Category: Politics and society

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The practical reality of contraception, Australian edition

Background the first: The practical reality of contraception: A guide for men, by Valerie Aurora, about contraception in the US

Background the second: A layperson’s intro to paying for healthcare in Australia which I wrote as specific background to this post.

Things that are the same in Australia

Contraception works the same way! The side-effect risks are the same:

Let’s start with estrogen-based hormonal birth control and health. I know women who get life-threatening blood clots on estrogen birth control (if the clot gets lodged in a blood vessel, effects range from loss of a limb to death). Others have mood swings so bad that their partners threaten to break up with them and their boss calls them into their office to ask why they’re so mean and bitchy all of a sudden. Don’t laugh – losing your partner or your job is serious shit, and many women decide to risk pregnancy and an abortion rather than the certainty of being abandoned and broke. Another side effect is feeling like you’re going to barf, which usually goes away after a few weeks, but not for everyone. More side effects and health problems abound, but those are the ones I know about offhand.

The mechanism is the same:

Now let’s talk failure rates. You have to take the birth control pill every single day, within a few hours of the same time, to get that 98% or 99% effective rate. Big whoop, you may think. I take my blood pressure medicine every day. Usually. Actually, it’s pretty hard, even with those little day-of-the-week labels on the pills.

Those are specific to the combined pill, but there is no special magical Australian version of contraception. Same risks, same side-effects, same administration, same failure rate.

Valerie’s description of providers withholding prescriptions to force a patient to have a pelvic exams is also true here, although they usually aren’t called pelvic exams: they’re called Pap smears, even though the bimanual exam is often performed too. However, they’re done slightly less often: every 2 years in Australia for low-risk women.

I believe doctors and pharmacists in Australia can refuse the prescription and the supply based on personal moral considerations, and that really sucks. However, it doesn’t seem as common except for the (sometimes publicly-funded!) Catholic hospitals, ew. (See Lauredhel’s “Pro-life” Archbishop Hart’s murderous misogyny and Catholic Church says “Thalidomide-analogue cancer trial? No contraceptive advice for you!”)

Things that are different

Cost

Very important! Many many many brands of the pill are PBS medications, and cost about $30 for 4 months’ supply, so, getting close to Valerie’s mythical $8 a month mark.

Moreover, other contraceptive mechanisms (except condoms, which probably cost about the same) are cheaper too. For example, in the US I understand that I would be out of pocket at least $500 to have a Mirena IUD. In Australia, I had the insertion performed in a public hospital (being elective, I had to wait about 10 weeks), and bought the device from a pharmacy for $35 as it is a PBS medication. Total cost: $35! Length of contraceptive effectiveness: 5 years! (Downside: needs to be shoved into uterus. However, this is easier to do if you’ve shoved a baby the other way.)

Trouble at the doctor

As in Valerie’s entry, scripts for regular hormonal contraception do need to be re-done once a year or so, and given the side-effect profile of the Pill, I can see why. (If your blood pressure is up, you probably won’t notice, but you should be off the Pill.) At least in major metro areas, getting a non-essential appointment to get a script re-issued seems less of a pain though: a few days notice and your clinic will get you in for the required 15 minutes. Also, most doctors will prescribe the Pill to a brand-new patient after a short verbal medical history (at least, if you mention a Pap smear within the last two years) and a blood pressure check, so you can pop into a bulk billing clinic if you have one handy.

In addition, very recent law changes apparently will allow pharmacists to directly supply a small amount of contraceptives (and blood pressure meds) to patients to tide them over to their next doctor’s appointment. (I heard this on the radio, so, sadly, no citation.)

Trouble at the pharmacy

Like other meds in Australia, this just isn’t as much of a pain. The PBS contribution, if any (Nuvaring isn’t covered, say), goes on before you ever go anywhere near the pharmacy, you pay the remainder yourself usually. So the fighting with one’s insurer step is gone. Moreover, while pharmacies do only fill scripts towards the end of the previous supply, the “towards the end” test is more generous: you have two to three weeks at least.

Summary

I think Australia really wins here, especially on cost.

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A layperson's intro to paying for healthcare in Australia

I wanted to write a comparison post to Valerie’s The practical reality of contraception: A guide for men about the Australian equivalents. However, I realised a background in the Australian healthcare system might be needed. Hence this post.

Caution: I am not a medical professional or health administrator. There are plenty of details of healthcare payment in Australia I am blissfully unaware of. This is a guide to what it is like to pay for healthcare in Australia as a relatively healthy younger woman.

Summary

In Australia, many people in cities can see doctors mostly for free, and get free hospital treatment and pretty cheap pharmaceuticals. Yay. It isn’t the magical land of totally free though. Boo.

Medicare

Australia has government funded healthcare, called Medicare. Medicare is available to all Australian citizens and permanent residents living in the country. It is funded through the Medicare levy, a federal tax applied to people on moderate incomes and up.

To prove your eligibility for Medicare you have a Medicare card listing your name (often families are combined onto one card of which each adult gets a copy). In the absense of this card Medicare can verify coverage directly to health care services, I believe, but that’s more hassle. Most people carry their Medicare card in their wallet.

Further reading: overview of Medicare, tax guide to the Medicare levy.

Medicare pays for medical services: that is, (a fixed amount of) doctors’ fees and, for public hospitals, other costs associated with hospitalisation. That is, in Australia, you can for most conditions go to a public hospital, be admitted, and be operated on, x-rayed, diagnosed, etc, for free. Hooray!

The Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS)

The PBS provides government subsidised pharmaceuticals to Medicare card holders. Basically, almost all common drugs are bought in huge numbers by the government at agreed prices and then sold in pharmacies to patients. No matter what the government paid, the patient will pay something in the order of $20 to $50 for PBS medication. Low income people can obtain a health care card entitling them to medication prices on the order of $5 or so.

Private health insurers (see below) may provide partial reimbursements for some non-PBS drugs.

People who have unusual drug needs (for example, some types of chemotherapy and painkillers, or a drug for which there are several PBS alternatives that for some reason you personally can’t take) can still end up paying huge amounts for medications.

Further reading: About the PBS, Health Care Card

Bulk billing, private billing, and gaps

Doctors’ fees are an important thing to understand here. A doctor in a public hosptial will bill the government for their fixed fee only (or rather, the hospital will bill the government, and pay the doctor a salary). A doctor working outside a public hospital has a choice, they can bulk bill, which is the jargon for billing the government directly, and which from the point of view of the patient is a free consultation. Or they can privately bill, and they can bill any fee they like. The patient can claim the fixed government contribution from Medicare. The difference between the doctor’s bill and the government scheduled fee is called a gap (not a “co-pay”, that’s American jargon) and it is often paid by the patient themselves, especially if the doctor was seen in their own clinic rather than in a private hospital.

The same can be true of other medical services like X-Rays and scans, or blood tests. There are some practitioners or clinics that bulk bill and some that don’t.

There are also some procedures that Medicare flat-out doesn’t cover. I mostly encounter this with unusual blood tests.

Availability of bulk billing

As above, public hospitals do it, and there are a lot of public hospitals. For non-emergency treatment or care for which there is contention, such as childbirth, the hospital usually has a defined catchment area, and will only treat in-area patients. So you have an assigned hospital, essentially, that will admit you and treat you under Medicare.

Outside hospitals, in major metropolitan areas it is often possible to find bulk-billing general practitioners, and, in some specialties, even bulk-billing specialists with their own practice. (This can have downsides such as shorter appointments or high practitioner turnover, but some private billing clinics have these problems too!) In smaller cities and regional and rural areas on the other hand, there is usually a shortage of medical practitioners and private billing can be near-universal. And underserved specialties often have near-universal enormous gap fees for out-of-hospital consultations.

There is some protection against enormous gaps. Some private insurers (below) have some coverage, and the Medicare Safety Net starts paying part of many gaps after you spend about $500 in a year on gaps.

Private insurance

Now, there is private health insurance, which you take out in addition to (not instead of) Medicare. What this gets you is:

  1. coverage of many expenses associated with choosing a private hospital (accommodation, operating theatre fees) and so on, and on some policies partial coverage of the gap amount on the doctors who treated you at the hospital
  2. coverage of some non- or partly-Medicare covered expenses, like dental, optical and physiotherapy fees (for example, Medicare covers eye exams to prescribe glasses, but not the actual glasses themselves), the jargon for that here is extras cover
  3. coverage of ambulance expenses in states where the state government doesn’t pay for them (NSW is one of the states where you pay for your own ambulance)
  4. coverage of a (usually pretty limited) range of non-PBS drugs

You can usually buy pieces of this too: eg, just hospital, or just ambulance.

As an indication as regards cost, private premiums presently start at about $150 for a family for a month, and a super-kickarse policy with huge yearly limits on extras and private obstetric care (this, psychiatric care and dialysis are often excluded from cheap policies) included starts around $350 a month for a family with adults my age. They actually have to get the federal government to approve their rate of premium rises.

Employers sometimes, but by no means always, offer private health cover. It’s usually a benefit associated with US-owned companies. (Google presently pays for my family’s private cover.) It’s not a tax-exempt benefit.

Why use the private system?

Here, the private system is anything where the patient may be billed. This includes:

  1. being admitted to a public hospital as a private patient, which is a choice they offer you, and the hospital bills you/your private insurer rather than Medicare
  2. being admitted to a privately funded hospital
  3. seeing a doctor or visiting a clinic that does not bulk bill

One major reason is that, as above, out of a hospital you simply may not have a local bulk billing practitioner. Or, if you are wealthy, you might, but you may have a personal preference for a particular practitioner who doesn’t bulk bill.

The other is to avoid the downsides of the public system:

  1. for some treatments, especially elective surgery (tangent, in Australian medical jargon, that means all surgery that isn’t urgent, it does not only mean “surgery for which there isn’t a medical need”) public hospitals may have long waiting lists, whereas you could get your treatment more swiftly in the private system, which may be considerably more pleasant for you!
  2. in the public system, you are not entitled to a choice of doctor. You get treated by the rostered doctor (often a registrar, ie, specialist-in-training in the appropriate specialty). In the private system (including a privately-paying patient in a public hospital) you appoint your doctor.
  3. public hospitals tend to have a lower standard of accommodation than private ones, ie, shared rooms, less light in rooms and similar. So, a class thing.
  4. quite a number of public hosptials are actually Catholic, and refuse proscribed services like abortion, tubal ligation, and prescribing or supplying contraception (whether publicly funded hospitals should be allowed to do this is an interesting question, but not really live, politically). Mind you, so are a lot of private ones, but since you can go to a private hospital of your choice, you can choose a non-Catholic one, and you may not be able to in the public system.

Nevertheless, as you can imagine, Medicare coverage suffices for many Australians even if they can afford private premiums. There are a couple of financial carrots and sticks used to encourage taking it up and, in theory, reduce the cost burden on Medicare.

Further reading: the Medicare levy surcharge tax on wealthy people who don’t take up private insurance, and lifetime health cover premiums in which your premium is locked to the age that you first bought private insurance at.

Comparisons with the US system

Improvements on the US system, based on my (very imperfect!) understanding of that system:

  1. the most obvious one is that when you lose your job you do not lose Medicare coverage if you are unemployed, or earn too much money, or earn it the wrong way, or are too old, too young, too healthy or too sick.
  2. likewise, you cannot end up with a health history that makes it impossible for you to be insured: private insurers cannot, by law, discriminate on anything other than age (higher age is higher premiums) or medical history, and the only permissable medical history discrimination is that they can (and always do) refuse to pay for treatment related to a “pre-existing condition” for the first 12 months of cover. Medicare does not discriminate other than on nationality and visa status.
  3. insurers don’t get involved in the details of your medical decisions. It’s fairly plain when something is covered and when it isn’t. There seems to be far fewer problems with “and then I presented my script in a month with a blue moon and it turns out that clause 197c2 subsection b means that I now pay for my medication myself this year”. Generally you and your treating professional make a decision, stuff happens, and Medicare, PBS and you collectively pay the same amount for it no matter who billed what when and who sacrificed which mammal to the gods.
  4. even privately billed stuff seems cheaper, probably because the giant single-payer forces all the prices down, and the fact that for things that Medicare doesn’t cover, you tend to see the entire bill, which seems to be more price transparency than the US has.

    As a price difference example, Valerie states that she had a USD 40 co-pay on Nuvaring. Nuvaring is not a PBS medication here and my private insurer didn’t cover it either. But I paid AUD 30 a month for it and that was the entire cost, not just a portion of it.

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Book review: Steve Jobs

Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs.

It is the day in Australia to be thinking about poor leadership and its sequelae. And coincidentally I’ve just finished up everyone’s favourite summer hardback brick (all hail the Kindle), the authorised Steve Jobs biography, and I just read this today too:

However, sometimes really smart employees develop agendas other than improving the company. Rather than identifying weaknesses, so that he can fix them, he looks for faults to build his case. Specifically, he builds his case that the company is hopeless and run by a bunch of morons. The smarter the employee, the more destructive this type of behavior can be. Simply put, it takes a really smart person to be maximally destructive, because otherwise nobody else will listen to him.

Why would a smart person try to destroy the company that he works for?… He is fundamentally a rebel—She will not be happy unless she is rebelling; this can be a deep personality trait. Sometimes these people actually make better CEOs than employees.

When Smart People are Bad Employees

Well, good to see that someone understands Jobs better than me.

One major thing that struck me about this book is that Isaacson is really quite flattering about… Bill Gates. It is, however, fairly easy to do this in a biography of Jobs, because Gates was really one of the fairly few people with both power and emotional and financial distance to assess Jobs relatively dispassionately and to go on the record about it. He also never had a intense and short-lived mutual admiration relationship with him in the way that Jobs had with many men he worked more closely with. Gates and Jobs apparently always considered each other a little bit of a despicable miracle: astonishingly good work with your little company over there, Bill/Steve, I would never have considered it believed with your deluded pragmatic/uncompromising approach to software aesthetics.

I read these books mostly for the leadership and corporate governance insights at the moment: unfortunately there’s not a lot here. There is of course a lot of unreplicatable information about Jobs personally: I doubt a firm belief that vegans don’t need to wear deodorant is essential to building a massive IT company. Likewise, if your boss is uncompromising and divides the world into shitheads and geniuses, the solution turns out to (in this book) “be Jony Ive or John Lasseter”. Not really a repeatable result.

It shouldn’t (and didn’t!) really come as a surprise, but if you want to know more about Jobs personally, read this book. If you want to know a great deal about the successes and failures of Apple’s corporate strategy, you’ll largely see them through a Jobs-shaped lens. Which probably isn’t the worst lens for it, but not the only one. In any case, it’s a nice flowing read (I read it in a couple of days) and is ever so full of those “oh goodness he did WHAT?” anecdotes you can subject your patient housemates to, if you like.

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Sunday spam: watered-down gruel

Mmm, yum.

I’ve been thinking more intensely about schooling my son since, well, he was born and also since I began reading Rivka’s homeschooling blog (she began homeschooling her then five-year-old year old daughter in June 2010, when my own son was about four months old).

I probably, frankly, wouldn’t know the first thing about homeschooling otherwise, but as it is, I can bring you several links. The first couple are a defence of homeschooling from a self-identified liberal point of view, in the US sense of progressive. In fact, all of this is about the US school system.

Does homeschooling violate liberal values?

Do we have a responsibility to work towards equal educational opportunity for all children, and if so, do we violate it by removing our family from the public system? Even liberal homeschoolers don’t really seem to engage with this question much. Partly I think it’s because there’s such a strong libertarian streak in homeschooling communities, even on the left wing. But also, liberal philosophical arguments for homeschooling tend to be based on a critique of schools as rigid and stifling institutions…

Are liberal homeschoolers hypocrites?

… I’m not a homeschooler, and I don’t particularly care whether anyone thinks I’m sufficiently liberal. But I certainly don’t judge anyone who chooses to take their kids out of these schools. There’s no one right answer to how to make this world a more humane place, and the homeschoolers’ answer seems at least as wise as Goldstein’s. If anything, I instinctively distrust the idea that we can create a more liberal and humane society by putting our kids into less liberal and humane environments. By treating kids as instruments for social improvement, that argument mirrors the very same instrumental treatment of children that I object to when it’s practiced by “reformers” who treat kids as soldiers in the battle for global competitiveness.

And that last point about soldiers in the battle for global competitiveness neatly brings me to Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools:

Hundreds of private philanthropies together spend almost $4 billion annually to support or transform K–12 education, most of it directed to schools that serve low-income children (only religious organizations receive more money). But three funders—the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad (rhymes with road) Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation—working in sync, command the field. Whatever nuances differentiate the motivations of the Big Three, their market-based goals for overhauling public education coincide: choice, competition, deregulation, accountability, and data-based decision-making. And they fund the same vehicles to achieve their goals: charter schools, high-stakes standardized testing for students, merit pay for teachers whose students improve their test scores, firing teachers and closing schools when scores don’t rise adequately, and longitudinal data collection on the performance of every student and teacher…

Every day, dozens of reporters and bloggers cover the Big Three’s reform campaign, but critical in-depth investigations have been scarce (for reasons I’ll explain further on). Meanwhile, evidence is mounting that the reforms are not working…

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Talking about his generation: you too can be a bad futurist

The X or Y posts (Gen X or Y?, On being X-ish) reminded me of something I wrote about my son, who was born in 2010, not long before he was born:

I was looking at one of those “the kids of today” lists and thinking about V. What will the world of the 2010 baby look like? I came up with:

  • September 11 will be something that happened when his parents were young, roughly equivalent to the Vietnam War for me, a bit nearer than the moon landing or Harold Holt drowning
  • in fact by the time he’s a teenager everyone or nearly everyone who walked on the moon will have died
  • he may not ever learn to read a paper map or street directory unless he gets heavily into bushwalking or something
  • by the time he’s grown up, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s really unusual to own many paper books, perhaps as uncommon as people my age who own vinyl (yeah, I do know a few, but…)
  • there will be a few veterans of WWII and people who experienced the Holocaust (other than as little babies) around in his childhood and even teens, but they’ll be like I remember WWI veterans: very elderly

If anyone wants to play: can you come up with things that aren’t true of children born in 2000, say? Things like “your parents have always had mobile phones” are going to be true of children 10 or even 15 years older than V will be. (Of my list, the paper map stuff probably fails that test, so might the WWII stuff.)

I’m a terrible futurist, that already reads badly to me. For example, I didn’t own a GPS device at the time: that’s why I thought that bushwalking would rely on paper maps in 2030. (Since they don’t run out of charge, presumably they’ll be useful as backups for a long time, at least for the type of folks who are wary enough to take backup maps anywhere.)

But the question stands: there’s a lot of difference already between me and someone born in, say, 1995. But what’s the difference between that child’s life, and that of my son born in 2010?

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On being X-ish

Now that I have described how I graduated into Generation X, I have a secret to confess: I’m starting to think that that might not be entirely wrong.

Let’s stick to cohort effects here, since it’s supposed to be a cohort term. And I should add that this is all very trivial stuff, I’m focussing on media, pop culture and technology experiences.

One of the major temptations of identifying as Generation Y had to do with pop culture. My teenage years were just past the wave of slackers and grunge and Seattle. I probably heard Nirvana’s music during Kurt Cobain’s lifetime, but I didn’t know of them as a thing until about a year after he died. I’ve never even seen Reality Bites, but Ethan Hawke and Winona Ryder are both 10 years older than I am, and their movies weren’t about my cohort.

I am, frankly, Spice Girls age: not the pre-teen thrilled girls waving things to be signed, but the teenagers who actually paid for the albums with their own money. (I didn’t, for reference. We were a Garbage family.) Britney Spears was born in the same year as me, and her biggest year career-wise was my first year of university. And obviously, when the term “Generation Y” was coined, the stereotypes of late university/early career certainly fit my friends better than the Generation X tags with managerial aspirations. The return of cool people listening to cheesy pop: Y-ish. So that was where I felt I fell. (In case anyone I knew at high school drops by: I realise I wasn’t cool. But you may have been, and don’t think I didn’t notice you danced to the Spice Girls.)

But then, there’s certainly a few small societal boundaries between me and people who were born in 1986. (I have a sister born in 1986, and thinking about the five years between us is often telling.) Starting at a global level, I was reading Tony Judt’s Postwar recently (recommended, I’ll come back to it here at some point), and I was struck because I remember 1989.

To be fair, that’s more important if one lives in Europe, which I never have, but most of my first detailed memories of newsworthy events have to do with the revolutions of 1989 and the 1990 Gulf War. I remember the USSR, again, from the perspective of a young child who was growing up in Australia, but still. I can read the science fiction people smirk about now, the fiction with the USA and USSR facing off in 2150, and remember, a little bit, what that was actually about. This is, well, frankly, more than a little X-ish.

While we’re talking about defining events, I recall that quite a lot of people talked about the children who won’t remember 9/11. (And by children, I now mean 15 year olds, of course.) Obviously this is more important in the USA, perhaps a little like the European children (by which I mean 25 year olds) who don’t remember 1989 in Europe. I obviously remember 2001, and moreover remember the geopolitical situation in the years before it quite vividly too, and that latter is again, more than a touch X-ish.

Turning to technology, which is fairly defining for me, we’ll start with Douglas Adams:

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

Leaving aside the age effect where shortly everything cool will be against the natural order of things, it’s noticeable to me that the Web and email and so on fall in the “can probably get a career in it” bracket for me. Well, obviously not truly (the first version of the SMTP specification, which still more or less describes how email works today, was published in 1982), but my late teenage years were exactly the years when suddenly a lot of Australian consumers were on the ‘net. Hotmail was founded when I was 15 and I got an address there the following year. (icekween@, the address has been gone since 1999 and I’ve never used that handle since, partly because even in 98/99 it was always taken. But, actually, for a 16 year old’s user name I still think that was fairly OK considering some of the alternatives.)

In short, it was all happening in prime “get a career in it” time for me, and not coincidentally I am at the tail end of the huge boom in computer science enrolments and graduates that came to a giant sudden stop about two years after I finished. Frankly, X-ish. My youngest sister and her friends didn’t get excited about how they were going to become IT managers and have luxury yachts as a matter of course. (Well, partly age and partly not being jerks, there.) It’s a lot harder to get the “just a natural part of the way the world works” people excited about it.

Diagnosis: tailing X.

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Gen X or Y?

Charles Stross:

In my next novel (the one I’m going to write for publication in 2014), I’m planning on tackling the future of politics circa 2030-2040. Today’s front-rank politicians, aged 45-70 and children of the Boomer generation and their immediate predecessors and successors, will be elderly and retired or dead by that time; the pre-occupations of politics will revolve around the issues and preoccupations of Generation X and Generation Y, those born between 1965-1985, and 1986-2000.

The shifting in the definition of “Generation Y” has been noticable to all my university friends (born, roughly, 1980 and 1981). The term was coined when I was at the type of age that needed a generation tag, I was probably 20 at the time. People born in 1965 were in their mid-thirties at the time, and “Generation X” seemed to cover the age range of roughly 25 to 40 year olds at that time, the people who were waiting (are waiting?) for Baby Boomers to move out of management positions for them, the people whose issues were kids and mortgages and such.

Thus, to the extent that they cared, people born in 1980 or so were first labelled, and came to identify with, Generation Y.

Then a change in rhetoric happened, because a catchy term for “16 to 25 year olds” was needed, and Generation Y was right there. (Stross is using it for people currently aged 11 to 26, in his entry.) So for about half a decade now, the leading edge of Generation Y has been stuck at 25 years of age, and anyone over 25 is Generation X. Thus, quite a lot of people have suddenly found themselves “promoted” to Generation X in the last five years or so. (For that matter, I suspect that people who were born in 1960 to 1965 are a bit surprised to suddenly find out that they’re now considered Baby Boomers, after being fed a steady diet of “the Boomers are keeping you down!” fluff in their own twenties.)

Really, if you want to seriously analyse this, John Quiggin had the final word in the Australian Financial Review in 2000 (and I imagine the inspiration for it was the coining of the term “Generation Y”, which certainly was not used at the time to refer to children then being born):

One of the standard ploys in journalism, marketing and political commentary is the generation game. The basic idea is to label a generation ‘X’ or ‘Y’, then dissect its attitudes, culture, and relationship with other generations. The most famous generation, of course, is that of the Baby Boomers, born between the end of World War II and the early 1960s, and their most enduring contribution to the generation gap is the ‘Generation Gap’ between children and their parents…

At first sight, discussion of this kind can carry with it an air of fresh insight, but most of it stales rapidly. Much of what passes for discussion about the merits or otherwise of particular generations is little more than a repetition of unchanging formulas about different age groups: the moral degeneration of the young, the rigidity and hypocrisy of the old, and so on.

Demographers have a word (or rather two words) for this. They distinguish between age effects and cohort effects [my emphasis]. The group of people born in a given period, say a year or a decade, is called a cohort. Members of a cohort have things in common because they have shared common experiences through their lives. But, at any given point in time, when members of the cohort are at some particular age, they share things in common with the experience of earlier and later generations when they were at the same age.

Most of the time, age effects are more important than cohort effects. The primary schoolers of the 1960s were very like the primary schoolers of today and, of course, totally different from the middle-aged parents they have become. The grandparents of today are more like their own grandparents than the bodgies and widgies they may have been in the 1950s.

So, Generation Y was originally a cohort term referring to children born, very roughly, from 1980 to about 1990, very roughly the bulk of children of the Baby Boomers (that’s a pretty short generation, so I can see how it gets extended to 2000 readily enough). But all three of “Baby Boomer”, “Generation X” and “Generation Y” are now being used to describe age effects instead:

  • Baby Boomers are perpetually pre-retirees: they have the bulk of the desirable jobs and the bulk of adult power. They are also perpetually a future liability in anticipated health costs and pensions. (In actual fact, many of the children born in the decade after World War I and quite a few born in the early 1950s are now retired or retiring.)
  • Generation X are perpetually early- to mid-career: they have high debt burdens, they have young children, they have high stress levels, they don’t feel entirely settled in their career but they are invested in it.
  • Generation Y are perpetually older youth: they spend a lot of time (“too much”) at university, they don’t take their jobs seriously, they nick off and travel at the least opportunity.

Incidentally, I assume the class aspect of these labels is apparent enough: these stereotypes all refer pretty much exclusively to managerial people (upper-middle) and their parents and children. This is often true of coverage of cohort effects: they describe the youth of journalists’ friends’ children.

I am that class, but the Gen Y stereotypes didn’t even describe my early 20s cohort that well, too many long term relationships and relatively young marriages. There was a lot of travelling and career-hopping though: my husband is one of the very few people I know who graduated with a Bachelor degree and has worked a full-time salaried job—not one individual job, mind you—in the same industry ever since. Stereotypes, eh?

However, since the coining of the terms, the confusion of age and cohort effects in the use of these terms means that people are surprised to find themselves aging out of them: you used to be Gen X, but now you’re a tailing Boomer. I used to be Gen Y for that matter, but I turned 30 and that was that. I graduated. I’m X.

I’ll be curious to see how long this effect lasts, if in five to ten years, as it should, the term Boomer is used to refer to people who actually have retired, rather than Boomers being perpetually on the cusp of retiring as they have been for seemingly my entire life.

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The 44th Down Under Feminists Carnival

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

Apologies for not getting this done on time everyone, December and January turned out to be a major time crunch for me. However, I won’t keep you, on with the show!

In blue on a white background, the DUFC logo: in a square with rounded corners, there is the female/feminine symbol; with the Southern Cross inside, above which it says 'Down Under' and below 'Feminists Carnival'.

Welcome! This post is the 44th monthly Down Under Feminists Carnival. This edition of the carnival gathers together December 2011 feminist posts from writers living in Australia and New Zealand. Thanks to all the writers and submitters for making this carnival carnilicious.

Highlighted new(er) Down Under voices

I’ve decided to highlight inline posts that come from people who began been blogging at their current home in January 2011 or later, such posts are marked with (2011 blog) after the link. I know this is a very imperfect guide to new writers, since some may have simply started new blogs or switched URLs, or be well-known as writers in other media, but hopefully this may be a quick guide to feeds you may not be following yet.

Also, this carnival observes the new rule that each writer may feature at most twice (full disclosure: I used the “three if the host really really wants to!” exemption once). Apologies to the many fine submissions that were dropped under this system, but I hope it results in a more manageable carnival size and representation of different writers.

Feminist spaces

Maia wrote On Change and Accountability: A response to Clarisse Thorn (cross-posted at Feministe and Alas! A Blog) in response to Feministe’s interview with Hugo Schwyzer and ensuing critical discussion of Schwyzer’s reception as a leading ally.

Politics and social justice

anthea encourages consideration of a charity’s ethical framework and agenda before donating.

stargazer doesn’t think identity politics and inequality politics are in conflict.

Disability

anthea deconstructs judgments about fat, laziness, energy expenditure, priorities and disability.

Maia is troubled by the presentation of the sexuality of people with disabilities in The Scarlet Road‘s trailer, and notes the conflation of the sexuality of people with disabilities and the sexuality of men with disabilities.

Ethnicity, race and racism

Chally is not happy with racially coded beauty standards about her hair.

Chrys Stevenson reflects on Aboriginal health, Meryl Dorey’s promotion of non-vaccination and that Aboriginal people have every reason not to listen to white people like Stevenson. (Later, Stevenson/Gladly writes about working with the media to publicise Dorey’s involvement in the Woodford folk festival.)

Workplace

Mentally Sexy Dad introduces Lisa Coffa and Bronwyn Sutton, co-winners of the Pam Keating Award given by the Waste Management Association of Australia. (2011 blog)

Kaylia Payne explores internalised stereotypes about women’s and men’s jobs.

Blue Milk recalls staging an office coup for the corner office.

Penelope Robinson considers the academic workforce, including workloads and casualisation.

Environment

Steph is skeptical about wind farm noise complaints being genuine, rather than a lobbying technique.

Feminist life

tallulahspankhead discusses consent issues and ethics outside the context of sex acts. (2011 blog)

Sonya Krzywoszyja rolls her eyes at feminism 101 questions sent through dating sites.

Deborah writes about the feminism of raising daughters as independent thinkers.

Sex work

Anita condemns the focus on Nuttidar Vaikaew’s sex work in the media coverage of her murder by her spouse.

Blue Milk explains how she, as an outsider, views sex worker experiences by analogy with drug culture experiences ranging from very negative to very positive. (This post is a followup to a late November post on her blog.)

LGBTQIA

Jo writes about personal explorations of asexuality. (2011 blog)

bluebec is suspicious of any claim that “It has always been that way since the dawn of humanity” and gives Joe de Bruyn of the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association a lesson to that effect.

LudditeJourno thinks that the mythos of New Zealand egalitarianism is causing police to prematurely determine that Phillip Cottrell’s murder wasn’t a hate crime.

Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear makes sure the bigotry of politicians gets exposure beyond Hansard.

Religion

stargazer is pleased with a review of mosques as women’s spaces in Turkey and thinks New Zealand could benefit from the same.

Media, literature and culture

brownflotsam has a mixed review of Albert Nobbs and is keen to talk with other people who’ve seen it. (2011 blog)

IsBambi celebrates the work and thoughts of Abigail E. Disney, who makes films about women’s roles in peace processes. (2011 blog)

Jo is critical of the conflation of motherhood with womanhood in the Doctor Who Christmas special. (2011 blog)

PharaohKatt pushes back on privileged criticisms of The Australian Women Writers Challenge.

bluebec reflects on choosing to and being allowed to play female (and non-white) characters in computer games.

Anita demonstrates how an NZ Herald article unnecessarily emphasises the gender of a police officer who was assaulted.

Penelope Robinson is bothered by media talk of Nicola, Tanya and Julie instead of Roxon, Plibersek and Collins.

sleepydumpling takes Mia Freedman to task on fashion judgments as classist, ableist and sizeist, and newswithnipples examines Freedman’s denial that there’s any problem.

Violence

Jshoep got some very unhelpful “report him” and “hit him” advice after being assaulted at an Opeth gig.

ColeyTangerina explains that the prevalence of triggers and people who can be triggered is why the feminist blogosphere tends to warn for them.

Deborah observes another case of victim-blaming when police talk about sexual assault.

Mindy considers whether the fundamentals of the perception of women prisoners have changed since the Victorian era.

LudditeJourno calls on the New Zealand government to adequately fund the Auckland Sexual Abuse Help line.

Reproductive rights and justice

Alison McCulloch details the history and consequences of creating a moral hierarchy of abortions in New Zealand. (2011 blog)

Megan Clayton writes about prenatal testing and the assumptions made that terminating the pregnancy is the only choice if atypical chromosomes are found.

Beauty and body image

The End is Naenae! discovers a doozy of a comment thread about pubic hair and removal thereof in, of course, a Life and Style section. (2011 blog)

The End is Naenae! also considers the continued assumption that beauty is a woman’s or girl’s foremost aim and accomplishment. (2011 blog)

Rachel Hills writes about the special shame of trying hard and still failing to look 100% officially beautiful.

Chally analyses the telling of stories about women who lose their beauty, particularly the case of Lauren Scruggs, injured in an accident. (Cross-posted at HAT.)

Tracy Crisp writes about beauty and intercultural communication when she is diagnosed with a basal cell carcinoma (and, later, how Australian women consider that news).

sleepydumpling celebrates what the fat acceptance ideas and community have led her to.

Next carnival

The 45th carnival will follow hard on our heels at Maybe it means nothing. Submit January 2012 posts as per Chally’s instructions.

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Friday Hoydens: Ellyse Perry and Suzie Bates

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

There’s something about women cricketers… they just can’t confine themselves to one sport, dammit!

Ellyse Perry plays a forward defensive shot
Ellyse Perry, by YellowMonkey, CC BY-SA
Ellyse Perry is one of the Southern Star’s best known players, playing for the national team since age 16. She’s an all-rounder, and now aged 21 has appeared in 2 Tests and 39 One Day Internationals. (Women cricketers have far fewer opportunities to play Test matches than men do, a lifetime total of under 10 Tests is normal.) She also debuted for the Matildas, our national soccer team, in the same year as she began playing for the Southern Stars. In 2011, when she came on as a substitute in a Norway v Australia game in the FIFA World Cup she became the first woman to have represented Australia in senior World Cups in two different sports.

Suzie Bates stands with bat in the field
Suzie Bates, by paddynapper CC BY-SA
Suzie Bates was made captain of the White Ferns in December 2011. Like Perry, she is an all-rounder (or apparently so, I haven’t found her described as such, coverage of her online is poorer, and if you ever felt like contributing to Wikipedia today is your lucky day): she currently holds the highest batting average in her Twenty20 team, and she took four wickets in New Zealand’s path to the World Cup final in 2009. In addition to her years of cricketing, she also played for New Zealand’s basketball team in the 2008 Olympics, although she told Cricinfo that her responsibilities as cricket captain will probably mean that she cannot play again in the 2012 Olympics.

Perry and Bates will be part of the Southern Stars and the White Ferns respectively during their upcoming eight-match series in Sydney/Melbourne in late January and early February.

References

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Mary’s helpful guide to soliciting research participation on the ‘net

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

In my years on the ‘net, I’ve seen any number of people want to interview others or get them to take surveys for everything from a short high school or undergraduate paper through to graduate research projects and books. And they so seldom manage to meet basic ethical guidelines for making sure they aren’t wasting their participants’ time at best or endangering them at worst. Hence this article.

In addition, this article may help research participants better assess requests: are researchers telling you what you need to know? Have they considered your interests as well as their desire to Find Something Out At All Costs?

Full disclosure: I am not a research ethics expert, I am simply a researcher helping you get the basics right. Please seek expert advice if you have any doubt about the safety or integrity of your research.

Why do I need to do this stuff?

Because you’re so often asking people sensitive stuff, that’s why!

Look, I have some sympathy for the “it’s just questions about something-seemingly-small!” myself. I ask people questions about their linguistic intuitions. “Which sentence reads better to you, A or B?” There’s nothing less fun than completing a 31 page ethics application to get approval to ask people about which sentences read better.

But look, all research, at best, takes up people’s time. You owe people something for that. In addition, quite a lot of the research people are recruiting for on the ‘net wants to get into harassment of women, political affiliations, sexual experiences, why people write slash. That kind of stuff? That kind of stuff in the wrong hands loses people jobs and relationships. You owe people serious, well thought out harm mitigation for that.

So, ethical research recruitment lets people know what they’re getting into, whether it is a boring half hour sharing linguistic intuitions, or sharing potentially damaging information with a reseracher.

The bare minimum

All researchers asking for participation should share this information:

  • Who are you?
  • Who do you work for or who commissioned this work, if not yourself?
  • How can I get in contact with you, and how can I get in contact with who you are working for?
  • What is the purpose of the research?
  • What is the status of the research? Is this sheer curiosity that made you whip up a survey in five minutes, or a pilot study, or the main game?
  • What kind of effort do you want from me? (Interviews versus surveys. Five minutes versus many hours. You get the idea. Tell me upfront what my time investment is.)
  • When you’re done, where can I see the results?
  • Will the results be made public and in what form? (A peer-reviewed article? A PhD thesis? A pop science book? On your blog?)

Some of this might be the sort of thing you want to put on a webpage you can link to, so you can leave short advertisements like “Hi, I’m looking for help with X, and thought readers here might want to help because of Y, if you need to know more, please see LINK.”

You;d be amazed how many people miss the “When you’re done, where can I see the results?” step. Even if they’re asking people for 20 hours of interviews or something like that. For anything but the most trivial investment of time, letting people read your results is the minimum reward required.

Also, results being made public can often be good: the subject’s work is contributing to the sum of human knowledge! So don’t consider this necessarily a bad thing in and of itself.

Institutional research

If you are doing research at the postgraduate, postdoctoral or faculty level, research using human subjects (and other animal subjects for that matter, but you aren’t likely to be recruiting them on blogs) requires ethics approval by an institution-level ethics committee in most institutions.

So, when soliciting participants for research that has ethics approval, provide the following info:

  • All the bare minimums plus
  • A statement citing your ethics approval in whatever manner is usual. Your committee probably has boilerplate. Typically this will name the institution, give a reference number for your experiment and provide contact details for the ethics committee.
  • If your ethics committee approved a recruitment advertisement, use it! If it’s long put it at the other end of a link if that’s OK with them.
  • If your ethics approval requires that you disclose a bunch of things, also state them or place them at your info link if allowed.

If your institutional research didn’t require ethics approval (some institutions might, for example, have a blanket policy covering low-risk things like linguistic intuition questionnaires) find whatever boilerplate they let you use instead, if there is any or say something sensible along the lines of “This questionnaire comes under the XYZ University Low Risk Experimentation Policy [link].”

Basically, if you are doing research on behalf of an employer state either that you have ethics approval, or if not, why not (eg, your institution has no committee).

No committee but doing something sensitive?

If you’re doing sensitive work outside the oversight of ethics committees, here’s the start of your checklist!

  • All the bare minimums plus
  • Are respondents going to be anonymised in your personal/researcher copy of the data? Are you stripping any associated names, IP addresses, email addresses and similar? If not, what are you keeping and why?
  • How are you storing the researcher copy of the data?
  • Who has access to the researcher copy of the data? (Yourself? Your boss? All of your boss’s present and future employees? The Internet?)
  • When do you plan to delete the researcher copy of the data, if ever?
  • Are respondents going to be anonymised in the published results? If not, what identifying information will you publish and why?
  • Can a respondent withdraw their participation and be deleted from your data or transcripts? How do they do it? How long do they have to do so?

There are all kinds of other factors that ethics committees would get you to look at, basically, what capacity for harm does your research have? How are you mitigating that harm? What risk to your participants is left?

Risks include: physical health risks; mental health risks (more common with online data gathering, eg, triggering questions); exposing people to relationship disruption or breakdown, or abuse (by, eg, asking them to discuss infidelity); exposing people to criminal prosecution (eg by asking them to discuss illegal drug use); exposing people to civil liability (eg by getting them to discuss breach of contract), exposing them to job loss; denying them the best treatment or resources (by, eg, giving preferential treatment to patients or students or employees who agree to take part in the research, thus harming others); and coercing participation in general. And there’s one question that frankly stands out to me as a member of the apparently rare species Lady on the ‘Net, which is “are you studying an over-studied population and if so, what benefit does this extra research have for them, as opposed to for you?”

One of the most obvious mitigation strategies is anonymity of your subjects in reports, and eventual data destruction of any private identifying data. But as you can see from the examples related to coerced participation, it isn’t the only strategy you might need. List your possible harms, list your mitigations, let the potential subjects decide if the research is worth it to them.

Related

I wrote a similar post focussed on software development a few years back, in that case mainly focussed on “prove to your subjects that their participation is not a waste of their time.”