(Blue Cross Blue Shield started a site called Get Health Reform Right earlier this year to express the insurance industry’s wishes regarding health-care reform, such as, “Creating a new government plan would cause the employer-provided health insurance system that 160 million Americans rely on today to unravel.”)
U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius released a statement Nov. 18, saying, “I would be very surprised if any private insurance company changed its mammography coverage decisions as a result of this action.” Anyone who says the task force doesn’t influence what private insurance companies do regarding mammograms needs to read the task force’s Web site, which explains that one of its goals is to inform and develop coverage decisions.
The EPCs review all relevant scientific literature on clinical, behavioral, and organization and financing topics to produce evidence reports and technology assessments. These reports are used for informing and developing coverage decisions, quality measures, educational materials and tools, guidelines, and research agendas. The EPCs also conduct research on methodology of systematic reviews. [Emphasis added is mine.]
Besides, where do they think the current mammogram guidelines come from?
To come up with this most recent recommendation, the task force looked at research done in China and Russia.
The research in China (“Randomized Trial of Breast Self-Examination in Shanghai: Final Results,” published Oct. 2, 2002, in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Oxford University Press) found that “the efficacy of breast self-examination for decreasing breast cancer mortality is unproven,” based on 266 breast-cancer deaths (135 in the main group and 131 in the control group) over 10 years. The study was conducted from October 1989 to October 1991, and women were followed through December 2000. The task force apparently took the difference of only four breast-cancer deaths to show that breast self-examination plays no part in saving women’s lives from breast cancer.
However, the authors of that study also said, “This was a trial of the teaching of BSE, not the practice of BSE.” They went on to say:
It should not be inferred from the results of this study that there would be no reduction in risk of dying from breast cancer if women practiced BSE competently and frequently. It is possible that highly motivated women could be taught to detect cancers that develop between regular screenings, and that the diligent practice of BSE would enhance the benefit of a screening program.
Yet, the task force recommends that physicians stop teaching patients how to do breast self-examinations.
The articles about the research in Russia are all published in Russian. Unless someone on the task force can read and understand Russian, or unless the task force had the articles translated, it’s fair to say that nobody on the task force read anything other than abstracts on Medline, which provide incredibly limited information, except for dates of publication.
As I was getting ready to write something about the book, I ran across Maloney’s July 29, 2008, appearance on Comedy Central’s Colbert Report. At first, I thought I would just include it with other links, but the more I thought about it, the more it bothered me.
Is it really funny that women get fired for lactating?
Here’s a quote from Maloney’s book.
I also heard numerous stories about difficulties in the workplace, including one woman whose male colleagues mooed outside the door as she expressed milk to take home and another woman being banished to do so in her car across the street from her office.
I didn’t laugh once while reading her book, but maybe I missed something. Exactly which issue that she wrote about was funny? Rape? Domestic violence? Burkas? Breast cancer? Or maybe prostitution? That link goes to a 2007 feature in Prism magazine, which Maloney reprinted on page 246 of her book and said it made the strongest case against sex trafficking she had ever seen.
Depictions of prostitution in the media and popular culture (including the movie Pretty Woman) can be grossly misleading, even glamorous. In fact, street prostitutes are typically trafficked, exploited, battered, and often force-fed drugs by slavemaster pimps. This series of mugshots of street prostitutes, which documents their first arrest to their eighth, illustrates the reality of life on the street, which more closely resembles a descent into hell than a Hollywood movie.
Is that funny? If not, I’m confused about why one of the first places she went to discuss her book was Comedy Central.
I’ve written about the blurred lines between celebrity and politics. It’s as if something has shifted. Instead of looking back as former government officials (elected or not), they now have to prove they don’t take themselves too seriously while they’re in office, no matter how “serious” the positions they hold. They have to prove that they get the joke. Hey, they’re even in on the joke because so many things that happen in Washington are, well, a joke. Is that it?
Maybe I just don’t get the whole Inside the Beltway atmosphere. Is it really just a non-stop college kegger where everyone has to hit the beer bong and slam shots until they puke their guts out to prove they can keep up?
Sigh.
Maloney’s book is a fairly comprehensive list of women’s issues — what’s been done, what’s been undone and what still needs to be done. For those who regularly keep up on these issues, not much of the information is new, but it’s interesting to read about the issues from Maloney’s perspective as a policymaker.
She put a “take-action guide” at the end of each chapter, providing contact information for some of the groups and organizations working on specific issues. Her goal is to convince readers to do something, anything: “I hope to persuade you that any action in support of your beliefs matters, whether it is large or small, brief or time-consuming, successful or unsuccessful.”
She included women’s personal stories as well as her own story and a wealth of information from other sources.
She also included some of her own research and highlighted inconsistencies between cultural myth and everyday reality.
Maloney mentioned Morgan Stanley, which settled a class-action sex-discrimination case for $54 million and then another one for $46 million, yet it consistently appears on Working Mother magazine’s 100 Best Companies for Working Mothers list, a topic I have written about many times.
You might think that Morgan Stanley would work especially hard to eradicate sex discrimination after so costly [$54 million] an episode. But the firm settled another class action sex discrimination suit in 2007 for $46 million — bringing its overall sex discrimination price tag to an even $100 million. That sounds like a lot, but it only amounts to a few good days of trading.
Despite these incidents, Morgan Stanley has been cited numerous times by Working Mother magazine as one of the 100 Best Companies for Working Mothers. That makes me wonder how bad things are at other companies.
While she pointed out the inconsistency of the companies that appear in Working Mother with their employment track record, she listed in the take-action guide the National Association for Female Executives, which might be a perfectly fine organization. But it falls under the umbrella of Working Mother Media, which publishes Working Mother magazine, whose 100 Best list is — well, let’s just say I’m highlyskeptical of the wholething.
She also gave this example.
If you drive your Mitsubishi to the airport after filling its tank at Sunoco, board a Boeing-built plane for a United Airlines flight, use your Verizon cell phone service to call your spouse before you take off, and then bite into a Krispy Kreme doughnut, you’ve just enriched six household-name companies that have settled or lost sex discrimination cases and lawsuits in recent years.
Right. At least one of those companies — Verizon — makes Working Mother magazine’s 100 Best Companies for Working Mothers list year after year.
In the take-action guide at the end of the “Health Care That’s Always There” chapter, she recommended (among others) Dove’s Campain for Real Beauty as a way to “start health education early by teaching our young and teenaged girls about issues that affect them.” If you scratch the surface of Dove, you’ll find a wee bit of image manipulation of its own.
Unilever is the maker of Dove products (and major “research” funder), which are the basis for the Campaign for Real Beauty and its self-esteem education for young girls. Unilever also makes and markets Axe products, which exist in a parallel universe where the V.I.X.E.N.S. (Very Interactive Xtremely Entertaining Naughty Supermodels) and Bom Chicka Wah Wahs don’t have “real beauty” or self-esteem issues.
In “The Pretty Woman Myth” chapter, Maloney wrote about misleading portrayals of prostitution in popular culture and mentioned that the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 2006 went to ‘It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,'” whose lyrics include:
Wait I got a snow bunny, and a black girl too
You pay the right price and they’ll both do you
That’s the way the game goes, gotta keep it strictly pimpin
Gotta have my hustle tight, makin change off these women, yeah
I remember when that happened, thinking, what?!? There was George Clooney, smugly patting himself on the back for Hollywood being “out of touch” for “giving Hattie McDaniel an Oscar when blacks were still sitting in the backs of theaters.” That was in 1939. Just how long was it, dear George, until the next black person was so honored? That would be 1948, then 1964, then 1982, then 2002. And just how far has Hollywood come, George, by glorifying “the black man” … as a pimp, not to mention portraying women of all colors as simply a venue for making money? Hollywood’s out of touch, George. Ya think?
Which brings me back around to the Comedy Central appearance.
If it’s a matter of reaching a younger audience? C’mon, they deserve more credit than that. It’s not only “the kids” watching Comedy Central, and “the younger audience” is watching much more than just Comedy Central. And there are tons of young, vibrant, intelligent voices on the Internet. Dust off the mouse and start clicking.
Besides, there’s not a damn thing that’s funny about this book. Just like the issues Maloney discusses in the book — the media and popular-culture myths that harm the efforts to improve the lives of real people — Maloney’s Comedy Central appearance did nothing but belittle and mock some very serious societal issues. The people behind the stories about sex discrimination, prostitution and unacceptably high infant-mortality rates (to name just a few) deserve much more than to become the butt of a comedian’s joke.
This headline was on the front page of my newspaper this morning: “‘Clean Enough’ Is New Housekeeping Standard.” My newspaper didn’t archive it online, but it’s a McClatchy article written by Federica Narancio.
In my own little upside-down world, I imagine that instead of this …
Many women who work outside the home, including those with helpful kids and husbands, have come up with a new housekeeping standard, according to sociologists and family relations experts. It’s called “clean enough.”
the first paragraph would read like this …
Many men who work outside the home, including those with helpful kids and wives, have come up with a new housekeeping standard, according to sociologists and family relations experts. It’s called “clean enough.”
And y’all’d be going, “And this is news?”
Right.
*I totally ripped off the headline for this post from a book I just started reading: Rumors of our Progress have been Greatly Exaggerated by Carolyn B. Maloney.
One of the first things I highlighted came after she talked about $54 million damages Morgan Stanley paid in a sex-discrimination case, and she pointed out that the cost might have made the company work especially hard to do away with discrimination. Yet, in 2007, Morgan Stanley settled another sex-discrimination case for $46 million.
Despite these incidents, Morgan Stanley has been cited numerous times by Working mother magazine as one of the 100 Best Companies for Working Mothers. That makes me wonder how bad things are at other companies.
Have you been reading that changing clocks earlier in spring and later in fall is saving us energy and money? Maybe. If we turn the hourglass back to 1974.
Carl Bialik, The Numbers Guy at The Wall Street Journal, said that statistics used to promote the Energy Policy Act of 2005 are outdated and supposed savings are in doubt.
When Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican, introduced the bill, they said the extension could save Americans the equivalent of 100,000 barrels of oil a day — an estimate repeated frequently in the media. But that statistic relied on figures from 1974, when President Nixon sprung clocks forward early, in January, during an energy crisis.
Never mind that our energy use is much, much different than it was three decades ago.
(I’m not sure when WSJ articles disappear behind the paywall, so here is another link to the article.)
Maybe you missed the headlines a couple of weeks ago about research that claims to show that girls like pink, but they caught my eye. It must have been all the pretty pink headlines and flowery language [girly sigh]. Maybe I’m making a magenta mountain out of a muted-pink molehill, but let’s just say this were a study on, say, the war in Iraq. I believe this little molehill indicates a much larger problem in journalism that goes like this:
Take a press release.
Rearrange a few words to “earn” a byline (with zero reporting and zero fact-checking) and, if you feel like it, add a witty sentence or two.
Slap a headline on it.
Call it news.
Let’s start with the study.Â
Researchers from Newcastle University in the United Kingdom published the results of a color-preference study on 208 college-age (20-26) volunteers in the Aug. 21, 2007, issue of Current Biology. The article was announced in a press release issued by Cell Press, which publishes Current Biology and several other scientific journals. Current Biology is a peer-reviewed journal, which means that materials submitted for publication are reviewed or “refereed” by a panel of experts in the same field to determine if they meet the standards of their scientific discipline.
Current Biology has 1,709 subscribers, and it’s distributed at about 30 conferences a year. At $179 a year, I doubt your average news consumer would subscribe just to read this article. I doubt they would even pay the $30 I did to download and read the 1,297-word article (a couple of pages) and its supplemental data. Apparently none of the media outlets that published the press release would either, although they really should have.
Or maybe it should be freely available, as Bad Science blogger, Dr. Ben Goldacre (who has a few things to say about the article), points out:
Unless you have an Athens login, you are not allowed to read what the researchers actually said, instead of what the media said they said. Because although they are publicly funded academics at the University of Newcastle, and although this work has been publicised in every major mainstream media outlet in Britain and the US, and although the journal is edited by academics you fund, and paid for by subscriptions from university libraries … the actual academic article is behind a paywall, with a payment model geared towards institutions, rather than interested individuals.
Bad luck you. I guess you have to rely on journalists.
According to the supplemental data, researchers tested three groups:
1) 90 subjects (28 British females, 25 British males, 18 Chinese females and 19 Chinese males) tested on 24 colors in three hue groups
2) 35 subjects (21 British females and 14 British males) tested on 44 colors in six hue groups
3) 83 subjects (43 British females and 40 British males) tested on 16 colors in three hue groups
Why the tests weren’t exactly the same in each setting, researchers didn’t say, and nobody asked. When were the tests done? 2007? 2006? 2005? Researchers didn’t say, and nobody asked.
The first group also completed the Bem Sex Role Inventory, which scores feminity and masculinity based on subjects rating themselves from 1 to 7 on a list of adjectives and phrases, such as self-reliant, yielding, dominant and soft-spoken. Why? Researchers didn’t say, although they found a “significant” correlation between feminity scores (of 46 females) and the preference test. Why this group and not the others? Researchers didn’t say. Nobody asked.
The universal favorite color for all people appears to be blue.
“On top of that, females have a preference for the red end of the red-green axis, and this shifts their color preference slightly away from blue towards red, which tends to make pinks and lilacs the most preferred colors in comparison with others.”
Actually, Hurlbert wrote in the Current Biology article:
On average, all subjects give positive weight to the S-(L+M) contrast component (“bluish” contrasts), with British females weighting it significantly higher than British males. (Emphasis added.)
That means 92 women preferred blue even more than 79 men. Do we need a new headline?
Girls like blue even more than boys do!
The article also said, “On average, all males give large negative weight to the L-M [red-green] axis, whereas all females weight it slightly positively.” (Emphasis added.) New headline?
Boys hate red;Â girls think it’s OK
To rule out cultural influences on color preference, researchers also tested 18 Chinese women and 19 Chinese men. Researchers thought they would get a higher preference for red from the Chinese participants because, they said, red signifies “good luck” in Chinese culture. (I don’t know. Isn’t that like saying the Irish like green?) Results were similar, thus proving to researchers that color preference had nothing to do with culture and everything to do with biology.
Which brings us to this gem:
We speculate that this [girls’ preference for pink] sex difference arose from sex-specific functional specializations in the evolutionary division of labour. The hunter-gatherer theory proposes that female brains should be specialized for gathering-related tasks and is supported by studies of visual spatial abilities.
“Gatherer” females apparently had to identify red fruit among all the green leaves and be highly aware of changes in skin color because of their role as “empathizers.” Sooooo … it’s a scientific fact that a small group of 20-something 21st century women “prefer” reddish hues over men who dislike it because of evolution. Remember, cultural influences were removed as a factor because the Chinese participants didn’t like red any more than the others, even though, according to researchers, they should have.
All-righty.
Here‘s what one blogger had to say about the scientific aspects of the article. Here’s what the Bad Science blogger/doctor said about it. (Red Jenny tipped me off to Bad Science.)
What’s the point of the research, and how will results be used? Researchers didn’t say, except that they plan to study color preference in infants, and perhaps they need funding for that. Except that research apparently has already been done, according to a May 8, 2005, article by BBC News. Even so, nobody asked.
Who’s funding this research and why? Researchers didn’t say, and nobody asked.
However, Unilever was acknowledged for supporting co-researcher Yazhu Ling with a studentship in a 2002 article in Perception and a 2004 article in the Journal of Vision. Unilever was also listed under “support” for a presentation on color perceptionby Hurlbert and Ling at the 29 European Conference on Visual Perception in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Aug. 21, 2006.
Unilever provides financial support for research through its Port Sunlight office in Liverpool, which boasts more than “700 scientists and engineers from various backgrounds and nationalities working to create innovative products for consumers around the world. The global brands our teams contribute to include Dove, Sunsilk, Lynx/Axe, Cif, Persil/Omo and Domestos.” This work, the Web site continues, results in more than 100 patent filings and about 140 peer-reviewed papers and conference presentations. Oh, and by the way, Unilever also created “The Gamekillers,” a television series set to debut on MTV on Sept. 21, to sell Axe antiperspirant, according to an article in the Sept. 13, 2007, Wall Street Journal.
How to sell products to consumers?
“Psychologists, social scientists, and experts in cognitive neuroscience form another important team — Consumer Science Insight — whose role is to investigate how a consumer’s ‘need’ or ‘desire’ translates into a product.”
Let’s check out the headlines. This one’s from Cell’s press release:
Girls prefer pink, or at least a redder shade of blue
Psst! Wouldn’t a “redder shade of blue” be purple?
Other headlines
Study: Why Girls Like Pink (Time.com, Aug. 20, 2007)
Why women love a red, red rose (USATODAY, Aug. 20, 2007)
Girls Really Do Prefer Pink (HealthDay/Yahoo! News, Aug. 20, 2007)
Color biases may be nature, not nurture (Los Angeles Times, Aug. 21, 2007)
At last, science discovers why blue is for boys but girls really do prefer pink (The Times, Aug. 21, 2007)
Why girls ‘really do prefer pink’ (BBC, Aug. 21, 2007)
Girls Prefer Pink, Or At Least A Redder Shade of Blue (Science Daily, Aug. 22, 2007)
I saved the best for last. No, there’s nothing special about the headline. It’s about the same as all the others. The article is the same.
Girls really do prefer pink, study shows (Telegraph, Aug. 21, 2007)
Oh, but this … this takes the cake. The Telegraph’s science editor, Dr. Roger Highfield, made a video version of the article, complete with color-screen changes with a snap of his fingers and a tone of authority and finality. As in, this is the truth, this is scientific fact, these researchers said so, I’m a doctor and I say so, amen.
P.S. The good Dr. Highfield used to work for Unilever.
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