Taking the spy game to Happy Hour

If you hadn't noticed, I've been quite mum on the progress of my heels-and-marital-status study over the past few weeks.

My silence is not tantamount to project abandonment or even due to your author's waning interest in the topic. Hardly. No, the main problem - the only problem - is that it is damn difficult to gather the evidence I need (i.e. heel-height, heel-thickness, ring-or-no-ring?) when women are walking by me at a relatively quick clip. Compounding this is that I too am often on-foot while slurping down my midday protein shake.

What? Like you don't spend your 20 minute lunch walking in perfect squares around your office in 4-inch heels? Please. How else on earth is a girl supposed to earn her even-all-over Spring base-tan when the weekends are always rainy and/or 10 degrees colder than the weekdays?

But I digress.

The point is, without quite literally stalking and staring at women beyond the universally-accepted just-takin'-a-look time limit (for women, this runs about five seconds; for men, even if you're Cheney-hot, no more than three), I can't accurately and with confidence collect my three pieces of data.

My solution, then, is to tack onto the end of my original operational definition of "DC" - "a four-block radius of the ConnAve/M St. intersection" the addendum "and any right-after-work (i.e. between 5-7pm) happy hours within DC proper."

This way, sitting down, relaxed with a Heineken Light or an altered Kir Royale (sue me, I prefer getting my ounce of color with Chambord, not crème de cassis), I can sip, speak and get my sexy spy on all at the same time.


Starting now at Panache.

The rough outline: heels and marital status

My first attempt at organizing a research plan based on my observations from yesterday.

1. Observation:

The best shoes seem to be on the feet of professional women without rings on their left ring fingers.

2. Hypothesis:

Unmarried DC women wear taller, skinnier pumps to the office than do married DC women.

3. Operational Definitions:

unmarried: women under 35 years of age without rings on their left fingers

DC: a four-block radius of the ConnAve/M St. intersection

women: individuals who, based on my close assessment, were born with female reproductive organs

pumps: a woman's dress shoe, which includes a wedge with a pump-like toe (i.e. not espadrille or sandal wedges), that has at least a half inch of elevation

married: women under 35 years of age with rings on their left ring fingers

to the office: I will make the assumption that any woman wearing professional or business casual clothing - like porn, we know it when we see it - is a woman going to the office

4. Testing the Hypothesis:

Each week, as often as I can, at some point between 11:30am and 3pm, for every pump-wearing married and unmarried woman under 35 years of age, I will record, based on my expert judgment, exactly how high (.5-inch on up) and how skinny (super-stiletto, stiletto, stacked, chunky, block) each of their heels are.

After a week of recording this information, assign reasonable quantitative values to each heel height and each heel width to simplify the analytic process.

For example:

Height

.5 to 1-inch heel: 1 point
1.5 to 2-inch heel: 2 points

2.5 to 3-inch heel: 3 points

3.5 to 4-inch heel: 4 points

4+: 5 points

Width

super-stiletto heel: 5 points

stiletto heel: 4 points

stacked heel: 3 points

chunky heel: 2 points

block heel: 1 point

Height and width point totals will remain separate so as to allow for comparisons between unmarried/married women's heel height and unmarried/married women's heel width -- adding the two numbers would make it impossible to discern between the two.

5. Data Analysis:
Still in the works...this is the crux of the study, obviously, and I will be counting on the regression mastery of C to help me achieve the most accurate, error-free analytic product possible.

6. Weaknesses:

Clearly, not every woman wearing a ring on her left ring finger is married and not every woman with a bare left ring finger is unmarried, but in the interest of avoiding cat-fight after cat-fight, I am instead going to work from the assumption that a ring on that particular finger - including all stones and all metals - is tantamount to "currently married." The exceptions on both sides will hopefully cancel each other out, or at the very least reduce the amount of error.

Another foreseen weakness that threatens the robustness of my results involves the under-35 age limit. Because I've now become one of those women who doesn't like being asked "How old are you?" by anyone in any situation, I refuse to impose this query on anyone else. I have three women in mind - all "regular" women, not celebrities - who will collectively remind me what an average woman of that age looks like. Sure, I might end up including a tremendously well-preserved 42 year old Chinese woman and skipping a bare, weathered faced I-don't-need-to-be-pretty-to-make-partner 26 year old, but again, like above, I plan on these two exceptions ultimately cancelling one another out.

7. Conclusions:

To be seen

8. Recommendations:

To be seen

Heels and Marital Status: Correlation?

In the 20 or so minutes it took me to slurp down my Robek's Vitabek-enriched Strawbanana protein smoothie, I noticed a distinct and at first blush, alarmingly robust correlation between the heels on a woman's shoes and her marital status.

Now before you rush to dispel my not-yet-sussed-out, still very nascent, still multifaceted hypothesis that unmarried professional women are more likely to wear skinnier, taller, more toe-revealing pumps than their married counterparts, know that I did make a cursory attempt to limit my sample group to women under 30 - women who looked under 30, anyway - and women in professional dress so as not to allow lurking variables such as age (i.e. older women need shorter, fatter heels for health reasons) and dress-code (i.e. those in NGO-type work environments, married or not, are most likely forced to wear comfort sandals and crosstrainers) to cloud my results.

Because I am a devout follower of the Scientific Method, my goal for today is to scope out a research plan centering on this potentially powerful theory. From crafting a carefully-worded hypothesis to writing distinct operational definitions to identifying measurable empirical evidence gathering techniques to speculating on the kinds of thoughtful conclusions and recommendations I might put forth, this study has the potential to be a 4 or even 5-part series of postings.

I always knew pursuing my first longitudinal case study not focusing on the pan Asian region would be a turning point in my life.

Very exciting stuff. Stay tuned...