June 2010
26 posts
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Today We Ask: Can Legislation Help Improve the...
We’ve already told you how much we love Mae Jemison (and more on her to come soon), but this week we looked at her story, and asked what she would do to improve the lot of women in science, tech, engineering and math. Her answer was interesting:
During a conference Jemison organized to address the issue, a few of the (white, male) professors suggested something more radical: making...
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Breaking! (Er, Not): Shiloh Jolie-Pitt Wants to...
In case you haven’t seen this headline on every blog imaginable since Angie’s Vanity Fair piece hit the web, Salon has a nice little item about why we care. Yeah, we’re all obsessed with Angelina (and that kid does have some amazingly pouty lips). But why, of all the stupid celebrity crap we have to obsess about—and, in Angie’s case, the quite varied commentary we...
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Can a Cartoon Movie Really Be Sexist? Pixar, Kids,...
Pixar is no stranger to accusations of gender bias—nor is Hollywood, obvs—but Ms magazine is the latest to point a finger at the production company, this time for sexism in Toy Story 3. With help from the The Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media, Ms gives us the following data:
* Out of 7 new toy characters, only one is female—far worse than the 3-1 average in...
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Today in Missing the Point (Again): More Women...
We really have nothing to say other than, oy. Again, women are marching topless in the name of gender equality. At least (says the Mainer) this time they’re in Florida. Still, ladies, really???
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"The Last Frontier of Women’s Liberation May Well...
We’ve written on the fact that women are still not equal in the modern workplace, and we’ve written on why women of our cohort may be better off rejecting marriage (because, in part, we’re doing so well at work). We even wanted to write on why men are the new women (until the Atlantic beat us to it). But explaining why these arguments don’t contradict each other is a...
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Apparently Jon Stewart Throws Scripts at...
A piece on Jezebel yesterday tackles the lack of women at the Daily Show, revealing that, while Jon Stewart may positively lovable on air, one former executive describes the “huge discrepancy between the Jon Stewart who goes on TV every night and the Jon Stewart who runs The Daily Show with joyless rage.” Ouch.
In one oft-told story, apparently Stewart threw a newspaper or script at...
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Are Same Sex Education a Solution or Just Modern...
This week we wrote about same-sex classes, which have grown by a whopping 4,000 percent since 2001, and are now a surprisingly hot-button issue whose opponents and advocates are, well, also surprising:
“Our concern is that once you separate boys and girls you are telling them that there is some inherent difference such that they need to be educated separately,” says Lenora Lapidus, head of...
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When Mean Girls Grow Up, They Become... Mean...
Our esteemed colleagues Pat Wingert and Barbara Kantrowitz write today about recent examples of very public girl-on-girl, or, in these cases, woman-on-woman meanness, including Carly Fiorina’s “oh my God her hair is so last season” comment; Meg Whitman’s rumored shoving of a female subordinate; and, of course, the Real Housewives of New York City, who are pretty much mean...
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Tales From the Frontlines: "I Am an Overly...
From a reader, on crying:
I am an overly emotional woman and it’s something I try to accept and control the best I can. (I blame my mother) Though I have this ‘issue’ I am a strong believer that you leave your personal problems at home. Even when I was recently sexually harassed while simultaneously receiving hate email from my client calling me a ‘raciest’, I held myself together. The way I...
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We Have a Girl-Crush on Mae Jemison: Doctor,...
This week we got to see Mae Jemison speak at an event for the always-awesome AAUW. Let us just say, WE LOVE HER. Lady went to Stanford at age 16, where she double-majored in chemical engineering and African American studies. After stints in the Peace Corps and working as a general practitioner, she joined NASA, and eventually became the first woman of color to go into space.
And it...
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How Lawsuits Against Novartis, WalMart Could...
We’ve written about the Novartis case before, but we did a little more digging and found that the precedent-setting judgment—which could amount to company paying perhaps a billion dollars in fees—will have an even bigger impact than we thought:
The Novartis verdict is deemed precedent setting because it went far beyond simple pay discrimination. Employees alleged ...
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Holy Crap! Can We all Move to Sweden? Gender...
In Sweden, writes the New York Times, men have it all. Which, well, simultaneously means that women have it all. It’s like the land of perfect gender-equality, where 85 percent fathers take parental leave, the ponytailed finance minister calls himself a feminist, ads for cleaning products rarely feature women as homemakers, and preschools vet books for gender stereotypes in animal...
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'If it’s Sunday, it’s More Men in Dark Suits':...
Politico’s got a good roundup today of the lack of women on the Sunday talk-show circuit, based on new data from American University showing that women made up just 13.4 percent of lawmaker appearances on the Sunday shows this year.
Thus far this year, the five major Sunday shows — including NBC’s “Meet the Press,” “Fox News Sunday,” CBS’s “Face the Nation,” ABC’s “This Week” and CNN’s...
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The Richer Sex: Why Companies Need to Cater to...
Colleague Rana Foroohar has a great piece in this week’s Women & Leadership issue of Newsweek, about female spending power.
By 2024, Foroohar writes, the average woman will outearn the average man (even with the wage gap!). But what’s shocking is that more companies haven’t tapped into that spending power.
The most obviously female-oriented sectors, like food, packaged...
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Sorry, Y'all! We've Been a Little Busy....
working on this:
We know this is going to strike a chord with people—marriage is an intensely personal choice—and we’ve already gotten some pretty impassioned responses from friends, family, and colleagues. Now we want to know what you think. Don’t hold back!
Oh—and check out our friend/colleague Andrew Romano’s rebuttal: A modern man’s perspective on why...
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Sandra Bullock, Faux Lesbianism and Enough with...
Meant to post this yesterday, but we couldn’t help but get worked up during the MTV Movie Awards on Sunday, when Sandra Bullock—in her first major appearance since her very public, very dramatic breakup from Jesse James—decided that the best comeback strategy would be to, um, french kiss Scarlett Johanson on stage. Was it hot? Sure, if you get off on the staged faux lesbian...
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Feminist Hulk--The Ms Mag Interview: HULK WILL...
We’re mildly obsessed with the Feminist Hulk, the imaginary fighter of all things good and feminist, WITH A GOAL OF SMASHING PATRIARCHY (he also writes in all caps). Since the FEMINIST HULK hit Twitter last month, he’s gathered some 10,000 fans who follow his 140-character commentary on gender, patriarchy and feminism. The Hulk conducted his first interview (ever) with Ms. Magazine....
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The Crying Conundrum: How Do You Navigate the...
Men, women, readers: We want your feedback. We’re starting a new feature, with tidbits of advice (from you all) for how to navigate uncomfortable working situations. We’ll prompt with specific questions, but email us with your own stories and tips. First up: The Crying Conundrum. Have you ever cried at work? What did it get you (if anything)? Do you think women should hide their...
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Lady Gaga On Feminism (Again, Love It): 'Perhaps...
We’re confused as to how this (webTV show?) got a TWO HOUR interview with Lady Gaga (subtext: we’re jealous!) but they’ve got some great quotes on what feminism means to her. Excerpts:
“I am a feminist. I reject wholeheartedly the way we are taught to perceive women. The beauty of women, how a woman should act or behave. Women are strong and fragile. Women are beautiful and...
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Who Died and Made You The Arbiter of "Feminism"?
Today, a Washington Post reader calls out Jessica Valenti’s recent piece, “The fake feminism of Sarah Palin” for some flawed logic:
While claiming “there’s no grand arbiter of the [feminist] label,” [Valenti] nevertheless said that it is “absolutely” possible to exclude women such as Sarah Palin from the feminist camp — in other words,...
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Boners, Tossed Salad, and the Perils of Being 'Too...
The Village Voice has an excessively long profile this week, “Is This Woman Too Hot to Be a Banker?”, about a woman fired from Citibank last year because her bosses told her they “couldn’t concentrate” around her—she was simply too hot. The woman, Debbie Lorenzana, is—as the Voice so eloquently puts it, alongside a ginormous photo of her (not the one...
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Come On, Do Men Really Make Better Bosses?
Male bosses are competitive and strategic thinkers, writes Forbes, while women are team-builders and energizing. So who do employees prefer?
Men, apparently—at least according to fans of “Forbes Woman” on Facebook. They asked readers, “Would you rather work for a man or a woman?” and the majority replied, in the words of one reader, “A man—any day of...
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Women Officially Screwed at Work...And a Bill that...
As if we needed any more evidence that women making less than men at work is straight-up unfair—and not, as some would have you think, because of motherhood or part-time work, or career choice—an op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times argues that the recent landmark judgment against Novartis proves that we need legislation protecting women at work more than ever before:
Some of...