The Geography of Women's Economic Opportunity - Jobs & Economy. At the APEC Summit this past September, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton argued that women are a great untapped economic resource. "There is a stimulative and ripple effect that kicks in when women have greater access to jobs and the economic lives of our countries," she told the delegates there. It's a noble aspiration to be sure, but substantial barriers remain. An Economist report on the subject noted that: Overall, economic opportunities for women still lag those of men. A wide range of metrics have been developed to gauge the opportunity and treatment afforded women around the world. The first map charts the United Nation’s Gender Inequality Index, which reflects inequality between men and women in three spheres: labor force participation, educational attainment and political representation and reproductive health (based on the maternal mortality rate and the adolescent fertility rate).
Five Surprisingly Good Places to Be a Woman - By David Kenner and Uri Friedman. When we think about the best places in the world to be a woman, Northern Europe typically springs to mind. And, indeed, countries such as Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden are perennial heavyweights in rankings of gender equality. Sweden, for goodness' sake, offers women (fine, men too) 480 days of paid maternity leave -- at 80 percent of salary -- which can be taken at any point until the child is 8 years old. But the picture is more diverse than you might think. As the Independent recently pointed out, Rwanda is the only nation on the planet in which females make up the majority of parliamentarians, while Burundi is the only country where women have higher labor-force participation (92 percent of working-age females) than men (88 percent). During the 101st International Women's Day on Thursday, March 8, there will no doubt be much talk of the work that must still be done to achieve greater gender equality.
Jay Directo/AFP/Getty Images Dominique Faget/AFP/Getty Images. The Worst Places to Be a Woman - By Valerie M. Hudson. "Sustaining Women" by Kandeh K. Yumkella , Michelle Bachelet and Margaret Chan. Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space NEW YORK – The United Nations “Rio+20” Earth Summit this month will be a staging ground to chart the course for inclusive economies, social equality, and environmental protection.
For that reason, it must place sustainable development at the forefront of the global agenda. It is already clear that achieving sustainable development is not possible without sustainable energy. Recognizing this, the UN has declared 2012 the Year of Sustainable Energy for All, and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has launched a global initiative to achieve three ambitious goals by 2030: universal access to modern energy services, a doubling of the global rate of improvement in energy efficiency, and a doubling of the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix. These are global issues. In many places, especially in rural areas, women spend long hours each day finding fuel wherever they can in the absence of sustainable energy sources.
Why the Gender Gap Won't Go Away. Ever. by Kay S. Hymowitz, City Journal Summer 2011. Kay S. Hymowitz Why the Gender Gap Won’t Go Away. Ever. Women prefer the mommy track. Early this past spring, the White House Council on Women and Girls released a much-anticipated report called Women in America. One of its conclusions struck a familiar note: today, as President Obama said in describing the document, “women still earn on average only about 75 cents for every dollar a man earns.
It is a huge discrepancy. This isn’t to say that all is gender-equal in the labor market. Let’s begin by unpacking that 75-cent statistic, which actually varies from 75 to about 81, depending on the year and the study. But consider the mischief contained in that “or more.” The way proofers finesse “full-time” can be a wonder to behold. The other arena of mischief contained in the 75-cent statistic lies in the seemingly harmless term “occupation.”
But proofers often make the claim that women earn less than men doing the exact same job. No, you can’t rule out discrimination. The list goes on. Kay S. How Our Brains Turn Women Into Objects. Recent reports of a mountain lion or cougar stalking the campus of the University of Iowa prompted campus jokesters to tweet their surprise that Michelle Bachman was in town. A cougar, colloquially, is an attractive older woman who seeks out trysts with younger men, and to some, it seems that Bachmann fits the bill. This emphasis on appearance is nothing new for high-profile women who are anything but homely, and feminist scholars are quick to point out its potential detrimental effects on perceptions of female competence. Of course, we don’t need to consider reactions to political candidates to understand this idea. There is a well-known tension between seeing someone as, and appreciating them for, a body as opposed to a mind.
At least, that’s what parents tell their daughters when their school clothes veer too far towards the revealing. Science has backed parents up on this. Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? Rebekah Brooks and Ina Drew: When Women in Power Are Punished - Business. There's a new fall gal in town. She's Ina Drew, the 55-year-old J.P. Morgan executive at the center of the bank's recent $2 billion loss on risky trades.
She's a woman who stands to get $14.7 million (she'd been with the company for 30 years) upon her resignation; she's a woman who was one of the highest paid employees of the bank. Oh, and did we note that she's a woman. Which is one thing that Drew has in common with Rebekah Brooks, who was charged Tuesday with "perverting the course of justice" in the investigation of News International's phone-hacking scandal.
Does being a woman mean the punishments are harsher in these sorts of crimes? And why does it seem that woman must take the fall for their male bosses, in these cases? Who was the first to go? This is especially sad as Drew appeared to work to support and mentor women. And in this case, very large losses. So, that's that. In The Telegraph, O'Neill goes on to explain that the censure of Brooks is a class thing, too. Magazine - Why Women Still Can’t Have It All. The culture of “time macho”—a relentless competition to work harder, stay later, pull more all-nighters, travel around the world and bill the extra hours that the international date line affords you—remains astonishingly prevalent among professionals today.
Nothing captures the belief that more time equals more value better than the cult of billable hours afflicting large law firms across the country and providing exactly the wrong incentives for employees who hope to integrate work and family. Yet even in industries that don’t explicitly reward sheer quantity of hours spent on the job, the pressure to arrive early, stay late, and be available, always, for in-person meetings at 11 a.m. on Saturdays can be intense. Indeed, by some measures, the problem has gotten worse over time: a study by the Center for American Progress reports that nationwide, the share of all professionals—women and men—working more than 50 hours a week has increased since the late 1970s. Revaluing Family Values. Business - Lori Gottlieb - Why There's No Such Thing as 'Having It All'—and There Never Will Be.
Women can't have everything they want all of the time. Neither can men. Who ever thought otherwise? I may get Slaughtered (pun intended) for this post, but somebody has to state two basic facts: (1) Nobody, male or female, married or single, young or old, tall or short, educated or not, pretty or plain, wealthy or poor, with kids or without, can have it all -- neither in the very narrow way Slaughter defines "it," nor in the broader context of life. (2) Recognizing this makes people happier!
In fact, the people who accept this don't lie awake at night wondering why they've been handed the keys to the palace but the gilded moldings just aren't sparkly enough. How does a smart woman like Slaughter still believe in the childlike notion that people (of either gender) can have whatever they want whenever they want it, regardless of life's intrinsic constraints? "But I want to go to my gymnastics class and I want to go Rosie's birthday party and they're both on Saturday morning! " Voila! What? "Why Women Still Can’t Ask the Right Questions" by Naomi Wolf.
Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space NEW YORK – We are just recovering, in the United States, from the entirely predictable kerfuffle over a plaint published by Anne-Marie Slaughter, former Director of Policy Planning at the State Department and a professor at Princeton University, called “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All.” The response was predictable because Slaughter’s article is one that is published in the US by a revolving cast of powerful (most often white) women every three years or so. The article, whoever has written it, always bemoans the “myth” of a work-life balance for women who work outside the home, presents the glass ceiling and work-family exhaustion as a personal revelation, and blames “feminism” for holding out this elusive “having-it-all ideal.”
And it always manages to evade the major policy elephants in the room – which is especially ironic in this case, as Slaughter was worn out by crafting policy. The problems with such arguments are many. The Recession Was Sexist (So Is the Recovery) - Jordan Weissmann - Business. Men and women lived through separate recessions. Now, women could be at a disadvantage as they experience a separate recovery. Reuters The Great Recession was hell on everybody, but it was a particularly hellish time for men. The housing collapse and financial crisis tag-teamed to gut industries like construction and manufacturing that had been traditional bastions of male employment for decades. Women reached nearly 50% of the work force. But there's also a less talked about story about gender and the recession.
A chart from the Institute for Women's Policy Research illustrates the disparity between job gains for men and women since the economy began to turn around. You're looking at a two-track recession and a two-track recovery. Enter the recovery. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a gender gap. As the graphic to the left shows, women far outnumber men on state and local government payrolls, especially in public schools. Where might women find some relief on the job market? Baby Gap. For most of human history, high birthrates and high mortality rates tended to balance each other out. That began to change in the nineteenth century, when better sanitation and nutrition lengthened life spans. The world's population surged from about one billion in 1800 to seven billion today. Although overpopulation plagues much of the developing world, many developed societies are now suffering from the opposite problem: birthrates so low that each generation is smaller than the previous one.
Much of southern and eastern Europe, as well as Austria, Germany, Russia, and the developed nations of Southeast Asia, have alarmingly low fertility rates, with women having, on average, fewer than 1.5 children each. For example, the total fertility rate is 1.6 in Russia, 1.4 in Poland, and 1.2 in South Korea. In the United States, it is 2.05, which is about the replacement level. To continue reading, please log in. Don't have an account? Register Register now to get three articles each month. Jenny Turner · As Many Pairs of Shoes as She Likes: On Feminism · LRB 15 December 2011. Young women, the state and public order in Britain, as seen in clippings from the newspapers, August 2011: Natasha Reid, 24, pleaded guilty to stealing a television from a Comet in North London during the riots of 7 August. Her mother said she was ‘baffled’ by her own behaviour – she had a much nicer TV set at home.
Shonola Smith, 22, pleaded guilty, along with her sister and a friend, to ‘entering’ Argos in Croydon: ‘The tragedy is that you are all of previous good character,’ the judge said, as he sentenced them to six months each. Chelsea Ives, the 18-year-old ‘shamed former Olympic youth ambassador’ shopped by her mother, pleaded guilty to criminal damage and burglary on the Sunday, and to violent disorder (a Somerfield in Hackney) the following evening.
Here, in a nutshell, is the problem with feminism. Young women ‘of good character’ losing their heads and wishing they hadn’t. More from YouTube, late September. How has Western feminism drifted so far out of touch? ‘Why a book?’ "Women on the Verge of an Economic Breakthrough" by Heidi Hautala. Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space HELSINKI – In 2010, two Kenyan women, Jamila Abbas and Susan Oguya, were angered by newspaper reports about middlemen exploiting small farmers. In response, the two IT professionals launched M-Farm, a company that sends farmers real-time crop prices and market information via SMS, connecting them directly with food exporters and cutting out the middlemen. Now, less than two years later, M-Farm reaches more than 2,000 farmers in Kenya, including many female smallholders, and has won several international awards.
Abbas and Oguya represent a new class of female innovators. According to the World Bank’s World Development Report 2012, which focuses on gender equality, the world’s 3.5 billion woman and girls still face an uneven playing field in education, employment, earnings, and decision-making power. There are bright spots on the horizon. Smart development programs have also played a role. Uruguay: First to Ratify Domestic Workers Convention. (New York) – Uruguay’s move to be the first country to ratify the international Domestic Workers Convention brings long overdue protections closer to reality for millions of women and girls worldwide, Human Rights Watch said today.
The treaty, which extends core labor rights to an estimated 50 to 100 million domestic workers, will come into legal force when it is ratified by two countries. Governments, trade unions, and employers’ organizations that make up the International Labor Organization (ILO) overwhelmingly voted to adopt the Domestic Workers Convention – ILO Convention 189 Concerning Decent Work for Domestic Workers – on June 16, 2011. The convention requires governments to provide housekeepers, nannies, and other caregivers with labor protections equivalent to those of other workers, protect them against harassment and violence, and ensure effective monitoring and enforcement.
Uruguay has 120,000 domestic workers. Women as Breadwinner: Black Women Already Fill Role in Family. Though obvious on its face, the point bears occasional repetition: When we speak of “women” in the feminist blogscape, we are often talking about a specific demographic profile; usually white, straight, middle-class and somewhat liberal.
But in reality, of course, women are a far more diverse bunch, with a diversity of experience and perspective to match. As Amanda Marcotte and Libby Copeland have discussed here recently (in response to comments made by S.C. Governor Nikki Haley), conservative women see the contraception debate and the “War on Women” in general from a very different point of view than we might expect. And, as we consider the quickly approaching future in which women are predicted to be the primary breadwinners in most households, African-American women have something unique to add to discussion as well—they’ve been living that “future” for a long time already. "The Female Economy" by Nena Stoiljkovic.
"Power to Asia’s Women" by Vishakha N. Desai , Astrid S. Tuminez and Gerald Rolfe.