Yes: Smart Women Are Scarier

Based on personal experiences throughout my life, with a 130 IQ, I know this to be true.  I didn't pretend to be dumb and "nice;" the alternative to being accepted as a smart human being, though, appeared mostly to be labeled as a bitch and man-hater (as to the bitch part that depends on who you ask, as to the man-hater part, definitely not!!!)  And I didn't go into a STEM area in undergrad and post-undergrad.  Article from Salon online.

Are smart women scary? Study suggests women are punished for academic success with lower pay

Call it the Hermione effect: New study shows employers would rather hire women who got B’s than those who got A’s

By Amanda Marcotte

March 26, 2018

There are two schools of thought when it comes to what fuels the gender pay gap. Feminists tend to point to systematic discrimination, arguing that through various means over the course of women's lives, they are pushed out of higher-paid work into underpaid or unpaid labor. Anti-feminists argue that women themselves are the problem, suggesting that women tend to be too dull, lazy or frivolous to compete with men and choose instead to take on less challenging careers or a life of domesticity.

"Women, far more than men, appear to be drawn to jobs in the caring professions; and men are more likely to turn up in people-free zones," anti-feminist Christina Hoff Sommers has written, without interrogating why "caring" professions are routinely underpaid. (Probably because they're largely done by women.)

"Want to close wage gap? Step one: Change your major from feminist dance therapy to electrical engineering," she tweeted in 2015, in a snottier version of the argument that made clear her view that women simply are duller and lazier than men.

But what happens to women when they take Sommers' advice, and apply themselves energetically in college? A new study to be published in April's American Sociological Review shows that potential employers often hold that against them. For women who pick a traditionally "masculine" major, like math or the physical sciences, the discrimination they face for being a high achiever is even greater.

"There’s been a lot of research in sociology about how women now earn more college degrees than men, so it’s more likely for women to go to college than men and also to graduate," Natasha Quadlin, an assistant professor of sociology at Ohio State University, told Salon. "But there’s still lots of documented evidence of gender inequalities in the workplace and in society more broadly."

Women and Children Banned from "Christian" Homeless Shelter in Kentucky

Ho ho ho.  Merry Christmas, everyone, from your local Kentucky misogynist "Christian" males.

Reported at Raw Story.

Kentucky shelter tosses out all women days before holidays because they tempt men with ‘ungodly’ sex

DAVID EDWARDS
14 DEC 2015 AT 11:10 ET  

A Kentucky homeless shelter said that it has banned all women and children in an effort to stop them from having sex with male residents.

Emergency Christian Ministries Director Billy Woodward told WYMT that he had to put a stop to the “sex problem.”

“They may want to meet or slip in a room occasionally, we can’t have that,” Woodward explained. “It seems like these last days it’s getting worse … the ungodly type.”

“They say, ‘We’re homeless, maybe we can find somebody, a mate or something,'” he continued. “If they done it right, it would be fine. But, you know, they go overboard with it.”

Emergency Christian Ministries forced up to a dozen women to leave, according to WYMT. It was not immediately clear if the women had been able to relocate because Emergency Christian Ministries is the only shelter for the homeless in Williamsburg.

A female-only KCEOC shelter in Gray, Kentucky was reportedly accepting women. However, that shelter is a 40 minute drive from Williamsburg.

Williamsburg Mayor Roddy Harrison lamented that kicking out homeless women was “not something the city feels should be done.”

“I guess I’m a little old school, but the first people off the boat were the women and children,” Harrison remarked.

Woodward insisted that the decision had been made based on teachings in the Bible, but he admitted that women were not completely to blame for the “sex problem.”

“It takes two to do that,” Woodward said. “We are not biased or prejudice whatsoever.”

According to the False Prophet Erdogan, Using Birth Control is Treason

Read it and weap.  Common sense is fast deserting the Earth and woe betide us, people.  Woe betide us.

Turkey's Erdogan says birth control 'treason' against Turkish lineage

Source: Reuters - Mon, 22 Dec 2014 14:53 GMT

Author: Reuters

ISTANBUL, Dec 22 (Reuters) - Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has described birth control as a form of "treason," saying it threatened the country's bloodline.

Erdogan urged a newly married couple at their wedding late on Sunday to have at least three children to help boost Turkish population figures, a common refrain from the president, who worries a declining birth rate may undermine economic growth. [Fact:  More often than not, a declining birth rate mirrors a decline in economic growth and shrinking prosperity of the middle class, not the other way around.  Doh.]

"For years they committed a treason of birth control in this country, seeking to dry up our bloodline. Lineage is very important both economically and spiritually," he told the couple after serving as their witness at the wedding. A video of the speech was posted on the mainstream Radikal news website.

Last month, Erdogan, a devout Muslim, said it was unnatural to consider women and men equal and said feminists did not understand the importance of motherhood. In 2012, he sought to effectively outlaw abortion, but later dropped the plan amid a public outcry.

Erdogan regularly faces criticism for an authoritarian style of rule after 11 years in power. [This is something much deeper than that -- the man obviously has penis issues.  Probably has nightmares about Vagina Dentata...]

Turkey's population growth has been slowing in recent years and the live-birth rate hovered at 2.07 percent last year, according to official statistics. (Reporting by Ayla Jean Yackley; Editing by Dominic Evans)

What Does This Mean - Having It All?

I haven't been blogging much recently.  I am dealing with some inconvenient health issues and, frankly darlings, at nearly 61, although I feel internally as young as I always have (eternal youth), my body and energy level are not cooperating.

How much, then, I was touched and disturbed by this article I just finished reading at The New York Times.  I have started down the road of the last third of my life which will, I hope, last a good 30 years or so - but no one comes with a guarantee, do they.  What I see happening in this country is profoundly upsetting and discouraging.  As a product of that generation of women talked about in the article -- you know, the so-called pioneers -- I can only shake my head and ask myself "Why the hell did you even bother, Jan?" 

Elite Women Put a New Spin on an Old Debate
By JODI KANTOR
Pulished: June 21, 2012

If a woman has a sterling résumé, a supportive husband who speaks fluent car pool and a nurturing boss who just happens to be one of the most powerful women in the world herself, who or what is to blame if Ms. Supposed-to-Have-It-All still cannot balance work and family?

A magazine article by a former Obama administration official has blown up into an instant debate about a new conundrum of female success: women have greater status than ever before in human history, even outpacing men in education, yet the lineup at the top of most fields is still stubbornly male. Is that new gender gap caused by women who give up too easily, unsympathetic employers or just nature itself?

The article in The Atlantic, by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton professor who recently left a job at the State Department, added to a renewed feminist conversation that is bringing fresh twists to bear on longstanding concerns about status, opportunity and family. Unlike earlier iterations, it is being led not by agitators who are out of power, but by elite women at the top of their fields, like the comedian Tina Fey, the Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg and now Ms. Slaughter. In contrast to some earlier barrier-breakers from Gloria Steinem to Condoleezza Rice, these women have children, along with husbands who do as much child-rearing as they do, or more.

The conversation came to life in part because of a compelling face-off of issues and personalities: Ms. Slaughter, who urged workplaces to change and women to stop blaming themselves, took on Ms. Sandberg, who has somewhat unintentionally come to epitomize the higher-harder-faster school of female achievement.

Starting a year and a half ago, Ms. Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, injected new energy into the often circular work-or-home debate with videotaped talks that became Internet sensations. After bemoaning the lack of women in top business positions, she instructed them to change their lot themselves by following three rules: require your partner to do half the work at home, don’t underestimate your own abilities, and don’t cut back on ambition out of fear that you won’t be able to balance work and children.

The talks transformed Ms. Sandberg from little-known executive to the new face of female achievement, earning her untold letters and speaking invitations, along with micro-inspection of her life for clues to career success. She hired a sociologist, Marianne Cooper, to help her get the research and data right. When Ms. Sandberg confessed in a recent interview that, contrary to her work-hound reputation, she leaves work at 5:30 p.m. to eat dinner with her children, and returns to a computer later, she earned yet another round of attention, and her words were taken as the working-mom equivalent of a papal ruling.

But her advice also spurred quiet skepticism: by putting even more pressure on women to succeed, was she, even unintentionally, blaming the victim if they did not?

Enter Ms. Slaughter’s article, posted Wednesday night, in which she described a life that looked like a feminist diorama from the outside (a mother and top policy adviser for Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton) but was accompanied by domestic meltdown (workweeks spent in a different state than her family, a rebellious teenage son to whom she had little time to attend). As she questioned whether her job in Washington was doable and at what cost, she began hearing from younger women who complained about advice like Ms. Sandberg’s.

“Women of my generation have clung to the feminist credo we were raised with ... because we are determined not to drop the flag for the next generation,” Ms. Slaughter wrote. “But when many members of the younger generation have stopped listening, on the grounds that glibly repeating ‘you can have it all’ is simply airbrushing reality, it is time to talk.”

“Although couched in terms of encouragement, Sandberg’s exhortation contains more than a note of reproach,” Ms. Slaughter continued, an insinuation of “ ‘What’s the matter with you?’ ”

Instead, Ms. Slaughter said, the workplace needs to adapt, and women who opt out have no need to apologize.

In an interview, Ms. Slaughter added that she was motivated to write in part by her concern about the number of women serving in high posts under President Obama — and now that the first round of female appointees is leaving, she said, they are mostly being replaced by men. “I don’t think there is sufficient appreciation across the administration as a whole of the different circumstances facing women and men,” she said.

Unlike in earlier eras, when Germaine Greer would publish one book and then Betty Friedan would weigh in months later, a new crop of feminist bloggers and writers now respond instantaneously. The women they were writing about followed along in real time on Thursday as well, reading the debate as they were living it, inhaling Ms. Slaughter’s article and the responses as they stole a few minutes from work or raced off to pick up their children. By Thursday afternoon, Ms. Slaughter’s confession-slash-manifesto was breaking readership records for The Atlantic’s Web site, according to a magazine representative.

Many responded with enthusiasm for Ms. Slaughter’s recommendations (more latitude to work at home, career breaks, matching work schedules to school schedules, even freezing eggs). Some defended Ms. Sandberg or expressed solidarity with their husbands, who they said feel just as much work-life agita as they do. More than a few said they were irritated by what they called outdated language (“having it all”) and a clichéd cover illustration (Baby, check. Briefcase, check).

“Irresponsibly conflating liberation with satisfaction, the ‘have it all’ formulation sets an impossible bar for female success and then ensures that when women fail to clear it, it’s feminism — as opposed to persistent gender inequity — that’s to blame,” Rebecca Traister wrote in an article on Salon.com.

For her part, Ms. Sandberg remained silent, declining a request to address the Atlantic article. But Ms. Slaughter said in an interview that the Silicon Valley executive was one of the many readers who e-mailed her as soon as the article came out. Her message: they had to talk more about this, and soon.         

A version of this article appeared in print on June 22, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Elite Women Put New Spin On Old Debate.

Indian Girls Shed "Unwanted" Names

I just don't know what to say when confronted with an article like this, and it takes a lot (as you well know) to render me speechless:

285 Indian girls shed 'unwanted' names

By CHAYA BABU - Associated Press | AP – 6 hrs ago

MUMBAI, India (AP) — More than 200 Indian girls whose names mean "unwanted" in Hindi chose new names Saturday for a fresh start in life.

A central Indian district held a renaming ceremony it hopes will give the girls new dignity and help fight widespread gender discrimination that gives India a skewed gender ratio, with far more boys than girls.

The 285 girls — wearing their best outfits with barrettes, braids and bows in their hair — lined up to receive certificates with their new names along with small flower bouquets from Satara district officials in Maharashtra state.

In shedding names like "Nakusa" or "Nakushi," which mean "unwanted" in Hindi, some girls chose to name themselves after Bollywood stars like "Aishwarya" or Hindu goddesses like "Savitri." Some just wanted traditional names with happier meanings, such as "Vaishali" or "prosperous, beautiful and good."

"Now in school, my classmates and friends will be calling me this new name, and that makes me very happy," said a 15-year-old girl who had been named Nakusa by a grandfather disappointed by her birth. She chose the new name "Ashmita," which means "very tough" or "rock hard" in Hindi.

The plight of girls in India came to a focus as this year's census showed the nation's sex ratio had dropped over the past decade from 927 girls for every 1,000 boys under the age of 6 to 914. Maharashtra state's ratio is well below that, with just 883 girls for every 1,000 boys — down from 913 a decade ago. In the district of Satara, it is even lower at 881.

Such ratios are the result of abortions of female fetuses, or just sheer neglect leading to a higher death rate among girls. The problem is so serious in India that hospitals are legally banned from revealing the gender of an unborn fetus in order to prevent sex-selective abortions, though evidence suggests the information gets out.

Part of the reason Indians favor sons is the enormous expense of marrying off girls. Families often go into debt arranging marriages and paying for elaborate dowries. A boy, on the other hand, will one day bring home a bride and dowry. Hindu custom also dictates that only sons can light their parents' funeral pyres.

Over the years, and again now, there are efforts to fight the discrimination.

"Nakusa is a very negative name as far as female discrimination is concerned," said Satara district health officer Dr. Bhagwan Pawar, who came up with the idea for the renaming ceremony.

Other incentives, announced by federal or state governments every few years, include free meals and free education to encourage people to take care of their girls, and even cash bonuses for families with girls who graduate from high school.

Activists say the name "unwanted," which is widely given to girls across India, gives them the feeling they are worthless and a burden.

"When the child thinks about it, you know, 'My mom, my dad, and all my relatives and society call me unwanted,' she will feel very bad and depressed," said Sudha Kankaria of the organization Save the Girl Child. But giving these girls new names is only the beginning, she said.

"We have to take care of the girls, their education and even financial and social security, or again the cycle is going to repeat."

Misleading Title of Article Obscures Awful Truth

You have to read down into the article to get to the real meat of the article and the horrifying facts about female infanticide openly practiced in China, as well as persistent cultural sexual discrimination against females because "they aren't as good as boys":

Published at Fox News Online
One-child policy a surprising boon for China girls
Published August 14, 2011
| Associated Press

BEIJING – Tsinghua University freshman Mia Wang has confidence to spare. Asked what her home city of Benxi in China's far northeastern tip is famous for, she flashes a cool smile and says: "Producing excellence. Like me."

A Communist Youth League member at one of China's top science universities, she boasts enviable skills in calligraphy, piano, flute and pingpong.

Such gifted young women are increasingly common in China's cities and make up the most educated generation of women in Chinese history. Never have so many been in college or graduate school, and never has their ratio to male students been more balanced.

To thank for this, experts say, is three decades of steady Chinese economic growth, heavy government spending on education and a third, surprising, factor: the one-child policy. In 1978, women made up only 24.2 percent of the student population at Chinese colleges and universities. By 2009, nearly half of China's full-time undergraduates were women and 47 percent of graduate students were female, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. In India, by comparison, women make up 37.6 percent of those enrolled at institutes of higher education, according to government statistics.

Since 1979, China's family planning rules have barred nearly all urban families from having a second child in a bid to stem population growth. With no male heir competing for resources, parents have spent more on their daughters' education and well-being, a groundbreaking shift after centuries of discrimination.

"They've basically gotten everything that used to only go to the boys," said Vanessa Fong, a Harvard University professor and expert on China's family planning policy.

Wang and many of her female classmates grew up with tutors and allowances, after-school classes and laptop computers. Though she is just one generation off the farm, she carries an iPad and a debit card, and shops for the latest fashions online. Her purchases arrive at Tsinghua, where Wang's all-girls dorm used to be jokingly called a "Panda House," because women were so rarely seen on campus. They now make up a third of the student body, up from one-fifth a decade ago.

"In the past, girls were raised to be good wives and mothers," Fong said. "They were going to marry out anyway, so it wasn't a big deal if they didn't want to study."

Not so anymore. Fong says today's urban Chinese parents "perceive their daughters as the family's sole hope for the future," and try to help them to outperform their classmates, regardless of gender.

Some demographers argue that China's fertility rate would have fallen sharply even without the one-child policy because economic growth tends to reduce family size. In that scenario, Chinese girls may have gotten more access to education anyway, though the gains may have been more gradual.

Crediting the one-child policy with improving the lives of women is jarring, given its history and how it's harmed women in other ways. Facing pressure to stay under population quotas, overzealous family planning officials have resorted to forced sterilizations and late-term abortions, sometimes within weeks of delivery, although such practices are illegal. The birth limits are also often criticized for encouraging sex-selective abortions in a son-favoring society. Chinese traditionally prefer boys because they carry on the family name and are considered better earners.

With the arrival of sonogram technology in the 1980's, some families no longer merely hoped for a boy, they were able to engineer a male heir by terminating pregnancies when the fetus was a girl.

"It is gendercide," said Therese Hesketh, a University College London professor who has studied China's skewed sex ratio. "I don't understand why China doesn't just really penalize people who've had sex-selective abortions and the people who do them. The law exists but nobody enforces it."

To combat the problem, China allows families in rural areas, where son preference is strongest, to have a second child if their first is a girl. The government has also launched education campaigns promoting girls and gives cash subsidies to rural families with daughters. Still, 43 million girls have "disappeared" in China due to gender-selective abortion as well as neglect and inadequate access to health care and nutrition, the United Nations estimated in a report last year.

Yin Yin Nwe, UNICEF's representative to China, puts it bluntly: The one-child policy brings many benefits for girls "but they have to be born first."

Wang's birth in the spring of 1992 triggered a family rift that persists to this day. She was a disappointment to her father's parents, who already had one granddaughter from their eldest son. They had hoped for a boy.

"Everyone around us had this attitude that boys were valuable, girls were less," Gao Mingxiang, Wang's paternal grandmother, said by way of explanation — but not apology.

Small and stooped, Gao perched on the edge of her farmhouse "kang," a heated brick platform that in northern Chinese homes serves as couch, bed and work area. She wore three sweaters, quilted pants and slippers. Her granddaughter, tall and graceful and dressed in Ugg boots and a sparkly blue top, sat next to her listening, a sour expression on her face. She wasn't shy about showing her lingering bitterness or her eagerness to leave. She agreed to the visit to please her father but refused to stay overnight — despite a four-hour drive each way.

Fong, the Harvard researcher, says that many Chinese households are like this these days: a microcosm of third world and first world cultures clashing. The gulf between Wang and her grandmother seems particularly vast.

The 77-year-old Gao grew up in Yixian, a poor corn- and wheat-growing county in southern Liaoning province. At 20, she moved less than a mile (about a kilometer) to her new husband's house. She had three children and never dared to dream what life was like outside the village. She remembers rain fell in the living room and a cherished pig was sold, because there wasn't enough money for repairs or feed. She relied on her daughter to help around the house so her two sons could study.

"Our kids understood," said Gao, her gray hair pinned back with a bobby pin, her skin chapped by weather, work and age. "All families around here were like that."

But Wang's mother, Zheng Hong, did not understand. She grew up 300 kilometers (185 miles) away in the steel-factory town of Benxi with two elder sisters and went to vocational college for manufacturing. She lowers her voice to a whisper as she recalls the sting of her in-law's rejection when her daughter was born.

"I sort of limited my contact with them after that," Zheng said. "I remember feeling very angry and wronged by them. I decided then that I was going to raise my daughter to be even more outstanding than the boys."

They named her Qihua, a pairing of the characters for chess and art — a constant reminder of her parents' hope that she be both clever and artistic. From the age of six, Wang was pushed hard, beginning with pingpong lessons. Competitions were coed, and she beat boys and girls alike, she said. She also learned classical piano and Chinese flute, practiced swimming and ice skating and had tutors for Chinese, English and math. During summer vacations, she competed in English speech contests and started using the name Mia.

In high school, Wang had cram sessions for China's college entrance exam that lasted until 10 p.m. Her mother delivered dinners to her at school. She routinely woke up at 6 a.m. to study before class. She had status and expectations her mother and grandmother never knew, a double-edged sword of pampering and pressure.

If she'd had a sibling or even the possibility of a sibling one day, the stakes might not have been so high, her studies not so intense. Beijing-based population expert Yang Juhua has studied enrollment figures and family size and determined that single children in China tend to be the best educated, while those with elder brothers get shortchanged. She was able to make comparisons because China has many loopholes to the one-child rule, including a few cities that have experimented with a two-child policy for decades.

"Definitely single children are better off, particularly girls," said Yang, who works at the Center for Population and Development Studies at Renmin University. "If the girl has a brother then she will be disadvantaged. ... If a family has financial constraints, it's more likely that the educational input will go to the sons."

While her research shows clearly that it's better, education-wise, for girls to be single children, she favors allowing everyone two kids.

"I do think the (one-child) policy has improved female well-being to a great extent, but most people want two children so their children can have somebody to play with while they're growing up," said Yang, who herself has a college-age daughter.

Ideally, she said, China should relax the policy while also investing more in education so that fewer families will be forced to choose which child to favor when it comes to schooling.

While strides have been made in reaching gender parity in education, other inequalities remain. Women remain woefully underrepresented in government, have higher suicide rates than males, often face domestic violence and workplace discrimination and by law must retire at a younger age than men. It remains to be seen whether the new generation of degree-wielding women can alter the balance outside the classroom.

Some, like Wang, are already changing perceptions about what women can achieve. When she dropped by her grandmother's house this spring, the local village chief came by to see her. She was a local celebrity: the first village descendent in memory to make it into Tsinghua University.

"Women today, they can go out and do anything," her grandmother said. "They can do big things."

I Want My Own Name Back --

'Sis sent this article to me.  I think it ties in quite eloquently, despite being from half a world away (Japan), to the interesting fact my friend Ann passed along to me a few days ago that I mentioned in an earlier blog that, in the United States of America, between the years 1907 and 1920, a female citizen of this country LOST HER CITIZENSHIP if she married a man who was not also a citizen of the USA.  Under the eyes of this law, a woman ceased to exist as an independent person (or legal entity) when she married.  Absolutely, incredibly disgusting!

I wonder if the citizenship statutes that govern our laws today in the USA contain some equally horrible aspects denigrating a woman's being as well.  For sure in Japan they still do!
Government to face first suit on surnames
Tue, Jan 11 11:05 AM EST
By Yoko Kubota

TOKYO (Reuters) - After nearly fifty years of persevering with a life under her husband's surname, 75-year-old Kyoko Tsukamoto is taking the Japanese government to court so that she can at least bear her own name when she dies.

"My husband and I still love each other, but this and the issue of Tsukamoto are different," she said.

The former teacher uses her maiden name, but due to Japanese civil law requirements she had to take her husband's name when she married to make the union legal.

But debate over the surname issue, long a sore point with some women, has heated up as more women stay in jobs after marriage and juggle two names -- their maiden name at work and their registered name on legal documents.

"I thought that I would get used to my husband's name, but I could not, and a sense of loss grew inside me," Tsukamoto said.

"Now I am 75 and I was shocked to realize that I can't do things anymore that I used to be able to do last year. That's when I thought that I am Kyoko Tsukamoto and I want to die as Kyoko Tsukamoto."

Tsukamoto is one of five people planning to file a lawsuit against the government and local authorities as early as February, saying the civil code that requires married couples to register under the same surname violates equal rights among married couples, as well as personal rights.

Men are allowed to take their spouses' name, but it is rare.

The group will seek compensation for what it says is the legislature's failure to enact change, the first such case to be debated in open court in Japan, the only country in the Group of Eight major industrialized nations with such a surname rule.

Hopes grew that the government would submit a bill to amend the civil code after the Democratic Party of Japan, which has advocated letting married couples keep separate names if they wish, took power in 2009. But opposition from a coalition ally caused the plan to stall.

"There were expectations that it could be enacted but unfortunately this did not take place. They do not want to wait any longer," said Fujiko Sakakibara, lead lawyer for the group.

TRADITIONAL FAMILY
The rule is tied to Japan's traditional concept of the family, which in the past ensured that property, businesses, and surnames were passed on to men within the family unit.

Some say it is outdated. In certain cases, couples repeat marriages and divorces between each other to avoid having to register their children as out of wedlock births, partly because the civil code limits inheritance rights for such children.

Tsukamoto, with her husband since 1960, is going through her second marriage with him after divorcing once in 1965 to get her maiden name back. They re-married when they had their third child but her husband has rejected requests for a second divorce.

Those against change say it's a matter of family unity and are wary of the impact on children's identities. They also warn of a possible increase in divorce.

Tsukamoto began studying women's issues at the age of 63, after she was freed of duties to nurse her parents. She has since taken up an activist's role.

"Others were getting by well in society and I have thought that perhaps I was stupid to insist on this ... Now things are changing in a good direction, unimaginable in 1960," she said.

(Editing by Elaine Lies)

Egyptian Women Work - But No Rights

From The New York Times
The Female Factor
In Egypt, Women Have Burdens but No Privileges
By MONA EL-NAGGAR
Published: July 13, 2010

CAIRO — Hoda Gameel is 22 and one of the millions of women in Egypt thrust by need and circumstance into the world of work. While the act of leaving home to work may have liberated some women in the past, Egyptian women have found no recognition and are fleeing instead back toward tradition.

“I used to be ambitious, and I had dreams. Now I just want to get married and stay at home,” Ms. Gameel said. “My only hope is to be able to rest when I get married.”

She wakes at 7 a.m., makes breakfast for two younger brothers, walks them to school, returns home to iron clothes and goes to work, selling headscarfs at a booth in a glitzy mall. At night, after battling Cairo traffic on a 90-minute ride in a dilapidated bus, she has a late dinner, studies and — finally — sleeps.

It is a grind that yields barely $100 a month even with extra shifts, and a story drearily familiar in countries where tradition still deprives most women of opportunity, and poorly paid drudgery is the only choice.

Ms. Gameel has the burdens, but not the privileges, of her male counterparts. “I feel like a man,” she said. “Men are the ones who are supposed to struggle and carry the burden of their family. A woman is meant to provide love, affection and be sheltered. She shouldn’t be out and about all the time.”

The oldest of four children, Ms. Gameel, in her fourth year of accounting studies, had to provide when her father, an illiterate construction worker, retired with severe asthma at 51 and her mother grew too overweight to sew clothes in a factory for less than $50 a month.

At first, when she was 19, she worked as a secretary in a small company that sells air-conditioners. She liked the office job, and her salary was twice what she makes selling headscarfs. But her boss was a little too attentive — “he would keep dropping things on purpose so that I would have to bend down and get them.” When Ms. Gameel complained to colleagues, word got to her boss, and he fired her.

Women’s greater presence in the work force has not translated into any fundamental shift in prevailing attitudes toward women in public life.

Indeed, in a recent survey in association with the International Herald Tribune by the Pew Research Center in Washington, Egypt emerged as one country where women in the workplace clearly take a back seat to men and equal rights are a goal rather than reality. Sixty-one percent of respondents in Egypt said women should be allowed to work outside the home. But 75 percent said that when jobs are scarce, men should have more right to work.

“Yes, more women are working, but not every work is liberating,” said Iman Bibars, chairwoman of the Association for the Development and Enhancement of Women, based in Cairo. “So in the end, a lot of the younger generation do not want to work. It is regressive and reactionary.”

“At the same time that women are out to work, and this is a modern indicator, traditions continue to have the upper hand,” noted Madiha el-Safty, professor of sociology at the American University in Cairo.

Egypt is ranked 120 out of 128 countries in gender equality by the World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report, with emphasis on its low performance in the subcategories of political empowerment and genuine female opportunity in the economy.

Things may in fact be getting worse for women. In Egypt, the government sector has traditionally proved more hospitable to women. As the economy has shifted toward the private sector, women are losing out. According to a 2010 Population Council report, the unemployment rate for women ages 15 to 29 is about 32 percent, compared with 12 percent for men the same ages.

Women in Egypt occupy only eight out of the 454 seats in Parliament — and five of those female deputies were appointed by the president. There are just three female ministers and no women among Egypt’s 29 governors.

When women applied to be judges in the State Council, Egypt’s highest administrative court, the council’s general assembly voted against, arguing that women’s emotional disposition and maternal duties rendered them unfit. The decision was overruled in March after Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif appealed to the constitutional court, but no women have been appointed.

Similarly, Parliament passed a law last year, initiated by the ruling National Democratic Party, giving women a 64-seat quota in an expanded lower house over the next two five-year terms, starting with elections this autumn.

Spheres like law and politics are scarcely open to women of Ms. Gameel’s modest background, noted Fayzah el-Tahnawy, a member of the ruling party and a former member of Parliament from the conservative region of Menya.

Only affluent women “can afford to have ambition,” while most women belong to the middle or lower classes, she noted. In addition, female illiteracy remains high: the most recent Egyptian Labor Market Survey found that 47 percent of rural women and 23 percent of urban women could not read or write.

“This is why we had to implement the quota system in order to make room for women in politics,” said Ms. Tahnawy. “It didn’t just happen on its own.”

How any of these measures would help Ms. Gameel is unclear. She doggedly pursues her degree, and English language courses in summer. She wants a job in a bank for favorable hours (work ending at 2 p.m.) that she sees as her only shot at a dignified career and happy marriage.

“I work like a machine,” said Ms. Gameel. “There are no promotions, my salary doesn’t increase, and there is no mercy. Where is the sense of fulfillment in that?”

It is 11 p.m. Ms. Gameel totals sales for the day, calls in to the owner and shutters the booth. She is carrying frozen okra, which her mother will cook for dinner. She shuffles to the bus. She gazes out the window. Halfway home, she finally speaks. “This bumpy ride alone is bound to kill me.”

The More Things Seem to Change, the More They Stay the Same...

Redux.

I know there are millions of people, in the USA and in Europe (which presents itself as more sophisticated and urbane than us "cowboys" in the wild wild West), who think that women have achieved absolute equality with men.  Unfortunately, the title of the following article gives a bad name to the absolutely blameless Neanderthal humans.

Ukrainian women berate 'Neanderthal' PM for sexist remarks
Mykola Azarov enrages feminist groups by suggesting women are unsuitable for high political office
Luke Harding in Moscow
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 24 March 2010 19.50 GMT

Ukraine's new pro-Russia prime minister, Mykola Azarov, has enraged feminist groups by suggesting that women are unsuitable for high political office and incapable of carrying out reforms.

Women's groups in Ukraine have angrily reported Azarov – who presides over an all-male cabinet – to the country's ombudsman following his remarks last week. They accuse him of gender discrimination and holding Neanderthal views.

Speaking on Friday, Azarov said Ukraine's economic problems were too difficult for any woman to handle.

"Some say our government is too large; others that there are no women," he said. "There's no one to look at during cabinet sessions: they're all boring faces. With all respect to women, conducting reforms is not women's business."

Ukraine's new woman-free government was capable of working 16 hours a day with "no breaks and weekends", Azarov boasted.

The prime minister's gaffe echoes comments made recently by the man who appointed him – Ukraine's new president, Viktor Yanukovych. During February's election campaign, Yanukovych declared that his female opponent, Yulia Tymoshenko, should "go to the kitchen".

Today, Azarov's political enemies denounced him as an unreconstructed dinosaur. They said his derisory remark, snubbing half of the country's 46 million population, underlined just how out of touch he is with ordinary Ukrainians.

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Against this current backdrop, I put forth for your consideration:

March 22, 2010, 6:09 pm
Using Quotas to Raise the Glass Ceiling
By THE EDITORS (The New York Times)
In 2002, Norway enacted a law requiring that 40 percent of all board members at state-owned and publicly listed companies be women by 2008.

Since then, Spain and the Netherlands have passed similar laws. Now Belgium, Britain, Germany, France and Sweden are considering legislative measures involving female quotas. And although Germany is also debating such a law, Deutsche Telekom, which is based in Bonn, announced last week that it would voluntarily introduce a quota aiming to fill 30 percent of upper and middle management jobs with women by the end of 2015.

Do quotas work? Would they work in the U.S.? Does the U.S. need them?  Viewpoints by:

Marit Hoel, Center for Corporate Diversity, Oslo
Amy Dittmar, University of Michigan
Peter Baldwin, author, “The Narcissism of Minor Differences”
Sharon Meers, former managing director at Goldman Sachs
Linda Hirshman, author, “Get to Work”

The More Things Seem to Change, the More They Stay the Same...

...don't you think it's strange.  Girl, put your records on, play me your favorite song, your gonna find yourself someday...  Corinne Bailey Rae

I assume in honor of International Women's Day a week or two ago, there have been several articles cropping up recently about women - both ancient and modern. I know I run the risk of each of these articles not getting the attention each deserves by grouping them together this evening - but these two seem to fit together, so here goes:

On the streets of Alexandria, Egypt, a mob led by Peter the Lector brutally murdered Hypatia, one of the last great thinkers of ancient Alexandria.
Mary Evans Picture Library / Alamy
History & Archaeology
Hypatia, Ancient Alexandria’s Great Female Scholar
An avowed paganist in a time of religious strife, Hypatia was also one of the first women to study math, astronomy and philosophy
By Sarah Zielinski
Smithsonian.com, March 15, 2010
I will not go into detail about the horrific way that Hypatia was killed by a mob of men incited by a so-called Christian. Suffice to say that in our collective memories of her great accomplishments, she has achieved eternal life and glory.

From The New York Times
Bias Called Persistent Hurdle for Women in Sciences
By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: March 21, 2010
A report on the underrepresentation of women in science and math by the American Association of University Women, to be released Monday, found that although women have made gains, stereotypes and cultural biases still impede their success.  . . .

Five years ago, Lawrence H. Summers, then the president of Harvard, sparked a firestorm when he suggested that “there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude” reinforced by “lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.”  . . .

The association’s report acknowledges differences in male and female brains. But Ms. Hill said, “None of the research convincingly links those differences to specific skills, so we don’t know what they mean in terms of mathematical abilities.”

At the top level of math abilities, where boys are overrepresented, the report found that the gender gap is rapidly shrinking. Among mathematically precocious youth — sixth and seventh graders who score more than 700 on the math SAT — 30 years ago boys outnumbered girls 13 to 1, but only about 3 to 1 now.

“That’s not biology at play, it doesn’t change so fast,” Ms. Hill said. “Even if there are biological factors in boys outnumbering girls, they’re clearly not the whole story. There’s a real danger in assuming that innate differences are important in determining who will succeed, so we looked at the cultural factors, to see what evidence there is on the nurture side of nature or nurture.”

The report found ample evidence of continuing cultural bias. . . .

More tomorrow night.  Right now, I've got to put my records on and do some serious boogeying for aerobic fitness, muscle toning and (hopefully) weight loss.  Found two new favorites to add to my mix:  Praful ("Sigh") and Spencer Day ("You'll Come Back to Me").

Haitian Women Become Targets of Hatian Male Thieves and Rapists

It never changes, does it.  Women and children - always the ultimate victims of male avarice and perversion.

AP Report at Yahoo News
Haitian women become crime targets after quake
By PAISLEY DODDS, Associated Press Writer Paisley Dodds, Associated Press Writer – 2 hrs 11 mins ago
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Bernice Chamblain keeps a machete under her frayed mattress to ward off sexual predators and one leg wrapped around a bag of rice to stop nighttime thieves from stealing her daughters' food.

She's barely slept since Haiti's catastrophic earthquake Jan. 12 forced her and other homeless women and children into tent camps, where they are easy targets for gangs of men.

Women have always had it bad in Haiti. Now things are worse.

"I try not to sleep," says Chamblain, 22, who lost her father and now lives in a squalid camp with her mother and aunts near the Port-au-Prince airport. "Some of the men who escaped from prison are coming around to the camps and causing problems for the women. We're all scared but what can we do? Many of our husbands, boyfriends and fathers are dead."

Reports of attacks are increasing: Women are robbed of coupons needed to obtain food at distribution points. Others relay rumors of rape and sexual intimidation at the outdoor camps, now home to more than a half million earthquake victims.

A curtain of darkness drops on most of the encampments at night. Only flickering candles or the glow of cell phones provide light. Families huddle under plastic tarps because there aren't enough tents. With no showers and scant sanitation, men often lurk around places where women or young girls bathe out of buckets. Clusters of teenage girls sleep in the open streets while others wander the camps alone.

The government's communications minister, Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue, recently acknowledged the vulnerability of women and children but said the government was pressed to prioritize food, shelter and debris removal.

Aid groups offer special shelters for women and provide women-only food distribution points to deter men from bullying them. But challenges are rife more than three weeks after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake killed an estimated 200,000 people and left as many as 3 million in need of food, shelter and medicine.

Women who lined up for food before dawn Saturday said they were attacked by knife-wielding men who stole their coupons.

"At 4 a.m. we were coming and a group of men came out from an alley," said Paquet Marly, 28, who was waiting for rice to feed her two daughters, mother and extended family. "They came out with knives and said, 'Give me your coupons.' We were obliged to give them. Now we have nothing — no coupons and no food."

Aid organizations set up women-only distribution schemes because they trust the primary caregivers to get that food to extended family, not resell it.

"We've targeted the women because we think it's the best way to get to families," said Jacques Montouroy, a Catholic Relief Services worker helping out Saturday. "In other distributions when we've opened it up to men, we found that only half of the men would do what they were supposed to with the food."

Soldiers from the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, guard many of the streets around the distribution points, but they can't be everywhere all the time.

Aid workers say they've been staging elaborate decoy operations to draw men to one area while food coupons are given to women in another. Each of the 16 daily distributions throughout Port-au-Prince presents its own security challenges, Montouroy said.

"The coupon distribution has been hellish," he said, explaining how crowds of men swarm around the women.

Even if the women successfully make it back to the camps with their 55-pound (25-kilogram) bags of rice, that doesn't mean their worries are over. Some camps are even providing special protection for women, with tents where they can receive trauma counseling or be alone to breast-feed and care for young children.

"My sister died in the earthquake, so now I have to take care of my three daughters and my sister's two," said Magda Cayo, 42. "I try to keep them close but I see lots of hoodlums looking at them. We're all nervous. It's no good."

Women have long been second-class citizens in Haiti.

According to the United Nations, the Haitian Constitution does not specifically prohibit sexual discrimination. Under Haitian law, the minimum legal age for marriage is 15 years for women and 18 years for men, and early marriage is common. A 2004 U.N. report estimated 19 percent of girls between the ages of 15 and 19 were married, divorced or widowed.

Rape was only made a criminal offense in Haiti in 2005.

In the months after a violent uprising ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004, thousands of women were raped or sexually abused, the British medical journal Lancet reported. The coup set off a bloody wave of clashes among Haiti's national police, pro- and anti-Aristide gangs, U.N. peacekeepers and rebels.

Because so many police stations and government offices were destroyed in the earthquake, some women may have no place to go to report assaults, according to Melanie Brooks of CARE, which is working to protect women while providing disaster relief.

She said women recovering from quake-related injuries are even more vulnerable because many are not mobile. An additional threat is HIV; Haiti has the highest infection rate in the Caribbean.

"The women whom we've talked to tell stories of rape, assaults or men following them around when they're bathing," Brooks said. "These stories are becoming the new bogeymen now. Everyone is looking over their shoulder."

Before the earthquake, the government set up a panel to look at ways of empowering Haitian women. But the Women's Ministry was among the government buildings destroyed.

Three Haitian women working on important judiciary reforms to protect women against sexual violence — Myriam Merlet, Anne Marie Coriolan and Magalie Marcelin — died in the earthquake. Many view their deaths as setbacks for all Haitian women.

As women lined up for food at the National Palace on Saturday, U.S. soldiers kept the men behind a cordon.

"It's discrimination!" said Thomas Louis, 40. "We've all lost mothers, sisters, wives. Without women we can't get coupons. They're treating men like we are animals."

Ladies, Ladies!

The ladies are in the news. Thanks, Isis, for the heads-up on the Joan of Arc and English 'queen' articles. Germany is finally moving into the 20th century (oops! It's already the 21st century - oh well, Germany will catch up, eventually...) From The New York Times (January 19, 2010): In Germany, a Tradition Falls, and Women Rise Joan of Arc Relics Proved Fake (well -duh!) From Discovery News (January 20, 2010): Joan of Arc 'Relics' Confirmed to Be Fake How did the bones of two ancient Egyptian mummies -- one human, the other feline -- end up in a bottle that supposedly contained the remains of Joan of Arc? The remains of one of the early ladies of the 'English' royal family (Queen Eadgyth, pronounced Edith) may have been discovered in a cathedral in Germany- she was shipped out and married off at an early age, probably to some fat old dude with really bad halitosis who farted, had rotting stubs of teeth and had warts. Eeeeuuuuuwwwww... She died at 36, probably thanking Goddess for 'taking' her so early. From BBC News (January 20, 2010): Early queen's skeleton 'found in German cathedral' Remains of one of the earliest members of the English royal family may have been unearthed in a German cathedral, a Bristol University research team says.

Boo Hoo for the Lost Boys - NOT!

Blatant sexual discrimination in favor of male admissions to college because - get this - it's patriotic! From the online edition of The Wall Street Journal/Opinion NOVEMBER 5, 2009, 10:47 P.M. ET The Lost Boys By RICHARD WHITMIRE This week, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights announced that it will investigate whether colleges discriminate against women by admitting less qualified men. It will strike many as odd to think that American men would need such a leg up. From the men-only basketball games at the White House to the testosterone club on Wall Street, we seem surrounded by male dominance. And yet, when looking to America's future—trying to spot the future entrepreneurs and inventors—there's reason to be troubled by the flagging academic performance among men. Nearly 58% of all those earning bachelor's degrees are women. Graduate programs are headed in the same direction, and the gender gaps at community colleges—where 62% of those earning two-year degrees are female—are even wider. Economists at both the Department of Education and the College Board agree that, to ensure high future earnings, men and women have an equal need for college degrees, and yet only women are getting that message. The numbers are startling. This summer the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University published the results of a study tracking the students who graduated from Boston Public Schools in 2007. Their conclusion: For every 167 females in four-year colleges, there were 100 males. In theory, the surge in the number of educated women should make up for male shortcomings when we're looking at the overall prospects for the economy. But men and women are not the same. At the same levels of education, women remain less inclined to roll the dice on risky business start-ups or to grind out careers in isolated tech labs. Revenue generated by women-owned businesses remains less than 5% of all revenue. And while the number of women taking on economically important majors is rising, women still earn only a fifth of the bachelor's degrees granted in physics, computer science and engineering. Why males don't seem to "get" the importance of a college education is a mystery, especially considering the current collapse of jobs that traditionally don't require post-high-school study. (Even "cash for clunkers" isn't going to mark the return of car companies as a major employer of uneducated men.) And who could miss the message of the recession, where as many as 80% of the workers laid off have been male? Too many boys arrive at their senior year of high school lacking both the skills and aspirations that would get them into, and through, college. At a typical state university, a gender gap of 10 percentage points in the freshman class grows by five points by graduation day, as more men than women drop out. All this explains why colleges have been putting a thumb on the scale to favor men in admissions. There just aren't enough highly qualified men to go around. Determining that colleges practice discrimination doesn't take much detective work. Higher acceptance rates for men show that colleges dig deeper into their applicant pool to find them. The final proof: Freshman class profiles reveal that the women, with their far higher high-school grade point averages, are more academically qualified than the men. Interviews with admissions officers reveal that the girls' essays sparkle compared to the boys', and girls far outshine boys in extracurricular activities as well. The Commission on Civil Rights cited an example written about in U.S. News & World Report in 2007: Virginia's University of Richmond was maintaining its rough gender parity in men and women only by accepting women at a rate 13 percentage points lower than the men. It would be patriotic to report that this discrimination against women is carried out in the national economic interest of boosting graduates in key math and science fields. But, in truth, it's really a social consideration. Colleges simply want to avoid approaching the dreaded 60-40 female-male ratio. At that point, men start to take advantage of their scarcity and make social life miserable for the women by becoming "players" on the dating scene. The case to abolish male gender preferences is problematic. Most of those male preferences are granted by private colleges, which consider themselves on solid legal ground. (Some public colleges and universities also grant those preferences at considerable legal risk, an indication of the depth of the fear about broaching that 60-40 threshold.) In truth, these gender preferences are a sideshow. The real issue is the flagging academic interest among boys, a phenomenon that dates back only about two decades. It's a new issue to most Americans but hotly debated in countries such as England. So far, nobody has solved the boy mystery, but some countries are years ahead of the U.S. Australia has had some success with literacy-boosting programs for young boys. Until the code gets cracked, there's a national economic interest in keeping those preferences in place—just for a few more years.— Mr. Whitmire is the author of the forthcoming book "Why Boys Fail." Hey Mr. Whitmire - here's a hint - if you want to change the boys, change the culture that allows them to be lazy self-absorbed wimps or gansta wannabes. If they don't want to be tomorrow's engineers and physicists and chemists, train up the females to do the work. It CAN be done by - you guess it - changing the underlying cultural mores and expectations for females. Mr. Whitmire's thinking is soooooo 19th century, just as is the American male expectation that they should earn a living wage without having to actually acquire any skills and knowledge to get ahead in this 21st century world we are now, actually, living in. Ha!

A Woman's World

A series by The Washington Post: The Struggle for Equality from Around the World Here are just a few of the stories: In Togo, a 10-Year-Old's Muted Cry: 'I Couldn't Take Any More' As the Global Trade in Domestic Workers Surges, Millions of Young Girls Face Exploitation and Abuse By Kevin Sullivan. Washington Post Foreign Service Friday, December 26, 2008; Page A01 'This Is the Destiny of Girls' Across Much of South Asia, a Daughter's Life Is Circumscribed By Tradition and Poverty. But for Some, the Dreams Die Slower. By Mary Jordan Saturday, December 13, 2008; Page A01

Israeli Newspaper Edits Out Women Cabinet Members

Story from Middle East Online First Published 2009-04-05, Last Updated 2009-04-06 08:31:23 Image from the story: top photo is the "before", bottom photo is "after" editing to remove the two women. Israeli newspapers edit out women in Cabinet photo Newspapers aimed at ultra-Orthodox Jewish readers tamper with inaugural photograph of Israeli Cabinet. JERUSALEM – Two women serve in Israel's new Cabinet, but some Israelis would rather not see them. Newspapers aimed at ultra-Orthodox Jewish readers tampered with the inaugural photograph of the Cabinet, erasing ministers Limor Livnat and Sofa Landver. Ultra-Orthodox newspapers consider it immodest to print images of women. The daily Yated Neeman digitally changed the photo, moving two male ministers into the places formerly occupied by the women. The weekly Shaa Tova simply blacked the women out, in a photo reprinted Friday by the mainstream daily Maariv. No response was available from the two papers. During the election, campaign posters featuring female candidate Tzipi Livni were defaced near ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods. (AP)

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Absolutely disgusting. This is no different than the treatment of females by the Taliban. They worship the same god, just by a different name. The denigration of women by both sects is the same. We won't see this on the 6 PM news in the states, and that's disgusting, too. Why can't we see the truth of radicalism on both sides of the equation in the Middle East on prime time news coverage in the USA? This treatment of women is TOTALLY ABHORRENT to the norms of a modern secular society.

By Invitation Only

There are hundreds of thousands of blogs on the internet these days - pick a subject, you'll find a blog. How to narrow down what's worth reading? Frankly, I've no idea, darlings! What is one woman's garbage is another woman's treasure until the next rummage sale, as the saying goes... I happened across this blog by accident ("there is no such thing as coincidence...") The subject is one I find absolutely fascinating since, by inference, it touches on the subject of, as it is so often incorrectly framed - why can't women play chess as good as men? How the question is framed and thus, defining the focus of the research, is a topic that deserves it own blog! Change the perameters of the question and the focus of the research changes entirely - that takes me back to one of my favorite true stories about scientific research. But that's another topic :) After reading a blog entry at Twisted Physics, I framed the "topic" this way: how to define a paradigm (social, political, scientific, whatever) and just about anything else by using the power to exclude and omit. Think about it: when it comes right down to it, he who has the power to define the question controls what the ultimate answer will be. Please read By Invitation Only.