Gender Discrimination Suit Against Bloomberg LP Grows

The number of plaintiffs in a gender discrimination suit filed against Bloomberg LP grew last week from 58 to 72. According to New York Magazine, one in seven female employees who became pregnant in the last six years are now plantiffs in the lawsuit brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against Bloomberg LP last fall.

According to the Associated Press , the EEOC claims Bloomberg LP discriminated against women after they disclosed their pregnancies by regularly demoting them, reducing their professional duties, and, according to Reuters, replacing them with "junior" male employees.

http://www.feminist.org/news/newsbyte/uswirestory.asp?id=11295

Punishment in schools and racism

DALLAS – More than 200,000 US public school students were punished by beatings during the 2006-2007 school year, Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union said in a joint report released today. In the 13 states that corporally punished more than 1,000 students per year, African-American girls were twice as likely to be beaten as their white counterparts.

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Sexism in Today's Media

Fertile women 'have sexier voice'

A woman's voice becomes more alluring when she is at her most fertile, according to US research.
Recordings of women taken at different points in their menstrual cycle were played to people of both sexes.
New Scientist magazine reports that the voices rated as most attractive belonged to women at peak fertility.

BBC story

Study Shows Comprehensive Sex Education Reduces Teen Pregnancy

A new study by researchers at the University of Washington found that students who receive comprehensive sex education are half as likely to become teen parents as those who receive abstinence-only sex education. According to the Seattle Times, this study marks the first time researchers have compared comprehensive sex education and abstinence-only education in a national sample of teenagers.

Read the Feminist DDaily News story.

For the "our culture of rape" files

'Torture Porn' Makers Shrug Off the Label


As "torture porn" movies deepen their imaginative excursions into terror and violence against women, some of their creators are not only defending themselves from attacks by women's activists, they're calling their work feminist.

(WOMENSENEWS)--When the movie "Hostel" raked in $19 million on its debut weekend and gripped the No. 1 spot for a week in 2005, some critics heralded the comeback of horror, which had been in a box office slump for a decade.

From, Women's News

The Women's Body Image Quiz

Quarter of U.S. women suffer domestic violence

WASHINGTON - About a quarter of U.S. women suffer domestic violence, U.S. health officials reported on Thursday, with ongoing health problems that one activist likened to the effects of living in a war zone.

Some men also experience domestic violence, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey found.

The CDC said 23.6 percent of women and 11.5 percent of men reported being a victim of what it called "intimate partner violence" at some time in their lives.

The CDC defined this as threatened, attempted or completed physical or sexual violence or emotional abuse by a spouse, former spouse, current or former boyfriend or girlfriend or a dating partner. The CDC estimates that 1,200 women are killed and 2 million injured in domestic violence annually.

Read the rest of this Reuters report.

Original CDC Report

Gender Gap

The World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report

The US's standing.

Hillary's challenge

Tom Toles
Female leaders face a double standard. Typical leader behavior is seen as extreme (as compared to male leaders) because the behavior deviates from the feminine gender role expectations. Any small amount of feminine gender role congruent behavior is seen as hyper-feminine as compared to the scheme for a leader's behavior.

Gloria Steinem on the Iowa Cacuses

Women Are Never Front-Runners
By GLORIA STEINEM
Published: January 8, 2008
Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House.

Are We Teaching Our Kids To Be Fearful of Men?

When children get lost in a mall, they're supposed to find a "low-risk adult" to help them. Guidelines issued by police departments and child-safety groups often encourage them to look for "a pregnant woman," "a mother pushing a stroller" or "a grandmother."
The implied message: Men, even dads pushing strollers, are "high-risk."

Cosmopolitan magazine: Gray Rape

According to the article 'hook up' culture and women's new sexual 'aggression' has created a new kind of rape -- 'gray rape' -- "a kind of sex that falls somewhere between consent and denial."

"It seems the author completely made up the term. None of the 'experts' cited use it. There is no clinical or even criminal justice term called, 'gray rape.' If this term gets popularized, particularly by the same political segment that attacked the documentation of acquaintance rape in the eighties, victims will be even less likely to come forward or seek help. "

I've often heard this from writers at Cosmopolitan, that they are given conclusions to articles by the editors and told to go out and write a story to support it. Why? Making people afraid sells magazines.

New study finds problems with Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Programs

A Congressional inquiry released in December of 2004 found that over 80% of the abstinence-only-until-marriage curricula used by over two-thirds of federal grantees in 2003, contain false, misleading, or distorted information about reproductive health," said Bill Smith, vice president for public policy at the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS). "It is unacceptable that the federal government continues to dump millions of taxpayer dollars into abstinence-only-until-marriage programs that contain false and misleading information, censor critical sexual health information, and contain scientific errors," Smith continued.

Police Families prone to violence

Two studies have found that at least 40% of police officer families experience domestic violence, in contrast to 10% of families in the general population

1 in 5 high school girls victimized by dates

One in five high school girls has been physically or sexually abused by a dating partner, significantly increasing their risk of drug abuse, suicide and other harmful behavior, a study suggests.
The research published in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association stems from surveys of 4,163 public school students in Massachusetts, but the authors say the results likely apply to teens nationwide.
According to estimates from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 22% of high school students are victims of nonsexual dating violence, with girls slightly more likely to report being victims.

Feminine guys better for long-term love

Women see masculine-looking men as more unsuitable long-term partners but men with more feminine features are seen as more committed and less likely to stray, researchers said Wednesday.

Seeking 'thinspiration'

Pro-anorexia websites offering tips on extreme dieting are nothing new, but their growth on social networking sites is a disturbing new twist and brings them within reach of a wider audience.

Family-Leave Values

Do workers have a fundamental right to care for theirfamilies? The latest front in the job-discrimination battle.

Gender differences on the job: asking for more

About 10 years ago, a group of graduate students lodged a complaint with Linda C. Babcock, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University: All their male counterparts in the university's PhD program were teaching courses on their own, whereas the women were working only as teaching assistants.

That mattered, because doctoral students who teach their own classes get more experience and look better prepared when it comes time to go on the job market.
When Babcock took the complaint to her boss, she learned there was a very simple explanation: "The dean said each of the guys had come to him and said, 'I want to teach a course,' and none of the women had done that," she said. "The female students had expected someone to send around an e-mail saying, 'Who wants to teach?' "

----and----

Although it may well be true that women often hurt themselves by not trying to negotiate, this study found that women's reluctance was based on an entirely reasonable and accurate view of how they were likely to be treated if they did. Both men and women were more likely to subtly penalize women who asked for more -- the perception was that women who asked for more were "less nice".

Read the rest of the Washington Post article.