Links - 23rd April 2015

Navy Women Head to the Sick Bay Much More Than the Men - "Female sailors visited the sick bay aboard one of the U.S. Navy's ships nearly 10 times more than their male counterparts, a "startling difference" the Navy had not expected to see, according to a new study. "With a female-to-male visit ratio of more than 9 to 1, the conversion of a ship with an all-male crew to 10 percent female would essentially double the clinical workload of the ship's medical department," says the article in the latest issue of Military Medicine, a respected professional journal for U.S. military physicians. The Navy dismissed the findings as an aberration. An earlier study involving four U.S. Navy ships found that women visited the sick bay 60 percent more often than men"

Women are almost 42 per cent more likely to take sick days than men - Telegraph - "The Office for National Statistics has disclosed that women take on average almost five sick days a year, compared to men who take fewer than four. The analysts found that after stripping out all other factors including age, profession and employer size, women are on average 42 per cent more likely to take time off. Karen Steadman, a researcher at the Work Foundation, a think tank, said that men are more likely to go to work even when they should be off sick. She said that women tend to be the main carer for children or elderly relatives, so take sick days to deal with emergencies... The new figures also reveal that people working in the public sector are 24 per cent more likely be sick, although the gap has shrunk since 1993. The worst sick rates were in the health service, where 3.4 per cent of working hours were lost each year to sickness. In central government the figure was 3 per cent, while in local government it was 2.7 per cent. In the private sector, by contrast, 1.8 per cent of working hours were lost to sickness... “Individuals in the private sector are less likely to have a payment for being off sick than they are in the public sector. “A lot of the smaller workforces for those with less than 25 employees have lower levels of sickness. People in smaller workforces tend go into work when they're sick because they don't want to let their colleagues down."
Maybe this is another reason women are paid less than men

Social Justice Warriors: Do Not Engage: What is "derailment"? - "A social justice warrior once called me The Derailment Machine, which I loved so much that I used it as the name of my now deleted LiveJournal... I love the way [the SJW] definition works: people who shut up and accept what they're told are good; people who reject the speaker's analysis are bad.
Here's a more objective definition:
Derail (v): (1) to offer information that does not fit the agenda of a person who wants to control a conversation; (2) to reject the framing of an issue."
Keywords: definition of derailing, define derailing

Self Perceptions of Student Activists - "This study examines personality differences and similarities between student groups in protest activities by comparing activists to student leaders and random students. Results indicate many similarities in personality dimensions but protesters are more adventurous, autocratic and individualistic. They are also more spontaneous and irresponsible"

The Social Context of the Rank-and-File Student Activist: A Test of Four Hypotheses - "We find that there is no consistent association between socioeconomic background and activism within quality contexts; that academic commitment is related to activism only at the better institutions; that majoring in the humanities and social sciences is associated with activism primarily at the better institutions; and that being intellectually oriented is associated with activism in all quality contexts. The higher rates of student activism found to prevail at the nation's leading institutions are not simply a function of the kinds of students they attract. These institutions foster or promote activism among all categories of students"
Addendum: If this still holds true today, we can conclude that colleges do radicalise their students

Transition or transformation? Personal and political development of former Berkeley Free Speech Movement activists - "Former Berkeley Free Speech Movement activists' sociopolitical status, self and ideal self constructions, perceptions of parents' child-rearing practices and moral reasoning were compared with an assessment made 11 years earlier following the Berkeley Sproul Hall sit-in. Activists were found to be less politically active, more tempered in their political radicalism, more pragmatic and personally reactive in their self and ideal self conceptualizations, more critical in their perceptions of parental relationships, and stable in their level of moral development"
Backlash!

Moral judgment, personality, and attitudes toward authority. - "Ss endorsing the "ethics of social responsibility" held more favorable attitudes toward authority than did those endorsing the "ethics of personal conscience.""

Personality Correlates of Marxist and Nonviolent Political Activists - "Four personality inventories were given to political activists separated into two groups, one pacifist and one Marxist, by their scores on a pacifism scale and by a self-reporting measure of political ideology. The inventories were tests of Complexity of Self-Concept, Locus of Control, and 2 factors of the 16 Personality Factor Test, ego & superego. All of these tests differentiated the two groups with the pacifists scoring more complex self-concepts, more internally oriented, more emotional stability and more superego control. Comparisons between these activists & student activists of the 60's showed them to have few demographic similarities"

Religious fanatics who wreck lives - "One month ago, G Thiyaggurudeen alleged that his teachers had forced him to drink “air penawar” (holy water), before he was indoctrinated by religious missionaries, and coerced into making a police report against his father. Yesterday, the 14-year-old drank coffee laced with paraquat, because he did not want to be traumatised by the religious missionaries, again... Last February, soon after Ganesan’s request that his son, Thiyaggurudeen be excluded from the Islamic Studies class, the teenager alleged that two Muslim teachers had taken him to a missionary centre in Negeri Sembilan, where he received an indoctrination which lasted a few hours. He alleged that his captors were state religious department officials. A tip-off, by a security guard at his son’s school, enabled Ganesan to rescue his son. Earlier that day, it was also alleged that two teachers at his son’s school, had forced Thiyaggurudeen to lodge a police report against his father. They also claimed that Ganesan had been guilty of abusing his son, over the past three years... We have read about religious authorities seizing dead bodies from funeral parlours, claiming that these people were converts and should be buried according to Islamic rites. Women have had their weddings terminated because of the action of religious officials. Children have been snatched from their mothers, because their fathers converted. Children at residential boarding schools, have been converted, without their parents’ permission. So, when will this madness end? Despite civil laws governing the rights of the children and the mothers, syariah law always triumphs... Are the fanatics claiming that it is better to be a bad Muslim, than be a good non-Muslim? Are fanatics more concerned about the total numbers of Muslims in the population, or are they more bothered about the person’s piety and compassion? To the fanatics, being a Muslim is more about quantity than quality."

Man dressed as medieval jester with foot fetish seen harassing women at Raffles Place MRT with glass shoe | New Nation - "Eyewitnesses said the man with the foot fetish was stopping random women and asking them if they would want to marry him, as he promised a dowry of 20 cows, castle-living, a wedding to be held in a country with rolling meadows and a blacksmith who doubles up as the village abortionist. Several of the women approached who could fit into the shoe said they were keen on the marriage proposal. However, as talk turned to whether they were virgins, all said they weren’t, resulting in disappointed sighs ringing out as the search for a suitable bride continued."

SAF halts all training, deems war misogynistic, offensive | New Nation

74,476 Reasons You Should Always Get The Bigger Pizza - "One day last year, an engineer and I went to a pizza place for lunch. The engineer told me he wasn't very hungry, but he said he was going to get the 12-inch medium instead of the 8-inch small — because the medium was more than twice as big as the small, and it cost only a little bit more. This sort of blew my mind... The math of why bigger pizzas are such a good deal is simple: A pizza is a circle, and the area of a circle increases with the square of the radius. So, for example, a 16-inch pizza is actually four times as big as an 8-inch pizza."

Italian defender celebrates with Peppa Pig after scoring a header
Wut.

Move The Fuck Over, Sis - "People needlessly depriving others of seats in public is selfish, regardless of gender. This space is for showing the situations movethefuckoverbro.tumblr.com won't."
It's only bad when men do it, apparently

27 Reasons Feminism Is Not ‘For Everybody’ - "1. I don’t need feminism because I don’t like playing victim.
2. I don’t need feminism, because as a woman in western society who has the luxury to sit inside her own house, in a comfortable bed with a laptop and has access to the internet I would feel ashamed to consider myself “oppressed” or complain about nonsense-issues, while women in other countries have to endure real suffering.
3. I don’t need feminism because the movement is filled with hypocrisy.
4. I don’t need feminism because it’s okay, somehow, to call men creeps and pedophiles, but it’s an absolute sin to call women sluts, even when the women who being called sluts are sluts.
5. I don’t need feminism because I was told by a feminist that because I am anti-feminist I cannot go around saying I’m pro-equality. Because apparently feminists not only invented fighting for human rights they also patented it.
8. I don’t need feminism because after years of my friends and family telling me to love and accept my obese body, I watched my father die at 55 from a heart attack. He was obese too but weighed less than I did. I’ve lost 80 pounds since then and I’m still going, that’s how I love my body. That’s how I want everyone to love their bodies.
9. I don’t need feminism because feminist claim America is a patriarchal society yet they ask those men to do things for them.
23. I don’t need feminism because I don’t like blaming society for my problems.
25. I don’t need feminism because I don’t find anything wrong with rape jokes.
26. I don’t need feminism because my gender doesn’t make me weak.
27. I don’t need feminism because I’m a logical person who sees the misandry in feminism."