We stand in some pretty awesome shoes.
Thank you so much to ramara, Besame, Tara the Antisocial Social Worker, SandraLLAP and Crimson Quillfeather for the links this week.
Child Custody:
It began when the Denver mom said she noticed her daughter's odd behavior after a visit with her father, McLean's ex-husband. At 2-and-a-half years old, McLean said her daughter began signaling with words and actions that she'd been inappropriately touched, but when McLean reported this to the courts, she found herself in a custody battle — a battle she'd eventually lose, making her ex-husband the sole caretaker of their daughter.
While McLean's story may be beyond belief to many, it is all too familiar to the hundreds of women in the Protective Mothers Alliance, who are fighting — or have fought — for custody of their child so the child doesn't end up in the hands of their abuser. McLean told A Plus such cases are happening in epidemic numbers in the U.S. and internationally.
a plus
Yet:
Women at Work
Gender Bias in Grant Applications in the Sciences
Women lose out when reviewers are asked to assess the researcher, rather than the research, on a grant application, according to a study on gender bias. Training reviewers to recognize unconscious biases seems to correct this imbalance, despite previous work suggesting that it increased bias instead.
Nature
Why aren’t more women in senior positions at American corporations? Not for the reasons so often spouted by the patriarchy.
From the Golden Globes to this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, the topic on every group of leaders’ agenda is “women.” Thanks to movements like #MeToo and #TimesUp, and given the prospect of a record number of women running for office, women’s voices are being heard like never before.
But if we want what’s been dubbed “The Year of the Woman” to be more than a slogan, we also need significant numbers of women heading our biggest companies and institutions, the organizations that can drive real change. And that won’t happen unless we recognize that the world still operates under a set of assumptions—we prefer to call them myths—that hold women back from reaching anything near parity in the upper ranks.
These myths go something like this: If only women would be more assertive. If only they would raise their hands and take more risks. If we could just fix the women, then the leadership roles that have so long eluded women would be theirs.
(snip)
This “fix-the-women” mentality places the onus for change on women, rather than on the real culprit: systemic flaws inherited from a time when the workplace was designed from a single perspective (male).
(snip)
Creating a workplace where women can lead requires that we stop trying to fix women, and debunk all the myths that feed into this mentality.
Quartz
(Please read the whole thing.)
The problem the MSM just refuses to address:
Think being caught harassing women at media companies causes problems for the harassers? As Moira Donegan (creator of the "Shitty Media Men List") put it: "False accusations ruin lives? Dude, true allegations barely make a dent in careers.”
Glenn Thrush remains at the NYT after harassment revelations, and will be covering the social safety net, an issue that disproportionately affects women.
Washington Post
Dayan Candappa, who left Reuters after a harassment complaint, landed a better job at Newsweek.
Huffington Post
The DJ who was found liable in court for groping Taylor Swift is working in radio again.
Jezebel
And on a personal note:
The senior editor who assaulted me in a parking garage when I was 23? I screwed up my courage and reported him, using words that I found hard to say. Then I found out he had done this to other young women at the newspaper. The result: nothing at all.
That happened in 1981. I was hoping things would be different now. Apparently not.
Women in Prison
Women's prison populations in 35 states worse than men's, study says.
In a few states, women’s prison populations have even grown enough to counteract reductions in the men’s population snip
According to Sharp’s research, about 25% of women in Oklahoma prisons would likely be in jails in other states. But even if those 25% were removed from the total number of women in prisons, Oklahoma would still lead the nation in incarcerating women.
The effects are profound. Women tend to enter prison in more vulnerable situations than men: they are more likely to be using drugs, to be receiving public assistance or to be unemployed. More than half are parents of minor children.
Prison tends to deepen the grip of addiction, make women less employable and add strain to strain family relationships, increasing the risk of recidivism.
The Guardian
Horrifying:
Treatment of pregnant women at the Santa Rita Jail in California has been so bad, that lawyers for the women are asking a federal court for a “preliminary injunction for an emergency transfer of pregnant prisoners to alternative treatment programs in the community”, citing that the women “are getting poor medical care, are under-fed, and sometimes are coerced to have abortions.”
Pacifica Evening News
From SandraLLAP:
I think that last part about the coercion of the women to have abortions, is pretty significant- for this is a prime example of why the expression “pro-choice” is far more fair & accurate than “pro-abortion”. Although opponents of women’s rights may like to characterize us as being crazed abortion fanatics, we actually believe that it is just as wrong to pressure a woman to have an abortion, as it is to pressure her to have the child. The decision should instead just be up to the woman (hence, “choice”).
(Hear! Hear!)
Meanwhile, for those women not yet incarcerated:
Texas state Representative Tony Tinderholt hoped to put women in jail and take away their voting rights if they had an abortion.
In an interview with the Texas Observer, the Republican lawmaker explained that women need to know there are “repercussions” for their actions.
“Right now, it’s real easy,” Tinderholt said. “Right now, they don’t make it important to be personally responsible because they know that they have a backup of ‘oh, I can just go get an abortion.’ Now, we both know that consenting adults don’t always think smartly sometimes. But consenting adults need to also consider the repercussions of the sexual relationship that they’re gonna have, which is a child.”
Raw Story
Child Brides
In Africa, there are 125m child brides, with 39% of all girls in the sub-Saharan region married before the age of 18.
Although many families believe child marriage provides a financial benefit, it often only exacerbates the situation.
(snip)
In poor communities, any spare money is often spent on sending boys to school, as they are seen as having a higher chance of securing work, and don't face the same safety risks as girls on long journeys to school.
But that means families losing the earnings that could have come from keeping girls in school.
Women often reinvest their earning in their families, paying to educate their children, siblings and relatives, meaning one educated girl has the potential to lift her entire family out of poverty.
But when girls are married off their education usually ends there.
(snip)
In sub-Saharan Africa, 75% of girls start primary school, but only 8% finish secondary school. A report from Unicef projected the number of girl brides will double by 2050 if no action is taken.
BBC (emphasis mine)
In the remote north of Vietnam, girls are disappearing. These girls, some as young as 13, are victims of bride trafficking, having been kidnapped and taken to China to be sold into marriage.
According to child rights organisation Plan International, this type of forced marriage has been growing slowly but steadily over the past decade.
Exacerbated by a decades-long one-child policy, a preference for sons is deeply embedded within Chinese society, leading to a growing gender imbalance within the country.
BBC
And in the United States:
Florida doesn’t allow anyone under the age of 18 to independently consent to marriage. Children aged 16 and 17 can marry with the consent of both children’s parents. But if there’s a pregnancy involved, there is no minimum age for marriage as long as a judge approves the marriage license.
Between 2010 and 2016, 3,161 children — 72 of them under the age of 16 — were married in Florida, according to state Department of Health statistics. At least one child was married in every one of Florida’s 67 counties and in some cases the spouse was at least twice the minor’s age.
Bill supporters say current law essentially lets child rapists use marriage to go unpunished.
TIME Magazine
Trafficked Children
Who pays for sex with trafficked children? Apparently, a lot of American men.
On the day she met Marcus Thompson, the girl later told the FBI, she had been ready to leap from a bridge to end her life.
She was only 15, pregnant and alone on the streets.
And in this wounded child, Thompson saw a means to make money. He promised that if she left her small Illinois town with him, he would make her a model. Grasping for hope, she climbed into his truck.
But the promise was a lie.
Instead, in the summer of 2015, Thompson and his wife, Robin, forced the girl on a nightmarish six-week trek across the southern United States. Photographed in suggestive poses and marketed online, she was sold out of hotel rooms and truck stops to any man with the money and the desire to buy sex.
USA Today
(This is the first part of a series and it is simply devastating. Indianapolis Star columnist Tim Swarens spent more than a year investigating a lucrative business where abused children are bought and sold.)
Women on Campus
One-third of college students with disabilities report having been sexually assaulted.
The study, conducted by the National Council on Disability, a federal agency, suggests that undergraduates with a disability are more likely to be sexually assaulted than are their peers without a disability, and that colleges don’t know how to support them.
About 31.6 percent of female undergraduates with a disability reported having been sexually assaulted, compared with 18.4 percent of undergraduate women without a disability, the study found.
(snip)
“Sexual assault has become a topic of concern on campuses and with the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, but seldom has the conversation included consideration of the needs of college students with disabilities,” said Wendy Harbour, a member of the council and director of the National Center for College Students With Disabilities, in a news release.
The study, described in a report titled “Not on the Radar: Sexual Assault of College Students With Disabilities,” is the first federally funded examination of how the needs of sexual-assault victims with disabilities are treated in colleges’ policies and procedures.
Chronicle of Higher Education
Abortion Rights
Democrats blocked a bill on Monday that would ban most abortions after 20 weeks, a blow to anti-abortion groups that considered its passage a top priority for Congress in 2018.
The bill, authored by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), was unable to get the 60 votes necessary to end a filibuster and proceed to a vote, meaning the bill is effectively dead in the upper chamber.
The bill failed with a 51-46 vote. Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) were among those who voted "no." Alabama Sen. Doug Jones (D), who recently won in a special election against Republican candidate Roy Moore, also voted "no."
The Hill
Elections:
If he has daughters, he hopes they don't grow up into "career obsessed banshees who (forgo) home life and children and the happiness of family to become nail-biting manophobic hell-bent feminist she devils.”
~ Courtland Sykes, candidate for United Senate, Missouri
CNN
See Besame’s awesome diary from earlier this week: Right Here.
David Brooks
And speaking of abortion and elections, this abhorrent column by David Brooks, in which he dons the guise of a Democratic consultant to discuss how supporting abortion rights is damaging the party:
I understand that our donors (though not necessarily our voters) want to preserve a woman’s right to choose through all nine months of her pregnancy. But do we want late-term abortion so much that we are willing to tolerate President Trump? Do we want it so much that we give up our chance at congressional majorities? Do we want it so much that we see our agendas on poverty, immigration, income equality and racial justice thwarted and defeated?
The New York Times
(Um . . . nine months of pregnancy? I think not. But see below.)
Thank goodness for this first-class smackdown thereof by Dawn Laguens, which begins thusly:
Dear David Brooks,
Yesterday, I watched as you used your space in the New York Times to insert yourself into an issue about which you know nothing. As I was watching, I kept wondering: Who advised him that this was a good idea? Does he think abortion only exists as a word printed on the pages of bills? Has he ever talked with someone who needed an abortion?
(snip)
And if polls aren’t enough to convince you, consider that one in four women in the U.S. have an abortion, and that women are currently the most potent political force in this country. They’re organizing, running, voting, and winning for Democrats. It’s laughable to think that if Democrats stop fighting for their rights, they’ll stay energized and mobilized.
You might also think about how reproductive rights, including the right to abortion, cannot be separated from the other priorities of the progressive movement. Our “agendas on poverty, immigration, income equality and racial justice” include women’s ability to control their own bodies — especially for poor women, immigrant women and women of color who are most hurt by the barriers politicians put between them and their right to safe and legal abortion.
Medium
One more reason why David Brooks is a horse’s ass.
If you missed #AMJoy this morning, you missed the incredibly smart Tara Dowdell reminding the party that the faces of those recently elected to the Virginia House of Delegates are the faces of the Democratic party: women, people of color, Asians, the transgendered. I wish I could find a link to her comments because I was cheering.
I wasn’t alone:
And on a hopeful note:
Feminism is the most talked-about political movement of the moment. And that is something to celebrate.
Jessica Valenti in the Guardian
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