Fingerprints in the lab of forensic scientists who have developed a technique that can determine whether a print came from a man or a woman.CreditPaul Miller/University at Albany
A simple test performed at a crime scene may help forensic scientists determine whether a fingerprint belongs to a man or a woman, a new study reports.
The test is based on certain amino acids found in the fingerprints. Levels are twice as high in the sweat of women as in that of men.
“Fingerprints have really been treated as pictures for more than a hundred years,” said Jan Halamek, a forensic scientist at the State University of New York at Albany and one of the study’s authors. “The only major improvements in recent years have been due to software and databases that make it faster to match fingerprints.”
Mr. Halamek and his colleagues tested fingerprints on a doorknob, a laminate desktop, a composite bench top and a computer screen. Regardless of the surface type, they found it was possible to tell whether the fingerprint belonged to a woman by testing levels of residual amino acids.
From left, Allie Westover, Daphne Mortenson, Taylor Alcozer, Ella Jacobs and Skyler Westover played in a parking lot before a Boy Scouts meeting in Santa Rosa, Calif., on Nov. 13. (Allie is 13; the other four girls are 10.)CreditSarah Rice for The New York Times
SANTA ROSA, Calif. — Five girls wearing makeshift scout uniforms stood before top Boy Scout brass this month and made an announcement: We want in.
“I want to be a Boy Scout,” Allie Westover, 13, told a panel of men in khaki uniforms weighted by pins and patches. She dropped a scout application in front of them. Then so did her sister, Skyler, and three friends: Ella Jacobs, Daphne Mortenson and Taylor Alcozer.
In a year in which gender roles in traditional American institutions have undergone major changes and challenges, a fight in Northern California over joining the Boy Scouts is among the most recent points of contention. These girls — the latest of many over the decades who have sought to become Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts instead of Brownies and Girl Scouts — say they would rather be camping and tying knots than selling cookies.
And they say shifting attitudes are on their side: Bathrooms are going unisex in deference to transgender people, the Supreme Court has redefined marriage to include same-sex couples, and even the Boy Scouts have softened their stance on gay scouts and scout leaders.
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Local Boy Scout leaders in Santa Rosa at a meeting on Nov. 13.CreditSarah Rice for The New York Times
In this liberal-minded community, about two hours north of San Francisco, a group of girls ages 10 and 13 who have named themselves the Unicorns want to formally join the Boy Scouts, the 105-year-old organization that has long considered itself the cradle of American male leadership. None of them want to be boys — they just want to play like them.
“Because we’re girls we can’t participate with boys?” said Ella, 10. “When we get into the real world, we’re going to have to work with other people who are, like, not just girls.”
But they face stiff legal obstacles: Among other factors, Title IX, the federal law that prohibits discrimination by sex, carves out an exception for the Boy Scouts, allowing them to exclude members based on gender.
Indeed, even as the Boy Scouts have accepted gay members, the organization has guarded its boys-only ethos. While allowing girls to participate in some affiliated programs, it keeps them out of the core scouting curriculum that has built a reputation as the most rigorous youth development program in the nation.
“We understand that the values and the lessons of scouting are attractive to the entire family,” the national Boy Scouts organization said in an email to reporters. “However, Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts are year-round programs for boys and young men.”
The Unicorns began to consider themselves Boy Scouts last fall, after they enrolled in a skills-building course, Learning for Life, that is affiliated with the organization and is offered to boys and girls. Several Unicorns had tried the Girl Scouts but found the experience too sedate: rest time and whispering instead of playing tag and lighting fires.
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Danelle Jacobs, the leader of a group of girls who want to join the Boy Scouts, prepared the girls for the scout meeting.CreditSarah Rice for The New York Times
A spokeswoman for the Girl Scouts of Northern California disagreed with that assessment. “Outdoor experience has really always been a hallmark of what we do,” said the spokeswoman, Nikki Van Ausdall. “If they want to come back to join us, we’re thrilled to have them.”
Led by Ella’s mother, Danelle Jacobs, 43, the Unicorns moved quickly from the course lessons to more formal Boy Scout activities: earning badges, hiking alongside boy groups and buying uniforms that mimicked those worn by boys.
In the spring, the Unicorns placed second in a major scouting competition called camporee, where they went up against dozens of Boy Scout groups judged for grit and spirit.
“We can do the same things boys can — proven from camporee,” Ella said in an interview at her home. She waved a fistful of ribbons: first place in team building, second in backpacking, third in slingshot. “There’s no really ‘girl things’ or ‘boy things.’”
Her 12-year-old brother, Evan, said he was “very scared” the girls would sweep the competition next year.
But expanding the definition of “Boy Scout” is alarming some parents, who voiced concerns about the prospect of shared tents, the erosion of valuable boys-only time and the possibility that girls — who already outperform boys in many areas — might start to snap up all the leadership positions.
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The girls, who call themselves the Unicorns, gave their names to a stenographer at the Boy Scout meeting.CreditSarah Rice for The New York Times
“I have sons,” said Jennifer Masterson, 54, a scout leader in the same region as the Unicorns who said she felt uneasy about the idea of coed scouting. “Would I want a girl sleeping in my son’s tent? No.”
Another Northern California scout leader, Randy Huffman, 56, said he felt similarly uncomfortable. “Maybe their approach should have been to go to the Girl Scouts and say: Instead of painting our nails and clipping our — whatever they do — to do archery and do climbing. Going through that process.”
This fall, at least one person contacted top Boy Scout officials to report that the girls here had invaded campouts and competitions. On Oct. 1, the local Boy Scout council barred the girls from participating in further activities, telling them that they had gone beyond the lessons permitted in the life-skills program and that the organization’s charter made it clear that “Cub Scouting, Boy Scouting and Varsity Scouting are for boys.”
A meeting was called for Nov. 13 to help the Unicorns understand the decision. It was there, at the local Boy Scout headquarters, that the girls confronted leaders and asked to be made full-fledged Boy Scouts.
The response from the men on the panel was swift: They would forward the girls’ requests to the national office, but said they had no local authority to admit them.
“The rules and regulations, the bylaws, don’t allow that,” said Rodney Mangus, 65, one of three top officials in the Boy Scout area that includes Santa Rosa.
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The girls returned to school after the meeting. Local Boy Scout leaders said they would forward the girls' request to join to the national office.CreditSarah Rice for The New York Times
Another official, Herb Williams, 79, said he supported the idea of girls in scouting, but only with approval from above. “Without process, without rules and regulation, there’s chaos,” he said.
Allie, one of the Unicorns, responded after the meeting: “I’d like to see them standing up like they did for the gay scouts and the gay leaders.” She noted that several of the officials had been early supporters of gay people in scouting.
“The conflict about admitting girls goes back even further than the conflict over admitting gays,” said Richard Ellis, a professor of politics at Willamette University in Salem, Ore., and the author of the book “Judging the Boy Scouts of America.”
The conflict in California coincides with a trend of declining membership in the Boy Scouts for at least a decade. About 2.4 million boys participated in Boy Scout activities in 2014, down from 2.6 million the year before, and some in Santa Rosa cited girl recruitment as a possible solution.
“Those programs have all been written for squirrelly little boys that run around and get crazy,” said Mr. Mangus, the local Boy Scout official, adding that he thought the curriculum would need to be rewritten if girls were admitted.
At the same time, Mr. Mangus said, “the Boy Scouts are not daft about what’s happening in society.” As far as admitting girls in the future, he said, “Who knows?”
My 18-year-old daughter knows exactly when it will be that time of the month. Since June, she’s been plugging the dates of her menstrual cycle into a popular period tracking app called Clue, and has it programmed to send her an alert every month, two days before her next period is due.
“It’s great because I never think about it, and now I never have to think about it,” she said.
Like a lot of young women, my teenager is just too busy. And no, she doesn’t mind being quoted, she said, adding, “Mom: I’m not embarrassed about my period.”
She’s not the only one. Girls and women are openly talking, tweeting and texting about their periods, and not just to Donald Trump. New companies tired of the stigma are selling menstrual products using the “P” word, singers and artists weave menstruation themes into their work, athletes and others have mentioned it on talk shows and at press conferences. Two New York City high school girls developed a video game called “Tampon Run” — the heroine’s mission is “to rid the world of the menstrual taboo.”
Add to this mix period tracker apps, which have helped shift attitudes, demystifying and normalizing menstruation by assigning cute icons to once unmentionables like heavy flow, maxi pads and period pimples. Most important, the apps transform the input into crunchable data that can tell a young woman when her period is due, when it’s late and even why she might be feeling so blue.
There are over 200 different period tracker apps to choose from, and they are immensely popular: consumers have downloadedPeriod Tracker (by GP International) and Period Calendar/Tracker(by Abishkking) more than 10 million times from the Android store alone, according to IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics.
Period tracker apps can track a range of issues related to the menstrual cycle including emotions, cramps, weight, sleep, energy, food cravings and more. They also can record when you had sex (Clue’s icon for protected sex is a man wearing a tie) or remind you to pack tampons, take your birth control pill or do a breast exam, all information women say is both empowering and liberating. Some apps are pink and girlie, all hearts and flowers and butterflies; others take a more subtle approach with lots of graphs in muted shades of purple. Specialized apps have even been developed for niche groups like Orthodox Jewish women who adhere to religious family purity laws. The apps say they are “rabbinically approved.”
“When you see a technology that someone has developed specifically for you as a woman, it really legitimizes talking about your periods and thinking about them,” said Shuangyi “E.E.” Hou, 24, a product designer in San Francisco for apps and websites who has used a period tracker app for over a year. “If we as a society say women should be checking in on their periods, and we give them permission to talk about it, I’m convinced it will be beneficial for women’s health.”
While the apps also can be used to track ovulation, signaling the days the user is more or less likely to become pregnant, most period tracker apps explicitly warn users not to rely on them to prevent pregnancy. The ovulation tracker and fertility prediction can be helpful for a woman trying to conceive, but it can give a false sense of security to a woman who relies on the app as a form of birth control.
That’s because even the most vigilant ovulation tracking methods have shockingly high failure rates, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, with up to one in four women becoming pregnant over the course of a year with typical use.
“Apps are a tool; they’re not actually a birth control method,” said Hannah Ransom of San Diego, a certified fertility awareness educator.
But many users of period tracker apps rely on them to help schedule their busy lives or for tracking health conditions that fluctuate with their cycle, rather than contraception. Aliya, a 23-year-old from the Bronx, said she uses Pink Pad Pro to schedule social outings like visits to a Russian bath house and to give her doctor an accurate answer to the inevitable question about the date of her last menstrual period (though she admitted relying on it occasionally for birth control as well).
One college theater student said she always forgets about her period during the week or two before a production, when there are a million other details to think about, so she likes the push notification reminders from Period Tracker Lite.
One concern about the trackers is privacy, and the fact that most young users won’t read the app’s privacy policy. Registered users of Clue agree to let the company use anonymous cycle data to improve the app and for academic and clinical research. Data isn’t collected from unregistered users.
Ida Tin, who founded Clue, one of the fastest growing period tracker apps with 2 million active users in 180 countries, said her motivation in developing the app was to provide women with more information and greater understanding about a “foundational” part of their lives for 40 years.
“If you just have the data about what is going on in your body,” said Ms. Tin, “It’s a navigating tool for your life.”
SO far the gender revolution has been a one-sided effort. Women have entered previously male precincts of economic and political life, and for the most part they have succeeded. They can lead companies, fly fighter jets, even run for president.
But along the way something crucial has been left out. We have not pushed hard enough to put men in traditionally female roles — that is where our priority should lie now. This is not just about gender equality. The stakes are even higher. The jobs that many men used to do are gone or going fast, and families need two engaged parents to share the task of raising children.
As painful as it may be, men need to adapt to what a modern economy and family life demand. There has been progress in recent years, but it hasn’t been equal to the depth and urgency of the transformation we’re undergoing. The old economy and the old model of masculinity are obsolete. Women have learned to become more like men. Now men need to learn to become more like women.
Will this transformation be good for men? In the long run, we think so. But in any case they don’t really have a choice. Recent changes in women’s status and in the economy aren’t going to be reversed. Men must either adapt or be left behind.
Many men have felt a double whammy: a loss of economic status as jobs in traditionally masculine sectors have disappeared and a loss of social status as women have advanced. Male wages are stagnant and among the less educated, they have fallen: Median earnings for men with only a high school diploma have dropped in real terms by 28 percent since 1980.
These disturbing trends have led many observers to call on boys and men to regain their competitive edge over women, so they can once again be successful breadwinners and leaders. But that’s the wrong message. Rather than trying to recreate a patriarchal past, men have to embrace a more feminine future.
Instead, some men, especially those with the bleakest economic prospects, are retreating into what some scholars have labeled “hyper-masculinity.” At the extreme this leads to violence and misogyny, and may be a form of compensation for low status or loss of respect.
They have been moving into some traditionally male-dominated jobs.
But men have not been moving as fast into traditionally female-dominated jobs.
Pharmacist
48%
PERCENTAGE OF EACH FIELD HELD BY WOMEN
Physician,
surgeon
37
38%
PERCENTAGE OF EACH FIELD HELD BY MEN
Lawyer
36
32%
Elementary
school teacher
20%
Dentist
27
Social worker
18
Civil
engineer
16
15
14
Librarian
17
14
12
Registered nurse
9
Kindergarten, pre-
kindergarten teacher
2
4
3
3
2
1980
2014
’80
’14
Men Are Giving Way
Who’s providing for U.S. households with children under 18, in percent.
Single mothers
Married mothers
who earn more than their husbands
Fathers are the sole or primary providers*:
50%
89%
85
77
71
66
60
1960
7%
4
1970
11
4
1980
16
7
1990
19
10
2000
21
13
2011
25
15
40% have mothers as the sole or primary provider.
But given their own limited prospects, these men are the very ones who most need female partners, along with a partner’s paycheck, to survive in today’s economy.
The male malaise starts in the classroom. Girls have overtaken boys at every stage of education, with higher grades from the early years through high school and college. Men are now a minority on college campuses,accounting for 42 percent of graduates.
The greater success being enjoyed by girls results not from superior intellect but from better study habits. Girls typically demonstrate more focus, effort and self-discipline. Boys and young men are more likely to be distracted by video games, or even derailed by drink or drugs.
Armed with a better education and more skills, women have also advanced steadily in the workplace, and look set to continue to do so. This is not to say that the gender gap has closed. America’s boardrooms and legislatures are still male-dominated. Women still earn, on average, $8 for every $10 that their male counterparts bring home. But the wage gap is shrinking rapidly among younger workers.
The labor market is becoming steadily more female-friendly. Jobs are being created as the economy recovers from the blow it received during the Great Recession. The problem is that they are largely “women’s jobs,” so men aren’t taking them. Women have moved into formerly all-male provinces like law and business, but men have not made the reverse trek into health and education.
LATELY, there has been a laudable push to get girls and women into jobs that require STEM skills (science, technology, engineering and math). But it is equally important to train and encourage men to take jobs that require skills in health, education, administration and literacy, so-called HEAL jobs.
Right now, HEAL jobs are dominated by women. Men make up 20 percent of elementary and middle-school teachers, 9 percent of nurses, 16 percent of personal care aides and 6 percent of personal assistants.
Until men seize opportunities in these “pink collar” sectors, they will continue to lose out in this dynamic area of the labor market. Women currently dominate the sectors expected to produce the most jobs. Unless the gender imbalance in the 30 fastest-growing occupations changes, women will take up a million jobs that would otherwise have gone to men.
There are no legal obstacles to men becoming schoolteachers or nurses, so this is largely a question of culture and attitude. We need to match the campaigns to help girls and women see traditionally male jobs as appropriate for them with equally effective efforts in the other direction.
Small messages can be powerful here. We know that girls are less likely to apply to study science if they see boy-oriented posters, featuring “Star Trek” or Harry Potter. Boys almost surely react the same way to images and environments with a feminine feel.
“Stewardesses” have become flight attendants. Good. So why not call nurses “health attendants” (if entry level) or “health associates” (if more highly trained)? Getting more men into teaching would have two advantages: widening male job prospects and at the same time providing more diverse role models for boys in the classroom.
Men need to adapt on the home front, too. Women are now the primary breadwinners in 40 percent of all households with children under 18, according to the Pew Research Center. Most of these women are single parents.
Percentage of men and women under age 35 who agreed with this statement, in 1977 and 2012:
“It is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achieveroutside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.”
Education:
Less than high school
High school
College
59
MEN
55
50
52
50%
46
WOMEN
29
27
24
24
25
20
19
11
1977
2012
’77
’12
’77
’12
Resistance to career women
is strongest among less educated men — who most need a wage-earning partner in today's economy.
But nearly a quarter or more
of better-educated men also agree that it’s preferable for women to stay home.
But the proportion of married mothers out-earning their husbands has also risen, from 4 percent in 1960 to 17 percent in 2015. In half the families where both parents work full time, the mother earns as much as or more than the father.
Men are doing some more child care: 7.3 hours per week in 2011, compared with 2.6 hours in 1985, but there has been no increase, and in fact a slight decline, in their contribution to housework. There needs to be much faster progress toward a more equal division of domestic labor.
Family leave policies can be designed to help here, though the frequency with which they are relabeled “maternity leave” shows how far behind we still are. Right now, the United States is the only advanced country without a national paid leave policy.
There are some small signs of hope from the campaign trail. Hillary Rodham Clinton proposes a national mandate requiring employers to offer all new parents three months of paid time off. Senator Marco Rubio suggests a 25 percent tax credit for companies that provide at least four weeks of paid leave to employees.
We should go further, and institute leave rights specifically and solely for fathers. Policy is usually built on the assumption that if there is a father in the picture, he should either be earning or paying child support; his role as a potential caretaker is typically ignored or stigmatized.
Sweden and Germany have already successfully introduced this kind of “use it or lose it” leave policy (in other words, only the father can make use of it), and a similar program in Quebec demonstrates what can be accomplished. Since 2006, parents in the province have been offered a generous benefit of 70 percent income replacement for a year. A critical feature of the policy is that five weeks of leave are reserved for fathers.
As a result, the proportion of fathers taking time off from work jumped from 21 to 75 percent. The amount of time these fathers took off also increased, by an average of three weeks. The father-only element of the policy may have helped to de-stigmatize men who stayed home, according to research by the economist Ankita Patnaik.
The effects lasted, too. In the three years following the leave, mothers and fathers continued to pursue a more egalitarian division of both domestic and market work. There is an important message here. Policies deliberately aimed at helping fathers to take on a bigger role at home can have profound and rapid effects on gender roles.
MORE symmetry in gender roles will also reshape (and is already reshaping) what economists unromantically label “marriage markets.” The old model of the marriage contract was lopsided; women would marry men who were more educated, more successful and older than they were. (Social scientists, even less romantically, call this hypergamy.)
But the idea that men will be the “senior partner” in a marriage is no longer realistic; soon, there will be as many successful women as men. This means men need to get used to the idea of “marrying up” — and women to the idea of “marrying down.” This seems to be happening to some extent already: In 2012, 27 percent of newlywed men married “up” educationally.
More men ought to be doing what women did historically: improving their economic prospects by marrying well. With apologies to Jane Austen, even a man who is not in possession of a fortune will still be in want of a wife — ideally one who has a fortune of her own.
The problem is that many men and women, disoriented by the shake-up of gender roles, are not marrying at all — less-educated adults, especially — resulting in a class-based marriage gap. Marriage rates among men under 35 have dropped by 23 percentage points since 1980.
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Outdated ideas are doing some damage here. Too many men and women are holding out for a traditional marriage when the traditional conditions that supported it have largely disappeared. Men with poor job prospects do not see themselves as husband material. Many of the women they know agree with them.
More educated couples are meanwhile reshaping marriage into a more symmetrical and egalitarian institution. Married men seem to be adapting more quickly, probably because they are more educated and more economically secure.
In feminist thought, marriage is typically seen as a patriarchal institution. Twenty-first-century marriage seems in fact to be providing fertile ground for a renegotiation of gender roles in an egalitarian direction.
But rather than encouraging the transition to these more equal marriages, public policies are too often formulated, framed or communicated in a way that reinforces, rather than replaces, outdated gender stereotypes.
There is, for example, a growing desire among some policy mavens to create more “marriageable men” by providing them with the kinds of apprenticeships and wage subsidies that will enhance their marriage prospects. This whole enterprise is shot through with a breadwinner-male definition of marriage that is well past its sell-by date.
None of this is to say that better wages and more skills aren’t needed for men: They are, desperately. But it is just as important to keep lifting up women’s skills, earnings and incomes. We don’t want a world in which men can get better jobs than women simply because they are men. Nor are we going to restore marriages based on the superior earning power of men.
Resistance to these kinds of changes in familial roles is often based on assumptions about innate biological differences. There is little doubt that evolutionary differences exist. But it is hard to say how much they influence the adoption of certain roles under current cultural conditions. We suspect beliefs about innate differences are often an excuse for preserving the status quo. If the role of biology is exaggerated, society will suffer.
Cultural recalibration to the new economic and social realities certainly won’t happen overnight. Think how easily the terms “working mother” and “career woman” still trip off the tongue, by comparison with “working father” or “career man.” About a third of adults in the United States still agree that “it is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.”
This is a clear improvement over the 1970s, when more than half concurred: But attitudes have shifted most slowly among men and women with the least education. Among those without a high school diploma, a majority still believe in the sole-breadwinner model (even the women split 50-50 on the question).
It has been clear for a long time that cramped gender roles are bad for women. It is becoming obvious that now they are hurting men, too. So a transformation of our ideas of male roles and masculinity is required, if many of the economic and social shifts described above are actually going to occur.
This kind of cultural change is hard, of course. But it can happen; sometimes quickly. Think of the gains that women have made in the last 50 years, or changing attitudes toward gay rights, and interracial marriage.
America now seems to be experiencing a renewed bout of cultural turbulence over what it means to be a woman, or a wife; a man, or a husband. Gay marriage, even after legalization, sharply divides opinion. Women’s reproductive freedom is being curtailed. The growing confidence and strengthening rights of the transgender community are causing wildly disproportionate anxiety.
The way forward, we believe, is for men to embrace and adapt to the new, more androgynous world. There is no point in harking back. The world in which high-paid manufacturing jobs could support a family, and where women were expected to focus only on being wives and mothers is gone. Women have shown they are ready for this transition. But what about men?
