A Firm Resolve

Stay-at-home Moms worth $131,477 per year

Salary.com just released a report saying the typical stay-at-home mom works 100 hours per week and values the total effort at exactly $131,471 annually.  Too bad the government doesn't allow a more aggressive tax writeoff.  Three cheers for stay-at-home moms!

Female athletes mistakenly believe "thin" means better performance

Some female athletes believe being extra thin helps in improving athletic performance (see "Female athletes trade thin for results - more discovering that thinner doesn't mean stronger").  It turns out that some girls go on sub-1000 calorie per day diets to try to lose weight.  Since this starves the girls from adequate energy and nutrition, performance will suffer.  From the article:

About a year ago, Pudwill and several sports medicine doctors and therapists at the University of Colorado opened the Active Women's Health program after realizing many female athletes didn't understand how to meet their body's nutritional needs. Adding to the challenge is society's pressure to lose weight.

"What happens with females is they don't realize how much it takes to fuel their body to do the kind of activity they're doing," she said. "Sometimes, typical of females, they're not eating enough."

Men think jokes are funny by default, women subject jokes to more scrutiny

In a report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Dr. Allan L. Reiss from the Stanford University School of Medicine (see "Who is more likely to enjoy a good joke?"), men automatically expect jokes to be funny while women subject jokes to greater scrutiny to see if they are funny.  Thus, women have higher cognitive expectations of themselves in dealing with humor.  Dr. Reiss thinks there could be some connection with the higher rates of depression among women.

Even broader, the findings agree with common knowledge that women have higher expectations of themselves in social situations than men.  The pressure to meet their high self-expectations can gradually contribution to emotional tiredness and a slow and gradual collapse into depression, if not caught sooner. 

Teaching young girls to say "no" to sex -- historical perspective

Here's an interesting article about teaching young girls to say "no" to sex, tracing issues back to the sexual revolution of the 1960's and early 1970's.