Only 20% of the top linked articles were by women

From It’s 2012 already: why is opinion writing still mostly male? by Erika Fry.

A data-rich and nuanced discussion of gender-based disparate impact as manifested in the mainstream media. Some very interesting material. Here is one item that particularly caught my eye.

Take for example findings from The Gender Report, an organization that monitors gender in online media: a year-long study found that women had bylines on 19.6 percent of the most-linked and discussed stories.

Only 20% of the top linked articles were by women. I think this is interesting because presumably this reflects something more than simple biases and prejudices. When you have a low barrier of access to a huge audience, it might be presumed that the degree to which you are linked is a measure of the degree to which what you have to say is of interest, relevance or use to that audience. I.e. it reflects free choices unmediated by institutional barriers.

In that environment, why would there only be a 20% representation rate? My supposition for most gender-based disparate impact issues is that it is a simple reflection of two phenomenon - 1) People make trade-off decisions, some of which are biologically imposed and 2) excellence is a function of volume of hours (working full time) and continuity of effort (persistence over time).

The trade-off decision is the sacrificed monetary productivity that occurs when a couple decide to have children and invest a portion (usually a good portion) of their waking hours to the care and nurturing of those children. Who actually does that nurturing is of course an open question but most families end up in a model of full-time working male and either stay-at-home or part-time female. Combine this with the observation that the capacity to rise to the top of any field of endeavor is usually a function of time (volume and continuity) and you end up with a mathematical disparate impact.

To elaborate, at any given point in time, the labor force participation rate in full-time employment for males is about 35% higher than for females (between 20 and 65). That is the first element. Let's assume that it takes some years of practice and experience to become expert. I am at this point making up numbers but I would suggest that in most fields, it takes roughly twenty years to rise to the top; more in some fields less in others. But using that number of 20 years, the second question is, at the age of 45, what percent of full-time employed males have been continuously employed for the preceding twenty years and what is the percentage for females. I am guessing that perhaps 80% of males have sustained continuous employment between 25 and 45 whereas perhaps only 50% of females have remained continuously full-time employed. I suspect that that 50% number is high, particularly if one adds on the attribute of "unencumbered" (i.e. not restricted to working set hours only). We know that the market pretty much clears equitably (single, unmarried, childless males and females earn virtually the same amount at any age). If you run these numbers out, it means that the candidate population of those that might have created the work profile to be considered "expert" (those that have been full-time employed for twenty years) is about 70% male and 30% female. That means that on most measures, one would expect a disparate impact of roughly 70:30 for most measures; executives, compensation, by-lines, awards, etc.

Now all those numbers are fairly crude guestimates in the absence of good, large population, rigorously collected data. However, it does give a ball-park for estimating whether there is an issue or not.

So I see that 20% number arising from a competitive, free-choice, low barriers-to-entry environment (new age media) and compare it to a ball park of 30% and it doesn't seem too out of whack. Interesting to investigate further but probably explainable.

UPDATE: The Opt-Out Revolution by Lisa Belkin. It is from 2003, so moderately dated. This paragraph, comparing top level achievement in different fields, indicates that perhaps the natural yield (given lower level of hours worked and greater discontinuity) might be more like 16%.

And then, suddenly, they stop. Despite all those women graduating from law school, they comprise only 16 percent of partners in law firms. Although men and women enter corporate training programs in equal numbers, just 16 percent of corporate officers are women, and only eight companies in the Fortune 500 have female C.E.O.'s. Of 435 members of the House of Representatives, 62 are women [ed: 16%]; there are 14 women in the 100-member Senate.

My back of the envelope estimate is that given individual life choices, one might see 30% of a field being female. Specific 2003 numbers in a handfull of competitive fields indicates about 16%. Free-range linking indicates 20%. Net - I am guessing that as long as achievement at the top of any particular field is within the realm of 15-25%, you probably don't have any alarming indication of discrimination - it is just the free market clearing itself based on value and individual choices.