Covert Pay Discrimination: How Authority Predicts Pay Differences between Women and Men

Research repeatedly highlights the gap between male and female earnings across the public and private sectors. The authors address an overlooked manifestation of pay discrimination against women in the labor market. Using a survey of 384 public sector chief procurement officers, they analyze the indirect effects of gender on women’s pay through the intervening variable of authority. Gender affects the amount of authority that is delegated to an employee, which, in turn, affects the variance in pay between men and women. Results reveal that gender plays a hidden role in influencing compensation levels by shifting the chain of authority given to executives as they build a career portfolio. The conclusion underscores why gender pay disparities should account for both the indirect and the direct effects of gender on pay.     

Radical Islam in Europe

Europe now faces three related but different challenges: how to respond, in a time when “native” European populations are shrinking, to the growing presence of Muslim minorities; how to avoid having its relationships with its Muslim communities controlled by Islamists who seek to replace Western civilization with Islamic government based on sharia law; and what to do generally about this Islamist threat. Thus far, the European responses to these challenges have been shaped by four factors: accumulated civilizational exhaustion; the inability to grasp the challenge posed to European national identities by the allure of the global Caliphate; weakness arising from degraded security capabilities, including the impact of the continued drive to “build Europe” by adopting the Treaty of Lisbon; and the preference for appeasement of Islamist demands.     

The Energy System and Economic Imbalances in the USSR

This article examines the severe structural and geograpic imbalances imposed on the Soviet economy by the demands and priorities of the energy complex; it also deals with imbalances manifest within the energy system itself. The feasibilities of policy change and prospect for success in energy conservation under Gorbachev are briefly assessed. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: 052, 124, 723.     

Should Law Improve Morality?

Lawyers and philosophers have long debated whether law should enforce social morality. This paper explores whether law should improve social morality. It explains how this might be possible, and what sort of obstacles, factual and moral, there are to doing so. It concludes with an example: our law should attempt to improve our social morality of sexual conduct.     

Sexual frigidity: the social construction of masculine privilege and feminine pathology

This study examines how mid-twentieth century physicians used the term ‘sexual frigidity’ to disempower women. Conceptualizing medical texts as accounts, I focus on how medical authors saw, described and explained sexual frigidity from the 1930s to the 1960s in both scientific writings and in those aimed at the general public as sex guides, marriage manuals and advice columns. The study concludes, that behind the pretext of treating a woman’s frigidity, psychiatrists and gynecologists, using the language and theoretical structures of psychoanalysis, constructed a narrative in which ‘normal’, non-frigid women always see their man through a lens of unlimited patience, tenderness and altruism. Their attitude is always welcoming, joyous, and worshipful. By contrast, women defined as sexually frigid see their man through a lens of bitterness and resentment, an attitude which reaches its apotheosis during the man’s attempts to engage them in intercourse. Through the frigidity narrative, mid-twentieth century physicians managed to pass judgment, not only on women’s sexuality, but on their autonomy, their character, and the success or failure of their marriage: they are to blame when their husband leaves them for another woman; they are to blame when their husband is impotent; and they only have themselves to blame if they are unable to function in a sexually ‘healthy’ way. The discourse that seemed preoccupied with a woman’s genitals, with their feelings and contractions, was also interested in a woman’s heart, her intentions and activities, with particular emphasis on how she performed as her husband’s housekeeper and companion. There was scarcely an attitude, feeling, or interpersonal activity known to women from which mid-twentieth century physicians did not impute some connection to frigidity.