Scandinavia. Three of the world's wealthiest countries and the happiest as well.
Some researchers have ascribed Denmark's status as the "happiest country in the world" to the psychological well being of its poorest citizens rather than its wealthiest. The key, they say, is "high income equality."
The research on our fellow primates squares with this opinion.
I've used the example of Yale's "monkey economy" on many occasions here and elsewhere.
That University's research has proven that primates from whom the human line separated fifty million years ago, have a grinding sense of injustice whenever a visibly non-working monkey makes five times the compensation as the working monkeys.
Monkey See, Monkey Strike
The "worker" monkeys throw their "money" (grapes and cucumbers) out of their cages, scream, jump up and down with rage and refuse to work at all as soon as the differential reaches five orders of magnitude.
It is this "relative" deprivation among human primates that causes most of the distributive disputes in the world, i.e., those related to goods and services rather than to values and identity.
Norway's Gender Balance Programs
Recently, I spoke with Curt Rice, the Vice President for Research & Development at the University of Tromsø in Norway. We were chatting about women negotiating raises in an academic setting (where his work is focused).
He told me it was difficult to compare the U.S. with Norway because the University system does not allow any Professor to make more than four times the salary of, say, a groundskeeper.
This type of social engineering would, of course, cause outrage here in the land of the free, but it - along with happiness indices, has drawn my attention to the Scandinavian workforce - a workforce I might well be part of if the family on my father's side of the tree hadn't immigrated to America in the late 19th century.
Gender Balance and Sex Points
So it is that we come to "sex points."
As Curt recently reported in his article A sex point or two for male nurses, Norway's Gender Balance in Research committee recommended that men should be given extra "points" toward admission to nursing programs just because they're men.
Rice explains how the "point" system for admission to Universities in Norway works as follows:
Admission to some programs is based on a point system, reflecting grades from secondary school, subjects from secondary school, age, work experience, and other factors the government deems worthy of reward.
Already today, the law allows for one or two extra points to be awarded to the under-represented sex in study programs where there is a significant imbalance. . . For example, the admissions process for several engineering programs gives extra points to women, while veterinary sciences give extra points go to men.
The Gender Committee has now proposed a system that will reward "gender points" to either gender which comprises fewer than 30% of the students, regardless of whether it is men or women.
Rice covers the pro's and con's of such a system and asks the most pertinent questions,
Are boys not choosing nursing because they don’t have the grades to get in, or is it something else that stops them? Are girls not choosing engineering because they don’t think they can tackle it, or are they perhaps just not interested in the subject the way it’s traditionally taught?
Changing the culture of a field of study in ways that might attract more diverse cohorts of students surely requires much more than affirmative action. . . The remaining question is whether affirmative action makes a difference at all.
Or, to put it another way, would a sex point or two get more guys into nursing?
Here's my untutored reaction and I'll ask for reader responses as well.
Men don't tend to go into "women's fields" not only because the entire field's compensation drastically decreases as soon as it becomes "women's work" but also because it suggests that the man is more "feminine" than our culture deems suitable.
Arnold would call them girly men and that's the talk of a man who served in the Governor's office in one of the richest and most productive states in the Union, California. In other words, he's speaking from a privileged place in government, politics and culture. It's a voice that can't be ignored.
I'll leave you with this. Sometime in the early aughts ('03 or '04) one of my law partners told me that the law would "eventually become a woman's professional because it's become primarily a 'clerical task.'"
Nice.
Lucky for him I never put his name in print.
