April 2010
48 posts
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Tales from the Frontlines: 'Why Don't You Smile...
Today, a “Tales from the Frontlines” from Jennifer Pozner, the executive director of Women In Media & News.
My first journalism job was an internship at Courier Life Newspapers in Brooklyn . Summer of 1993 … It ran on a small staff. There were no women working as reporters, and only one woman who wrote a column. The editors were all men, too. So, because the columnist...
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Why Can't Women Keep Up With Men? Try the Curse of...
Our perennial favorite girl-advocate Rachel Simmons has a fabulous piece up at the Huffington Post today about the ongoing conversation about workplace equality—and its connection to adolescent girls. She writes:
Women, and our struggle for workplace equality, seem to be having a moment. Seems like everywhere you look lately, there’s a story about how we don’t seek or win...
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Bemoaning the Lack of Diversity in Media, Volume...
Above, behold the new Washington Post Politics authors page. Yet again, a sea of white, male faces. Sigh. (Ed Note: We love you parent company! We really really do!!)
Monica Potts has a smart take over at The American Prospect, and others point out that the paper ran a column decrying its own lack of diversity— TWO years ago. Ombudsman Deborah Howell wrote:
The Post’s op-ed...
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“If you think about social justice movements, you understand that unless they...”
– Gloria Steinem, to NY1. Looks like we’ve got another 60 years to go.
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Would a Story About a (Male) Nobel Laureate Begin...
Today the Feminist Peace Network points us to a story in the Corvallis, Ore. Gazzette Times, about a conference featuring Nobel laureate Jody Williams. The headline is harmless enough—“Nobel laureate shares her views on peace”—but instead of beginning the story with what those views might be, the newspaper chose a different approach:
Nobel laureate Jody Williams sat on...
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WatchThis video, brought to you by The Girl Effect, is a little simplistic (we wish, for starters, that it explained why girls, not boys, make such a difference). But still, it’s pretty neat. And an excellent model of how to do outreach well. As the organization puts it, “adolescent girls are uniquely capable of raising the standard of living in the developing world.” Learn more about...
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Wow. Wal-Mart to Face Massive Class-Action Suit...
A sharply divided federal appeals court exposed Wal-Mart to billions in legal damages when it ruled on Monday that a massive class action lawsuit alleging gender discrimination can go to trial.
In its 6-5 ruling, the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals said the world’s largest private employer will have to face charges that it pays women less than men for the same jobs and that female...
WatchGrowing up, some of the men in our lives were the best examples of feminists we could have asked for. Particularly a certain Leonard Commet Krill, English teacher, step-father, and role model to many. Well, this weekend he blew our minds with this video, which, it turns out, he’s been using with his high school students for years.
The video looks at the Whorfian Hypothesis—the idea...
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Women, the Wage Gap and the Curse of Acting Like a...
Today’s Economix blog over at the New York Times asks, Do Nice Gals Finish Last? Nancy Folbre, an economist at UMass Amhurst, explains that social scientists have long observed how the aggressive “Machiavellian personality” more typical to men tends to improve economic success, increasing both efforts to demand higher pay and a propensity to lie, cheat and steal. Women,...
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Weekend News Roundup: Men on Dollar Bills, Sexism...
Nice little bit in Saturday’s Washington Post about sexism on our paper money. “We might tell girls ‘you can do anything,’” they write, “but our nation’s symbols and icons tell a different story.”
Hollywood remains a “sexualized and sexist ecosystem,” where hierarchies and fear silence complaints, says the UK Independent. Amy...
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Will the Entitled Generation Have Their "Click...
Women’s eNews covered our story and NPR’s self-examination today, looking at recent media coverage of the issue through the lens Susan Douglas presents in Enlightened Sexism, namely that individual examples of high-profile female success create a false notion of equality, and open the door for ongoing sexism—especially the subtle kind.
Sarah Seltzer writes the following:
...
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Whose Fault is it Anyway? Jessica Discusses the...
Our own Ms. Bennett was on NPR’s On Point program today discussing our story about the pay gap with the (in)famous Caitlin Flanagan. Listen to their lively conversation here.
And while you’re there, take a minute to look through the comments. It seems to us that the pay gap is one of the most straightforward and least controversial parts of this issue. But damn do people get riled up. Let us...
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Tales From the Frontlines (Mad Men Edition): 'At...
A 30-year-old New York ad recruiter writes:
I was working for a creative ad agency and one of our clients (a now defunct cell phone provider) had us in their LA office for the week presenting ideas. The creative director presented a round of scripts, and the client’s response was: “The work is awful, I don’t know how you guys come up with this crap.” Then he pointed...
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From One Feminist to Another: "Unclench Those Butt...
Last night, the 92nd St. Y held an event called Young Women, Feminism and the Future: Third Wavers Then and Now. BUST Magazine founder and editor Debbie Stoller, original Riot Grrrl Allison Wolfe, and Manifesta co-authors Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards were there to talk about, essentially, feminism’s shifting priorities. The conversation covered everything from growing up with...
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News Roundup: Ben Roethlisberger, Educated Women &...
Three news stories of interest today—and stay tuned for highlights from last night’s “Young Women and Feminism” panel at the 92nd Street Y.
* Timothy Egan rips Nike a new asshole for standing by alleged serial-rapist Ben Roethlisberger in today’s New York Times. “Is there anything creepier than a big, beer-breathed celebrity athlete exposing himself in a...
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Score One Point For Women's Studies, Femi-Nazis,...
Roy Den Hollander, our friend from last week’s Male Studies expo, got some bad, but expected, news this week. The somewhat whack-a-doodle lawyer was suing Columbia University’s women’s studies department, alleging that its very existence discriminates against men. It’s one of what he calls a “trilogy” of lawsuits, which include a case against bars that...
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Tales from the Frontlines: 'I'll Have a Waitress...
Today in reader-submitted stories, from a 23-year-old teacher in northeast Indiana:
When I was 15 years old, I worked at a tiny, local restaurant. I had only worked there about a week when I went to take a customer’s order at the drive-up window. When I asked the man what he wanted, he looked me right in the eye and said, “I’ll have a waitress with nothing on it.” I...
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Why Aren't There More Women in Engineering &...
It was a small victory for women in tech earlier this year, when Mattel announced that longtime career model Barbie would have a new calling as a computer scientist. But as the New York Times pointed out this week, a doll is still a doll—and women in the world of tech aren’t faring as well as we might have hoped.
In 2008, we wrote a piece in Newsweek, Revenge of the Nerdette, about...
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The Good News: 'Equal Pay Day' Falls on 4/20
Our favorite comment of the day, from notamartyr, in response to Equal Pay Day.
That does suck. Good thing it falls on 4/20. Smoke it off, ladies. Smoke it off.
We will, notamartyr, we will.
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Good Morning: And Happy (Er, Sad) Equal Pay Day
Today, April 20, is Equal Pay Day—a yearly marker of how long women must work into the current year (at 77 cents per every male dollar) to earn what men earned in the year past. We’ll be updating throughout the day, but here are a few figures to get your morning started:
8 months of groceries The amount a woman could buy for a family of four if she were paid equal to her male...
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Tales from the Frontlines: 'I Constantly Worry My...
Today in reader submitted stories, from a 20-something woman working in Congress:
I’m in my first real job after college… surrounded by capable and powerful women. [But] I’m still judged largely on my appearance by both men and women. I’m constantly worrying that my shirt is too tight or my skirt is too short, and that no one will ever take me seriously if they see an...
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On the Media: It's Raining Men. And We'll Have a...
We posted recently on the piece written by NPR Ombuds(woman) Alicia Shepard, about how few women make it onto NPR’s airwaves. On Saturday, On the Media host Brooke Gladstone took the story one step further, asking, well, why is that? And then, in an acknowledged irony, she asked NYU professor Clay Shirky, the author of the much-debated “Rant About Women” (in which he said that...
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That's What We've Been Sayin'... New York Times...
Though many people say that outright sexism is rare in the tech world these days, as the New York Times reports this weekend, in a really long feature that we are jealous we didn’t get to write, the reality for women in Silicon Valley would show otherwise. The highlights:
A woman in tech, with degrees from Stanford and Harvard, will still be told her business cards should read...
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For the Last Time (er, probably not): Feminists...
We work in cubicles at Newsweek, and for the past six months, each of our desks has had a growing mountain of books on women. So perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised when a young male colleague, a Yale graduate who is (not) a reporter, walked by and asked, “You’re not one of those angry feminists, are you?”
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard this, nor...
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When Your Boss Refers to Your "Honkers," It's Not...
Same goes for when he tells you that women should be at home cleaning floors, according to a judgment this week by a UK tribunal. It came after two women filed a lawsuit against their former employer, Nomura, a Japanese bank, alleging that their bosses had referred to their breasts as “honkers,” said women belong at home cleaning floors, and that the key to cheating on your wife was...
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Guest Post: Women, Work and 'Stereotype Threat'
Equality Myth reader and new friend Jillian Weinberger, a freelance writer and Program Associate at Legal Momentum, unpacks a new book about “stereotype threat”—the idea that people who internalize negative stereotypes (women are bad at math, etc), in turn confirm them. She writes:
Until eighth grade, school was a breeze. I raced through math problems and reading assignments,...
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Men: Obsessed with Penises, Unemotional, Cheaters...
We call bullshit on Louann Brizendine’s new book, The Male Brain. As we write in Newsweek:
With [her first book], The Female Brain, Brizendine was attacked for shoddy science—and her follow-up should receive no less criticism. The author makes vast claims about male biology without really delving into the science, which leaves you with a manual for excusing every crappy thing your man has...
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Today in Products that Shouldn't Exist: The...
Reader Laura Birek, from Echo Park, Los Angeles, blew our minds today. Her story:
I’ve come to accept the fact that getting cat-called is just a fact of life. It still pisses me off to no end, but I’ve stopped being surprised when it happens every single time I walk down my street or stand on my porch. But recently, I was walking home and I heard a CAR HORN whistle at me. Some...
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Tales from the Frontlines: 'You'll Make an...
Today, a 25-year-old Oakland woman writes:
I worked in a cafe, in a bookstore. One night I worked late with the manager, because that week some regional manager was visiting for an inspection. We had to scrub down every surface and make everything as organized as possible. I spent my time on my hands and knees, scrubbing and scrubbing and scrubbing. The manager dawdled, threw out some trash, and...
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Salon: The Tina Fey Backlash and Feminists as...
Amen to Rebecca Traister at Salon, who writes today about the Tina Fey backlash, most-recently prompted by her “pathetic single girl” skit on last week’s SNL. Fey has been called all kinds of things, but this week, the ladybloggers of the world took it to a whole new level, questioning what the single woman trope was “really trying to say,” whether Fey secretly...
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Today in That's What She Said: In Media, Women...
Over at In These Times, Megan Tady writes “Still Missing: Women In the Media,” covering a lot of the territory we’ve covered here, but also making, or, well, linking to, some interesting points:
Even throwaway headlines like CNN’s “Women Blamed in Moscow Suicide Blasts” are damaging to women, and point to both a strange fascination with and objectification of the gender in the...
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Depressing Stat of the Day
Just one in four businesspeople in a worldwide survey say their companies’ leaders consider gender parity a priority issue. From the Harvard Business Review.
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Harvard: Why Focusing on the Pay Gap Misses the...
Great piece from Harvard Business Review blogs, brought to our attention by a reader (thank you!), about how we must shift the conversation about work and gender from the problem with the wage gap to solutions for corporations. Some highlights:
Women represent one of the world’s biggest and most under-reported opportunities—a growth market twice as big as India and China combined.
...
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Renee Martin: 'I'm not a feminist (and there is no...
In Saturday’s Guardian, Renee Martin of Womanist Musings writes about her path to womanism: “As a black woman, I felt the white feminism movement was not created of for people like me. So I embraced womanism.” She continues:
Feminism is the form of women’s organisation that is prioritised both in the media and academia, but many black women have turned to womanism in an...
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Tales from the Frontlines: 'Thanks for Taking Care...
It’s pretty amazing to hear that our blog reached a woman working at a beer company in the Midwest. She writes:
Our company has 80 employees, 5 are female. When I first started, I didn’t notice the lack of respect for females right away, because I was working so closely with the only other women. Then I started to get to know our salesmen, merchandisers, inventory controllers &...
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“Dispiriting as they may be to [young] people, for me [the numbers] are...”
– Ruth Bader Ginsbug, speaking to a class of Georgetown law students about numbers showing that just 18 percent of lawyers arguing before the Supreme Court this term were women. Agree or disagree: are young women impatient?
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Tales from the Frontlines: 'Use Your Femininity'
Today in reader-submitted stories, from a 17-year-old Bay Area high school student, a self-identified feminist (yes!):
One of my many extracurriculars [in school] is Mock Trial, where I am the lead prosecutor. I remember one trial at the county courthouse, where one female judge — who is a judge in ”real life” — and all three female scorers told me and the five other...
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Misandry, Male Studies, and Staten Island. Good...
Today, we trekked to Staten Island. Dear readers, with no offense to the borough, it feels like a foreign land. For starters, you have to take a boat to get there. And when we went to the ferry’s taxi area, we were literally rushed by dozens of cabbies desperate to drive us. We chose, natch, the only woman in the bunch. Her cab turned out to be a minivan, and her mother and daughter were...
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Tales from the Frontlines: 'The Worst Part Is, I...
Today we launch an ongoing collection of reader-submitted stories of workplace sexism. Email us and share yours! (And please indicate whether you’d prefer to remain anonymous.)
Today, a 20s-something New York writer, on looking for her first job out of college:
I applied for every writing position I could find in the months before graduating. I received a few interviews, but had nothing...
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What Kind of Feminist Are YOU?
We want your feedback: What’s the best way to describe this generation of feminists, who embrace feminism, but also embrace femininity? Jessica Valenti has said she dislikes the term “fourth-waver,” but that’s indeed how the New York Times dubbed their interview with her late last year. In some sense, we’ve always considered ourselves post-feminists, but...
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Today in Disturbing Media Inequities: We're...
Last night we were looking at Vanity Fair’s masthead and saw that their Contributors include the following two titles: Our Man in Kabul, and Our Man in Saigon. Really, VF? How come your Paris Editor isn’t your Lady in France? Why is your Los Angeles Editor not your California Girl?
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Today NPR Made Our Hearts Skip a Beat
Michel Martin became one of our heroes today. In “No, We’re Not Going to Sit Down and Shut Up,” she manages to satisfyingly shame Don Imus and Chris Wallace for sexist comments that, even for them, were particularly egregious; broaden the argument to make larger points about American culture, power, and the question of “entitlement;” and wrap up with a thrillingly...
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The 'Mancession' Is Real. (But Don't Forget About...
Today on Change.org, Lauren Kelly reports that the Great Recession has indeed caused a significant unemployment gender gap—a “mancession,” if you will—with men topping 11 percent unemployment in August 2009 compared to 8.3 percent for women. If you’ve been following the healthy stream of mancession reporting over the past months, this should come as no surprise. But...
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Lisa Miller: A Woman's Place is in the Church
In this week’s Newsweek, Lisa Miller argues that the cause of the Catholic clergy’s sex-abuse scandal is simple: insular groups of men often do bad things. So why not break up the boys’ club? Some excerpts:
By keeping modernity at bay, though, the men who run the Catholic Church have willfully ignored one of the great achievements of the modern age: the integration of women...
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Daily (Not Really Daily) Dose of Douchebaggery
Some awesome dude, in response to Jessica Valenti’s recent WashPost column, “For Women In America, Equality is Still an Illusion.“
“MAFIA, Men Against Feminist’s In America, is taking applications. We must counter the lies of the NOW, NARAL and Planned UnParents in the Hoods adherents. Women have become the spoiled class of liars…I have served globally and can say with...
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NPR Asks Self: "Where Are All the Women?"
Big-ups to NPR for this piece today, in which the org’s ombudsman (who is actually an ombudswoman) asks, Where Are All the Women Sources? NPR compiled a list of regular commentators over the past 15 months, who are not NPR employees but paid to appear on air, and found that only 26 percent of the 3,379 voices were female. Ombudsman Alicia Shepard writes:
NPR is often regarded — and...
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Pat Lynden, one of the original Newsweek...
Women of my generation had very little confidence in their ability to function independently and professionally. We at Newsweek had gone to top colleges, had significant academic achievements, but those simply increased our ornamental value as future wives whose destinies would end with motherhood. We were the last of the post-Victorians: there was a premium on virginity (observed mostly in the...