girls

The past few weeks have been particularly discouraging for anyone who follows politics and believes in reasoned discourse. Hoping the local news here in town might be more to my liking, I sat down to read The Wellesley Townsman for the first time in months.  The International Day of the Girl was coming up on the 11^th of October; maybe there’d be interesting coverage of girls in the area. There was.  But whether the front-page story on the girls’ softball team was encouraging or not remains a dilemma.

The headline read, “A Level Playing Field”, followed by the subhead, “Sixth grader’s frustrated letter lands her in influential company.”  The story went on to recount how, as a fifth grader, Emily Willrich had written to the Townsman about her frustrations with the differences between town sports’ opportunities for girls and boys. There were excellent facilities available to the boys’ baseball team–a well maintained field complete with brick dugouts, night-lights, a scoreboard, and even an announcer. The girls’ softball team was relegated to a scruffy field where the lights didn’t work and at times umpires never showed up.  Emily’s letter reached the President of nearby Simmons College, who invited her to be a special guest at a college=sponsored event, “How Women Become Political”. Emily, now in sixth grade, had a chance to meet and talk with Gloria Steinem and several prominent female politicians, including Massachusetts’ gubernatorial candidate, Martha Coakley.

My first reaction was, “Wow, what a great example of  feminist progress and ‘girl power!”   Forty years ago girls weren’t allowed to play Little League, and there certainly weren’t  any town wide girls’ softball teams when I was growing up in Mystic, Connecticut.  The closest I managed to get to a town playing field was as the semi-official score keeper for the boys’ baseball team my father coached.  I learned to be a baseball watcher, not a baseball player. ‘Everyone knew’ sports were more important for boys.

Reading the article a second time, I questioned my initial response. A 5^th grader had to raise the issue?  In the second decade of the 21^st century?  Where were the adults?  What about Title IX and the guarantee of equality?  But Title IX covers only programs sponsored by educational institutions receiving federal funds. It doesn’t address town teams.  Maybe my delight was misplaced, maybe being appalled was more on target.  A young girl challenging unfairness with confidence is wonderful; it might not have happened in the years before feminism’s empowering messages took hold. But old gendered assumptions remaining so deeply embedded that no one in this upscale  town seemed concerned about the inequitable sports facilities  is, indeed, appalling.  The news story presented the proverbial half-full/half-empty glass: ‘how far we’ve come; but how far we have to go’.

The Townsmen article concluded by reporting that Emily’s mother didn’t know if her daughter’s passion for fairness might lead to a career in politics. “We’re excited to find out. Nothing she does would surprise us.”

I, for one, hope Emily will pour at least some of her passion into politics. We need her. These discouraging weeks of Congressional malfunction have highlighted the critical importance of women in political office, not simply for women, but for the entire nation.  Women in the U.S. Senate have authored most of the major bills passed this session.  Female Senators are credited with the initial steps resulting in the compromise that has finally reopened the government.  Women are consistently more bipartisan than their male counterparts in their approach to legislation.  And studies repeatedly indicate that women—regardless of their political affiliation–tend to sponsor and vote for laws that support families in larger percentages than do their male colleagues.

So, we come to another half-full/ half-empty dilemma. Currently only 20 of the 100 members of the U.S. Senate are women–an all time high. As far as progress for women and girls goes, it will be a long  time before we can discard the metaphor of  the half-full/ half-empty glass . Personally, I prefer the energizing half-full perspective; but I never forget the empty half of the glass. It’s a constant reminder of  work unfinished.

With this coming Tuesday marking the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I’m inspired to post this month’s column early.

I encourage readers to check out the work of ANSIRH (Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health), a UCSF research program “dedicated to ensuring that reproductive health care and policy are grounded in evidence.” So, rather than cover the breadth of political and social dynamics related to abortion policies, I’m focusing on one specific new study which has important implications for protecting women’s health:

A newly published landmark study by ANSIRH demonstrates that trained nurse practitioners, certified nurse midwives, and physician assistants match physicians in the safety of aspiration abortions they provide. We hope that these results will give policymakers the evidence they need to move beyond physician-only restrictions in order to enable more women to have their reproductive health care needs met in their local communities by health care providers they know and trust.

The results of this study are significant because PAs, NPs and CNMs have been shown to be important and accessible health care providers for rural and low-income women. ANSIRH’s new findings support policies which would reduce health care disparities and increase continuity of care because a larger group of health care providers would be able to offer early abortion care. For more on this topic, read the latest post by Tracy Weitz, Director of ANSIRH.  This research should inform health policy across the U.S.

For more on the realities of abortion in the U.S., watch Abortion in the United States, a short video from the Guttmacher Institute.

Talk about irony: the same week that Rock Center with Brian Williams aired a story about a growing “concussion crisis” in girls’ soccer, I also got the curriculum for my 11-year-old daughter Maya’s soccer practice: “Heading (attacking and defensive situations, being brave).”

I definitely watched the Rock Center story with concern. Research shows that girls report twice as many concussions as boys in sports they both play.

The report aired Wednesday, and Maya practiced heading on Thursday. On Sunday we sat on the sidelines watching Maya’s team face off against a northern New Jersey opponent. The girls fought to control the ball, with neither team clearly dominating.

Then, as if in slow motion, I watched the ball sail through the air toward Maya at midfield. She stepped into the ball, leaned forward, and headed it toward the goal. Of course, she was fine. I’m sure she felt pleased with herself for putting the new technique into play in a game situation. To be honest, I was pleased myself, although anxious at the same time.

And here are the questions I’ve been turning over since the game: is this “crisis” one that should change the game of youth soccer for girls? Should heading be banned? One expert in the Rock Center story, Bob Cantu, the director of sports medicine at Emerson Hospital in Concord, MA suggests that it should, because “girls as a group have far weaker necks.”

Naturally I take concussions seriously and would not want to do anything that could jeopardize Maya’s health. But I’m not sure I buy this so-called crisis.  For one thing, the research draws on data from high school athletes.  How much can we generalize from that population to the nearly 1.5 million girls who play youth soccer in the US every year?

What’s more, is this thinking about girls’ weakness that much different from earlier arguments suggesting women shouldn’t be educated because our brains are smaller than men’s? Or that women shouldn’t walk alone at night because we face the threat of rape?

It seems to me that ideas about “protection” are often a guise for social constraints on women and girls.  What athletic opportunities would we curtail in the name of “safety” for girls?

For now, at least, I want Maya to practice “being brave,” and if that means heading the ball, I’ll be cheering her on.

But GWP readers, what do you think? How do you think about “risk” and “safety” for your daughters or sons?

Thanks to University of Wisconsin – Madison researchers for another study that says girls can do math!

We’ve been here before. I’m not blaming them. This research needed to be done. I wish it didn’t. But it does. This study does not only address if girls can do math or not, but it also addresses the frequent “solution” to helping girls do well in math and science — single-gender education.

From the conclusions of the paper:

[W]e conclude that gender equity and other sociocultural factors, not national income, school type, or religion per se, are the primary determinants of mathematics performance at all levels for both boys and girls. Our findings are consistent with the gender stratified hypothesis, but not with the greater male variability, gap due to inequity, single-gender classroom, or Muslim culture hypotheses.

In other words, the gap we see between girls and boys math ability is due to society and culture. “[T]hese major international studies strongly suggest that the maths gender gap, where it occurs, is due to cultural factors that differ among countries – and that these factors can be changed.”

It is not due to some mystery math gene on the Y-chromosome (greater male variability), not due to more boys having access to math classes (inequity), not due to separating boys from girls nor is it due to some mystery about Muslim culture. The last one is the most odd theory some people cling in order to not see that gender equity in society has an effect on girls and math performance. It was in Freakanomics. Essentially it goes like this: Since girls in Muslim societies have little equity, but they do awesome in math, feminism/gender equity has nothing to do with girls doing math.

‘The girls living in some Middle Eastern countries, such as Bahrain and Oman, had, in fact, not scored very well, but their boys had scored even worse, a result found to be unrelated to either Muslim culture or schooling in single-gender classrooms,’ says Kane.

He suggests that Bahraini boys may have low average math scores because some attend religious schools whose curricula include little mathematics.

Also, some low-performing girls drop out of school, making the tested sample unrepresentative of the whole population. [cite]

The Muslim society theory depends on the strength of single-gender classroom theory. Kane and Mertz also debunks this beloved theory on how to combat the lack of girls in math and science. Other studies have tried to debunk the single-gender classroom/school theory by pointing out that most single-gender schools have smaller classrooms. I only say “try” because some people have ignored them.

Last month my office co-sponsored a Girls and Computer Science Day for high school girls. During the lunch Q&A panel where some of our undergraduate and graduate women in CS talked about how awesome our CS department is, I chimed in. I told the girls that our quest to see more girls in CS is not merely a pro-girl movement, rather it is a movement to ensure that we have as many heads at that table as possible when solving problems our world is facing. I don’t do my job just to get girls and women into science and engineering to get the numbers up. Rather women and girls add something to the process of how science and engineering is done. It is not that women do better science, but with women at the table, science is better. Kane and Mertz sum it up pretty well in their concluding remarks:

Eliminating gender discrimination in pay and employment opportunities could be part of a win-win formula for producing an adequate supply of future workers with high-level competence in mathematics. Wealthy countries that fail to provide gender equity in employment are at risk of producing too few citizens of either gender with the skills necessary to compete successfully in a knowledge-based economy driven by science and technology.

Now that we’ve settled these questions, let’s get back in the lab and get some science done, shall we?

“Mom, I think I’d like to be a photographer,” my 10-year-old daughter, Maya, said recently.

“That would be very cool.”  Inside, I found myself thinking: I hope you can earn a living doing that.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m a believer in the arts.  I sang in a high school show choir before Glee made that seem cool.  I worked backstage on all of my high school’s plays and minored in theatre at Muskingum College just because I loved it.

In fact, maybe because I know I have a bias toward the arts and humanities, I worry about how to correct for that.  I also know very well the barriers women face in entering the male-dominated—and lucrative—STEM fields.  I love sharing blog space with Science Grrl, Veronica Arreola, and I definitely gain insights from her posts.  I want to try to expose Maya to those potential career paths, too.

But the National Women’s Studies Association’s annual conference in Atlanta, Georgia last week gave me a new way to think about the transformative potential of the arts.

I listed to Lisa Yun Lee, the director of the Jane Addams Hull House museum, talk about why she makes efforts to support the arts with her programs.  She explained that her immigrant mother—who she knew as an accountant—had wanted to be a poet, a calling she gave up when she came to the United States.

I attended Ashley Lucas’s moving one-woman show, Doin’ Time Through the Visiting Glass, which examines the impact of incarceration on families.  Before the performance I admit I had given little thought to how prison shapes and binds those on the outside.

Lee’s remarks about her mother and Lucas’s performance reminded me that I want Maya to pursue her passions, wherever they take her.  I want her to be the photographer—or the poet—who can realize her vision and possibly make art that makes change.

I respect that some of you are anti-vaccines–or just anti-Gardasil—but I hope that some Girl with Pen readers will join me in cheering what I consider a better-late-than-never decision by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. It has officially recommended that boys and men ages 13-to-21 be vaccinated against the sexually transmitted disease HPV (human papillomavirus) to protect from anal and throat cancers.

There are many reasons this makes good sense. As I wrote in the Winter 2010 issue of Ms., there’s overwhelming evidence that HPV can lead to deadly oral, anal and penile cancers–all of which affect men and all of which are collectively responsible for twice as many deaths in the U.S. each year as cervical cancer. However, vaccines are a touchy topic, and I want to be clear that I’m not advocating in favor of or against anyone’s decision to get an HPV vaccination. I do strongly advocate for boys and girls, men and women, to have equal access to Gardasil and any other FDA-approved vaccine. Private insurers are required to cover HPV vaccines for girls and young women with no co-pay under the 2010 health reform legislation, and with this decision, that coverage requirement will extend to boys and young men, effective one year after the date of the recommendation. And, whether or not you or your loved ones get vaccinated against HPV, we will all benefit from more vaccinations, considering the extent of this sexually transmitted epidemic/pandemic, which affects as many as 75 percent of adult Americans and can be spread by skin-to-skin genital or oral contact (yes, that includes “French kissing”).

However, the media coverage of the recommendation includes a line of reasoning that I, as a sexual health educator and researcher, find offensive, ignorant, and inaccurate. The New York Times wrote: “Many of the cancers in men result from homosexual sex.” Really? What counts as “homosexual sex”? Most public health experts and HIV/AIDS researchers view “homosexuality” primarily as a sexual orientation, sometimes as a social or political identity, but not as a type of intercourse. Anyone who studies U.S. sexual norms knows that oral sex and anal sex–the behaviors cited as increasing risks of HPV-related oral and anal cancers–are not restricted to men who have sex with men. In fact, the NYT article itself asserts, “A growing body of evidence suggests that HPV also causes throat cancers in men and women as a result of oral sex” –so you don’t have to identify as a “homosexual” man to be at risk; you don’t even have to be a man.

Nevertheless, the New York Times goes on to muse that “vaccinating homosexual boys would be far more cost effective than vaccinating all boys, since the burden of disease is far higher in homosexuals.” Thankfully, the author also thought to check this idea with a member of the CDC committee, who seemed to grasp the ethical and practical challenges of making a recommendation based on a boy’s or man’s “homosexuality.” Kristen R. Ehresmann, Minnesota Department of Health and ACIP member, is quoted as cautioning, “But it’s not necessarily effective or perhaps even appropriate to be making those determinations at the 11- to 12-year-old age.”

Still stuck on the question of sexual orientation, that NYT author seeks to console potentially “uncomfortable” parents of boys by reassuring them that “vaccinating boys will also benefit female partners since cervical cancer in women results mostly from vaginal sex with infected males.” So, is the message, if you don’t want to imagine your son having oral or anal sex with a male partner, then you can focus on the public health service you are providing for girls and women who have male partners?

Instead of contributing to a homophobic panic, I thought it might be helpful to field a few frequently-asked-questions:

Q: Do you have to have a cervix to benefit from the “cervical cancer” vaccine? A: No. Despite its early branding, Gardasil has always been an HPV vaccine. Physiologically speaking, boys and men could have been benefiting from the vaccine since its initial FDA approval.

Q: Why are they recommending vaccinations for girls and boys as young as 11? A: Vaccines only work if given before contact with the virus. Reliable data on age of first “French” kiss is not available, but recent surveys show that about 25 percent of girls and boys in the U.S. have had penile-vaginal intercourse before their 15th birthdays.

Q: Are you too old to benefit? A: If you have not yet been exposed to all four of the HPV strains covered by Gardasil, then you can still gain protection. The more challenging question is: How would you know? The only ways to test for HPV (and then HPV type) is by tissue samples being sent to a lab. Most HPV infections are asymptomatic.

Q: What’s the risk of not getting vaccinated? A: We know that U.S. cervical cancer rates have dramatically decreased in recent decades due to improvements in screening, such as the Pap smear, and better treatment options. However, rates of HPV-related oral and anal cancers are reported to be increasing–and our screening options for these types of cancers are not as effective, affordable or accessible as those for cervical cancer.

Q: So, what can an unvaccinated person do to protect him/herself from a cancer-causing strain of HPV? A: Abstain from behaviors that can transmit the virus, such as deep/open-mouthed kissing, and use barrier methods when engaging in vaginal, anal or oral sex.

If this last answer strikes you as unreasonable, then mobilize your political energies to advocate for increased funding for HPV research. We need and deserve better ways to be tested and treated for the types of HPV that have been linked to serious and potentially fatal cancers. And, as my own research has shown, we have to get rid of the harmful stigma surrounding HPV and other sexually transmitted infections. We need to stop linking STDs to immorality. You can help by making sure your community supports medically accurate, age-appropriate sexuality education. And if you or a loved one wants more information about sexual health, then check out these free online resources.

(Originally posted on Ms. blog, cross-posted at AdinaNack.com)

It always feels awesome when something I shared on Twitter is retweeted so many times, my phone starts to chirp. That is what happened on Tuesday when I heard the news that the winners of this year’s Google Science Fair were all girls.

This year’s Google Science Fair winners are all girls! http://bit.ly/ojt2zM #stem

Comments on the retweets included “Woohoo! Get it, girls!” “This news makes me so happy,” Who runs the world…,” “That’s awesome!” and “Hooray!” Were these tweets from anti-boy feminists? Heck no! But I get asked that question, either indirectly or directly, when I cheer on a headline about girls running the table at a competition. Spelling bee, chess, science fair, mathlete, and so on.

I am sensitive to how the cheering looks. Believe me, I do. I went through a very long and deep “Girls Rule, Boys Drool” phase. It wasn’t until I was a mom and raising my daughter that I was smacked in the face with the complexity of raising a pro-girl girl without making it sound like we were being anti-boy.

I am also aware that the tide is changing. Women are going to college more then men (that’s been happening since at least the 1990s) and girls are the majority of high school valedictorians. I get it. And yes, more women are heading into science, especially the fields the girls did their experiments in (chemistry, medicine, environmental science, biochemistry). But that does not mean we can’t jump up and cheer when we see three brilliant young women win like this.

This is why. Even for someone who has a degree in biological sciences, sees the progress on a daily basis, and watches first hand young women evolve into promising researchers, the “Girls don’t do science” taunts just never seem to fully go away. For some of the women in my life who were talked out of science, told they can’t do math or all the above, headlines like this are validation that their third grade teacher was wrong, wrong, WRONG! And yes, for some of us, it is also just plain and simple celebrating that 39 years after Title IX, a mere two generations, we are witnessing what it truly an exhibit of girl power. Three young women unafraid of their brain power holding some pretty kick ass LEGO trophies.

In the end, no matter how far we have come, women and girls in science still have a long way to go until we get to not just parity in numbers, but parity in leadership roles, paid fairly and so on. Until we get to that utopia called “parity” I’ll be cheering on all our victories, large and small.

I started talking with my 8-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter about sexuality as soon as they started to ask questions like, “How are babies made?”  From my point of view, books have all the answers, and I turned to It’s So Amazing: A Book about Eggs, Sperm, Birth, Babies, and Families by Robie H. Harris and Michael Emberley as a starting point.

But recent news has me wondering how and when to initiate other, more difficult conversations about sexuality and power.

For example, my neighbor and I were talking over our 10-year-old daughters’ heads at the bus stop on Monday morning about Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund who has been arrested and charged with sexually attacking a maid.

Our conversation went like this:

Neighbor: “Did you see the news about Dominique Strauss-Kahn?”

Me: “Yes, it really does show that incidents like that are about power.”

Neighbor: “That’s for sure.”

My daughter Maya hovered nearby, sensing that we were discussing something juicy, but not entirely understanding.  She interrupted us with a question about school, and we changed the subject.

And then yesterday the news broke that Arnold Schwarzenegger fathered a child with one of his household employees.

I admit to turning the paper facedown on the kitchen table.  I would have found a way to talk about the Schwarzenegger story, of course, but I wasn’t eager to have the conversation.

As someone who jumped in early with the “sex talk,” I wonder why I’m shying away from talking about sexuality and power.  Maybe I want to protect my children from linking sexuality and violence when they still want to believe the best about people’s intentions.  After reading Veronica Arreola’s great post, “Can We Whistle Stereotypes Away?” I think I might be doing a better service to my kids if I’m honest in acknowledging that some men abuse power over women.

GWP readers, what do you think?  Is there a right time for the other sex talk?  Do you have advice about how to navigate this topic?