Chapter 9: The Proper Report (Eventually)

The Proper Report (Eventually)

Sunday 17th November 2013

I owe you all an apology. On Thursday night, I promised a proper account of Friday’s debate once I had calmed down enough to type accurately. It is now Sunday.

In my defence, quite a lot happened on Friday. Much of it involved alcohol and a nightclub with a sticky floor and inexplicable décor. There were also two separate conversations, one of which I wasn’t expecting, and the other I can’t tell you about in any detail. Honestly, by the time I had a chance to sit down and write, I was too tired to construct a coherent sentence. Or possibly too drunk. Take your pick.

So ... Sorry. Here is the report. Eventually. But first, the usual weekly business.

Music

The Celestial Quartet continues to become alarmingly competent. I realise I keep saying that, but this week’s rehearsal genuinely felt like another step forward.

The Beethoven is beginning to settle. We are no longer concentrating entirely on surviving it, so we can begin the far more interesting work of deciding what we want it to sound like. Clean Beethoven, it turns out, is not necessarily interesting Beethoven, so we are now arguing about phrasing rather than intonation. Not bad arguments. Musician arguments. The kind where four people spend seven minutes debating whether a phrase should move fractionally faster, then play it again at almost exactly the same speed.

Maya insists it was different. Finn insists it wasn’t. Ari insists the disagreement itself altered our perception of time. Meanwhile, I sit quietly and play my cello.

Part of that last sentence may not be accurate.

Shostakovich is also improving. There are now stretches of competence long enough that we have stopped counting them in seconds, although it remains Shostakovich: beautiful, bleak and capable of making four otherwise reasonable people disagree about a single note for twenty minutes.

Por una cabeza remains ridiculous. We played it from beginning to end without stopping this week, and it now sounds more like a tango and less like four classical musicians encountering rhythm for the first time. I am not prepared to call it performance-ready.

It is, however, enormous fun.

Still no performance booked. Still don’t care.

Yet.

Orchestra is going well too. Finlandia is beginning to sound suitably enormous, the Grieg is coming together around the soloist rather than merely happening in the same room as her, and parts of the last movement of the Dvořák are genuinely thrilling. The cello section is extremely happy about this. Other parts are still being dismantled and reconstructed eight bars at a time.

The conductor has begun mentioning the number of rehearsals remaining rather than the number we have completed. This is never a comforting development.

I am still fourth desk. I am still learning constantly. And rehearsal now feels like a fixed part of my week rather than something I joined at the beginning of term. I suppose that’s how belonging happens. Quietly. One day you stop saying “the university orchestra” in your head and start thinking our orchestra.

I like that.

Badminton

We have a two-week gap between the quarter-final and the semi-final, which is probably good for my blood pressure, so no match this past Wednesday or next Wednesday. The semi-final is, of course, against Ross and Gemma. Their first two matches were even more one-sided than ours. Of course, they were.

For anyone who has only recently joined us, Ross and Gemma are the reigning national mixed doubles champions. Yes, national champions. They are also, from what I can tell, still almost telepathic.

Paul and I are not telepathic.

I am not frightened. That is a lie. I am a little frightened, but mostly I am excited.

We spent Wednesday working on the things Ross and Gemma do better than us, which is a fairly long list. Serve returns. Defensive positioning. Keeping rallies alive under pressure. We also have a tendency to become impatient and try to win a point one shot too early. Against most club players, we can get away with that. Against Ross and Gemma, we will be punished every time.

We may not be telepathic, but our communication is much better than it was a month ago. Paul now calls before moving forward from the back of the court, rather than appearing beside me without warning and nearly introducing his racquet to the back of my head. We are getting better at switching between attack and defence without consciously repositioning ourselves each time, and Paul has become irritatingly good at spotting when I am about to move forward before I have committed to it.

I regard this as evidence that my training methods worked. He regards it as evidence that he is learning despite my training methods. We disagree.

I have also learned that repeating an instruction at a higher volume does not make it easier to follow. That lesson may have applications beyond badminton.

My knee behaved reasonably well. Some soreness afterwards, nothing dramatic. I am still not running with Lily, which annoys me but is the sensible decision. Apparently, maturity is mostly about doing things you don’t want to do, or not doing things you do want to do, because future-you will be annoyed if you don’t (or do).

I may have confused myself with that last sentence.

I’m looking forward to the semi-final, but I’m trying not to think too far beyond it, because I start imagining elaborate fantasies about beating the national champions, followed by an equally elaborate list of all the ways they could humiliate us.

And I have absolutely not replayed our first match against them in my head approximately forty times. Honest.

One rally at a time, Lana. One Rally at a Time.

The Debate

Now for the part I promised on Friday.

I WON.

Sorry. That remains exciting.

Thursday was my first proper competitive debate at the Westmouth Union. The motion was,

“This House believes that the gender pay gap is evidence of structural discrimination.”

I spoke for the proposition. Henry Cavendish, the President of the Union, led the opposition: a third-year Economics student, excellent debater, extremely confident, privately educated, although not since birth, apparently, and in possession of the kind of accent that makes “I disagree” sound vaguely like one is being evicted from his estate.

I like him considerably more now than I did before Thursday. This is unfortunate, because mocking him is becoming harder.

My case was the one we developed here last Sunday, only shorter. Considerably shorter. Thank God.

I began by clarifying what “the gender pay gap” means, because people far too often treat the phrase as if it means only one thing. It does not. There is the overall gap, gaps within particular occupations, differences between full-time and part-time workers, and differences that remain after controlling for hours, education and experience. Those figures do not all tell the same story, and none of them proves that every woman is paid less than a man for the same work.

Then I distinguished between evidence and proof. The motion did not say the pay gap was proof of a single, universal act of discrimination. It said the gap was evidence of structural discrimination.

Evidence is not a verdict.

Then I conceded things. Occupation matters. Working hours matter. Career interruption, experience, part-time work and individual choices all matter. I conceded all of it.

Henry looked delighted for approximately thirty seconds.

Then I argued that conceding those things does not resolve the motion, because several of those “explanations” may themselves be the mechanisms through which structural disadvantage operates. Women disproportionately undertake unpaid care. Women disproportionately work part-time, and high-quality part-time work is harder to find in some professions. Career breaks do not carry equal consequences for men and women. Childcare is not equally available to everybody. And choices are made within incentives and constraints.

Which led to the line several of you helped me formulate: Establishing agency does not establish absence of constraint.

That landed. I knew it had landed because the room went very quiet. There is something slightly intoxicating about that. I should probably be worried by how intoxicating.

I said that explaining a gap does not necessarily exonerate the system that produced it. Or, in rather fewer words: explanation is not exoneration.

Henry’s response was much better than the final vote suggested. He argued that the overall figure obscures too many different decisions and circumstances to establish discrimination, and that once hours, occupation and experience are considered, the unexplained gap becomes considerably smaller. He also argued that if “structural discrimination” is defined broadly enough to absorb every difference, the claim becomes impossible to disprove.

I think that was probably his strongest point.

His other line of attack was the one @marketliberalgirl put to me last Sunday: if I need independent evidence of structural barriers before I can read the pay gap as evidence of them, perhaps the independent evidence is doing all the work, and the gap itself tells us very little.

Good argument. Annoyingly good.

Fortunately, @marketliberalgirl, @statisticsarenotsexism, @floorpoint and several others had already spent Sunday trying to murder me with it. So I was ready.

My answer was that statistics do not interpret themselves. Independent evidence identifies plausible mechanisms. The pay gap then shows that those mechanisms are linked to a measurable population-level outcome. Neither piece of evidence has to stand alone. Context tells us how to interpret the statistic. The statistic shows that context has consequences.

As for the rest: I said that I had not argued that women lack agency, or that every difference between men and women is discrimination. Women make genuine choices. Some women freely prioritise family, flexibility, or work they find meaningful over higher earnings. Some men do the same. A statistical difference cannot tell us what any individual wanted. But the existence of choice does not mean every option carries the same cost, and controlling for occupation does not explain why men and women are distributed differently across occupations in the first place.

The pay gap is not a complete diagnosis. It is a clue.

Henry went through preference. I conceded that preference exists. He went through occupational choice. I asked how we determine whether occupational patterns reflect preference, constraint or both. He went back to agency. I went back to the line.

Apparently repeating yourself is acceptable if you disguise it slightly. Politics has taught me something useful.

Then came rebuttal.

I had been nervous before the debate. Very nervous. Actually-shaking nervous. Spotting Dr Bennett at the back of the room didn’t help. But the nerves vanished about ninety seconds after I began speaking, and by rebuttal I was having fun. Far too much fun, if I’m honest.

Henry had spent several minutes extracting concessions from me. Women make choices. Yes. The adjusted gap is smaller. Yes. Not every difference is discrimination. Yes. The residual is not automatically discrimination. Yes.

And I asserted that almost none of those concessions defeated what I had actually claimed. So I went through them. One at a time. Essentially, I said: Yes. And?

Not literally. That would have been rude. But structurally...

Henry tells me this was the point where I won. He also described the rebuttal publicly as “vicious”. I dispute this. I was perfectly polite.

The questions afterwards were my favourite part, partly because I couldn’t prepare for them and partly because they were, in some ways, harder than the speeches.

I was asked what evidence could persuade me that a particular pay gap was not the result of discrimination, an excellent and necessary challenge. I was asked whether treating women’s occupational preferences as socially influenced is patronising to women. Also very good. I was asked about the apparent earnings advantage associated with fatherhood, and I was careful, this time, to say “association” rather than “cause”. There were questions about occupational risk, compensation for unpleasant work, childcare, transport, unpredictable shifts, and whether governments should interfere with choices freely made by adults.

Someone raised class and asked whether my childcare analysis rested on professional couples with real choices about their working patterns. I admitted that my original Tumblr post had been weak on exactly that and explained how the discussion here had changed my argument.

Someone asked whether employer expectations about fathers matter too. Yes. Absolutely. If fathers are penalised for taking on caring responsibilities, that can help preserve the very division we’re discussing.

And somebody asked Henry whether a preference can really be called free if one of the options has been made financially impossible. I wish I had written down his exact answer. It was thoughtful, even though I did not entirely agree with it.

My favourite question was this one: “If you accept that some of the gap is preference, some is biology, some is occupation, and some is working hours, how much actually has to be discrimination before the motion becomes true?”

My answer: “Enough that the gap has meaningful evidential value.”

I am still not entirely sure that is mathematically satisfying. But this was a debate, not an econometrics viva.

Then the vote.

We won. Comfortably. Very comfortably. The final vote was 67–18, with six abstentions.

I am still slightly astonished. I did not merely win my first debate. I beat the President of the Union, a third-year Economics student who has been doing this considerably longer than I have. I keep writing that sentence because it still looks incorrect.

In badminton terms, it was two games to love, and I conceded fewer than ten points across both.

That sounds horribly boastful. It is also true.

Henry has been extremely gracious about losing. More gracious than I would have been. Probably. He said I had defined the burden of the motion more carefully than he had, and that I had addressed the distinction between evidence and proof in a way that rendered his broadest attacks ineffective. Coming from the person I had just defeated, that meant a great deal.