feminist blogs in english

This post is cross-posted with Transatlantic Sketches and Redheaded Shenanigans and co-authored by Emily and Kate Wiseman. What a revolutionary concept. And yet—I bet you would find a lot of people out there, adults and young adults alike, who instinctively disagree with the statement that “shaming teenagers about sex is a bad idea.” Think about [...]

In a scene from the most recent Twilight movie, Bella tries to convince Edward that she wants him and wants to take the next step in their relationship by having sex.  While Edward makes it clear that he definitely wants her back, he tells her that in his time, there would be a whole process before any of this could take place.  He would have wooed her, they’d hold hands, he’d get permission from her father to marry her, they’d get married, then they’d do the deed.  Bella informs him that it’s now her day in age, and that’s definitely not the way it works.  Who knew that Twilight would have such a brilliant metaphor for why abstinence-only education doesn’t work?

The problem with abstinence-only education is not so much that it wants teenagers to prolong sexual activity until they are married, but more that it’s completely out of touch with today’s modern teenager.  Suporters of ab-only education seem to believe that sex should only occur during marriage, and anything outside of that concept is morally wrong.  They suggest that comprehensive sex education that teaches students about condoms and other forms of contraception is what causes teenagers to engage in sexual behavior.  As if saying, well if kids don’t learn about condoms and contraception from their sex-ed teacher at school, then they will magically never be curious about sex or have any idea what it is.  Apparently, they’ve never turned on their TV.

The simple truth  is, teenagers are exposed to sex on a regular basis, whether their parents want to accept it or not.  It’s on TV.  It’s in music videos and song lyrics.  It’s in magazines and print ads for their favorite clothing store.  And on that little thing called the internet.  Sex is a part of our society and our culture, plain and simple.  Sexuality is part of the human condition.  And it’s complicated. (more…)

Nia A. sent in a chart from an article in the Revista Española de Cardiología about gender in medical schools in Spain. Overall, the medical field is increasingly feminized. In 2008, 73% of new medical school graduates (licenciadas en medicina) were female (note that in Spain they use commas where we would use a decimal in a number in the U.S., so 73,04 = 73.04):

It’s a significant increase, but women also earned a significant majority of medical degrees by 1998, so this isn’t a new phenomenon. Women also earned just over half (52%) of Ph.D.s in 2008 (tesis doctorales aprobadas).

When we look at faculty (docentes en la universidad, total), women are a distinct minority, making up only 20%. This varies quite a bit by position (I’m relying on Nia’s comments and Wikipedia to translate Spain’s academic ranks to the U.S. equivalent; please let me know if I’ve misunderstood a category):

• The percentage of women serving as teaching assistants (profesoras ayudantes) has gone down from 72% in 1998 to 50% in 2008 (the only area where the percentage of women decreased).
• Women make up 22% of lecturers (profesoras asociadas, who may or may not be tenured) and 9% of titulares de universidad (which I think are what we would call associate professors in the U.S.). They make up a sizable minority of contratadas doctoras, a tenured position similar to a professor (42%).
• Women made up a larger percentage of titulares de escuela universitaria (53%), a position at non-Ph.D. granting and technical colleges; however, this position was abolished in some academic restructuring in 2007. Those holding it keep their jobs, but no new hires will be made.
• However, women make up only a tiny portion (4%) of catedráticas de universidad (roughly the same as a full professor — received tenure and then met a number of other requirements for promotion). Only this group is eligible to become a rector (university president)

This pattern is widespread in universities (see our post on engineering and tech faculty), and likely due to a number of factors. There is always lag time between demographic changes in a field and changes in faculty, since unless a lot of new positions are created, potential faculty have to wait until current ones retire. All things being equal, we’d expect the % of women faculty to go up steadily over time as more female Ph.D. candidates apply for positions previously held by men. Of course, women have been earning the majority of medical degrees since before 1998, so there’s been sufficient time for gender changes in the field to affect the composition of faculty.

But all things aren’t equal in university hiring. Historically women have faced significant gender discrimination, and this continues to occur. However, a large body of evidence indicates that family/work conflicts play a huge role. Because women still, as a group, have primary responsibility for childcare, they are more likely than men to face difficulties balancing family time with work requirements, such that they are less likely to advance to tenure or promotions. They are more likely to opt out of more demanding positions — applying to be Dean, say, or accepting a position at a research-heavy university as opposed to a community college — but also find that they may be “mommy tracked” by hiring committees who assume they’ll be taking too much time out of the paid workforce to raise their kids (and often make these assumption whether or not the woman has or plans to have kids or stay home with them).

I also suspect that if the data were broken down into specialty, we’d see more women earning degrees or teaching in areas associated with women or the family (ob/gyns, for example) as opposed to more masculinized specialties, often perceived as very high-status, like neurosurgery (we see more women than men in pediatrics and ob/gyn in the U.S., for instance).

Will the percent of female med school faculty in Spain and elsewhere increase? Undoubtedly over time it will. But due to factors including those I just discussed, it’s also likely that the increase will lag significantly behind what we’d expect just based on the number of women earning medical degrees.

(View original at http://contexts.org/socimages)

Joel S. sent in a link to an article by Gonzalo Frasca at Serious Game Source about a management simulation game the U.K. branch of Intel released back in 2004. It was called The Intel IT Manager Game: The Simulation of an IT Department and was a free promotional program:

The player had to hire IT employees, as well as manage a budget and buy computer equipment, the latter of which was either generic or Intel-branded.

When you started out you selected the sex of your IT manager:

But then, when you went to hire employees…they forgot to include an option to hire any women. You could get a guy with a green mohawk, though:

After a few days the game was taken down and Intel said they were making revisions; it re-launched a month later, this time with  female employee options, including this one, whose hair looks like alien antennae to me:

You can see the current version here.

Frasca argues that such oversights are more important than the lack of female avatars in some video games:

The Intel game is not merely an entertainment product: it is a piece of corporate advertising that simulated an IT workplace for an audience of real IT workers. Unlike what happens in the fantasy world of Fable, gender inequality is a very real problem for IT workers.

The post mentions the National Center for Women and Information Technology, so I went over and looked at some of their data. Gender of students who take the SAT and say they plan on choosing computer/IT majors:

If anything, it looks like the gender segregation of computer/IT occupations is increasing:

Broken down by gender and race/ethnicity:

Asian/Asian American women are actually overrepresented compared to their percentage of the U.S. population (all Asian Americans make up just about 5% of the entire U.S. population, obviously Asian American women make up less than that, though I don’t recall the exact proportion). All other racial/ethnic groups listed here are significantly underrepresented in computing jobs.

The percent of patents in various fields invented by women in the early ’80s and the early…’00s (?):

Frasca suggests that one reason for the Intel snafu might be a lack of women working on the project — if there were women, they might have noticed the lack of female employee options. That’s possible. It’s also likely that having more women in a workplace makes their male colleagues more aware, and thus a guy might think, “hey, maybe we should add some women employees to the game.”

This is totally anecdotal, I know, but forgive me. I have a number of female friends who work in computing jobs; almost all of them have generally found themselves to be the only, or one of just a few, women in their office. And with few exceptions, they say that the men they work with aren’t openly hostile or unfriendly. They don’t deviously exclude them from projects or social events or make lots of sexist remarks. But they forget they exist (for instance, inviting everyone else in the office to lunch where they talk about new project possibilities, and then seeming genuinely sorry later when they realize they left out the only woman in the office…but doing it again anyway).

And things like the Intel game reflect and reinforce the invisibility of women in such fields.

(View original at http://contexts.org/socimages)

In May, I wrote about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s statement that the United States would not abandon the women of Afghanistan by allowing President Hamid Karzai to make any deals with the Taliban.  Clinton told three senior female Afghan officials that “we will not abandon you. . . . [I]t is essential that women’s rights and women’s opportunities are not sacrificed or trampled on in the reconciliation process.”  Clinton also said that she had promised Karzai that the U.S. would not “abandon Afghanistan in its quest for peace and long-term stability and we will not. And I make the same pledge to the women of Afghanistan. We will not abandon you, we will stand with you always.”

However, Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai is still said to be “seeking a rapprochement with the Taliban movement, with the ultimate goal of drawing it into the political process.”  I haven’t heard anything more from Clinton about the situation.  Any rapprochement could have egregious impact on Afghanistan’s women.  For example, the Taliban is against any education of women after an early age.  As a result, in areas under Taliban control, the Taliban has been suspected in a series of poisonous gas attacks against school girls in 2010 and the past few years, including in 2008, when around 15 girls and teachers in Kandahar were sprayed with acid by men on motorbikes.  Female teachers are also being threatened.  One female teacher at a girls’ school in a southern Afghan province received a letter saying: “We warn you to leave your job as a teacher as soon as possible otherwise we will cut off the heads of your children and will set fire to your daughter.”

This past week, Human Rights Watch issued a report titled The ‘Ten Dollar Talib’ and Women’s Rights: Afghan Women and the Risks of Reintegration and Reconciliation. The report was based on interviews with 90 women in districts largely controlled by the Taliban.  The report’s purpose was to show that any claims that the Taliban are mostly influenced by money, rather than ideology, are wrong.  The report summarizes that:

“Afghan women want an end to the conflict. But as the prospect of negotiations with the Taliban draws closer, many women fear that they may also pay a heavy price for peace” and that “Reconciliation with the Taliban, a group synonymous with misogynous policies and the violent repression of women, raises serious concerns about the possible erosion of recently gained rights and freedoms.”

All of the women interviewed for the HRW report said they had lost freedoms. In some cases, women have been killed.  In April, a 22-year-old woman was threatened and then killed for working for an American development organization.  A day after the killing, another woman received a letter saying that she should stop working for the infidels and “in the same way that yesterday we have killed Hossai, whose name was on our list, your name and other women’s names are on our list.”  In late 2009, women were warned not to ring up radio stations and request songs and were told that, if they did, they would be beheaded or acid thrown in their faces.  More generally, women have been forced to give up their jobs and stay at home.  Women active in politics have been targeted and a number of the most prominent assassinated.

Hillary Clinton, please remember your pledge to the women of Afghanistan.

[Crossposted on "Alas" and on "TADA."]

An adjunct professor who taught courses on Catholicism at the University of Illinois has lost his teaching job there, and he claims it is a violation of his academic freedom.

Kenneth Howell was told after the spring semester ended that he would no longer be teaching in the UI’s Department of Religion. The decision came after a student complained about a discussion of homosexuality in the class in which Howell taught that the Catholic Church believes homosexual acts are morally wrong.

One thing that makes this story interesting is that we can actually read the email Howell sent his class, which prompted the complaint (which we can also read).

My initial reaction, upon reading this story, was to think the U of I was wrong to fire Howell (technically, Howell wasn’t fired — he was just not asked to return).

After all, the Catholic Church does believe homosexual acts are wrong. A professor should be able to describe the Church’s arguments in a course about Catholicism. And Howell sounds very agreeable when he says things like this:

Howell said he was presenting the idea that the Catholic moral teachings are based on natural moral law, and the Catholic understanding of what that means.

“My responsibility on teaching a class on Catholicism is to teach what the Catholic Church teaches,” Howell said. “I have always made it very, very clear to my students they are never required to believe what I’m teaching and they’ll never be judged on that.”

There’s an obvious free speech value in professors being able to state controversial and disliked opinions without being fired. And, as well, an educational value in students encountering a variety of views, including views that I hope most students disagree with.

So Howell’s firing was unjustified, right?

I’m not sure.

1) We don’t actually know that Howell was fired (or not asked back) because of the student complaint. That one event follows another doesn’t prove that one event caused the other.

2) Howell’s account is disputed. Howell claims to run a classroom in which students are encouraged to disagree with Howell’s own views. On the other hand, the letter of complaint claimed Howell “would preach (not teach) his ideology to the class …the teacher allowed little room for any opposition to Catholic dogma.” If that claim is true, then U of I is entirely justified in not asking Howell to return.

Of course, I have no idea if the claim is true or not.

3) Judging from the one example of his teaching we can see — the email — Howell is arrogant, hypocritical, ignorant, and a bad teacher. As PZ says, “I think it entirely reasonable to boot Kenneth Howell out of UI because he’s not very bright and doesn’t meet the intellectual standards I expect of UI professors.”

In his email, Howell wrote:

Unless you have done extensive research into homosexuality and are cognizant of the history of moral thought, you are not ready to make judgments about moral truth in this matter.

In context, it’s clear that Howell considers himself to be someone who is ready to make judgments, based on what I can only assume he considers to be his own “extensive research into homosexuality.” Which is laughable, because Howell also wrote:

To the best of my knowledge, in a sexual relationship between two men, one of them tends to act as the “woman” while the other acts as the “man.” In this scenario, homosexual men have been known to engage in certain types of actions for which their bodies are not fitted. I don’t want to be too graphic so I won’t go into details but a physician has told me that these acts are deleterious to the health of one or possibly both of the men.

So Howell is plainly an ignoramus. But worse: He’s the kind of arrogant know-nothing who believes he knows a lot, and presents myths to students as if they were facts. And he presents a terrible example of scholarship for students to emulate (i.e., “a physician has told me” — now there’s a valid academic source!).

If this email is a fair representation of Howell’s abilities as a teacher, then it’s likely that his students become more ignorant, and worse scholars, because they took his class. Frankly, if that’s why Howell was let go, then the only thing I’d ask is “what took them so long?”

One of the many Cameron stunts, which he used to obtain office to look as though he is one of the ‘common people’ (really watch this!), was sending (or going to send) his children to state schools. However, today, he talks about the fear he has in regards to finding a ‘decent’ state school in the centre of London. Whilst in the same week, Gove is busy ‘announcing’ one thing after another, basically amounting to a big attack upon our state schools.

Lets be frank, Cameron has the power to start changes in the state sector education so that he can reduce the worry many parents have when choosing their child’s schooling. Private education only promotes unnecessary divide and elitism, which Cameron is ‘trying’ to break free from. The only way to really improve education would for it to become wholly state provided, and then there would be greater collaboration between parents of all socio-economic groupings. Furthermore, the stigma around going to state school would be reduced (but there would most likely be regional stigmas), especially comprehensive (ideally, I think grammar schools should be gone away with too – again the segregation and elitism does nothing to improve education for everyone).

Obviously expecting Cameron and the Tories to do away with private schooling is a waste of time – but they could at least reform the divide such as through cancelling the charity status that private schools have. Many private schools are suffering to rake in the income, it is hardly fair that the state and the tax payer should subsidise their education, when it isn’t accessible for everyone. If they want to be private, I think they should do it on themselves. Think about if the charity status was removed, that money (around £100m) could have allowed for the school building plans to go ahead – a perfect example of how the Tories’ ideological nature will never instil fairness into any part of society/economy.

But instead of trying to reform education for the better, Cameron has everything to worry about when thinking about possible schools. Especially if the school he wants to send them to turns into an academy. There is the countless amount of information that shows that academies are poor educational providers, and also it is another way for private schools to turn to state funding to help save their elitist educational structure.

Cameron can complain all he wants about state sector education, but his government is doing everything it can to destroy it and promote inequality and the private sector. Oh how Cameron may be regretting his PR move now.

Cross-posted at Equality 101, a blog for teachers and students As feminists, we know that fighting for the equality for women also means fighting for equality for all. That’s why I want to talk to you about an important racial equity initiative happening in schools around the country. The America Healing Initiative, [AHI] a program [...]

A central argument used by the right (and LibDems – who seem on the right now, which even Richard Grayson agrees with) to help support their ‘Big Society’ agenda that Cameron has outlined today, in his radical reform speech, is localism. Consider the following from an article on ConHome today:

“Cameron not only has the chance to do the same today, but to take the Liberal Democrats with him, sparking the localist instincts that differentiate them from Labour.  Localism means experiment, risk and imperfection, but the new Leader of the Opposition may well find that being on the side of pessimism is a bad place to be.  That the state should fund but not run all public services – because others can often do the job better – isn’t dogmatic ideology, it’s common sense.”

There are several problems with this statement. For one, there will be a great reduction in the actual state funding of public services, so it not only state running that will be cut. Secondly, correct me if I am wrong, but there is not a lot to be optimistic about when considering the increase in women’s poverty that will occur because of the ‘Big Society’, the wide-ranging cuts and the promotion of inequality and post code lottery provision where the wealthiest will benefit.

There is no need for the opposition, and here I don’t just mean Labour as the commentator above does, to appear negative when opposing the type of localism of which the Tories/LibDems are proposing. The idea of risk and imperfection aren’t really the buzz words I would want to attach to important services such as education and health, which are vital for people’s future and livelihoods – but the crash way that the government are going about carrying out in some places 40% departmental cuts, well I don’t think it concerns them.

Instead, the oppositional progressive left need to join together and formulate a progressive vision of localism. Localism is desirable, that is why Cameron’s caught on so well – but not when implemented ConDem style. The state is not the problem, and it doesn’t have to be cut and hacked away at so that localism can work. Instead, the state can play a vital role in providing localism – and this is not counter-intuitive. Just take co-ops for example, the proper extension of these (not private sector extension) provides for proper local involvement.

Furthermore, nationalisation of vital services that should be universally accessible such as education and health, well that would provide for greater localism. Again, you may think that is being counter-intuitive, but consider a service that is accessible to all – there would be a promotion of a community spirit, not an ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ mentality – there would be a common goal in investing in all children’s future, not in perpetuating the segregation that already occurs across the educational sector, for example.

Localism cannot operate without a level of state direction and without the state, the services will suffer, and people’s involvement will also decline. Local government control needs to be extended too – there needs to be more cooperation with the public and the local and central government, this is true. But to argue that people should be in charge of running schools for example, without the assistance of the state to provide useful guidelines so that services are delivered fairer and progressively – well this is just gambling with people’s future, and does little to provide for better services. Instead, it just takes away the need for the government to account for the way the services are ran.

Furthermore, the local government has been on the end of the harshest of cuts, thus, the progressive left need to form a counter hegemony that illustrates how cutting this service reduces localism.

Localism is desirable, but localism envisaged by the ConDem’s is regressive, undesirable and the opposition need pluralistic localised agenda to help provide an effective counter hegemony.

In general, I'm politically right of center when it comes to fiscal issues. Obviously, after the catastrophic banking crisis of 2008, when we saw up close that the virtues of the invisible hand of the market come with a price: markets crash and revivals can be long in coming and very painful to wait for. The cost to our society has been very dear so far, and is looking to get worse before we see a meaningful upturn. Sometimes letting the market just do its thing can simply be too devastating to bear. Yet when things are going well, it's generally good to just stay out of the way of what the market does well. In other words, the cycles of markets are too turbulent to just let them run wild, but it's mainly the lows that we have to worry about.

I look at it like floating in a pool. Just let the buoyancy happen. But if you start to go under, do something about it.

Last night I caught Paul Krugman's appearance on Charlie Rose, where he talked about the price we're paying for fiscal austerity. His main point was that austerity now only shrinks the economy, and that the Fed is already as low as it can be on interest rates so there's really nothing more they can do to stimulate private sector growth to compensate for cuts in government economic activity. Krugman says we need another stimulus now to get the economy moving again. In the two previous major economic slowdowns, the emergence from the doldrums came, in the 1880s, from the railroad boom and, in the Great Depression, from World War 2. In the first case, technological innovation and a new industrial market led to economic expansion. In the latter case, the massive government spending on the war effort kicked the market into gear. Krugman asserts that now we're at a moment in time where we need one or the other to get us out of this mess, or we risk falling into deflation and rising unemployment.

In other words, we're sinking below the surface and we need either a boogie board or we better start activity swimming to get our heads above water.

To me it seems obvious that a national effort pushing development of alternative energies and energy-efficient technologies could prove to be the technological innovation that leads to new industrial markets. America could even become a manufacturing nation again, an exporter of goods.

In the meantime, though, we need some kind of spending to invest in our infrastructure — fix our crumbling bridges, our pothole-filled roads, our collapsing schools; build up our information infrastructure before we end up being on par with the third world — do things that put people to work improving our commons that is beyond the purview of any single corporation and bet on the future potential of this country.

The Republicans, however, and not a few conservative Democrats, are in a psychological brain-lock triggered, I believe, in no small part by their own buyer's remorse: After racking up trillions of dollars of national debt under the Bush Administration, and setting the stage for the bank meltdown that cost us trillions more in not just bailout funds but also lost economic growth and activity, the GOP has suddenly glommed onto the idea that they need to stop spending. Their anuses have puckered tightly shut and they'll be damned if they unclench.

And this anal retentive fear of spending is exacerbated by the right-wing's culture of bedwetting fear, which is showing itself in conservative attacks on immigrants, on equal rights for gays, on equal rights for blacks (because of course the Civil Rights legislations of the 1960s are problematic, says tea bagger candidate Rand Paul and others), and so on.

So the panic-stricken conservatives are blocking even aid to the unemployed — as if unemployed works who are looking for work but cannot find it were the real problem of our economy. Like nervous children who never learned how to swim, the right wing leaders are locking onto us all, frozen in fear, dragging us all down under water.

Yet the Republicans declare that such panic is virtuous.

Changing metaphors for a moment, let's look at our economy as a house. In general, you want to run your house in sound fiscal order. But sometimes you just have to spend. You have to spend if the roof is leaking. You have to spend if the water main breaks. You have to spend if the electrical wiring shorts out. You can't just say, "Well we spent too much on the credit cards throwing parties, so now we refuse to fix the broken water heater." (Maybe you shouldn't have spent so much on your war parties in the first place, Senator Mitch McConnell!)

Now is not the time to give in to conservatives' panic. We are not a country that displays its best out of fear. When we face the challenges head-on and mobilize our resources, we tend to triumph. When we react in fear and trepidation, we tend to make mistakes that cost us for years, even decades.

Yes, we need to get a handle on our long-term national debt. It's fucking frightening how big it has gotten in the last 10 years. But now's not the time. First we have to prime the economic engine again, and kick things into gear, get people working. Working people spend. Working people feel better about themselves. A working nation is empowered.

Then, when the economy is humming along again (which, by the by, also means government revenues are rising again), that's when we cut spending. Let's fix the house first, then worry about the monthly budget. Let's swim now, while we can, before we drown.