Gender and Problem Gambling

Both men and women can fall prey to problematic gambling habits, but it seems to affect men and women differently. In a program for problem gamblers, Martins et al (2004) found that women were more likely to attempt suicide; men were more likely to drink. Nower and Blaszczynski (2006) also studied a group of gamblers in treatment, and again found suicide attempts were much more prevalent among women. Hraba and Lee (1996) also draw a connection between drinking and problem gambling for men, but suggest that it is "estrangement from a conventional lifestyle" that leads women to problem gambling.

Ledgerwood and Petry (2006) suggest that risk factors for problem gambling could be broken down into three main components: escape, dissociation, and egotism/attention-seeking. Men were more likely than women to score high on the egotism scale. However, Mark and Lesieur's (1992) review raises concerns that most profiles of gamblers leave out the needs of women, and approach the literature from a feminist perspective.

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Honestly, I mostly see male/female couples in Vegas, so the numbers of men and women seem to be remarkably even. While I do see amounts of money that I personally find incredibly intimidating changing hands, I play at the low-stakes tables. I haven't checked the high-stakes areas of the casinos to see if there's a difference, but I'd suspect there would be more men.

Dan4th is on vacation. This post was created in advance.
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Casino Tourism

The lucrative world of casino gambling is the subject of not insignificant study. Not only do casinos want to know what their clientele is like, but districts want to know what kind of tourism a prospective casino will attract.

Hinch and Walker (2005) found that the tourists from Alberta, Canada who travelled to casinos were primarily female. Eadington (1999) examine the economics of the casino trade, while Morrison et al (1996) compare tourists to casino resorts with tourists to other destinations.

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Welcome to Vegas week on Difference Blog. For the next week, I'm in Las Vegas, Nevada taking a much needed vacation, so all the posts for the next 5 days will focus on Vegas-related themes. They'll also be posted automatically, so I won't actually be responding to comments until I get back. Talk amongst yourselves.

Dan4th is on vacation. This post was created in advance.
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Emotional Memories

Amygdala activation during emotional
arousal and emotional memory, from
Canli et al (2002)

Canli et al (2002) found that women remembered emotional photographs better than men did, and found different neural activation patterns associated with the encoding of these memories. Cahill et al (2004) suggests that the lateralization (different sides of the brain used) found in their study and also in Canli (see image) is related specifically to emotional memories more than to the experience of emotion. Canli et al used a delay of 3 weeks for long-term memory testing, while Cahill's group used a 2 week delay. Kensinger and Corkin (2003) found a similar effect of emotional content on word recall; negatively-charged words were more easily remembered than neutral ones. This study used only male subjects.

The amygdala's role in encoding emotional memories is especially significant as it seems that the amygdala ages differently than the hippocampus (which is associated more with emotionally neutral memories). Denburg et al (2003) found that emotional content modulated memory decline in an older population. However, Denburg's study did not find any difference in the accuracy of recall of emotional memories between men and women; women just rated the slides as more emotional (both negative and positive) than did their male counterparts.

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The memories that haunt me on windy nights are overwhelmingly negative. I can't remember an instance of being swept away in a comforting or positive memory, which may be part of why so many of these studies used negatively emotional stimuli. However, I suspect it's more likely that "fear" and "sadness" slides are more consistent in evoking a response from subjects than "joy" or "love." For today's post, I'd like to invite people to share images that convey positive emotions to them. I'd be surprised if one person's "joy" doesn't cause another's "despair."

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Alcoholism in the newsa

CNN Health reported yesterday on Nichol et al's (2007) findings that women display different symptoms of alcohol dependence than do men. Men are more likely to report binge drinking and aggression, while women are more likely to report guilt and depression over their drinking. Nichols suggests that this difference may be causing many women to go undiagnosed, and explain some of the gender disparity in alcoholism diagnosis.

In the same issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, Flannery et al (2007) report that women suffer greater cognitive impairment from alcohol abuse than men (see Reuters for summary). However, this study did not report any gender-wise control-vs-control or alcohol-vs-alcohol comparisons. The tests were on "motor speed, visuoperceptual processing, visuospatial processing, decision making, and cognitive flexibility." Some of these tasks have well documented gender differences without alcoholism, but if this was controlled for, it was not reported.

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Someone asked me recently if I worried that I would run out of topics for Difference Blog. I don't see how that would be possible, when new research is constantly being generated. Yes, I've talked about alcohol before, but when I can find two pertinent articles in a single issue of a single journal -- I could never write fast enough to cover everything.

The thing that really strikes me about these two articles is that one of them seems to be saying that differences in alcoholism prevalence between men and women are not as high as we thought, and the other is saying that differences in alcoholism impact are higher than we thought. I'm more skeptical of Flannery's conclusions than Nichol's, but then again, Nichol's conclusions are less concrete.

http://differenceblog.livejournal.com/2007/04/25/

Wage gap revisited

Rep. Carolyn Mahoney (2007) urges her readers to participate in "Equal Pay Day" on April 24th. Equal Pay Day is theoretically the day when what a woman earned since January 1st, 2006 equals what a man in a comparable job earned in calendar year 2006. The National Committee on Pay Equity (NCPE) website says that Equal Pay Day will be featured in a segment on ABC World News tonight.

CNN Money reports on research released yesterday by the American Association of University Women (AAUW, Hill, 2007). The study found that as early as 1 year out of college, women are earning only 80% of comparably educated men, and that the gap widens from there. Although the study acknowledges that much of the differences is due to choices, a significant portion of the gap has not been explained by anything but gender at this time.

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When asked why I transitioned, I've joked that I became a man because I wanted to earn 30% more without working any harder. There are a lot of other factors at work in the wage differential between men and women; I've explored some of them before (see tag="wage gap"). The difficult question is this: is it wrong? Is it unreasonable to expect employers to disregard prior experience when dealing with employees? Women are more likely to take sick days or family leave. Are pay increases based on prior performance or expected performance -- and what should they be based on?

http://differenceblog.livejournal.com/2007/04/24/

Clothes Shopping

How do men and women shop for clothes? Hayhoe et al (2000) found that female college were also more apt to purchase clothes, whereas males purchased electronics, food, and entertainment. Men may purchase clothing for themselves less often because others purchase it for them: John Peters (1989) found that mothers shopped with sons for clothing more often than for daughters. However, this may be changing, with men taking a more active interest in fashion than in the past, as John Galilee (2002) suggests.

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On Friday, my partner and I were out at dinner with a friend and the three of us started ribbing each other over our combined lack of fashion sense. I said to my partner "you must have fashion sense -- you're wearing Ralph Lauren!" "So are you!" he pointed out. "Yup," I replied, "your mother dresses me funny, too." (My partner's mother gives us both more Ralph Lauren factory seconds than we could possibly wear, because she lives near an outlet.)

http://differenceblog.livejournal.com/2007/04/23/

The effects of kissing

A passionate kiss can raise anyone's heart rate, but chocolate may be a better bet. According to a BBC News story (2007) this week, Dr. David Lewis of the Mind Lab has found that chocolate has a greater -- and longer lasting -- physiological effect than kissing on both males and females. However, The Art of Kissing (2004) by William Kane details many (anecdotal) differences between the ways men and women enjoy and respond to kisses, with women focusing on closeness and intimacy, while men seem to enjoy the physical sensation and arousal associated with kisses.

Nicholson (1984) suggests that kissing creates bonding between partners via a chemical addiction. An ABC News story by Tommy Dean (AUS, 2002) story suggests that kissing evolved from sniffing, in an opportunity to determine the fitness of mates through olfaction.

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I was extremely surprised not to find more studies on the physiological effects of kissing. News stories, as appealing as they are, aren't science. However, this is something I've been wanting to discuss, and if anyone has more sources about differences in response to kissing, I'd love to see them. In my long (and probably inappropriate) history of kissing both men and women, I haven't noticed any particular difference in kissing except the stubble.

http://differenceblog.livejournal.com/2007/04/20/

Same-sex harrassment

Who holds women back in the workplace more: men or women? Judith Sills' column (2006) in Psychology Today claims that women often feel their "worst enemy" in the workplace is another woman; Sills calls it "a common survey finding" and offers advice on how to deal with workplace competition between women. Garcia-Retamero and López-Zafra (2006) found more discrimination against women leaders from women than from men, although blogger Robert May at Business Pundit complains about the lack of "solid evidence" in this study.

Ramit Mizrahi's (2004) note in the Yale Law Journal asserts that female-on-female harassment is not only common, but does qualify as sex-based discrimination under the Civil Rights Act (see also Mizrahi, 2004). However, Berkley and Watt's (2006) review suggests that same-sex workplace harrassment is not covered under current statutes, and that further action is necessary to protect GLBT employees (admittedly a separate issue).

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I've heard many women complain about the pressure to join the old-boy's-network to gain acceptance in the workplace. When I was working as a female, I certainly wanted to be associated with the males I worked with more than the females, but I'm hardly good example in this circumstance. Working as a man, in a mostly female department, I've felt perhaps too supported by my bosses, and I sometimes worry that my progress may have more to do with my presenting gender than with the quality of my work.

http://differenceblog.livejournal.com/2007/04/19/

The Prisoner's Dilemma and Cooperation

The Prisoner's Dilemma is an economic/altruism game model popular for testing gender differences in cooperation. John List (2006) studied the results of the game show Friend or Foe? which had a Prisoner's Dilemma-type premise, and found not only that all-male groups cooperated less than all-female groups, but that males tended to cooperate less with females than with other males. Ortmann and Tichy (1999) guessed that women would be more cooperative than men, and that this was true in the first round, but in subsequent rounds, men and women reacted similarly to the other players. Boone et al (1999) also found that women were slightly more cooperative than men, but found that all groups got more cooperative as the game was repeated. It is worth pointing out, however, that Frank et al (1993) found that the effect of studying economics was stronger than the effect of gender.

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The Prisoner's Dilemma game needs another option, which seems to be the one I see exercised most often. Rather than "I betray you to benefit myself" there needs to be a third option for "I betray you at a cost to myself, because it may hurt you more than it hurts me." I call it "revenge" and I see it crop up in men and women in real-life scenarios all the time.

http://differenceblog.livejournal.com/2007/04/18/

Social networks and depression

According to Kendler et al (2005), women usually report having more supportive social networks than men, but have higher rates of depression. In a study of over 1,000 pairs of male-female twins, Kendler et al found that women reported having a more supportive social network than did their twin brothers. Male and female twins did not show a significant difference in the amount of support received from their parents. Kendler et al found that social support was a better predictor of depression in women than in men.

Shih et al (2006) suggest that these differences begin with greater reactivity and exposure to social episodic stress as adolescent girls. Brugha et al (2005) found that small social networks (< 3) were especially detrimental to men. Piccinelli and Wilkinson's 2000 review points out that studies on social support and depression are inconsistent, with some showing advantages for women and some for men.

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I feel incredibly lucky to have the social support that I do. I spent most of my life very socially isolated, first by being in a rural community as part of an unpopular family, and later by being in a romantic relationship where outside friendships were discouraged. While women are supposed to be more affiliative than men, in my life, the most supportive friendships I've seen have been between men, in my father and his friends.

http://differenceblog.livejournal.com/2007/04/17/

Balance and coordination

Cognitive/Balance tasks for adults do not seem to show a consistent gender effect. While studying the effects of cognitive processing on balance and posture, Kerr et al (1985) found that "men swayed left-right more than women" while balancing, but in general, did not find that memory tasks influenced balance in one gender preferentially. Barra et al (2006) found that number of falls increased during tasks with greater cognitive load for both sexes.

The Movement Assessment Battery for Children has often been used as a diagnostic tool. In the development of norms for the M-ABC, it was generally found that boys did better on ball skills while girls did better on balance skills. However, results from Miyahara et al (1998) suggest the norms for this test are not cross-culturally consistent.

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Much like today's studies, I can't say I've really noticed a pattern in clumsiness in men or women. I also haven't noticed men or women talking about their clumsiness more, but women seem to discuss it more loudly, and more apologetically. I think women may expect themselves to be more graceful, whereas men don't measure themselves on that factor as often.

http://differenceblog.livejournal.com/2007/04/16/

Getting what you deserve

A significant portion of the salary disparity between men and women can be traced to differences in salary negotiation. Stevens et al (1993) found that even after training in salary negotiation tactics and goal-setting, female MBA students were still negotiating lower salaries than their male counterparts, partially because they were still setting lower salary goals. Small et al (2004) found that women initiated negotiations less often than men in a situation where negotiation was not explicitly suggested, although O'Shea and Bush (2002) found that women were no less likely to negotiate for higher salary. Lisa Barron (2003) found that men asked for higher salaries in their initial salary request. Barron suggests this is related to beliefs she found in the men and women in her study: men were significantly more likely to be sure of themselves, believe that they were entitled to more than other employees, and expect to prove themselves during negotiations (as opposed to on the job).

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I've never negotiated for a salary, period. It has occurred to me recently that this is probably stupid, not to put too fine a point on it. I've received raises as a result of an annual employee review, or through promotion, but I've never once asked for a raise or for a higher starting salary. I've been in a position to negotiate recently, and I'm forcing myself to do it, but I think it's harder than my transition was.
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Television and sexual expectations.

The ways in which television viewing affects sexual attitudes and behaviors may vary by gender. Collins et al (2004) concluded from a telephone survey of teenagers that watching sexual content on television predicts earlier initiation of sexual behaviors. Interestingly, more time watching television was associated with later noncoital activity for males, but not females. Aubrey et al (2003) found that sexual content on television had different effects on college men and women: men tended to expect more variety in sexual acts, whereas women expected to begin sex earlier in a relationship. L. Monique Ward (2002) found that television viewing had a stronger effect on women's endorsement of sexual stereotypes than men's, although men endorsed the studied stereotypes more strongly in general.

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The biggest issue that I have with the Collins study is that the survey was performed by telephone in the teens' homes. I suspect that fear of their parents hearing their responses may have influenced some of the answers, especially considering that some (12) of the teens responded reported having had sex at the first interview, and being virgins at the follow-up. Both Aubrey and Ward used the favorite captive audience of psychological research: college undergraduates. One stereotype that Ward used that surprised me was "dating as a game"; if dating isn't a game, I'm not sure what it is. I didn't see any studies on whether people who watch a lot of television have higher or lower sex drives than those who watch less, which surprised me.

Edit: After reading the "dating as game" survey questions (see comments), I have issues with the use of the word "game" in this context, and agree that it is a harmful stereotype. Games are good. The "battle of manipulation" described by Ward is not.
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Open Letter to the New York Times

To the Health editors of the New York Times:

I was extremely disappointed with Nicholas Wade's article "Pas de Deux of Sexuality Is Written in the Genes" (4/10/2007). While Mr. Wade was correct to reference Larry Cahill's excellent 2006 review, it seems as if Mr. Wade read only the abstract. Dr. Cahill is fairly clear in his review that while functional and structural differences are present between male and female brains, this is not necessarily reflected in behavior.

It's also disheartening to see that J. Michael Bailey is referenced as "an expert on sexual orientation" without any mention of his unethical research (Chicago Tribune, 2003) that led to his stepping down as chair of the Psychology Department at Northwestern. The highly questioned results of Bailey's work with his student Gerulf Rieger on bisexuality also drew fire when reported in the Times, by Benedict Carey's 2005 "Gay, Straight, or Lying" (see Lynn Conway's log of media reports). The fact that Bailey still seems to be the go-to sexologist for the NYT after these multiple missteps is deeply troubling.

In short, the Times would be well served to find another "expert" if this topic continues to be of interest. Bailey's work is blatantly biased, poorly executed, and over-interpreted. I feel that I can normally count on the New York Times for reasonable coverage, but it is disappointing to see that where sexuality is involved, the Times stoops to this level of sensationalism.

Sincerely,

Danforth Nicholas
The Difference Blog
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Liar, Liar

Byrne and Corp (2004) found that neocortex size predicted deception rates among primates; that is - the bigger the neocortex, the more capable the monkeys were of deceiving other monkeys. Pakkenberg and Gundersen (1997) found that (on average), men in their Danish sample had 16% more neocortical neurons than women. Abe et al (2007) found in a PET study that different parts of the prefrontal cortex and amygdala were activated during saying something known to be untrue vs. attempts to deceive.

Columnist Dr. Joyce Brothers (3/13/2007) says that there is no difference between the sexes when it comes to lying. DePaulo et al (1996) found no sex differences between college students who kept "lie diaries" except for self-assessment of honesty. Men thought lied less often than other men their age to a greater degree than women thought they were honest compared to their peers. Sex differences did appear in the recipients of the lies: both sexes tended to tell self-centered lies to men, and other-centered lies to women.

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I used to be really concerned about being honest, when I was 10 or 12. A friend jokingly called me a liar, and I was so insulted that I didn't speak to her for ... well, honestly, I didn't speak to her for about two minutes, but I was tempted to lie to you to make the story better. It's very difficult to break the lying habit, once it's established, but I think that I'd probably find results similar to the students in DePaulo's study, who found that they lied less often than they expected. I wonder how much of that was due to statements that "weren't really lies" (as most of my deceptions are).

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Night vision in pregnancy

Fairfield and Fletcher's 2002 review of vitamin benefits and risks states that vitamin A is critical for night vision, but in doses as small as 3x the RDA, can cause birth defects. Katz et al (1995) found that night blindness was prevalent among lactating and pregnant Nepalese women, which they attributed to vitamin A deficiency, although Wedner et al (2004) did not find that self-reported night blindness was a good predictor of vitamin A deficiency in a Tanzanian population. Taren et al (2004) suggest that the "Night Vision Threshold Test" is a more accurate predictor, and finds nearly three times as many cases of reduced night vision as self-report.

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In October ("I can see clearly"), I mentioned Carlson's review of Taking Sex Differences Seriously (Rhoads, 2004), which apparently claims that women have better night vision. I still haven't managed to find any citation for this claim. While I've certainly encountered more women than men who complain of reduced night vision, I suspect this is more reporting bias than actual fact, a suspicion backed up by Brabyn et al's (2005) finding that women (even with better vision) are more likely to voluntarily restrict themselves to daytime driving than men.

edit: "Deviantart News" article (3/17/07) found by huGoFdeStruction "somewhere in the net" claims that "women have more cones and men have more rods". An April 4th comment by "Neuropsychguy" suggests that this is a misinterpretation of tetrachromacy data.

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Crossing over

Cognitive testing on people undergoing transgender therapy is rare, but has happened on a few occasions. The Netherlands seem to be the source of much of this research. Van Goozen et al (1995) found differences in spatial and verbal ability in both female-to-male and male-to-female transsexuals after just three months on hormone therapy. Hulshoff Pol et al (2006) performed MRIs on transsexuals before and after 4 months on hormones (but before any surgical intervention). This group found structural changes towards normal for the patient's new sex; "The magnitude of this change (i.e. 31 ml over a 4-month period) is striking, since it signifies a decrease in brain volume, which is at least ten times the average decrease of around 2.5 ml per year in healthy adults." In contrast, Haraldsen et al (2005, Norway) did not find any differences between transsexuals and birth-sex-matched controls on six sex-sensitive areas of cognitive testing, pre-hormones or at 3 and 12 months into hormone therapy.

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I generally try to avoid using transsexual studies, because I'm dissatisfied with the controls. I'm not sure of an ethical way to do it, but I'd really like to see studies done with a non-treated transsexual control group. Most theories of transsexuality suggest that there are already differences between transsexual and non-transsexual males and females, and therefore it may not be appropriate to use non-transsexuals as a control group. One interesting confound noted by Haraldsen et al is the socio-economic difference between transsexuals and non-transsexuals in the US; transsexuals tend to have a higher socio-economic class, because it is mostly the people who can afford the rigorous and unsupported medical standards who present for transsexual treatment.

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Attitudes towards Mental Disorders

Williams and Pow (2007) found that among Scottish teenagers, boys were much more likely to have negative attitudes about mental illness than girls. Ng and Chan (2000) also found more stereotyping and stigmatizing of mental illness among teen boys in their Hong Kong survey. Cotton et al (2006) found that Australian men were more likely to suggest treating depression with alcohol and psychosis with antibiotics than women in their "Mental Health Literacy" survey.

Diefenbach and West (2007) suggest that the media is partially to blame for negative attitudes towards the mentally ill: "the mentally disordered are portrayed as 10 times more likely to be a violent criminal than nonmentally disordered television characters." Slopen et al (2007) points out that newspaper stories about mental illness are much more sympathetic when the focus is on children than when it is on mentally disordered adults, critiquing the system rather than the patient. On the other hand, the negative attitudes could be coming from the mental health professionals, as Jorm et al (1999) suggest. Jorm was a co-author on Cotton et al, above.

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Why does it seem to consistently turn up that women have more positive "attitudes towards [x]" than men? I wonder how much of this is because the "attitudes towards [x]" I've been examining are generally viewed as weaknesses or handicaps. Would the proportions turn out differently if I was looking at "attitudes toward success" or "attitudes towards strength." Is this just an artifact of women being more sympathetic than men?

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I am not left-handed

In a Cal State Fullerton press release (3/29/07), some highlights from a BBC online survey conducted by Richard Lippa are discussed. More complete findings (Blanchard and Lippa, 2007) were published in the April issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior. The survey, which was taken over 200,000 times, found a relationship between hand preference and sexuality:

More gay men (13 percent) than heterosexual men (11percent) and more lesbians (11 percent) than heterosexual women (10 percent) reported being left-handed.

More bisexual men (12 percent) than gay or heterosexual men (8 percent) describe themselves as ambidextrous, and more bisexual women (16 percent) than lesbians (12 percent) and heterosexual women (8 percent) reported “mixed hand preferences.”

Holtzen (1994) also found more right-handedness among both male and female heterosexuals than non-heterosexuals. In contrast, Pattatucci et al (1998) found more left-handedness among heterosexual men than heterosexual women or homosexual men.

Lippa invites visitors to his site to participate in further online research on "Sexual Attitudes, Personality, and Interests."

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I'm always highly dubious about using online surveys as scientific tools. There's not enough opportunity to make sure that people don't take the test twice, there's no investment in honesty, and the sampling technique is biased in more directions than I can comfortably list.

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Skin cancer risk and gender

Researchers have long attributed higher skin cancer rates in men to higher rates of sun exposure. Holman et al (1984) discusses the confounding effect of different patterns of activity between men and women on cancer research. Interestingly, Jason Rivers (2004) points out that outdoor workers seem to have a lowered risk of melanoma than indoor workers, suggesting a protective effect from routine sun exposure.

Tatiana M. Oberyszyn, of Ohio State University, has another theory about gender differences in skin cancer incidence. Results from Oberyszyn's mouse study (published in the April 1st issue of Cancer Research) suggest that males may simply be at higher risk for the disease. Oberyszyn's interview with WebMD.com (2007) attributes the difference to antioxidants: "The male skin cells carried fewer antioxidants than the female skin cells."

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Other risk factors for non-melanoma skin cancers include blue eyes, fair skin, and a tendency to burn or freckle rather than tan. In other words: yours truly. I wasn't able to find any connections in the literature between hormone levels and skin anti-oxidants, but I probably should be wearing SPF 30 on a daily basis anyway. Most of the research on antioxidants in the skin appears to be focusing on whether topical antioxidant use (such as in moisturizers) is useful (inconclusive).

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Lesbian Sheep

Gender roles in heterosexual dating have been extensively studied. For example, Karl Grammer (1990) suggests that males use body language to signal dominance, whereas women's body language indicates both submission and "bodily self-presentation." Grammer (2000) points out ten years later that women seem to be in control of opposite-sex interactions, despite this role-play of submission.

Studies of gender roles in same-sex dating are rarer. Klinkenberg and Rose (1994) studied "dating scripts" for lesbians vs. gays, and found that "talk/laugh/joke" was an item mentioned by almost all participants, with no gender differences. However, the men's scripts mentioned only "self-initiated actions", whereas the several of the women's scripts mentioned "partner-initiated actions (e.g. 'partner picked me up')." Sergios and Cody (1985) found that "social assertiveness" had no effect on how likely a gay man was to request a subsequent date; only "physical attractiveness" influenced how much the subject "liked" their partner in this experiment.

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It is tempting to use gay and lesbian experiences to confirm stereotypes about gendered behavior in dating. This weekend a friend told me about the concept of "lesbian sheep": "if you are a female sheep, what you do to solicit sex is stand still". This has led to "lesbian sheep" being a term to refer to any potentially sexual relationship where both parties wait for the other to act. This term is overwhelmingly used for female-female relationships, but not exclusively so. In my personal (and therefore meaningless) experience, I'd like to say that not all men know how to make the first move either (and I don't just mean me).

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