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Behaviour in Politics & Resistance to making ideas scale

Behaviour in Politics & Resistance to making ideas scale

One of the lasting stereotype around activities shared by men, and women tends to be around political participation. This is not just limited to developing world but also to developed world. Lack of adequate female participation in active politics has far reaching consequences for the questions of equity, pay-gap, and other matters that affect the wider conversation of child care, maternity leave etc. is often left out or not part of the political debates. The lack of female participation can also lead to reversal of landmark legislation and judgments such as the current debate around Roe v Wade.

It is in this context that an interesting paper by Marta Fraile & Irene Sanchez Vitores titled 'Tracing the Gender Gap in Political Interest Over the Life Span: A Panel Analysis'. This is an interesting paper as it uses the British Household Panel Survey to measure the political interest gap between men, and women with a sample of 10,300 people over a span of 18 years. They also show the presence of the gap from as early as the age of 15. The interesting study also tracks the political gap, and finds it widening across the age spectrum.

The study finds that the gender gap in political thinking is already about 20 points at the age of 15. By the age of 25 when political choices are exercised in different forums the gap is almost 30. The stark findings however do not stop there. People who are better educated are supposed to be politically aware, a good proxy for education in the world is the presence or absence of a university degree, in Britain the political interest gap in genders is a whopping 37 points for this group. Clearly education does not lead to an interest in political interest.

The researchers posit a few very interesting reasons for this. They range from social norms to the under-representation of women in public life. However they note that countries where there is more gender equality such as the Scandinavian countries it tends to have a positive impact on interest in political participation across genders. Even in these countries there is a gap but it could be as low as third of other countries where gender equality is glaring. The paper also introduces and opens the question of the presence of this gap at the age of 15, therefore the processes shaping this perspective in childhood have to be investigated.

The paper is very interesting and contributes to the literature. However, it has a few caveats which bear remembering: Britain (UK) is better ranked in terms of gender equality than the rest of the world, and even other countries in Europe. Therefore in rest of the world this would have to be investigated further. The sample has certain data points that change throughout the panel, and therefore changes are involved which are dropped from final analysis. The sample though large does not delve in a lot of detail about the political interest and perhaps needs to be done to get a better understanding. However, these are small and not significant considering the new perspective the paper offers.

How often has it been that you were afraid to try something because you might fail? Or because the resistance to a new idea is strong. One of the most important finding of the behavioural science literature is that ideas have to scale, if they are to be meaningful. That is a valid finding, however, if a good idea does not scale do we give it up?

I am a Health Economist and when I survey the remarkable people who have contributed to bettering human health against odds, and ideas that took a long time to scale I am convinced that some of these remarkable stories do hold out a lesson in fostering positive change. Let me take you through the remarkable story of using volatile chemicals to ease labour pains during childbirth.

In 1817 Samuel Guthrie moved to the hamlet of Sackets Harbor on Lake Ontario to set up his medical practice. The newly minted doctor found out soon enough that there was to be not much medicine there, it did however give him ample time to dabble in his hobby of chemical experiments. Guthrie started his experiments with a bang, quite literally when he invented a “Percussion Pill” for firing weapons, he also dabbled in by all accounts a delicious alcohol of his brewing, which won him local renown.

Guthrie was an amateur chemist and soon found through prodigious letter writing a mentor in the Yale chemist and the leading chemist in North America Professor Benjamin Silliman whose book was the last word in the chemical research of the 19th Century North America. Due to this correspondence between the two, we have records of Silliman receiving in 1831 a journal article from Guthrie to make Chloric Ether in a new and inexpensive way. The locals thought it was another vat of a good whiskey, they took it to call “Guthrie's sweet whiskey”. This was very potent and sometimes would make the person imbibing it fall asleep. The chloric ether that Guthrie distilled is today known as the chloroform.

Though Guthrie saw in it some medicinal properties that must be investigated, there was no real interest in the medical community, try hard as he might. Chloroform a remarkable painless way of surgery was to wait some more time to have its day in the sun or on the surgery tables. It would take another two decades and ingenuity of an Edinburgh doctor to make the transition from a curious experiment to administering the drug to the reigning Queen of Great Britain during childbirth of her first royal issue.

It was in 1846 that Professor James Young Simpson the second person in the prestigious University of Edinburgh to occupy a chair of Medicine & Midwifery (Yup there was a chair with that name!), heard of the usage of chloric-ether as a pain numbing agent by inducing sleep. Simpson hit upon the idea of using this new substance for easing the pain experienced by women during child-birth. Good idea, right? Not according to the orthodox religious zealots. Who found it immoral to even countenance such an idea. They found the case of Lady Euphame MacCalzean who sought pain relief from her midwife in 1591, the midwife reported it to the Calvinists religious authorities. The authorities dispensed swift justice by burning her on Castle Hill in Edinburgh, as she had broken a primeval doctrine. Also she was accused of being a witch amongst other things! They used this case, and found the scriptures in the Bible to counteract the usage of this new substance during childbirth. Pulpit after pulpit was used to denounce this practice as anti-Christian, and rabble rousing happened to ensure it would be stopped.

Perhaps anyone else might have given up if faced with such resistance but not James Simpson who was a devout Christian. Though he was deeply offended by the smear campaign against him from every pulpit, he found a scripture from the Bible to show that there was nothing in the good book to illustrate the fact that women are duty bound to suffer the agony of childbirth pain for some biblical reason. He wrote pamphlet after pamphlet, got into debates, and answered questions with civility, and restraint. Think of an engaged scientist on one of our virtual public town-halls fighting climate change deniers, vaccine skeptics, and flat-earthers and you have a veritable James Young Simpson refusing to give-in, or give-up.

Plaque commemorating discovery of Chloroform, though technically it was Samuel Guthrie invented it! (St. Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh/Wikipedia)

In 1847 Professor James Young Simpson used chloroform on his first obstetrical patient. The wife of a fellow doctor who believed in this potent, if untested remedy, and perhaps trusted the two doctors. The patient was given a measured amount of anaesthetic, and she reportedly woke up after the whole process was complete and did not feel any pain. The elated parents named their child Anesthesia! The under-current of criticism had given way by now to curiosity, and doctors, surgeons started coming to Edinburgh to witness use of chloroform. It was not just labour pains that it could ease, by 1849 the United States Army officially began using it. During the Crimean war (1853-1856) chloroform came into its own, and the religious resistance died away.

The final approval came when Queen Victoria was administered chloroform to ease labour pains. In a span of less than a decade the revolutionary new discovery had come full circle.

The story of this innovation is a measure of how ideas scale against the grain, and sometimes serendipity plays a bigger role in innovation scaling than we know.


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