Countries with a lot of ethnic diversity generally show weaker economic growth than homogeneous countries. A new study, however, discovered a variable that strongly reverses the trend: women leaders.

Cats and dogs are gendered in contemporary American culture, such that dogs are thought to be the proper pet for men and cats for women (especially lesbians). This, it turns out, is an old stereotype. In fact, cats were a common symbol in suffragette imagery. Cats represented the domestic sphere, and anti-suffrage…

I don't know about you, but whenever I go shopping for shoes, I'm always stunned by the incredible disproportion of high heels. I'm just gonna guestimate here, but I'll bet 85% of the shoes at the average store are high heels so impractical that most women only wear them on special occasions that involve a lot of…

I am convinced that women could pee standing up, with the same accuracy as a man (which means, what, 90% accuracy?), if they practiced as often as men do.

One of the many privileges that Peggy McIntosh identifies in her famous essay on "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" is that, as she writes, "I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented." This statement resounded when I saw the images…

In my opinion, there is no way to administer a math test that will identify inborn ability. So people who think the greater presence of men in high-end math and science positions is a result of the distribution of inborn abilities generally rely on the observation of (a) big gender gaps, (b) long-standing gender gaps,…

Here's a revealing look at the wait time to get a family-sponsored immigration visa in America. With the removal of strict, racialized quotas in 1965, the U.S. turned to a policy based on a set of priorities for deciding who would be granted a visa; among the various categories was a preference for those who had…

Here's an interesting example of how to interpret scientific results - and draw policy implications from them - from the world of birth practices and safety.

The U.S. Census Bureau recently released a report on employment and parental leave for first-time mothers, showing how little time women now take off when they have kids. The data also show that the least-educated women in America have the least access to paid leave.

It's the kind of finding to warm the hearts of us liberal, Larry-Summers-hating, gender-egalitarians. Summers — you saw him in The Social Network as the Harvard president who had no patience for the Winklevoss twins (he didn't have much patience for Cornel West either and probably many other things) — suggested that…

After unveiling their latest advertisement claiming "Skinny Always Gets The Attention," Skinny Water has decided to pull the campaign because —drum roll please— someone wrote in and told them they should.

At least that's what Skinny Water is promising in their latest advertisement. The ad shows a woman facing a throng of cameramen snapping her picture, elegant earrings dropping to the top of the headline which says: "Skinny Always Gets the Attention." Take a look:

With the summer over, it's time for Hollywood to pull out a new season of films. Here's some of what's coming up this fall and winter. For each trailer, I note what white people get to do and what non-white people get to do.

I've argued in the past against framing a preference for boy children as "culturally Asian." New data from Gallup shows that this preference is alive and well among Americans, at least among young men. While women are most likely to have no opinion and about equally likely to prefer a girl or boy, men are…

The dress below, available on etsy (and covered on regretsy) transforms a woman into … a urinal.

We recently learned of a new photo project by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio documenting individuals' daily meals across many countries. While the former post gave averages, the photographs in Menzel and D'Aluisio's new book, What I Eat, offer data points. What one person reported eating in one day. They are…

Way back in September of last year, we saw this Star Trek promotional poster, which showed the main cast staring straight out at the viewer, with the exception of the one female character, who was turned to the side, glancing sideways at the viewer with her mouth slightly open.

In a new book called "The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia became a Black Disease," psychiatrist and cultural critic Jonathan Metzl draws on a variety of sources — patient records, psychiatric studies, racialized drug advertisements, and popular metaphors for madness — to contend that schizophrenia transformed…

Recent studies show that inter-racial and -ethnic marriages are on the rise. Not all groups, however, intermarry at the same rate. Asians are more likely than Hispanics, Blacks, and Whites to marry someone of a different race or ethnicity.