They’re more likely to be seen in sexy clothing (25.8 percent to men at 4.7 percent) and more likely to be partially naked (23.6 percent to 7.4 percent).
Is it time to change that ratio?
Women Are Underrepresented, Oversexualized In Top Films: Study
No matter how much we may think we still feel the yoke of housework, electric appliances like the vacuum helped fling open the window for women back in the early part of the 20th century.
Think of it! No more dragging heavy Persian rugs outside to beat the bejesus out of them for hours on end. Finally! Some help cleaning the endless soot that settled from gas lamps and fires.
Oct. 3 marks the 112th anniversary of the patent for the first vacuum.
Nora Ephron on the premiere of NBC’s The Playboy Club, in this week’s NEWSWEEK:
I worry (as someone who was an adult in the 1960s) that young people will see The Playboy Club and think that this is what life was like back then and that Hefner, as he also says in his weird, creepy voice-over, was in fact “changing the world, one Bunny at a time.”
So I would like to say this:
1. Trust me, no one wanted to be a Bunny.
2. A Bunny’s life was essentially that of an underpaid waitress forced to wear a tight costume.
3. Playboy did not change the world.
More: A history of the Playboy club (photos).
(Source: newsweek)
A controversial new book suggests that interracial marriage may be a solution for middle-class African-American women who can’t find a suitable black husband.
In which the “Mancession” turns into a “Mancovery”
Memo to Frank Bruni: Women Have Been Devastated by the Economic Downturn
And what it has to do with gender parity. A few statistics:
Women currently hold:
* 16.6 percent of the 535 seats in Congress
* 23.5 percent of the seats in state legislatures
* There are 6 female governors
* Of the 100 big-city mayors, 8 are women
(Source: jessbennett, via statette)
Women in Film by the Numbers
This infographic is based on a study done by the USC Annenberg School for Communications & Journalism. The study “examined the gender of all speaking characters and behind the scenes employees on the 100 top grossing fictional films in 2008. A total of 4,370 speaking characters were evaluated and 1,227 above the line personnel.”
Women, Schwomen
For all the ballyhoo about this being “the year of the woman,” the number of women in Congress looks certain to decline for the first time since 1978. What does it mean? Our colleague Eleanor Clift reports.
Turns Out, Men Get Ahead Cause They’re Just Plain Smarter, Says Creepy UK Prof
In a newspaper article last month, Susan Greenfield, one of Britain’s best-known female scientists, bemoaned the lack of female science professors in the UK. Which prompted Richard Lynn, a retired psychology professor and possessor of crazy-ass thoughts, to ask, in last week’s Daily Mail, Is there really a glass ceiling? To which he quickly answered his own question: No (or is it yes?), because—wait for it—men are just, well, smarter. He writes:
Not only is the average man more intelligent than the average woman, but a clear and startling imbalance emerges between the sexes at the high levels of intelligence that the most demanding jobs require. For instance, at the near-genius level (an IQ of 145), brilliant men outnumber brilliant women by 8 to one. That’s statistics, not sexism.
All of that brilliance, Lynn continues, goes a long way toward explaining why, in almost 110 years of Nobel Prize history, only two women have ever won the Prize for physics, only four have won the Prize for chemistry and why no women have ever won the Fields Medal for mathematics “in eight decades of trying.”
He goes on to explain what he “means” by intelligence, why men have emerged as “the more intelligent sex,” why we can’t exactly explain this, and, oh—why, when it comes to verbal intelligence, women are actually smarter than men! (Because of our nonstop gabbing, of course.)
In our hunter-gatherer past, women needed verbal abilities to negotiate their relationships with both men and women and to teach and socialise their children.
Now, before we throw up all over ourselves (and we’re only halfway through the column), we should note that this is this Richard Lynn, eugenicist, and that the Daily Mail is, well, the British equivalent of the New York Post. Still, as the ladies over at Femonomics put it:
The fact that Richard Lynn can still call himself a scientist, and his theories and the evidence he provides to back them up can be thought of as scientific, is an embarrassment to every real scientist out there, and to those of us working our tails off to put the letters P, H, and D after our names.
We don’t have P, H, or Ds after our names, but we’ll leave you with this choice quote, care of Feministing, from the lovely Richard Lynn:
“What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the population of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of the ‘phasing out’ of such peoples…. Evolutionary progress means the extinction of the less competent. To think otherwise is mere sentimentality.”
If I Had a Hammer, I’d Smash Patriarchy: The Equalism v Feminism Debate
Anna Spysz of the Krakow Post has a nice post on her blog about embracing “equalism” over feminism, because, as she puts it, “to me it signifies in the simplest, most elegant way, the goal of the movement: complete gender equality.”
Equalism, of course, has had various waves of popularity over the years: as a more inclusive way of proclaiming feminist ideals; as a term without the baggage that the f-word carries; as a way of including not just gender but racial equality as well. But Spysz’s own take is that, for a generation removed from those early feminist battles, “equalism” is a term much easier to relate to. She writes:
Growing up in the 90s in the U.S., I took it for granted that I could do anything a boy could do, could grow up to be anything a man could be. Those initial battles had already been fought for me, and I couldn’t imagine that the gains would ever be taken away. In essence, equalism is just post-feminism, for those who never really experienced feminism in its initial struggles.
So, equalism: Any better than feminism?
Power of the Purse: A Note on Women’s Global ‘Influence’
We came across an interesting interview with the author of “Influence,” about how women will transform business in the 21st century. Some highlighted factoids to impress your friends:
- Over the last two decades, womens’ increased employment has contributed more to the growth of the global economy than either China or India, or even global technology. Says the author: “We’re at a tipping point: a critical mass of women have had an explosive rise in education and earning power which has opened the door for them to exert their influence.”
- Adding women to the corporate board of directors increases a company’s return on equity.
- Developing countries have found that when you educate young girls and women, you increase GDP. Those women also reinvest 90 percent of their income in family and community, compared to just 30-70 percent among men.
- Women start businesses at twice the national average
Congress Weighs ‘Potty Parity’: “Holding It Can Take its Toll.”
Yup, “Potty Parity” is the real name of real legislation that Congress hopes will provide much-needed relief to the bladders of women and children everywhere. (Er, at least those of us who visit new federal buildings.)
The average American uses a toilet more than half a dozen times a day, nearly 3,000 times a year, and, all told, will spend up to two years of an entire life in the restroom, reports ABC News. The “Potty Parity Bill” would require an equal number of toilets for each gender.
Experts say fewer toilets for women today largely reflect a previous era when women weren’t as prominent in the workforce. It’s a lingering reminder, [one expert] said, of a “subtle yet powerful form of gender discrimination.”
“Holding it in can take its toll,” Kathryn Anthony, an architecture professor at the University of Illinois told a House panel considering the bill. “Emergencies happen,” she said.
The other option, of course, is to try out the Go-Girl: “Because life’s greatest adventure shouldn’t be finding a bathroom.”
(Thanks to the one-and-only Brian Braiker for passing this along.)
