Archive: Nov 2008

GWP’s resident Science Grrl, Veronica Arreola, is here with a fantastic column adding to her WMC commentary on Larry Summers. Reminding us all that a much-celebrated election victory doesn’t mean our work is over, Veronica asks whether Summers is really change we can believe in. –Kristen

There’s much more not to like about Larry Summers than just one line in one speech.

First that line…It was not just a simple line, but a complex argument that was summarized into one line and then reinforced during the question and answer session and in subsequent interviews. And that was not all he said; he also ranked in order of importance three reasons why women are not well represented in science and engineering. First, he noted women’s unwillingness to work 80 hour weeks, second, their innate handicap in math, and finally, discrimination.

The first reason is important, because I believe it will soon become obsolete—it will be the straw that breaks academia’s back…MEN will quickly move into this category too. I have seen signs of Gen X men scoffing at 80 hour weeks because they want to be more than just the breadwinner. They want to know their children and enjoy their lives. Once a critical mass of men do, we’ll have more support for work/life balance. But what is flabbergasting is that Summer ranked discrimination last, privileging the idea that women are innately unable to do math as reason for our lack of representation. But the data simply does not bear out this theory.

While women hold the largest edge in biological sciences, they lose that edge by graduate school and quickly fade by faculty time. Obviously the on average 60% of biological sciences degree holders have a firm grasp on math, so what happens to them? Do they lose their math skills as they age? Doubtful. The genetic difference argument holds no water, and other factors, such as family pressures and lack of role models, give more valid insight into why women are being “lost in the pipeline” in graduate school.

Second issue: is Summers such a strong believer in the theory of the free market that he wouldn’t initiate any pro-women policies for fear of hindering the free market? That’s a question I’d like to see a Senator ask if Summers is nominated. Does welfare to single moms throw off the free market? Does it do more damage than a government bailout of the banking system? While Summers has written Financial Times columns in the past few months that show a greater role for a government hand in the economy, is this an actual rebirth, or would he still fall back on the free market policies of the Clinton years?

And lastly, yes, his past stance on the developing world is important to this debate. As I wrote in my WMC article about Summers, I voted for change and that means a change from this country using developing countries as a dumping ground.

My opposition to Larry Summers as Treasury Secretary goes beyond one line in one speech. It is the mentality and thoughts behind that one line, behind that one speech. What type of person thinks it is ok to say that women and girls can’t do math, and that he would be safe from rebuke for it? Will a man who holds these views fight for equal pay, give benefits for child care, or demand that discrimination be stamped out of the workplace?

The question: Does he or does he not believe in regulation … and if yes for financial markets, why NOT for labor markets?

~Thanks to economist Susan F. Feiner for guidance on this issue and for the last line.

–Veronica Arreola

Courtesy of our gal Rebekah at WMC again:

Potential Treasury Secretary Sheila Bair Is A “Woman To Watch” 11/10/08
Jezebel.com: Despite being the lone government employee on the list, Bair tops it not just because of her work in finance as the chair of the FDIC but because, more importantly, her name is bandied about as a black horse candidate for Treasury Secretary in an Obama Administration.

Women Seek Voice In Cabinet As Obama Team Short On Female Faces 11/10/08
Globe and Mail (Canada): The dominance of men on Obama’s transition economic advisory board begs the question: are women being overlooked?

Latinos And The Obama Cabinet 11/12/08
Washington Post: Latino political advocates, citing the importance of Latino votes in President-elect Barack Obama’s victory, are pressing him to appoint at least two and as many as four Latinos to his administration’s 20 Cabinet-level positions.

A quick tidbit to share from a recent dialogue on women’s leadership between Naomi Wolf and emotional intelligence guru Daniel Goleman, entitled “The Inner Compass for Ethics and Excellence.”

Naomi, among many other things of course, is co-founder of the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, where I’m a Fellow. During the dialogue, Naomi says something in reference to some of the young women who pass through Woodhull that may be tres a propos for GWP readers:

“Something we see a lot, is that young women come in, especially if they are highly educated, with a false voice – a false demeanor as a leader. You were talking about the visionary who speaks from the heart to the heart, but you can’t get there if you are presenting or accessing a persona that is artificial. People feel it and they are not moved. And you don’t produce as well as you could if you are putting all this energy into presenting a false front. It can be young women who have spent time in the academy, who tend to talk in an academic, stiff, jargoned way; women in the nonprofit world who tend to use abstractions; women from a male-dominated workplace, or who are surrounded by scientists in a male-dominated atmosphere, who feel like they have to repress the range of knowledge and interaction they have as women in order to be taken seriously. What’s really beautiful, is that when you bring out your highest ideals and aspirations and talents, and you send it out in the world, that’s when you are most effective. You see this amazing transformation.”

I’m thinking young men who come out of the academy and wonkland tend to speak stiffly too. But not, IMHO, Obama! Then again, he’s been said to have a “feminine” style of leadership–whatever that is.

Also from Naomi this fall is a new book: Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries. And to that I say hells yeah–we sure could use more revolutionaries of late!

(Thanks to Matt for the heads up.)

I am ridiculously thrilled to share the news that Shira Tarrant is joining the GWP team as our latest editor! Shira and I are teaming up on an evolving web project, called The Man Files, and we are “seeding” it here on GWP.

The Man Files–for now, a monthly column here–will bring together some of the most provocative thinking about feminism and masculinity on the web. Our shared aim as hostesses/editors is to continue the conversation Shira launched with Men Speak Out: Views on Gender, Sex, and Power and to foster the kind of the intergenerational conversation around the aftershocks of feminism I put out there with Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild. The Man Files column tackles a range of subjects, from sex to work to fashion to fatherhood. Our goal is to engage scholars, bloggers, and readers in a popular online forum about what it means these days to “be a man.” We got plans. Stay tuned!

If you have ideas for a guest column for The Man Files, please email me at deborah at girlwpen dot com.

And in the meantime, for anyone here in NYC, you can catch Shira reading TONIGHT at KGB Bar, along with Men Speak Out contributor Byron Hurt. The topic: Masculinity, Sex, and Hip Hop. Doesn’t get much better than that!

By the way, I’m sitting here with Shira and when I typed the title of this post Shira says to me, “Wow – that’s loaded.” Hehe.

If you’ve been subway traveling in NYC in the past year, then you may have noticed the proliferation of ads for Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs), which often feature the shadowy face of a young woman, and some text about “having more than one choice” or “if only I’d known.” We’ve heard from RH Reality Check about the misleading information spread by CPCs and their partner organizations, and Pandagon featured the story of a woman who called up a CPC, claimed that she had headaches but was not sexually active, but was still informed that she might be pregnant and should make an appointment.

Ms. Magazine adds to these damning exposes with an article in their latest issue featuring two college-aged women who went to check out the CPCs their college health centers directed them to. That bears repeating: their COLLEGE health centers. In fact, according to the article, 48% of college health centers that responded to a survey by the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance directed college students to CPCs.

What do these young women get when they’re directed the CPC way? Well first, one gets a delay, which is the last thing a woman considering pregnancy options wants. Then, upon arrival, she is handed the typical post-abortion stress fact sheets:

“Even before I found out I wasn’t pregnant, the counselor said I should abstain from sex,” says Lopez. She was given a fact sheet on “post-abortion stress” and asked to fill out a form that sought nonmedical information about her family and her religious beliefs. And then, when her urine test revealed not a pregnancy but a possible urinary tract infection, the center did not offer her any medical treatment or refer her elsewhere.

Lacking medical personnel, the goal of these centers is not to provide a woman with an array of options, but to convince her that having an abortion will be ruinous to her mental, physical, and emotional well-being. Have a history of breast cancer in the family? If you have an abortion, you’ve signed your death warrant.

While there have been campaigns against these centers and their advertisements, including legislation from Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) seeking to hold CPCs to “truth in advertising” standards, CPCs receive millions in federal grants ($60 million according to a 2006 Washington Post report), coming from taxpayer dollars, to fund their operations.

But besides the Bush administration’s long affiliation with abstinence-only education and obsession with re-opening the culture wars (on a side note, an interesting article from Frank Rich: with the defeat of three key anti-choice votes in South Dakota, Colorado, and California, has the American populace finally proved that they’re moving beyond this particular culture war?), we shouldn’t be surprised by their funding for these programs. After all, the paternalistic “protection” of a woman’s psyche, treating her as a woman-child who can’t be trusted to make these decisions on her own, has been at the forefront of reproductive legislation, appointments, and Supreme Court debates throughout the Bush administration:

1. The appointment of Dr. W. David Hager to the Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs in 2004. As The Nation wrote, Dr. Hager was the author of “Stress and the Woman’s Body and As Jesus Cared for Women, self-help tomes that interweave syrupy Christian spirituality with paternalistic advice on women’s health and relationships.”

2. The appointment of Eric Keroack as chief of family-planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services in 2006. As Susan Jacoby wrote in the Washington Post at the time, “In his view, anyone who has premarital sex is less likely to form a healthy relationship later in life because every orgasm somehow reduces a person’s capacity for deep emotional attachment. Dr. Keroack’s view of orgasm was approximately that of Gen. Jack D. Ripper in the movie Dr. Strangelove. Gen. Ripper, as you may recall, was concerned about the Russians stealing his ‘precious bodily fluids.'”

3. And finally, the most notorious and egregious example, was the ruling in Gonzales vs. Carhart, where the Supreme Court upheld the federal partial-birth abortion ban, primarily on the paternalistic claim of the Inconstant Female. As Dahlia Lithwick brilliantly argued at the time, “Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion is less about the scope of abortion regulation than an announcement of an astonishing new test: Hereinafter, on the morally and legally thorny question of abortion, the proposed rule should be weighed against the gauzy sensitivities of that iconic literary creature: the Inconstant Female.”

Ah yes, the fragile female psyche. Too weak to handle a few bad brushes with males, as the purity proponents argue, too fickle to be decisive on their own reproductive choices. We shouldn’t be surprised that CPCs have been federally funded under Bush, but we should hope that President-Elect Obama ushers in a new era where women are no longer treated as child-citizens.

–Kristen Loveland

These three researchy news items just in, courtesy CCF:

The Television Got Me Pregnant, by Tracy Clark-Flory, Salon, Nov. 4, 2008 — A new study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics. They found that, among sexually active teenagers, those who spend the most time watching racy programming like “Sex and the City” are twice as likely to become, or get a partner, pregnant. Researchers interviewed 718 sexually active teens aged 12 to 17 once a year for three years and, based on an analysis of 23 TV shows, estimated the amount of sexual content (including kissing, petting and sex) that they had been exposed to. About 12 percent of those who viewed the least amount of sexual programming became involved in a pregnancy, compared to 25 percent of those who consumed the most. A total of 58 girls got pregnant and 33 boys got a partner pregnant during the study.

Pregnancy Discrimination Complaints Jump, Especially for Women of Color, by Theresa Walsh Giarrusso, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Nov. 6, 2008 — Workplace discrimination against pregnant women is on the rise in a stunning way according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The National Partnership for Women and Families found that in 2007 working women filed 65 percent more complaints of pregnancy discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission than they had fifteen years earlier. The report also finds this new wave of discrimination affects women of color at a much higher rate than white women.

The Economics of Single Motherhood, by Kat Bergeron, Biloxi, Miss., Sun Herald, Nov. 6, 2008 — No other state has a higher rate of children born to single mothers than Mississippi, at 53.7 percent. That compares with the lowest state, Utah, at about 18 percent. Last year 46,456 Mississippi children were born, 24,939 to single mothers, and the numbers are rising. About 15 percent of those births are to teens aged 15 to 19. That is a slight drop from a decade ago but the trend is again upward, as are the rest of the unwed-mother statistics. Pete Walley, an economic analyst who studies and reports trends to state leaders, says that if Mississippi doesn’t change the numbers, it will permanently become No. 50 in income, health, education, economy, even in per capita traffic deaths.

Today we bring you Elizabeth Curtis with her monthly column, Blog U, coming to us from her newly established home on the left coast. We miss you, E! -Deborah

I hope that many of you out there are as giddy as I am about the U.S. presidential election results. I can’t pass up this opportunity to reflect on the power new media technologies had in the election this year. From building a Facebook group of 3,010,494 supporters to making important announcements via text message, the Obama campaign mobilized their (proven successful!) efforts using emergent technologies. And now that they are transitioning, the Obama team is keeping the American public updated with their very own blog.

But blogging isn’t just a powerful medium for politicians. Historically, blogs have allowed individuals to self-publish and share their message. As former FCC Chairman Michael Powell has stated, “The Blogosphere has added spice to our democracy, making it more appetizing to more people.”

Of course, some of you may still be skeptical about what blogging can accomplish and where blogging can take you personally. The personal is political and all.

I started my own blog as a part of my M.A. thesis, which focused on online social activism in the feminist blogosphere. The research I was pursuing and my own blogging connected with many great feminist bloggers – and even brought me here to GWP. While I have been more devoted to blogging at some times than others, I have maintained a constant presence in the blogosphere – and people noticed (even if I didn’t notice they noticed). When a major feminist blog showed me some link love, I was honored to know that my blog held A-list bloggers’ attention and excited that my advocacy around women’s studies status in the academy was getting more readers’ attention. As I kept blogging, I had the opportunities to share my message – by publishing a articles and presenting at conferences.

A break came when Naomi Wolf asked me if I would be interested in submitting a short essay to her new book about how average people can get civically engaged. What better platform, I thought, to use to advocate for my cause and – through such an amazing opportunity – for my career?

I know I’m not the only one out there with a personal story that proves why blogging is powerful. With 36.2 million active lady bloggers out there right now, I am sure that there many more impressive stories about why you should not give up on blogging turning into something much, much more. So, GWP readers, share your stories in the comments section – and I’ll highlight your expertise in a future full-fledged post.

And, if you’re feeling inspired and looking to gain a little next-step know-how on how to take your own blogging to the next level (or just get started!), check out ProBlogger. Or, bring Deborah to your campus, group, or organization to tell you more!.

With all the pre-election hoopla over here across the pond, I seem to have missed this gem by Alison Flood at The Guardian the other week, when she asked “Where are the books by women with big ideas?”. “Books like Freakonomics, defining significant cultural or economic trends with a punchy title, never seem to be produced by women. But why?”

The article quotes Julia Cheiffetz, blogging at publishing website HarperStudio, as saying, “It is hard to know whether women are better at telling stories than propagating ideas (I’m thinking of Susan Orlean, Mary Roach, Karen Abbott), or whether the intellectual audacity required to sell our hypotheses about the world simply isn’t in our genetic makeup.”

Ok, righto. Have at it, Penners. And for a nice critique, check out Feminocracy, who credits Flood for her observation that disparities in publishing have something to do with the gender disparities in both economics specifically and academia in general. But still…

There’s just so much post-election goodness out there in the analysis department, we’re posting links as we see them. (Thanks, Virginia, for that Katha link!) S’more:

Alice Walker’s letter to Brother Obama, at The Root

FlowTV’s Special Issue on Sarah Palin, which includes columns titled “In the Feminine Ideal, We Trust” by Janet McCabe / Manchester Metropolitan University; “Palin’s State,” by John Streamas / Washington State University; “Reading Sarah Palin,” by Bernadette Barker-Plummer / University of San Francisco; and “Sarah Palin: Castration as Plenitude,” by Nina Power / Roehampton University (Thanks to Mary Celeste Kearney for the heads up.)

Gloria Feldt at Heartfeldt Politics on Sarah Palin Clothinggate, and how the emperor has no towel (this one made my day)

And a great link round up, as always, from Ann over at feministing

Katha Pollitt has a great column about what Sarah Palin has left for us. Just as this week (“happy obama week!”) has given us heart, Katha has given us another way to see that things are looking up… and a way to understand how our talking and talking and talking about SP was good for feminism. My favorite passage addresses questions we’ve been discussing at gwp here (and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here) all fall:

So the first way Palin was good for feminism is that she helped us clarify what it isn’t: feminism doesn’t mean voting for “the woman” just because she’s female, and it doesn’t mean confusing self-injury with empowerment, like the Ellen Jamesians in The World According to Garp (I’ll vote for the forced-childbirth candidate, that’ll show Howard Dean!). It isn’t just feel-good “you go, girl” appreciation of female moxie, which I cheerfully acknowledge Palin has by the gallon. As I wrote when she was selected, if she were my neighbor I would probably like her–at least until she organized with her fellow Christians to ban abortion at the local hospital, as Palin did in the 1990s. Yes, feminism is about women getting their fair share of power, and that includes the top jobs–but that can’t take a back seat to policies that benefit all women: equality on the job and the legal framework that undergirds it, antiviolence, reproductive self-determination, healthcare, education, childcare and so on. Fortunately, women who care about equality get this–dead-enders like the comically clueless Lynn Forester de Rothschild got lots of press, but in the end Obama won the support of the vast majority of women who had supported Hillary Clinton.

Read the whole column and enjoy.

–Virginia Rutter