to six!

The spark for the post: this article on a 1981 LEGO ad aimed at girls in a not-condescending or gendered way, compared with their new gendered toys ("You can report on cake!")

The substance of the post: talking about an anime series that's slowly grown into one of my biggest fandom obsessions right now, despite its flaws. There should be a word for that, when you know something isn't great but you're really into it anyway.

(After years of occasional vague fanfic ideas for various fandoms, I've actually finally put fanfic ideas to keyboard for this fandom; no I'm not going to show them to anyone yet, it's like my first fiction ever, almost.)

The connection between the two is one of the things I like about it. The article talks about the new LEGO TV van toy, with a female figure reporting on cake and a male figure as camera operator. "Technical stuff is hard!" I thought about toys where the reporter and operator were both female, and then I thought about Nanoha because that's pretty much true there. It's not a series where everyone is female but it's pushing the line. Female roles:

( Read more... )

***

Oh hey, maybe I should say something like what it's about. It starts out looking like a standard magical girl show: girl in Tokyo runs across an animal mentor who teaches her magic which she uses to catch loose Jewel Seeds before they wreck her city. It sounds, and for that matter looks, a lot like Card Captor Sakura.



[girl on our left is Sakura, girl on our right is Nanoha. You may notice some similarities.]

Except there's a blink-and-you-miss-it mention of programs, and the viewers now the animal mentor is actually a boy. Or had a boy form, anyway. That's unusual.

Even more unusually, "transformed boy living with a girl" isn't played up for the sitcom laughs it might be. Yuuno gets a couple embarrassed moments but that's it; even when Nanoha finds out, she quickly recovers and is fine with him still living in her room. They *are* 9, after all.

It may be the only magical girl show where our heroine runs from the cops because of all the property damage she's just been party to.

It's also fun watching her progress from "can't use magic" to "can't fly" to "flies like a chicken" to "okay, that was cool". Particularly stage three; I'm not used to seeing heroes progress methodically through stages of sucking less.

The opening alone spoils us for there being two magical girls, one dark (clothing, not skin; no skin color diversity points here, except for the very brown Zafira but he's not human at all), and they're fighting a lot, and I'm told that's unusual; the show is even the trope codifier for Dark Magical Girl. (Also for many other tropes.) It certainly isn't the Sakura mode, nor I think the Sailor Moon mode.

Still, like I said, the pacing at first isn't great, but then Everything Changes, and I don't want to talk about that because I hope to get to watch someone as the change hits. Kind of like "you should watch Madoka no I can't tell you why just watch it through episode 3, okay?"

There's also summary movie versions of the first two series. I've seen people recommend watching the first movie and then the second series, A's, as pretty much all fans agree the second series is the high point of the series: solid pacing, best characters, fewest problematic elements. A's was actually my entry point, which might be why I'm so attached; I think of the franchise as "this really cool thing, plus that other stuff I can mine for ideas."

Man, I feel like I rambled. I hope someone got osmething interesting out of this.

Inspired by this I thought to look at the gender balance of books I've read. As I have digital records back to 2004, and paper ones back to 1997, this is in principle doable; as my records consist of "name, author" it's not easy. But I counted the past few years by hand.

2011 books:
54 by male authors, 26 female
2012 books:
79 male, 20 female
2013 books:
75 male, 47 female
2014 books so far:
52 male, 19 female.

Conclusion: I didn't read as many books in 2011 (so what was I doing? well, I didn't even move into an apartment until April), while this could be a blow out year.

Female author percentage ranges from 20-40%. Fiction and non-fiction lumped together. Graphic novel or manga volumes generally counted individually. Some books left out because I didn't know the author, especially RPG books.

The 2014 imbalance is due in large part to binging on all the Fables related books, so that's nearly 30 graphic novels by Bill Willingham right there.

Books in queue: Sufaces and Essences (M), Morgaine cycle (4xF), My Side of the Mountain trilogy (3xF), Steles of the Sky (F), a bunch of Spanish language books of mixed or unknown (Robin) gender.

I know Dawkins has gotten himself into some gender hot water, belittling Rebecca Watson's elevator experience and saying Western women don't have much to complain about compared to Islamic ones, or something like that. I've read most of his books, but not followed his internet presence.

But there's something I wanted to dig up:

"The present book goes further. To dramatize it a bit, it attempts to free the selfish gene from the individual organism which has been its conceptual prison. The phenotypic effects of a gene are the tools by which it levers itself into the next generation, and these tools may 'extend' far outside the body in which the gene sits, even reaching deep into the nervous systems of other organisms. Since it is not a factual position I am advocating, but a way of seeing facts, I wanted to warn the reader not to expect 'evidence' in the normal sense of the word. I announced that the book was a work of advocacy, because I was anxious not to disappoint the reader, not to lead her on under false pretences and waste her time.

The linguistic experiment of the last sentence reminds me that I wish I had had the courage to instruct the computer to feminize personal pronouns at random throughout the text. This is not only because I admire the current awareness of the masculine bias in our language. Whenever I write I have a particular imaginary reader in mind (different imaginary readers oversee and 'filter' the same passage in numerous successive revisions) and at least half my imaginary readers are, like at least half my friends, female. Unfortunately it is still true in English that the unexpectedness of a feminine pronoun, where a neutral meaning is intended, seriously distracts the attention of most readers, of either sex. I believe the experiment of the previous paragraph will substantiate this. With regret, therefore, I have followed the standard convention in this book."

This is from the preface to The Extended Phenotype, dated to June 1981. I read it sometime in the 1990s and was struck by the surprise gender issue in a genetics/evolution book; I'd probably been sensitized by Douglas Hofstadter's essays on gender, especially his disturbing Person Paper on Purity in Language, though I think Dawkins was writing before those came out.

On the one hand, Dawkins chickened out of it, even though it was just a randomization, not making the feminine default all the way through. (Though maybe switching would be worse?) On the other hand, it's easy as a modern reader to judge someone for not taking risks with their second book, in 1981, publishing in England. (On the third hand, I wonder what computer he was using at the time.) On net, I think I still give him a bunch of points for even caring about the issue and being on the right side.

For the 1989 reprint of The Selfish Gene he obliquely mentions the issue again, saying the publisher wanted to reprint the original book, "warts, sexist pronouns, and all", plus a couple more chapters. The one new chapter I looked at switched between gender neutral and male language: the proverbial nice guy quickly turned into 'it', but the Prisoner's Dilemma is illustrated with two men, not two people.

For his later books, I don't know; I didn't find many passages with generic people or pronouns that would need a gender. In The Ancestor's Tale there's "we are people" that could have been "we are men" in an older writer; "man-made artifacts", but then "All Humankind" for Rendezvous 0. But then a couple of hypothetical ancestral shrews are Henry and Eric. And, welp, "Every time an individual has a child, exactly half his genes".

***

Unrelatedly: Climbing Mount Improbable is printed in some trippily wide Centaur typeface. Seflish Gene looks quaint and not in a good way... Times? Extended Phenotype, also from Oxford University Press, looks better but also weird. Ancestor's Tale looks normal, but my paperback must be high-acid paper or something, it's browning pretty badly already, despite a 2004 copyright.

On the boy side:

Timothy Hunter (Books of Magic): the Opener, a conduit for magic like unto Merlin (DC Universe version), "Control the storm? I AM THE STORM", creates worlds accidentally, petitioned by gods, respected by the Endless, etc.

Coin (_Sourcery_): eighth son of a wizard, thus a sourcerer (sic), a source of magic rather than a mere wielder of it. Likewise creates worlds, is stronger than gods, could destroy the world accidentally.

Adam Young, an Antichrist (_Good Omens_): Antichrist raised by a normal English family. Has basically God/Q levels of power to rewrite the world.

Possibly others? Actually _Stranger in a Strange Land_ might qualify.

On the girl side:

Minus (webcomic) Minus: has strongly godlike powers. Why is never explained. Probably not even a teenager, tween or pre-tween maybe. Surreal one page comics with the occasional short storyline.

Haruhi Suzumiya (eponymous Japanese light novels/anime): said to be godlike, but unconsciously so. Yuki Nagato is like a drone terminal for the Q continuum, so more deliberately powerful. But the books aren't about them the way the boy books are about superpowered boys flinging power around or learning not to.

Strictly speaking, that's it.

There's also Jame Talissen (Chronicles of the Kencyrath): avatar of the Destruction aspect of God, so closest to those three boys. But she's focused on destruction, without world-creating powers, and doesn't wield even that power as casually as Tim Hunter or Minus.

And various magical prodigies: Korra, later Willow (but it's not her story), anime magical girls. But I can't think of world-making ones. (And Hermione? Way weaker relatively than even those.)

Others?