So while I can't give you the reasoning behind it, and don't know if it's still valid or now just being done to make the data comparable, I can assure you choosing this statistic wasn't a bad-faith attempt to manipulate.
They don't treat it as a family farm anymore. What people used to call a family farm year/decades ago is now more likely classified as a hobby farm.
Of course, farm labor and unincorporated self-employment are heavily male, and nonprofit work is heavily female. So it's a useful statistic for accurate change-over-time data, but stories like this treating 50% as an inherently meaningful tipping point are wildly misleading.
As a counter-example, average IQ at the workplace is 110. Where’s everyone under IQ90? Injured, suicide, drug addicts etc.
[2] For your other claims about low IQ. It is "correlated" with lower lifespan (bit different than what you claimed but causes are similar) since you didn't cite.
You can find studies explaining high IQ with differences in environment or income and others point to genes. Some studies claim the choice of [3]toys your kids play with correlates to their IQ and success in life while others ask you to find a good genetic match.
Depending on which camps you are in, IQ could be highly related to the poor condition of the society.
* -15 points for not getting a healthy diet and regular health check ups in your childhood.
* -15 points for lack of proper education, social and family structure in your childhood.
* -17 points for mental health problems, unemployment, poverty and limited freedom after you become an adult.
Those issues overlap with each other regardless of IQ. Although, you can argue Intelligent parents can change these outcomes and if you believe IQ is heritable, then it makes perfect sense. You can use that to explain your bias.
Historically, evidence has been carefully crafted to promote products, services, aristocracy and many other things. I believe a lot happens now too with a different vector (China manipulating their averages) so I think IQ is not a good metric for looking down on people and explaining other circumstantial problems.
1] https://www.healthline.com/health/average-iq
2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/research-confirms...
I found three big factors. First, the "labor force" has no age cap, so there are lots more women alive than men. Second, lots of adult men are in the military or prison, so equal numbers of jobs would mean higher male labor force participation. Third, "nonfarm payrolls" doesn't just mean nonfarm, and excludes more employed men than women. But there's one big issue with nonprofit labor I couldn't sort out.
(Details in the child post.)
From the BLS stats in question (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm), the total "civilian noninstitutional population" (i.e. labor force) is 260 million. Of the 244 million who are ages 20+ and broken out by gender, there are 117.4M men and 126.0M women.
Why the difference?
- Disabled people are still included for the labor force cohort unless they're hospitalized/institutionalized, so the gender-gap impact is relatively low.
- Active-duty military service covers 1.3M adults, 90% male.
- Incarceration covers 2.3M adults, 90% male.
- The "labor force" has no upper age boundary, so the 20+ cohort has about 6 million more women. (1.5M people are in nursing homes and not counted, but the gender split is fairly even.)
That's 6 million more women total, and 3M more men than women excluded from the pool, against a laborforce gap of ~9 million. Looks pretty complete for the denominator. But the raw number of total nonfarm payrolls listed is 76.2 million per gender. That would be 66.9% male LFPR, and 62.3% female LFPR, which we know isn't right.
The BLS report instead has a male 20+ LFPR of 84M (71.5%) and female 20+ of 74.5M (59.2%), which is that 12% gap. What gives?
- Farm labor is part of the LFPR. That data is extremely messy, but there are ~3M farm workers who appear to be ~75% male.
- "Proprietors", or unincorporated self-employed people, aren't counted. That's 9.5M people, roughly 68% male.
- Multiple jobs count as multiple payrolls, but one employment. This adds 6-7M non-employment payrolls per gender to help explain why the employment counts don't match payrolls, and up to 0.5M more female payrolls than male. (Although I can't tell what percentage are nonfarm payrolls.)
That correction gets us to 70.7% male LFPR and 60.7% female LFPR, which is much closer to correct. Correct for the 16-19 numbers at it gets even closer. Looks good!
...except that apparently nonprofit jobs aren't included in nonfarm payrolls either. And that's 12M people, ~73% female. Which completely blows out the stats, so badly that I can't find any way to fix it. All I can say is either seasonal adjustment, or major differences in raw population counts between the methods (e.g. response rate gaps). Does anyone else know what's up?
It seems like an unnecessary distinction to make that "excludes" men from the workforce for no reason.
Why measure it that way?
The BLS started collecting civilian labor force data in 1948. Participation rates had a gender gap of more than 50 points, so the implications of equal participation weren't very relevant. But 10 million soldiers had been raised during the war, many by conscription, and that same 10 million were decommissioned between 1945 and 1947 - all against an adult population of 100 million. So it was clear that during wartime any military-included statistic would have no real bearing on what potential workers at home were choosing to do.
It's not totally clear to me why government workers were counted at all. They don't get drafted and their numbers don't vary wildly in wartime, so it's less of a data issue, but it would include explicit make-work projects like the CCC. I suppose that if the point is to measure which available workers are choosing to work, CCC employment is more "valid" than conscription?
Why keep the stat that way with a comparatively small, all-volunteer military?
Continuity, pretty much. Changing definitions or abandoning stats ruins change-over-time data, so the BLS almost always adds new stats instead of changing old ones.
If I have my numbers right, there are ~120M men ages 20+ and ~125.5M women 20+ in the US. That's basically equal to the BLS female labor force stat, but about ~3M too high for the male labor force stat, with prisoners and military personnel making up the vast majority of the difference. It's not a huge gap in numbers, but both exclusions are overwhelmingly prime-age people and skew the male LFPR towards retirees.
(I should have been clearer, but my first set of bullets are about exclusions from the LFPR, and my second are about data in the LFPR but not in nonfarm payrolls. "Nonfarm payroll" appears to be a strict subset of the labor force "employed" pool. Both measures exclude active military personnel, although nonfarm payrolls uses a slightly broader standard which also covers intelligence agencies.)
edit: ok, ok, I got confused with the wording, I get it, you can stop hammering with downvotes. I'll leave the above up as my mark of shame.