XX. While men and women are both considered to be more capable as they get older, only women bear the brunt of being seen as “less warm” as they age, new research has found. This series of studies is reportedly the first to look at both gender and age to determine how perceptions of women and men differ. “It’s just stunning... These stereotypes are so hard-wired and deeply entrenched that they come out even when absolutely identical information is provided about a man and a woman,” Jennifer Chatman, Distinguished Professor of Management at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, said. In an analysis of professors’ evaluations, female professors witnessed a decline as they moved from their 30s to 40s, hitting an all-time low around the age of 47. All this while, the evaluation of male professors remained consistent. Interestingly, after the age of 47, the evaluations for women increased again, becoming equal with those of men around the early 60s. “At that point, there are different stereotypes of women, and they may benefit from being seen as more grandmotherly,” said Laura Kray, faculty director of the Center for Equity, Gender, and Leadership at Berkeley Haas and an author of the study.

Women around the age of mid 30s to late 40s also face what is called “the motherhood penalty,” where assumptions around parenting duties lead people to believe women are less committed to their careers than men. This has several repercussions, most particularly evident in hiring, promotions and wages. Women executives further pointed out that they face “hyper-scrutiny” and “scepticism” which harks back to perceptions of likeability versus agency. Gendered networks in the workplace, with men gaining greater access to senior leaders, become cemented mid-career, pose another difficulty for working women. Negative perceptions of women in middle-age can also be linked to stereotypes around menopause. In 2008, psychologists studied the attitudes of people towards women in different reproductive stages. They found that while the pregnant women or the woman with the baby were thought about in glowing terms, menopausal women were associated with negative emotions, illness and ageing.

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from “How Stereotypes Affect Middle-Aged Women’s Careers”, by Ananya Singh,
The Swaddle]

XXI. The depreciation of an economy’s currency is not a matter of concern in itself. The decline in value against major currencies has to be viewed within a set of macroeconomic factors. The recent depreciation of the Indian rupee is a case in point. The rupee has been depreciating for a long time. What are of concern now are the rate at which the depreciation is occurring and the underlying factors causing the change. The Russia-Ukraine war has disrupted supply chains causing commodity prices to rise, leading to a worldwide hardening of inflationary trends. This, in turn, has caused major central banks to raise interest rates, forcing investors back to the safe haven of the US dollar. For India, these headwinds from the global economy have caused several problems. The rise in international prices, especially of crude oil, has led to a higher import bill and, hence, a greater demand for dollars. Higher interest rates in developed country markets have caused a significant outflow of portfolio investments from India, aggravating the already climbing demand for dollars from a rising import bill. By May 2022, foreign institutional investors had pulled out Rs. 1.50 lakh crore from Indian markets.

In the face of these pressures, the rupee, left to itself, wrould decline in value as the rupee-price of a dollar would increase substantially. One way the Reserve Bank of India could stem the tide would be to sell off dollars in the market to ease the supply situation. However, this would mean that while the value of the rupee could be contained, the nation’s foreign exchange kitty would start to erode further. The RBI has been doing exactly that. The challenge before the RBI is this: how much to let the rupee depreciate and how much to intervene to prop it up? Too much depreciation would raise domestic inflation rates as the rupee-price of imports, especially oil, would raise costs of production. It could trigger a rise in policy-controlled interest rates while closely monitoring inflationary expectations. The biggest challenge is to navigate unpredictable international economic shocks in the near future. The Indian economy’s health is not exactly at its best. Exports may not be able to take advantage of a falling rupee since international demand is expected to stagnate. India’s growth and employment situations are yet to stabilise to what they were about a decade ago. The RBI has difficult choices: controlling inflation versus stimulating growth and stabilising the rupee without severely diminishing the economy’s foreign exchange kitty.

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from “Stiff test: Editorial on depreciation of rupee & challenges before RBI”, The Telegraph]

XXII. Why are we humans so susceptible to the doom and gloom of the news? Two reasons. The first is what psychologists call negativity bias: we’re more attuned to the bad than the good. Back in our hunting and gathering days, we were better off being frightened of a spider or a snake a hundred times too often than one time too few. Too much fear wouldn’t kill you; too little surely would.

Second, we’re also burdened with an availability bias. If we can easily recall examples of a given thing, we assume that thing is relatively common. The fact that we’re bombarded daily with horrific stories about aircraft disasters, child snatchers and beheadings — which tend to lodge in the memory — completely skews our view of the world.

In this digital age, the news we’re being fed is only getting more extreme. In the old days, journalists didn’t know much about their individual readers. They wrote for the masses. But the people behind Facebook, Twitter and Google know you well. They know what shocks and horrifies you, they know what makes you click. They know’ how to grab your attention and hold it so they can serve you the most lucrative helping of personalised ads. This modern media frenzy is nothing less than an assault on the mundane. Because, let’s be honest, the lives of most people are pretty predictable. Nice, but boring. So while we’d prefer having nice neighbours with boring lives, ‘boring’ won’t make you sit up and take notice. ‘Nice’ doesn’t sell ads. And so Silicon Valley keeps dishing us up ever more sensational clickbait, knowing full well, as a Swiss novelist once quipped, that “News is to the mind what sugar is to the body.”

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from Humankind: A Hopeful History, by Rutger Bregman, Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2021.]

XXIII. In this moment, the developed countries — I point to them, because these countries have already burnt massive amounts of carbon dioxide for energy to build their economies — are faced with a real energy conundrum. On the one hand, developed countries are battered because of a fast-heating planet; temperatures have gone through the roof; droughts and extreme weather events are hitting them as well. On the other hand, ordinary people in these countries are worried, not just because of climate change but because of the lack of energy to heat their homes this coming winter. In the US, gas prices went up in summer, so much so that people travelled less and consumption of fuel dropped. But now prices are down and it is business as usual.

The fact is that this energy disruption has provided the much-needed vault to the beleaguered fossil fuel industry. Governments are asking this industry to supply more. Europe has baptised natural gas, a fossil fuel less polluting than coal but still a major emitter of carbon dioxide, as “clean”. The US has passed a climate bill, which will invest in renewable energy but conditional to increased spends on oil and gas and the opening up of millions of hectares of federal land for drilling. Through this bill the US will do more than ever before to build a manufacturing base for renewable energy, particularly solar. Europe, even in this desperate scramble for gas, is working to ramp up its investment in renewable power. So, it is the worst of times. It could be the best of times, but there are some caveats. One, this renewed interest in fossil fuels must remain temporary and transient. Given the nature of economies, once the investment has been made in this new infrastructure or the supply of fossil fuel has increased from new oil and gas discoveries, it will be difficult to wean off. Two, these countries should not be entitled to more use of fossil fuels in our world of shrunk carbon budgets. They need to reduce emissions drastically and leave whatever little carbon budget space that is remaining to poorer countries to use, thereby satisfying such poorer countries’ demands.

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from “New energy conundrum”, by Sunita Narain, Down To Earth]

XXIV. The post-truth era is, expectedly, marked by a discerning erosion of public trust in sources of information. Mass media — both traditional and new-age avatars — has borne the brunt of this mistrust. And for good reasons too. Social media, its most popular platform, is a harbinger of falsity. It is thus encouraging to see that at least the old guard of the media ecosystem — the newspaper — continues to defy this discouraging trend. A pan-India survey of media consumption by Lokniti found that print media remains the most trusted source of information. The finding is consistent with the heartening surge in public endorsement of the reliability of newspapers since the pandemic. An earlier survey, which attempted to examine the impact of the lockdown on ‘reading patterns’, had found that the number of readers who used to spend over an hour on newspapers every day had risen to 38%, up from 16% in the pre-lockdown period. The increased trust in newspapers is because the lockdowns coincided with the dissemination of the crudest kinds of misinformation about the pandemic in India and around the world and newspapers played a pivotal role in exposing these lies.

But that is where the good news ends — for the print media, at least. Among other things, the data collated by the survey found deepening footprints of social media in rural and urban constituencies while television continues to dominate the screen. These developments are consistent with global trends that reveal that the newspaper industry is struggling to contain the migration of readers and revenue to other formats, especially digital media. Ironically, the pandemic, which saw a resurgence in collective trust in newspapers, adversely affected the print media as traditional advertisers, reeling under the economic fallouts of CoVID-19, cut back on advertisements. But the crisis in print precedes the pandemic. Newspapers have been outpaced by speedier, but also spurious, sources of information. The dominance of the image over text as a cultural phenomenon is another formidable challenge. The print media’s hopes of remaining competitive and profitable must, therefore, centre on using this collective trust as a form of capital. Survival strategies, especially the revenue model, must be re-explored and the emphasis shifted to in-depth analyses of news as well as eye-catching layouts now that newspapers are slower to reach news to the audience.

[Extracted, with edits and revisions, from “Good news: Editorial on print media remaining the most trusted source of information”, The Telegraph]