Whitey Bulger's Beauty Pageant Connection (from The Huffington Post Culture)

CLICK HERE TO READ THIS ON THE HUFFINGTON POST CULTURE! He was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list for twelve years. But Whitey Bulger was ultimately brought down by Miss Congeniality.

No, not Gracie Hart (Sandra Bullock's eponymous female FBI character in the 2000 film), but Anna Bjornsdottir.

According to The Boston Globe, which broke the story, Bjornsdottir is a 57-year-old graphic designer and yoga instructor who splits her time between Reykjavik, Iceland and Santa Monica, California.  During her California months she stays near Bulger's former hideout-- where he lived for sixteen years with girlfriend Catherine Greig while on the run from authorities in Boston (If you aren't familiar with Bulger, he was a former boss of the Irish mob in Boston, accused of killing at least nineteen; he was also the inspiration for Jack Nicholson's character in 2006's The Departed). Ever congenial, Bjornsdottir and Greig bonded over the neighborhood stray cat... Though at the time Bjornsdottir knew Greig as Carol Gasko.

After seeing a story on Whitey Bulger and Greig back home in Iceland, Bjornsdottir made the connection between Gasko and Greig and called in a tip to the FBI. She has since, reportedly, collected $2 million for her good deed. And, now, she has also gained international attention.

But this isn't Anna Bjornsdottir's first time in the international spotlight. Back in 1974 she competed in the Miss Universe Pageant as Miss Iceland. While she didn't win-- or even place as a semi-finalist-- she was crowned Miss Congeniality.

If you're interested in her national costume (my favorite part of the Miss Universe Pageant, which I've written about before) start watching at about 3:04:

After her pageant experience Bjornsdottir moved to California to pursue modeling, apparently doing quite well in print and television commercials (according to a People story, she earned more than $2000 a day for appearing in Vidal Sassoon and Noxzema commercials).

This also isn't the first time that the 1974 Miss Universe Pageant has been touched by intrigue and scandal. The winner, Miss Spain Ampara Muñoz, resigned her title a few months after crowning, citing irreconcilable differences with the Miss Universe Pageant. By that time the first runner-up, Miss Wales Helen Morgan, had won the title of Miss World (as Miss United Kingdom). In a bizarre twist, she also gave up her crown after it was revealed that she was a single mother. The Miss Universe title wasn't offered to any other runners-up. The following year Miss Universe 1972 crowned Miss Universe 1975, since there was no reigning queen.

Muñoz passed away earlier this year, not knowing that eventually one of her fellow contestants' involvement with a scandal would overshadow her own. Miss Congeniality, indeed. Just ask Whitey.

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Dance Studio Dynamics: Reflections on Season One of Dance Moms (from orgtheory.net)

During the summer of stage mothers, Lifetime’s Dance Moms emerged as a breakout hit for the network.  From its debut in mid-July 2011 to its season finale this past week, the show steadily attracted more viewers (up 62% since its premiere).  With about 1.6 million watching each episode, it’s not surprising that the network has given the green light to a 13-episode long second season. After the first episode, which I found quite shocking (even in the context of my previous research and experience with competitive dance), I had doubts that a second season would be possible. I couldn’t imagine the studio owner, Abby Lee Miller, agreeing to it, or many of the moms, given how negatively they were portrayed. But as the series has progressed I actually think Miller has emerged as more sympathetic; if I had to deal with some of these moms’ antics, I might be a bit brusque and stand-offish too.

The intra-studio competition is actually far more intense than the inter-studio competition.  And this is mainly because of the dance moms who jockey for attention from the teachers and choreographers within their small group.  Certainly, this type of behavior occurs in many kids’ activities, especially sports. I’m not sure it is typical of other small-group dynamics, like in firms and research groups? Perhaps others who study companies and firms know this research better and could share any insights. I found it especially interesting that whenever an outside threat to the core group emerged (like Crazy Cathy from Candy Apples), the moms banded together to defend one another and their studio. But they could easily, nastily turn on one another, including other kids in the group.

These highly charged competitive intra-studio dynamics are heightened on Dance Moms by the use of the dancer’s pyramid, which openly ranks the girls against their teammates each week.  While most competitive activities have some understood hierarchy of top achievers, the show makes this internal, usually invisible, ranking clear.  It’s emerged that Miller does not normally operate in this way, instead using this pyramid to (successfully) add extra drama to the show (thank goodness given the ages of the kids she works with).  Nonetheless it captures how moms don’t just want their girls to succeed in the bigger pond of dance competitions, but also to be “the star” in the smaller pond of their Pittsburgh dance studio.

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This week’s season finale, “There Can Only Be One Star,” plopped the girls into the even bigger pond of Hollywood. They tried out, and were featured, in a music video.  It was a good opportunity for Abby to emphasize why her sometimes draconian teaching techniques produce successful, working dancers.  For example, the moms who had complained about their daughters learning new routines each week admitted that they had to eat crow after they saw how quickly their girls picked up the choreography at the audition.  The girls themselves commented that dance competitions helped prepare them to be evaluated at auditions, even though now there were forty judges as opposed to just three or four.  And the youngest company member, adorable seven-year-old Makenzie, remarked: “Directors [of the music video] are kind of like Abby. They yell a lot.”  While in Hollywood the girls also learned the very real, but tough, lesson that sometimes it doesn’t matter how good you are—being successful means looking right at the right moment, which includes quite a bit of luck.

I’m curious to see if any other redemption arcs emerge in the second season… which might be hard given that the show has likely exacerbated many of the long-simmering group tensions by revealing not only how people act in their frontstage personas, but also backstage (it’s always amazing what people choose to reveal in one-on-one interviews knowing that those comments might be seen by millions, including those they have been talking about).  I do hope that the second season features more of Abby’s senior dancers and her now-professional students, along with more backstory on the families (like, where are most of their husbands, and other children, and what do they think?), while dropping unrealistic touches like the pyramid and leading viewers to believe that the girls only compete a subset of their routines at each competition.  The show is revealing not just for the dancing and the glimpse into the subculture of children’s dance competitions, but also for its insight into small-group dynamics in highly-charged, emotional situations.

Throw Like a Girl: Reviewing Softball Legend Jennie Finch's New Book (from BlogHer Sports)

You may recognize her from her pitching in the Olympics. Or from the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated. Or even from The Apprentice. Now you should also recognize her as an author. Softball great, and Olympic gold medalist, Jennie Finch, has just released her first book: Throw Like A Girl: How to Dream Big & Believe in Yourself (with sports journalist Ann Killion). This 256-page autobiographical work, recently published by sports press Triumph, is targeted at teen girls (it may be a bit long for elementary school-age readers, but is a great fit for middle- and high-school audiences). If your daughter is a softball player, or athlete of any type, this is a must read.

Throw Like A Girl traces Finch’s career from her days on Southern California sandlots to international softball diamonds on travel, high school, college, Olympic, and pro teams.  Divided into three sections—Body, Mind, and Heart— Finch gives tips on how to navigate politics in youth sports, how college recruiting really works, and how to balance sports, schooling, and a social life (at various life stages, as she covers her own marriage and pregnancies).  While she does repeat some stories a few times, the pictures and inspirational quotes throughout help distract from this repetition.

The gist of the book is summarized on page seven: “Through sports I learned to accept and appreciate my body and to accept myself for who I am. I gained confidence and inspiration. Athletics is not only good for your body, it’s great for your mind and spirit. And I learned that life is about so much more than just the wins and losses at the end of a game.”  Throughout Finch explains why athletics are beneficial to girls today, while also highlighting problem areas in youth sports—themes that resonate with my academic research on girls and competitive sports.

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n my work I label girls who are highly competitive and highly feminine “pink girls.”  These young women choose what type of girl they want to be, while performing at such a high level that they often beat boys.  She writes that the contrast between being a tough-as-nails athlete and a hot-pink-on-nails girl provides her with the right balance.  Some of her friends and teammates have chosen to be even more “supergirly” and others have chosen to shave their heads.  Finch explains that softball, and sports, has room for all types of girls.

Finch chose to be a pink girl from a young age: “When I started playing sports, I always put ribbons in my braids or ponytails.  My father was the one who did my hair for me before games when I was little because my mom was often at work. He always said that just because girl plays sports doesn’t mean she can’t be feminine. So that became my motto, too.” (55)

Finch’s father has played a huge role in her life.  More than anyone else besides the author he is the star of the book.  He developed a machine named the “Finch windmill” to help his daughter develop the muscles in her non-pitching arm.  He explained to her that her teammates depended on her and she shouldn’t go outside and ride her bike, for fear of breaking an arm.  And he defended her at games when people yelled from the stands that they were lying about her age.

Mr. Finch was an extremely involved sports dad who pushed his daughter to her limits to succeed.  While it clearly paid off in this case, it’s also clear that not all kids would respond well to this sort of parenting style.  Still, it’s a great example of sports bringing a father and daughter closer together, something that is still somewhat rare for many daddy-daughter combos, as I have previously written about on BlogHer.

Finch’s story shows how sports can help forge other familial bonds.  An obvious example is that Finch married a professional baseball player (a pitcher, no less), Casey Daigle.  Less obvious is the role her two older, athletic brothers played in her sports development.  For example, she explains that having older brothers helped prepare her parents to deal with the politics of youth sports teams (like the coach who likes to use his own child as star pitcher) and how to pick good coaches.

Finch provides other bits of relevant, practical advice to young athletes and their parents.  She tells people to be wary about those who sell services to young athletes and do some homework before hiring them—that just because they charge money doesn’t make them qualified (this is a real pet peeve of mine when it comes to the world of children’s competitive activities, as you can see here and here).  Finch also encourages young athletes to continue to explore various sporting opportunities and not specialize too young.  This includes playing different sports for fun and playing on a school team, not just for select travel teams.  Parents will especially appreciate her message that studying for school must also remain a priority.

While some of the tips apply to boys and girls, girls really are the focus in Throw Like a Girl. Finch discusses all the various competitive pressures girls may feel in their lives (academic, athletic, peer, romantic, and the list goes on), explaining she felt all of them at some point.  She doesn’t use psychologist Stephen Hinshaw’s term “The Triple Bind,” which refers to the pressures girls today feel to achieve like boys but still be nice and look good, but she has clearly lived this triple bind and succeeded.  While she is a positive role model I couldn’t help but ask myself if any male athletes would describe themselves as she did on page twenty: “I wasn’t the coolest girl. I wasn’t the most popular. I was too tall. I was chunky.”  Hopefully the next generation of female superstar athletes will read this book, take Jennie Finch’s advice to heart, and move beyond this triple bind.

Thoughts on Gawande and Personal Coaches: Coach, Teacher, or Babysitter? (from orgtheory.net)

If you missed Atul Gawande’s recent New Yorker piece on personal coaching, you should check it out (“Personal Best”). I think writers/academics have understood some of these ideas for some time (even tenured profs get regular feedback on their work from colleagues and in seminars, for example), but he presents a lot of interesting insights drawing on a range of examples including teacher training, Olympic-level and professional athletes, professional musicians, and physicians.

Gawande discusses a book that I have long-admired—Barbara Sand’s Teaching Genius—about legendary Juilliard strings teacher Dorothy DeLay (who knew a thing or two about Tiger Moms long before Amy Chua ever came along).  DeLay made a living teaching young children and adolescents how to play the violin—but was she a teacher or a coach?  This question has interested me ever since I started studying children’s competitive afterschool activities. During fieldwork I witnessed a lot of role confusion between parents and the adults they pay to instruct their children in a range of activities during the afterschool hours. Are people like DeLay teachers, coaches, or babysitters?

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As Gawande writes, the idea of coaching, especially in sports, is a “distinctly American development.” If you know anything about organized leisure activities and the competitive impulse in our society, this shouldn’t surprise you.  As the number of opportunities for athletic coaching has increased, so too has professionalization. But it often has not gone far enough, especially when it comes to children.

Most teachers and coaches (of children) I met think of themselves as educators. But in almost all cases they are not formally credentialed or certified as such because such programs simply don’t exist. Parents often think of these teachers/coaches as educators… when it’s convenient for them. If not, it’s easy to slip into a “babysitter” mindset, where a parent is paying someone to care for their child—hence they “work for them.”

Gawande recognizes that the coach role is tricky, explaining that: “The concept of coach is slippery. Coaches are not teachers, but they teach. They’re not your boss—in professional tennis, golf, and skating, the athlete hires and fires the coach—but they can be bossy. They don’t even have to be good at the sport. The famous Olympic gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi couldn’t do a split if his life depended on it.”

His choice of Bela Karolyi to illustrate his point is a very timely one.  First of all, the World Championships in gymnastics start this week in Tokyo.  But, more importantly, the USAG (the governing body for gymnastics in the US) is in the midst of a coaching scandal.  Several high profile male coaches (many of whom, like Karolyi, could not do a split if their life depended on it) have been accused of sexual abuse.  The Orange County Register has written extensively on this scandal and you can read some of their coverage here and here.

The most disturbing part of the story is that while one of the male coaches has been “banned” from coaching by USAG, he is still coaching young, female gymnasts. How? Well you don’t have to be certified by the USAG to open a gym. Any of you could decide to go open a gym next week in your hometown.  There is no law or governing body to prevent you from doing so.  Sure, it may be harder to get insurance (and I believe that insurance companies are the unsung heroes in protecting kids and families from predatory afterschool activities coaches/teachers), but you could still do it.

Similarly, you could open a dance studio, start a music school, or call yourself a chess coach.  And you could charge a lot for your services and parents would come.  In addition, you could hire anyone you wanted to—even if they have been convicted of sexual abuse of minors.

Despite such serious concerns when it comes to coaching young kids, many resist introducing regulations.  They say that the government should stay out (which is why, I argue insurance companies have stepped in), or they worry that imposing a credentialing process will increase fees. The latter is likely true. But we don’t send our kids to unaccredited schools (or most of us don’t). Why send your child to an unaccredited teacher/coach who can charge any price he or she desires? As coaching opportunities continue to increase I think this will become more of an issue, particularly when it comes to children.

Pulchronomics: Reviewing Beauty Pays (from orgtheory.net)

The economics of beauty? Well, that sort of economics definitely interests me more than stories about unemployment rates and tax cuts. (Yes, yes, I know they are important [though often depressing] topics.)  Since I’m married to an economist I feel I can say that sometimes economics can be a bit boring… In any case, it’s rare when our household experiences an overlapping academic interest, so I was particularly eager to read labor economist Daniel Hamermesh’s latest, Beauty Pays (Princeton University Press, 2011). The book has certainly been getting a lot of press.  (The fact it was featured in both The Economist and People, and that I read both features during my weekly reading, sums up my high- and low-brow periodical reading preferences.)  Beauty Pays has been reviewed and summarized in Time and The Huffington Post as well, and you may have seen the New York Times Op-Ed Hamermesh wrote last month on legal protections for the ugly.  Given these existing reviews I don’t want to summarize the major findings here, instead highlighting some points and questions that I believe will be of particular interest.

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• Given our chosen academic paths/careers, I was particularly interested when Hamermesh posed the question: Are better looking people better educated? (page 43). The answer is maybe. He finds that if you are smarter the premium for being beautiful is greater. But if you aren’t beautiful the penalty is greater as well.

What does this mean for professors? In examining teacher ratings Hamermesh finds that successful evaluations hinge on profs being more attractive.  More attractive economists also get elected to the presidency of the AEA more easily. Now this doesn’t mean the candidates have to look like Tom Brady. They just have to look better than the Manning brothers, since it’s relative attractiveness that really matters.

Not surprisingly, “On average, better-looking people will choose occupations where their looks pay off, and worse-looking people will shy away from those occupations.” (72)  Does this mean evaluating your own attractiveness in a realistic way should be added to The Grad Skool Rulz?

• While the book is full of many interesting findings, I did find myself wondering why certain topics weren’t discussed in more depth. For instance, while he discusses professions where looks would seem to matter quite a bit (like prostitution and acting), there was no serious mention of modeling (which seems particularly glaring given the recent publication of economic sociologist Ashley Mears’ Pricing Beauty).  I was similarly surprised to see beauty pageants ignored. The only mention of beauty pageants was a strange one—a reference to an online beauty contest for nuns.

One of the more interesting findings is that beauty matters just as much for men as for women, at least when it comes to labor market outcomes. I think the emphasis on presenting data for both men and women obscured opportunities for more thought-provoking analyses.  For instance, Hamermesh points out that more attractive women are more likely to be involved in the labor market than more unattractive women, who stay at home.  However, don’t many of the very best looking women opt out of the labor market by marrying extremely well? He does discuss the pay-off to women for marrying more attractive husbands (who also have more education, of course), but I would guess attractive women who marry well and leave the labor market are significantly more attractive than women who leverage their good looks for better-paying jobs.

• Finally, I would have liked to have seen Hamermesh discuss how good some of the studies he references really are. While his pulchronimics work has appeared in some of the top economics journals, many of the studies conducted by others that he discusses didn’t land in such lofty publications.  How much should we believe those studies? Just the findings are presented in the text; he could have used the notes to satisfy the curiosity of his more academic readers to evaluate the way the studies were conducted and point out some of the more and less compelling aspects of that research.

Additionally many of the data are dated, coming from the 1970s. In that case, would we expect there to have been an increase, or a decrease, in earnings due to looks since the 70s? I think we should expect an increase given the rise of celebrity culture and technological changes.  In addition to a 24/7 celebrity culture on television, there has also been the rise of the Internet. Even for non-celebrities that has led to a comeback of the portrait, focusing only on the face, for example (not just for Facebook, but for other forms of social media and websites). So beauty effects may be even larger today—a potentially sobering finding.

The study of beauty is more important than ever, especially given that higher rates of unemployment “gives employers more latitude to discriminate” (50). Hopefully other social scientists will take a cue from Daniel Hamermesh and continue studying beauty and appearance (not just facial beauty/physiognomy, but also height and weight) in a serious way to think about how beauty impacts the labor market, and beyond.