Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Short posts 10/18/16: Millennial Women Lukewarm for Clinton?, Tamika Cross and Some Fun


1.  This survey of the millennials about the coming presidential election is moooost interesting.  I quote:

Only 47 percent of millennial women support Clinton, and 18 percent support Trump. Another combined 18 percent back either Johnson or Stein.
Among men, 65 percent back Clinton and only 6 percent combined support third-party candidates.
Now parse those differences!  My first thought on them was that the researchers have made a coding mistake on gender.  Studies use a zero-or-one code for the respondent for being female or male, but there's no established rule about which sex you assign to one or to zero.  So a coding mistake is possible, and it would explain the odd findings pretty well, given that they would then look the same as the findings for other age groups (where the support for Trump is always higher among men than among women).

Such a mistake is pretty unlikely in a study of this sort (which would have a lot of double-checking before going public).  Still, I'd like to see similar results from another pollster (given that this poll looks at least like an outlier),  before spending brain calories on possible reasons for the lack of feminist support for Clinton among young women.  Or for greater feminist support among young men.  Or for the idea that there are more young women than young men who dislike Clinton's policies.

2.  This happens:

People across the country were horrified to hear of the way Tamika Cross, a doctor, was treated on a recent Delta Airlines flight from Detroit to Houston. A patient faced a medical emergency mid-flight and the crew asked if there were any physicians on board. Cross immediately signaled to the crew that she was available to help. But according to reports, the flight crew didn’t respond as you might think. They weren’t grateful. Instead, they doubted whether this young African American woman could actually be a medical doctor. They declined her help.

Cross has three strikes against her:  She is African-American, female and young.

Granted, airlines must have policies to be able to tell whether someone actually is a physician when help is sought, and Delta Airlines' answer to Cross's complaint was that out of the three individuals who offered to help only one had acceptable proof of qualifications with him.

But Cross's Facebook post suggested that he hadn't presented those qualifications and that the flight attendant treated Cross in a condescending manner:

A couple mins later he is unresponsive again and the flight attendant yells "call overhead for a physician on board". I raised my hand to grab her attention. She said to me "oh no sweetie put ur hand down, we are looking for actual physicians or nurses or some type of medical personnel, we don't have time to talk to you" I tried to inform her that I was a physician but I was continually cut off by condescending remarks.

...

Another "seasoned" white male approaches the row and says he is a physician as well. She says to me "thanks for your help but he can help us, and he has his credentials". (Mind you he hasn't shown anything to her. Just showed up and fit the "description of a doctor")

 It could be that Cross didn't see the other physician show his credentials (calling card???) to someone.  But it's still likely that we all have stored images of how physicians are supposed to look, how professors are supposed to look and so on, and those stored images will affect that crucial first reaction.  That's part of what economists call statistical discrimination.

3.  This five-day-old video on Trump supporters from the Daily Show is good for a cleansing laugh.  I know that the respondents are not picked randomly, but hearing their arguments is still fun.