Gye Greene's Thoughts

Gye Greene's Thoughts (w/ apologies to The Smithereens and their similarly-titled album!)

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

Greenhouse gasses and percent females in legislature

Actually, those two topics -- greenhouse gasses and the percent of female legislators -- are not causally related. I just didn't feel like starting two separate blog entries.


GREENHOUSE GASSES:

A quick estimate of which is worse for global warming: mailing a letter, or sending an e-mail.

Curiously, he concludes that it depends on the distance traveled, and whether the e-mail is stored for a long time (versus getting deleted). He also has some innovative suggestions.


PERCENT OF FEMALE LEGISLATORS:

If you want to use "the percentage of female legislators" as a measure of the gender equity of a nation -- and you accept that it's harder for females, ethnic minorities, etc. to make it to the national level of government (compared to the state level), then here's the numbers for the U.S. versus Australia:


AU (2007?):

29% female in Federal Parliament

(source: http://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/prod/parlment/HansArt.nsf/V3Key/LA20020903064)


US (2001):

14% female in House of Reps

13% female in Senate

(source: http://ask.yahoo.com/20011030.html)


I realize that this compares disparate years -- but I don't want to invest the time to find a source for matching years.

But -- unless the U.S. has doubled their proportion of females from 2001 to 2007, then AU has basically twice the proportion of females as representatives at the federal level.


--GG

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