ProPublica on Sex & Gender

Just how difficult is it to be a working parent in the U.S. these days? huffingtonpost has this sobering chart.
The U.S. lags significantly behind other developed countries in key areas such as paid maternity or paternity leave (it’s one of just... — Just how difficult is it to be a working parent in the U.S. these days? huffingtonpost has this sobering chart.
The U.S. lags significantly behind other developed countries in key areas such as paid maternity or paternity leave (it’s one of just three countries with no such provision— the other two are Oman and Papau New Guinea), paid family and sick leave, and affordable early childhood education. As a result, notes reporter Laura Bassett, the percentage of women participating in the workforce is relatively low:
In 1990, the U.S. had the sixth-highest female labor participation rate among 22 of the world’s wealthiest countries. Today, the U.S. ranks 17th.
Meanwhile, the White House Council of Economic Advisors has this new report on working families, part of the Obama administration’s ongoing campaign to explore ways of using federal workplace policy to improve the lives (and incomes) of parents and children. Yesterday, the White House hosted a daylong summit on working families, where President Obama told the audience,
“Family leave, child care, workplace flexibility, a decent wage — these are not frills, they are basic needs. They shouldn’t be bonuses. They should be part of our bottom line as a society. ”
Find video of that conference here.
*(Infographic by Alissa Scheller for The Huffington Post.)*

via theatlantic — read Rebecca Rosen’s full piece here

When [my son] Noah asks me one day, ‘What happened? What was it like when I was born?’ I could have answered, 'Well, Stephen Strasburg hung me a breaking ball that day, son. I slammed it into the right field corner.’ [But instead, I can say,] I am the one who cut his umbilical cord.

Daniel Murphy, the Mets second baseman ridiculed by some sports commentators for missing the first two games of the season to attend his son’s birth in April, at the White House Working Families Summit, via Slate

h/t “Does Feminism Have a Class Problem?” at thenationmagazine’s new blog, The Curve

If you want to understand why the new Lego female scientist kits are such a big step forward, compare them to earlier Lego efforts to capture the little-girls-who-like-to-build-things demographic. The absence of princess-y pastels and pixie... — If you want to understand why the new Lego female scientist kits are such a big step forward, compare them to earlier Lego efforts to capture the little-girls-who-like-to-build-things demographic. The absence of princess-y pastels and pixie preciousness (not to mention boobs, as in the “rock star” Lego figure above) is **awesome.**
For more on how the “Research Institute” line came to be, mentalfloss has the scoop here.
*(All images via Lego)*

A new report by the advocacy group Stop Street Harassment looks at how often women and GBT men are sexually harassed when they’re out and about, minding their own business. (Hint: a lot.)
Slate has the rundown:
“ Among women, street harassment most... — A new report by the advocacy group Stop Street Harassment looks at how often women and GBT men are sexually harassed when they’re out and about, minding their own business. (Hint: a lot.)
Slate has the rundown:
Among women, street harassment most commonly took the form of sexualized commentary like whistles, “pssssst” sounds, animal noises, and statements like “mmm, sexy”—51 percent of women reported these incidents, compared to 6 percent of men. But harassment against men often took on a different sexual element. The most frequent type of harassment reported by men came in the form of homophobic or transphobic slurs (which had been experienced by 9 percent of men in the survey).
Gay, bisexual, and trans men were much more likely than straight men to report experiencing harassment, and to experience it frequently. (Meanwhile, heterosexual men were the most likely of any group to say they had been harassed just once in their lives.)

motherjones:
Silicon Valley’s 10 biggest companies are even whiter and maler than the biggest tech companies were 15 years ago.
The companies in MoJo’s 2012 dataset: Apple, HP, Intel, Google, Cisco, Oracle, eBay, Facebook, Gilead Sciences, and... — motherjones:
**Silicon Valley’s 10 biggest companies are even whiter and maler than the biggest tech companies were 15 years ago.**
The companies in MoJo’s 2012 dataset: Apple, HP, Intel, Google, Cisco, Oracle, eBay, Facebook, Gilead Sciences, and VMware.

Why do men abuse women? What’s in it for them?
This list was generated by participants in a court-mandated batterers-intervention program in Minnesota. The facilitator asked the men what benefits they received from abusing their wives and... — **Why do men abuse women? What’s in it for them?**
This list was generated by participants in a court-mandated batterers-intervention program in Minnesota. The facilitator asked the men what benefits they received from abusing their wives and girlfriends; the answers — unabashed and chilling — filled a 4 x 8 whiteboard.
She’s scared and won’t go out and spend money
She won’t argue
Feeling superior: she’s accountable to me
(I) get the money
Total control in decision-making
She feels less worthy, so defers to my needs and wants
(I get) a robot babysitter, maid, sex, food
Isolate her so her friends can’t confront me
She works for me
Convince her she’s nuts
Convince her she’s unattractive
Convince her she’s to blame
Get to write history
Kids on my side against her
She won’t call police
*From a 1/30/14 webinar, “The Benefits of Violence: Why Give it Up?” by Chuck Derry, of the Gender Violence Institute, sponsored by the Battered Women’s Justice Project*.

Since the dawn of time, or at least the dawn of the GPA, high school students have been hearing that grades matter. Now, a University of Miami study backs up that parental talking point: The better your GPA, the higher your income is likely to be 10... — Since the dawn of time, or at least the dawn of the GPA, high school students have been hearing that grades matter. Now, a University of Miami study backs up that parental talking point: **The better your GPA, the higher your income is likely to be 10 years after graduation.**
But as @think-progress points out, **this doesn’t mean that girls with good grades earn more than boys with mediocre ones.** Quite the contrary, in fact:
A woman who got a 4.0 GPA in high school will only be worth about as much, income-wise, as a man who got a 2.0. A woman with a 2.0 average will make about as much as a man with a 0 GPA.
Other depressing findings: Girls have significantly higher average GPAs, but “men will still end up having significantly higher income later on,” Think Progress says.
And the GPA-gender wage gap continues through college and grad school:
A woman who is one credential ahead of a man will always be worth less in terms of income: a woman with an associate’s degree makes less than a man with a vocational degree, a woman with a bachelor’s makes less than a man with an associate’s, and a woman with an advanced degree makes less than a man with a bachelor’s. Even among recent college graduates with the same grades, majors, and career fields, men will make more in their first jobs.
*(Chart via U of Miami)*

The federal government has issued new rules aimed at eliminating systemic gender bias in medical research. It’s no longer enough for scientists testing drugs and doing other kinds of research to include women in clinical studies at the end of the... — The federal government has issued new rules aimed at eliminating systemic gender bias in medical research. It’s no longer enough for scientists testing drugs and doing other kinds of research to include women in clinical studies at the end of the process, the National Institutes of Health says. From now on, **scientists must begin using female subjects in their very first laboratory experiments — including female animals and female-derived cells**.
newyorktimesofficial explains:
Researchers [have often] avoided using female animals for fear that their reproductive cycles and hormone fluctuations would confound the results of delicately calibrated experiments.
That laboratory tradition has had enormous consequences for women. Name a new drug or treatment, and odds are researchers know far more about its effect on men than on women.
It’s been 25 years or so since gender bias in medical studies emerged as a major women’s health issue. Women now make up more than half the participants in government-funded clinical research, but they are still often underrepresented in clinical trials carried out by private companies.
**Partly as a result, women experience more severe side effects from new treatments, studies have shown.**
Yet clinical studies are just the last stage of the lengthy process of developing drugs and medical devices. And even in NIH-funded studies, female subjects continue to be hugely underrepresented in earlier stages of lab research, Roni Caryn Rabin reports.
Bias in mammalian test subjects was evident in eight of 10 scientific disciplines in an analysis of published research conducted by Irving Zucker, a professor of psychology and integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley. The most lopsided was neuroscience, where single-sex studies of male animals outnumbered those of females by 5.5 to 1.
**Even when researchers study diseases that are more prevalent in women** — including anxiety, depression, thyroid disease and multiple sclerosis — **they often rely on male animals,** Zucker has found.
*(photo via Wikipedia)*

ProPublica on Sex and Gender Follow

ProPublica's Nina Martin reports on American systems and institutions that fail or mistreat people on the basis of their gender or sexuality.