Offshoring, Downsizing, Rightsizing: Job Losses Hitting Women Hard
Posted by Todd Tucker, Eyes on Trade on July 22, 2008 at 6:34 PM.

Offshoring, downsizing, rightsizing ... mention these words, and the image that pops in most people's heads is a hefty Midwestern man grumbling about his economic problems and then voting Republican.

But Lou Uchitelle has a piece today entitled "Women Are Now Equal as Victims of Poor Economy" that shows this view to be fatally flawed:

After moving into virtually every occupation, women are being afflicted on a large scale by the same troubles as men: downturns, layoffs, outsourcing, stagnant wages or the discouraging prospect of an outright pay cut ...

Hard times in manufacturing certainly sidelined Tootie Samson of Baxter, Iowa. Nine months after she lost her job on a factory assembly line, Ms. Samson, 48, is still not working. She could be. Jobs that pay $8 or $9 an hour are easy enough to land, she says. But like the men with whom she worked at the Maytag washing machine factory, now closed, near her home, she resists going back to work at less than half her old wage ...

The Joint Economic Committee study cites the growing statistical evidence that women are leaving the work force "on par with men," and the potentially disastrous consequences for families.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Internet Assisted Abortion: Coathangers of the Digital Age?
Posted by Lauren, Feministe on July 22, 2008 at 12:55 PM.

Women in areas where abortion is illegal or near-illegal are resorting to the internet to buy medication that allows them to terminate their pregnancies at home.

Most of the women indicated in the article report they were "grateful" or found it "stressful but acceptable" that they were able to get medical abortions by this route, although about 11% needed surgical procedures after taking the medication because of incomplete abortion or excessive bleeding. Anti-abortion activists express regret that these women no longer need to walk through picket lines or die in cheap motel rooms to suffer properly for their sins, but methinks the ethics of the issue may be easily resolved by removing arbitrary restrictions against the procedure that force women to break the law in order to control the rate and frequency at which their bodies spawn.

As long as pregnancy exists, so abortion shall exist.

Much of this article reads like moralistic hand-wringing, but I'm concerned that the cycle of drugs that takes several days to complete is handed out to self-reporting individuals, most of whom have little to no medical experience.

I can't attest to the risk-levels of this kind of DIY reproductive health, but I imagine that it's as harmful as being able to order vanity drugs or painkillers online. Thoughts?

Does Time Magazine Believe Women's Bodies Should be Owned by Men?
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon on July 22, 2008 at 10:27 AM.

I'm quite possibly the last person who cares in the blogosphere to write about this appalling Time magazine celebration of purity balls, but I have to say that I'm not as surprised as I should be. Time has decided to embrace a retrograde patriarchal agenda, and not of the soft patriarchal sense of assuming that women just name themselves after their husbands and hand-wringing articles about the horror of women who draw their own income, as bad as those things are. No, we're talking the patriarchy of the anti-choice movement, the adulteress-stoning kind. The kind that treats the literal male ownership of women's bodies as a cute, sentimental way to organize society. That's far to the right of even mainstream sexist society. That's to the right of guys who like to go to Hooters, and assholes who argue that women get paid less because they don't work hard enough, what with the babies and all. This is the third example in very recent memory of Time shilling for the idea that women should be treated like male property and severely punished if they stray from patriarchal sexual norms, which is enough to start getting past "sloppy journalism" into the "open agenda" territory.

Egregious bullshit quotes that indicate not just sloppiness, but agenda:

The Abstinence Clearinghouse estimates there were more than 4,000 purity events across the country last year, with programs aimed at boys now growing even faster.

What they fail to tell you is that in the fundie world, boys don't have "purity", which is a word that describes an object that becomes ill-suited for use because of contamination. Water and food are pure, and Ivory soap is pure. Similarly, women are "pure" or "sullied", i.e. not humans but fuckholes whose usability is determined by whether or not someone has already used the property. For boys, they honor their agency by having integrity balls, where boys are chastened not to fuck someone else's fuckhole in the same way you don't wipe your ass with a hand towel and put it back.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Gender Policing is Harmful to Children
Posted by Habladora, Feministe on July 18, 2008 at 11:00 AM.

My good friend recently confessed that she wished her eight-year-old daughter were more interested in 'fashionable' shoes, lamenting that little Maria always insists on wearing sneakers- even with skirts. "Some day soon," my friend comforted herself, "Maria will want to be more like a girl -- she'll want to wear make-up, and shoes that compliment her outfits. I guess she's still just a little young for all that."

In light of that remark, I should have known when I agreed to babysit that Maria would show-up wearing shoes that limited her mobility. Had I been thinking of that conversation with her mother while arranging our day together, I could have saved the kid some pain. Instead, I thought of my own sneakered childhood, and planned to tour the neighborhood playgrounds, gardens, libraries, and ice-cream parlors with her -- on foot. Since I don't usually think of eight-year-olds wearing high-heels (although it seems to be a growing phenomenon), I didn't even notice Maria's 'fashionable' shoes until the poor kid started complaining of blisters and aching feet. Her mom had bought her the 'pretty grown-up shoes' the day before, and told her that big girls don't wear tennis shoes with skirts.

Little Maria's feet had fallen victim to gender-policing, the imposing of perceived 'typical' gender behaviors on another person.

As it turns out, gender policing is far from rare, and any kid who escapes adolescence with just a few blisters as a result can count herself lucky. According to research published in the journal Sex Roles, kids who's parents over-correct " ... gender atypical behavior (GAB) i.e. behavior traditionally considered more typical for children of the opposite sex" are at greater risk of developing adverse adult psychiatric symptoms:

Negative parenting style was associated with psychiatric symptoms. Structural equation modeling showed that parenting style significantly moderated the association between childhood GAB and adult psychiatric symptoms with positive parenting reducing the association and negative parenting sustaining it.

To put it a bit more succinctly, it isn't being different that put kids at risk, it's being punished for being different.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

It's 2008, and the Income Gender Gap Is Still Alive and Well
Posted by Allison Martell, Feministe on July 17, 2008 at 3:14 PM.

Several of you have asked for a post about the wage gap. I’ve held off, because it’s a huge topic –- really, most of my own blog circles back to income one way or another. But I get that not everyone feels like spending a few weeks, months, or years on this stuff, so I’ll try to quickly bring you up to speed.

The bottom line is that researchers haven’t been able to account for all of the pay gap between men and women. We know that part of it is about informal caregiving, which still overwhelmingly falls to women. On average, thanks to our other commitments, we have less formal work experience, and that translates to lower income, though in many cases it means that we work more hours in total.

Nonetheless, even when researchers try to correct for differences in education and work experience, the gender gap persists, suggesting that something else is at work. Feministe commenter Sappho pointed us towards this US Census report, complete with a dizzying number of charts and graphs. It quotes a GAO report:

When we account for difference between male and female work patterns as well as other key factors, women earned, on average, 80 percent of what men earned in 2000… Even after accounting for key factors that affect earnings, our model could not explain all of the differences in earnings between men and women.

What’s the source of that additional 20 per cent gap? I’d say it’s some part straightforward sexism –- unequal pay for equal work –- paired with workplace atmospheres that discourage women from excelling. Unfortunately, this stuff is tough to measure. Part of it also probably has to do with negotiation.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Conservatives Insist South Carolina Is Not Gay ... Not Even a Little Bi-Curious
Posted by Isaac Fitzgerald, AlterNet on July 17, 2008 at 5:28 AM.

Amro Worldwide has managed to upset a few folks in the Palmetto State with an advertising campaign they commissioned in London. A South Carolina state employee has resigned over the fiasco, and many state officials have publicly denounced the ads. MSNBC reports:

The campaign, which plastered the London subway with posters advertising the charms of South Carolina and five major U.S. cities to gay European tourists, landed with a resounding thud in South Carolina, where the issue of gay rights has long been a political flashpoint.

The advertisements were timed for London's Gay Pride Week, which ended Saturday. The posters touted the attractions of the state to gay tourists, including its "gay beaches" and its Civil War-era plantations.

Similar ads were posted for Atlanta, Boston, Las Vegas, New Orleans and Washington, D.C., none of which reported any negative backlash. But in South Carolina, reaction to the posters -- dubbed "the gayest ever mainstream media advertising campaign in London" by Out Now, the Australian advertising firm that designed the promotion -- was swift.

After The Palmetto Scoop, a South Carolina political blog, uncovered the promotion last week, Republican state Sen. David Thomas of Greenville protested the campaign and called for an audit of the advertising budget overseen by the state Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

American Liberalism Making a Come-Back
Posted by Daniel De Groot, Open Left on July 12, 2008 at 3:10 PM.

A good amount of attention has been paid to the ever larger party affiliation gap that Democrats are enjoying this year.  Unfortunately there is not nearly so much attention paid to the underlying ideological alignment of voters (not much polling on it either).  It is these beliefs that largely impact how elected officials behave with respect to policy, and particularly so for the Democratic party which still has a substantial conservative wing unlike the decimated ranks of the extinct or endangered liberal Republicans.

One thing I want to see the left doing more effectively is laying the blame for the disasterous policies of the Bush Administration and Republican congresses on the ideology that crafted them, namely conservativism.  John McCain is still demonizing "failed" liberal ideas from the 70s and trying to raise the spectre of a second term for Jimmy Carter (a really weak and self-dating attack).  Yet Democrats do not routinely link the failures of Iraq, Katrina and the Economy on the ideology that dreams up all these great ideas like invading unrelated countries after being attacked or handing a large state's energy system over to a bunch of unaccountable sociopaths happy to screw up the grid so prices will increase.  

Despite the relative lack of effort in this area outside of blogs, I'm happy to report that some people are figuring it out, and the lead conservativism has on liberalism is the smallest is has been in decades (I went back as far as 1984):

Source is the General Social Survey.

Now that's the gap, whither conservativism and liberalism in the populace? Some more charts and observations below.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

John McCain on Insurance Coverage for Viagra vs. Birth Control
Posted by Lindsay Beyerstein, AlterNet on July 11, 2008 at 9:55 AM.

A pool reporter asked John McCain what he thought of high-profile surrogates Cathy Fiorina's assertion that it's unfair for insurance companies to cover Viagra and not birth control. The shorter John McCain: "I certainly do not wanna discuss that issue . . ."

John McCain Befuddled By Birth Control
Posted by Matt Corley, Think Progress on July 10, 2008 at 8:26 AM.

Earlier this week, one of Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) top advisers, Carly Fiorina, argued for McCain’s free-market approach to health care by noting that “there are many health insurance plans that will cover Viagra but won’t cover birth-control medication” and that many “women would like a choice.” But, as ThinkProgress noted, Fiorina’s argument was undermined by McCain’s 2003 vote against legislation that would have required insurance coverage of prescription birth control. When asked about the disconnect on his campaign bus today, McCain nervously replied, “I certainly do not want to discuss that issue“:

Q: Earlier this week Carly Fiorina was meeting with a bunch of reporters and talked about it being unfair that insurance companies cover Viagra but not birth control. And -

McCain: I certainly do not want to discuss that issue. (uneasy laughter)

Q: But apparently you’ve voted against (McCain laughter continues)

McCain: I don’t know what I voted -

Q: Voted against coverage of birth control, forcing health insurance companies to cover birth control in the past. Is that still your position?

McCain: I’ll look at my voting record on it, but I have, uh, (5 second pause) , I don’t recall the vote right now. But I’ll be glad to look at it and get back to you as to why, I don’t -

Q: I guess her statement was that it was unfair that health insurance companies cover Viagra but not birth control. Do you have an opinion on that?

McCain: (after 8 second pause) I don’t know enough about it to give you an informed answer because I don’t recall the vote, I’ve cast thousands of votes in the Senate. I will respond to - it’s a, it’s a (nervous)

McCain’s stumbling answer is reminiscent of when he was asked in March 2007 about public funding for contraceptives and he could only reply, “whether I support government funding for them or not, I don’t know.”

CNN Spreading Innacurate Info on Cervical Cancer Vaccine
Posted by , Feministe on July 8, 2008 at 12:00 PM.

By Habladora

I can’t decide if this is an example of careless reporting, or of intentional fear-mongering. While there is no solid evidence that Gardasil is dangerous, CNN’s article “Should parents worry about HPV vaccine?” seems to be written with the aim of confusing the public into believing otherwise:

Gardasil has been the subject of 7,802 “adverse event” reports from the time the Food and Drug Administration approved its use two years ago, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Girls and women have blamed the vaccine for causing ailments from nausea to paralysis — even death. Fifteen deaths were reported to the FDA, and 10 were confirmed, but the CDC says none of the 10 were linked to the vaccine. The CDC says it continues to study the reports of illness.

While the idea that the HPV vaccinations might be unsafe is scary, at this point in CNN’s article I’m most appalled by a major news organization’s apparent lack of interest in conveying any real information to readers about an issue that concerns the safety of women and girls, and that could impact people’s decisions on whether or not to get vaccinated.

Let’s start with the first statement - that 7,802 “adverse event” reports have been filed. The obvious follow-up question that should occur to any reporter is “well, how many of these adverse events have actually been linked to Gardasil?” One might also wonder what the average adverse event report rate is for any vaccine, and if those reports decline after the vaccination is proven to be safe. Readers naturally want to know, after such a sensational headline, well - should we be worried, or are people drawing connections between illnesses and the vaccine where none actually exist?

The article’s second sensational statement, that “[f]ifteen deaths were reported to the FDA,” immediately looses its steam when we realize that none of those deaths have been linked to Gardasil. At this point in my reading, I began to doubt CNN’s motives - they wouldn’t strum-up fear just because it’s good for ratings, would they?

Finally, CNN presents us with the terrifying story of a teenager who developed pancreatitis not long after taking the vaccine. While I am not insensible to how horrifying such a serious illness would be for a young girl and her family, it should be CNN’s responsibility to verify whether or not her fear that it was related to the vaccine could be founded - by researching how many of those incident reports dealt with pancreatitis, for example, or other autoimmune diseases. This type of reporting is important, after all, since it could impact women’s decisions and, consequently, their health.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Young Feminist Activist Murdered by Ex-Boyfriend
Posted by Lindsay Beyerstein, AlterNet on July 8, 2008 at 9:27 AM.

A 25-year-old feminist activist was apparently murdered by her 46-year-old boyfriend last week. The suspect fled to New Jersey where he was apprehended and subsequently committed suicide in police custody.

Law student Jana Lynn Mackey of Lawrence, KS was found dead in her ex-boyfriend's home.

Mackey worked as a lobbyist for the National Organization For Women for three years before returning to school to study law. She served as a volunteer advocate for the Ga Du Gi Safe Center in Lawrence, KS.

A fund has been set up at Jana's former law school to honor her memory:

Jana Mackey Support for Public Advocacy Fund

c/o Dean of Law

Green Hall

1535 W. 15th St.

Lawrence, KS 66045

Canadian Abortion Rights Pioneer Awarded Nation's Highest Civilian Honor
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon on July 2, 2008 at 11:29 AM.

This is neat---Dr. Henry Morgentaler, a Canadian abortion rights activist, is getting the Order of Canada. Naturally, anti-choicers are wailing. The shamelessness of people will never cease to amaze me. The man is a hero to humanity who has helped save lives both in the physical sense (the lives of women who might have resorted to dangerous methods) and in the more philosophical sense (the way that your life is saved if it’s made more worth living because you are genuinely free). Anyway, Sirowski sent me the link and I’m sharing it with y’all, because people like Dr. Morgentaler are living reminders that there is good in the world.

The Myth of the Opt-Out Revolution
Posted by Kathy G on July 2, 2008 at 9:00 AM.

I've been meaning to blog about an important scholarly paper that was recently published in the June issue of the American Sociological Review, which concerns trends in women's labor force participation. The paper is not publicly available online, but you can find a press release about it here.

The main findings of the study, which is by a sociology graduate student at Princeton named Christine Percheski, is that the notion that increasing numbers of women are opting out of the work force is a myth. Using government data from the Census and the American Community Survey, she shows that the labor force participation of professional women has continued to increase. Moreover, these women are working longer hours, and the employment rates of women with children and women in male-dominated professions continue to climb. In addition, the fertility rates of professional women have remained steady, and college-educated women have the highest marriage rates of all educational groups.

Now, there is nothing new about these findings. As I wrote last summer when I was guest blogging for Ezra, all the recent empirical studies done by economists like Cornell's Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn, Harvard's Claudia Goldin, and Heather Boushey of the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, who all, like Percheski, used large datasets and rigorous methodologies, showed the same thing: no opt-out revolution. No decline in labor force participation among women in general, or mothers in particular, or even among professional class mothers or the mothers of very young children.

Yet, in spite of these strong and consistent findings, the myth of the "opt-out revolution" persists. Perhaps the most interesting part of Percheski's paper is the section that explores why this is so. First, she says, for women, having children does continue to be associated with lower levels of employment, and even though more professional women are working than ever before, many of them still don't work full-time, year-round.

Related to this, since there are more professional working women than ever before, "there are more women available to exit." Writes Percheski:

The average person is thus more likely to personally know a professional woman who has left the labor force. A woman who does not work full-time and long hours may now seem anomalous and be more noticeable than the thousands of professional women who are working full-time in demanding jobs while raising young children. Additionally, although the percentage of women with advanced degrees who are not working is declining across cohorts, the percentage of non-working women who have an advanced degree is growing because the whole population is becoming more educated.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Pregnancy Pact Myth Refuses to Die
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon on July 1, 2008 at 9:49 AM.

One of the worst problems in American politics is that once a wingnut myth takes off, it never dies, no matter how much evidence you can marshal against it.  There are people who will go to their graves believing that there was a good reason to think that Saddam Hussein was hiding WMDs as part of his plot to re-blow-up the World Trade Center after he personally crashed a plane into it the first time.  Or, as a less hyperbolic but still baffling example, my dentist told me a couple of weeks ago that she still, in the year 2008, has to talk down patients who are in a full blown panic about fluoridated drinking water. 

Which is why the second I heard the words “pregnancy pact” on the TV, I realized two things at once: a) there was no fucking way and b) no matter how much evidence you marshaled to prove that there was no fucking way, wingnuts would believe that gangs of teenage girls are roaming the countryside, sucking up sperm from hapless men with their succubi cunts of doom in order to get their hands on that diamond-jewelry-buying welfare cash.  The fact that the movie “Juno” was blamed was just an added bonus, and evidence that teaching women such as screenwriter Diablo Cody to read and write was the first step on the road to teenage sluttitude hell. 

Well, here’s the no fucking way part: Turns out the principal, in his desperation to prove the nay-sayers that suggest that making contraception available to teenagers might help them contracept, made up the pregnancy pact.  His main source was, contrary to his initial claims, not the school nurses’ office, but the gossip in the school hallways, which as we all recall has an accuracy rate nearing utter perfection. 

Okay, so school gossip isn’t accurate, but my grasp on what legends will never die seems to be hitting it out of the park---after recovering slightly from being proven fools once again, the Wingnutteria is coming back with, “So what if the pregnancy pact wasn’t true?  Let’s believe it is anyway, because it’s politically useful for denying girls access to contraception.” “Fuck reality, we’ll believe what we want to!” has been working for a long time with wingnuts, on everything from the War on Terra to global warming, so there’s no reason for them not to resort to that tactic here. 

Moloney starts off by breathlessly recounting stories of succubi teenagers, before hastily admitting and then dismissing the fact that the entire premise of his outraged article (the pregnancy pact) is bullshit. 

Local news reports have questioned Time’s characterization of the situation, but nobody is denying that these girls knew how to avoid getting pregnant and instead chose otherwise. To young girls who see teenage pregnancy as something desirable, making a pact like this is not unimaginable.

Er.  Yeah. “There wasn’t a pact exactly, but there might as well have been, and come on, it sounds right so let’s believe it anyway.”

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Radical Cleric Claims "Defiant" Wives Cause Spousal Abuse
Posted by Lucinda Marshall, Feminist Peace Network on July 1, 2008 at 8:55 AM.

For a blogger, there is nothing that says welcome back after being on the road like finding a really good story about a major misogynist from your hometown on a seriously obscure website rather than in the morning paper where it belongs. But kudos to Ethics Daily which reports that Bruce Ware, who teaches Christian theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY delivered a sermon that he said describes his "complementarian" view of SB theology as part of a series of sermons at the Denton (TX) Bible Church on "Biblical Manhood and Womanhood." According to the article, Ware claims that:

One reason that men abuse their wives is because women rebel against their husband's God-given authority.

and that,

"(W)omen desire to have their own way instead of submitting to their husbands because of sin."

And husbands on their parts, because they're sinners, now respond to that threat to their authority either by being abusive, which is of course one of the ways men can respond when their authority is challenged, or, more commonly, to become passive, acquiescent, and simply not asserting the leadership they ought to as men in their homes and in churches,”

Now aren’t you sorry you didn’t crawl out of bed on Sunday morning to hear that spew?