Gender Gap

BOSTON -- Somewhere in the recesses of my desk drawer there is a battered old pink pin bearing the message: 59 cents. This was not the price of the pin. It was the price of being a working woman circa 1969.When these pins first began to appear at political conferences and conventions, the average woman was earning 59 cents for every $1 earned by a man. Today, after 30 years of change, guess what? Women are earning 74 cents for every male dollar.We have, in short, made economic progress at roughly the rate of half a cent a year.

THE COZY relationship between lobbyists and legislators was on full display last week at Rocky Gap golf course near Cumberland at the annual charity golf tournament led by House Speaker Casper R. Taylor Jr.The tournament, which was begun by Taylor's predecessor as speaker, R. Clayton Mitchell Jr., raises money for a variety of charities. It attracts a who's who crowd of State House lobbyists, some of their corporate clients and legislators.Lobbyists, while generally not opposed to a springtime round of golf, quietly grumble that the event, which costs $150, has become a command performance for anyone who wants to have influence in Annapolis.

SUGAR AND SPICE and everything nice. They read better, too.If you look at the seven-year record of the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program (MSPAP), you'll see that girls have consistently outpaced boys in all six subjects tested.But here's an interesting distinction: The male-female gap is much wider in reading and writing than it is in math and science. This year, Maryland's third-grade girls scored 8.6 percentage points higher in reading than third-grade boys, and the gap in writing was nearly 11 percentage points.

WASHINGTON -- Oh my gawd. Stop them before they hug again. Here comes Bill. There is Monica. See the back of Bill's head. See Monica's beaming smile. See them embrace. Freeze frame. Start again.Do they have this video clip on a continual loop? At this point in the news cycle -- or news recycle -- Bill and Monica have been together more often on television than in real life.Oh no! Here it comes again. This time, she's got the beret! Why do I have the feeling that we are witnessing a new form of media water torture.

Although traditionally the safer drivers, women are closing the gender gap when it comes to wreaking havoc on the road.Women's driving behavior, like their social role, has changed in recent decades. They have the tickets and crashes to prove it.Consider this: Women in the 1990s have more collisions per mile than men, although their crashes are less likely to be severe. Men are still more likely to have a fatal crash, but female drivers are dying in far greater numbers than they were 20 years ago. Meanwhile, deaths among male drivers have dropped.

CHICAGO -- The Democratic National Convention opened Monday on just the right note, or at least the right date: August 26, the 76th anniversary of women's suffrage. If 1992 was the Year of the Woman Candidate, 1996 is being touted as the Year of the Woman Voter.In San Diego, the Republicans strutted their women out to the middle of the gender gap. As Ann Lewis, deputy campaign manager for President Clinton, told a spirited women's caucus here, the Republicans ''went through a major cosmetic makeover.

THE NUMBER and quality of female candidates running for office around the country had raised expectations of significant gains in the number of women elected to major offices. But despite some notable wins -- two new women were elected to the U.S. Senate -- there will be no change in the Senate's gender ratio since two other women are departing, one to retirement and one because of a primary election defeat. Final results in the House are still pending. Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, voters elected their first female governor.

SAN DIEGO -- Two thirds of them are men. Almost 90 percent of them are white. They earn more money than most Americans.Meet the delegates to the 1996 Republican National Convention.The profile of the delegates convening in San Diego does little to help the GOP as it tries to convince American voters that it is not a party of the elite, that it does not alienate women and minorities, and that it is not pushed to extremes by religious conservatives.The 1,990 delegates gathered here include fewer women and minorities than the group that gathered four years ago in Houston, a survey by the Associated Press found.

FAIRFAX, Va. -- Bob Dole's bid for the presidency faces a riptide of feminine opposition, and Libby Lucas, a 34-year-old Republican wife, mother and businesswoman, was eager to pause while shopping here the other day to explain why.She disagrees with Dole's stand against abortion, finds his platform lacking proposals aimed at children, and fears that the money for his 15 percent tax cut would be taken from social services benefiting poor women.Beyond that is a more basic reaction to the 73-year-old former Senate leader.

WASHINGTON -- Bob Dole's choice of Susan Molinari to give the keynote speech at the Republican convention is an obvious attempt to begin chiseling away at the notorious gender gap in American politics. It will take a lot more.Ms. Molinari, at 38 serving her third term in the House of Representatives from a Staten Island district her father represented for the previous decade, is supposed to send a message to women voters that, yes, you can be a woman who supports abortion rights and still live happily ever after in the Republican Party.

Researchers have found one more clue in their search for the reason that girls don't do as well as boys in math: a nation's culture. Scientists compared math and reading scores on tests given to thousands of 15-year-old students in 40 countries and then examined how each country ranked in terms of gender equality. While girls generally scored lower in math than boys, girls did better in countries with greater gender equality than in less progressive countries. Girls performed best in countries such as Norway and Iceland, which have progressive gender policies, and worst in countries such as Turkey, which scored relatively low on standard measures of gender equality.

Declaring and debunking crises has become a subsidiary industry of the gender wars. The latest to roll off the D&D assembly line is a study from the American Association of University Women (AAUW) that purports to debunk the idea of a "boys crisis," which followed closely on the heels of a purported "girls crisis." Boys are doing just fine, say the AAUW authors, who also insist that the boy crisis was a fabrication of people who are uncomfortable with the progress of girls and women. The authors also assert that girls' development hasn't come at the expense of boys, as some allegedly claim.

I enjoy the serenity of rare agnosticism on the matter of legalized gambling. I can turn the debate this way or that and see both sides. To learn more and perhaps claim a side, I drove to Dover Downs on a lovely spring day last year to see if it would serve up a cautionary tale or a fairy tale for Maryland. It took a few minutes to habituate myself to the cacophony created by 2,500 slot machines whistling, clanking and whirring at the same time. After that, the first thing that struck me seemed so obvious that I could not imagine I had not heard it before.

Elizabeth Beer thought her high school nemesis was math. She took advanced courses, but it was the only subject in which straight A's eluded her. Her real nemesis, she later concluded, might have been her math teacher, who dished out discouragement. "He didn't think women belonged in math," recalls Beer, a third-year doctoral student in the Johns Hopkins University's applied mathematics and statistics department. The teacher's message - that women are innately math-deficient - didn't keep Beer from succeeding in the subject in the long run, but it could explain her early struggles.

We've had soccer moms, security moms, NASCAR dads, South Park Republicans and Yellow Dog Democrats - real or imagined archetypes that have emerged over the years to define the political leanings of various groups. Surely someone now will have to come up with a label for those women who are closing the gender gap - which generally favors Democrats - between Maryland's gubernatorial candidates. As reporter John Fritze wrote this Sunday, The Sun's recent poll shows that Mayor Martin O'Malley's support among women went from an 11 percentage point lead over Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., in July to a 6 percentage point lead this month.

Republican Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. has made significant strides among women voters in recent months - eliminating a political gender gap that has historically benefited Democrats, a new poll for The Sun shows. Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley's support among women dropped from an 11 percentage point lead over Ehrlich in July to 6 percentage points this month, suggesting that Ehrlich's effort to wrest female voters from his Democratic opponent is paying off. In a series of television advertisements airing in the Baltimore media market over the past several weeks, Ehrlich has pounded on problems faced by the city's schools, stressing an issue that many believe resonates strongly with women.

CHICAGO -- Women are increasingly outnumbering men at America's colleges, a gap that is widest - and most troublesome - among low-income and minority students, researchers said in a report released yesterday. The share of males age 24 and younger dropped to 45 percent in 2003-2004, from 48 percent in 1995-1996. The gap is even wider for students older than 25, and among African-Americans and Latinos, particularly those from low-income families. "Yes, this is a matter of concern, but let's put it in context," said Jacqueline King, the author of the study by the American Council on Education.

Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. chose Kristen Cox - the legally blind head of the state disabilities office - as his running mate yesterday, a pick that makes a play for female voters and aims to show that the governor's brand of conservatism is tempered by compassion. Cox, 36, is a mother of two who has never run for elected office and is little known outside State House circles. A former Washington lobbyist for an advocacy group for the blind, she joined Ehrlich's administration in 2003 and became a department secretary when he elevated her office to Cabinet-level status.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush's approval rating has improved slightly, but discontent over the war in Iraq, especially among women, is continuing to boost Democratic prospects in the struggle for control of Congress, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll has found. Bush's approval rating edged up to 41 percent, his highest rating in the poll since January. But Democrats held a formidable advantage, 49 percent to 35 percent, when registered voters were asked which party they intend to support in this fall's congressional elections.

Female voters are supporting Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley in high numbers in the race for governor, helping create a double-digit lead over Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. in a general election match-up. Female voters support O'Malley 50 percent to 29 percent, according to the latest poll for The Sun by Potomac Inc. In a shift from conventional thinking, O'Malley, a Democrat, also leads Republican Ehrlich among male voters, 46 percent to 38 percent. Overall, that's a smaller difference between men and women than is common in most recent national and state elections, said Karen Kaufmann, an associate professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, College Park who has written extensively on the gender gap in elections.