Why the gender gap won’t go away. Ever: Women prefer the mommy track
From the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette:
It’s not at all clear how to solve this problem or even if there is a solution, but one thing is clear: the wage-gap debate ought to begin with the mommy track, not with proofy statistics.
There’s not much worth quoting from this piece, so I’ve left you with Ms. Hymowitz’s closing statement. If you’d care to submit a letter to the editor in reply to the article above, you can do so online here. (The paper only accepts letters from Arkansas residents.)
In a first, women surpass men in advanced degrees
From the Associated Press:
WASHINGTON (AP) — For the first time, American women have passed men in gaining advanced college degrees as well as bachelor’s degrees, part of a trend that is helping redefine who goes off to work and who stays home with the kids.
Census figures released Tuesday highlight the latest education milestone for women, who began to exceed men in college enrollment in the early 1980s. The findings come amid record shares of women in the workplace and a steady decline in stay-at-home mothers.
The educational gains for women are giving them greater access to a wider range of jobs, contributing to a shift of traditional gender roles at home and work. Based on one demographer’s estimate, the number of stay-at-home dads who are the primary caregivers for their children reached nearly 2 million last year, or one in 15 fathers. The official census tally was 154,000, based on a narrower definition that excludes those working part-time or looking for jobs.
The Issue of Abortion Returns to Center Stage in U.S. Politics
From The New York Times:
Abortion, a divisive topic that provokes little political debate in Europe, has re-emerged as a burning-hot wedge issue in United States politics, stirring up the bitter and sometimes violent discussion that has been raging for decades between antiabortion forces and supporters of abortion rights.
Caught up in the debate between conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats are women — their reproductive systems, their bodies, their health. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, abortion-rights supporters are sticking the “G.O.P. War on Women” label on this latest installment of the long-running abortion battles.
This time it is newly installed Republicans in Congress, winners of the 2010 midterm elections on the shoulders of energized grass-roots Tea Party activists, who are lending fresh impetus to the antiabortion campaign during the arguments over the size, shape and content of the United States’ budget.
Check out ongoing coverage of Newsweek/Daily Beast’s Women in the World event, which is so 180 degrees from Newsweek of a year ago we can’t even get over it. Go, ladies! Also: kudos to our design team (aka the one-man shop Roberto) for the interactive above.
The War on Women's Futures
From The Nation:
Using small-government, libertarian rhetoric, the Tea Party ushered in a new crop of Republican leaders under the banner of fiscal responsibility. But the aggressive antichoice legislation coming from the new GOP majority in the House makes perfectly clear that belt-tightening deficit reduction is entirely compatible with an older social agenda committed to pushing American women out of the public sphere.
npr:
Immigrants like these Indians at a Sikh festival in Barcelona are bolstering Europe’s stagnant population growth rates. Research shows that the more education a woman receives, the fewer children she is likely to have. Photo by Randy Olson, courtesy of National Geographic. (Taken with instagram)
Aftershocks: Welcome to Haiti's Reconstruction Hell
From Mother Jones:
When Alina happened upon a group of men—too many to count—raping a girl in the squalid Port-au-Prince camp where she and other quake victims lived, she couldn’t just stand there. Maybe it was because she has three daughters of her own; maybe it was some altruistic instinct. And the 58-year-old was successful, in a way, in that when she tried to intervene, the men decided to rape her instead, hitting her ribs with a gun, threatening to shoot her, firing shots in the air to keep other people from getting ideas of making trouble as they kept her on the ground and forced themselves inside her until she felt something tear, as they saw that she was bleeding and decided to go on, and on, and on. When it was over, Alina lay on the ground hemorrhaging and aching, alone. The men were gone, but no one dared to help her for fear of being killed.
“We had this rape problem before the earthquake,” Yolande Bazelais tells me. She is the president of FAVILEK (the Creole acronym stands for Women Victims Get Up Stand Up), an organization founded by women who were raped (PDF) during the 1991 coup that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. We’re sitting under a blue tarp in the driveway of another NGO’s office, because FAVILEK doesn’t have one, with four of the other founders and my translator, Marc. He works with FAVILEK sometimes, running rape-related errands, taking victims like Alina to the hospital or the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), an international lawyers’ group, for legal support. “Now,” Bazelais says, “we have double problems.”
Geraldine Doyle, 86, dies; one-time factory worker inspired Rosie the Riveter and 'We Can Do It!' poster
From The Washington Post:
Geraldine Doyle, 86, who as a 17-year-old factory worker became the inspiration for a popular World War II recruitment poster that evoked female power and independence under the slogan “We Can Do It!,” died Dec. 26 at a hospice in Lansing, Mich.
Her daughter, Stephanie Gregg, said the cause of death was complications from severe arthritis.
