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Justice

Ignore The Political Rhetoric: Women Support Gun Safety Laws

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Feb 7, 2013 at 2:30 pm

Last week, at a hearing on gun safety legislation, a witness from an anti-feminist group was brought forth to argue that the US’s current gun laws are a boon to women’s rights. Women, witness Gayle Trotter said, need AR-15s because, “They have good handling. They’re light. They’re easy for women to hold… And the peace of mind that a woman has as she’s facing three, four, five violent attackers, intruders in her home, with her children screaming in the background, the peace of mind that she has knowing that she has a scary-looking gun gives her more courage when she’s fighting hardened, violent criminals.”

It turns out that Trotter couldn’t be more wrong.

Women don’t have peace of mind when it comes to guns in the home. In fact, a recent poll commissioned by the Women’s Donor Network shows the opposite. Sixty four percent of women think that tighter gun laws will help lower the overall level of violence in the United States.

But perhaps Trotter was only looking at the concerns of Republican women, who have the lowest levels of support for tighter gun restrictions. Only 44 percent of them believe that gun laws would make the US safer. On the other hand, low-income women and women of color are the most likely to support tighter restrictions on firearms. A full 86 percent of African American women think gun laws could reduce violence, and 77 percent of Hispanic women agree.

Women, in actuality, face heightened concerns of domestic violence with a gun in the home, since a woman is 12 times more likely to die in a domestic dispute if a gun is involved. They also tend to be the primary caretakers of children, and fear for their children’s safety.

Whether or not a gun is easy to carry and looks nice might not be the right question for Trotter to think about when she considers a woman’s support of gun laws. Rather, she might want to ask: When there is relatively little regulation of firearms, is there a real, increased threat of violence for women?

Security

Wall Street Journal: Women Shouldn’t Be In Combat Because Men Poop

By Zack Beauchamp on Jan 24, 2013 at 11:12 am

An opinion piece published in one of America’s most prestigious newspapers made a curious assertion this morning: women shouldn’t serve in combat because “social norms” would make it “humiliating” for men.

After Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s surprise announcement on Wednesday that women would be free to serve in most or all combat roles by 2016, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by former Marine infantryman Ryan Smith. Smith argued that since soldiers had to “defecate inches from his seated comrade’s face” during his tour in Iraq, women could not be permitted in combat because it would “humiliate” men:

Societal norms are a reality, and their maintenance is important to most members of a society. It is humiliating enough to relieve yourself in front of your male comrades; one can only imagine the humiliation of being forced to relieve yourself in front of the opposite sex.

Despite the professionalism of Marines, it would be distracting and potentially traumatizing to be forced to be naked in front of the opposite sex, particularly when your body has been ravaged by lack of hygiene. In the reverse, it would be painful to witness a member of the opposite sex in such an uncomfortable and awkward position. Combat effectiveness is based in large part on unit cohesion. The relationships among members of a unit can be irreparably harmed by forcing them to violate societal norms.

Smith’s scatological suppositions don’t stand up to scrutiny. As most know, irregular warfare against insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan blurred the lines between “combat” and “non-combat” roles, meaning that female soldiers have been fighting in combat in practice for roughly a decade. 292,000 American women served in combat zones during in these two wars, 152 of whom were killed in action. There is no evidence that these women’s bravery damaged “unit cohesion” or in any other fashion worsened the ability of soldiers to do their jobs.

The evidence from foreign militaries suggest the same. Several American allies in Afghanistan allowed women to serve in “frontline roles,” and found that it had no effect on the performance of the unit in question. Israel’s Caracal Batallion, the country’s famous mixed gender combat unit, has performed admirably in combat situations.

If Smith and the Journal were interested in gender problems inside the military, they’d be better served focusing on the growing threat of sexual assault inside the ranks rather than attempting to restrict women’s freedom to choose their career path. One third of military women have been sexually assaulted, roughly twice the civilian figure.

Economy

Women Lead Few Financial Firms, Despite Getting Better Results

By Rebecca Leber on Jan 10, 2013 at 11:40 am

While women who preside at the top of their companies are still a tiny minority, studies show businesses led by women often outperform industry averages. And this tendency applies to the hedge fund industry, according to a new survey from Rothstein Kass.

Hedge funds headed by women had higher returns of 8.95 percent, compared to hedge fund 2012 averages of 2.69 percent, the survey shows. However, female hedge fund managers are a rare find, The New York Times’ Dealbook reports:

Only 16 percent of the survey respondents said their firms were owned or managed by women. Of the respondents from hedge funds, 16.8 percent fell into this category, while 13 percent of those in venture capital and 12 percent of those in private equity said women were in charge.

The survey found that 18 percent of the firms surveyed had female chief investment officers, and 16 percent had chief executives who were women.

That is not the only evidence suggesting firms would be better served by more women: Hedge funds run by women fell only half as much during the financial crisis, and several other studies show “that women are more profitable investors, money managers and hedge fund managers, and they incur less risk in the process.”

Overall, businesses with women on their boards outperform those with all-male boards by 26 percent, yet 36 percent of U.S. companies still have no sitting women.

Even when women reach the top of a company, they face a wage gap. Throughout the financial sector, women make only 62 cents for a man’s dollar, and the problem persists for female CEOs and CFOs.

Election

Women’s Group Pressures Obama To Make Female Appointments In Second Term

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Jan 9, 2013 at 1:26 pm

As President Obama slowly releases his appointments for his second term, a trend is forming. The people nominated so far include Chuck Hagel for Defense Secretary, John Kerry for Secretary of State, John Brennan for CIA Director and, just today, the press got word that Jack Lew is the choice for Treasury Secretary. The trend? White men.

Now, the advocacy group Women’s Media Center is formally asking Obama to consider more gender diversity in his appointments. Today, it launched a petition calling on Obama to consider a woman for the slot of the Federal Communications Commission Chair. The petition points out a shocking statistic: In its almost 80 years of existence, a woman has not once headed up the commission:

There has never been a female chair of the Federal Communications Commission – the independent agency that oversees America’s telecommunications and media policy.

The FCC is supposed to represent the American public. Half the public are women. It’s long past the time to close the gender gap in our nation’s leadership and in the media and telecom industries’ leadership, where only 28.4% of TV news directors were women in 2011, according to the Women’s Media Center’s 2012 Status of Women in the U.S. Media Report. And the post atop the FCC is one of the most important opportunities available to raise the bar for representational diversity and decision-making in the media and telecom sectors, which are the infrastructure of this generation and of the future.

Even in his first term, the Obama administration’s record on female appointments was not nearly as stellar as one might hope. The New York Times reported just yesterday that, “male appointees under Mr. Obama outnumbered female appointees at 11 of the 15 federal departments, for instance. In some cases, the skew was also deep. At the Departments of Justice, Defense, Veterans Affairs and Energy, male appointees outnumbered female appointees by about two to one.”

The appointments thus far also demonstrate a lack of racial diversity, as well. The only person of color whose name was floated for a new appointment in a top-level position in the next cabinet — Ambassador Susan Rice — was quickly driven out of the conversation by a right wing smear campaign.

Economy

Women Haven’t Gained A Larger Share Of Corporate Board Seats In Seven Years

By Pat Garofalo on Dec 11, 2012 at 5:00 pm

In addition to grappling with a persistent pay gap, working women also have to deal with extreme difficulty ascending to powerful corporate positions, according to a report by the research organization Catalyst. As Bryce Covert explained at The Nation:

Women held just over 14 percent of executive officer positions at Fortune 500 companies this year and 16.6 percent of board seats at the same. Adding insult to injury, an even smaller percent of those female executive officers are counted among the highest earners—less than 8 percent of the top earner positions were held by women. Meanwhile, a full quarter of these companies simply had no women executive officers at all and one-tenth had no women directors on their boards. [...]

Did this year represent a step forward? Not even close. Women’s share of these positions went up by a mere half of a percentage point or less last year. Even worse, 2012 was the seventh consecutive year in which we haven’t seen any growth in board seats and the third year of stagnation in the C-suite.

Overall, more than one-third of companies have no women on their board of directors. But economic evidence shows that keeping women out of the board room is a mistake. According to work by the Credit Suisse Research Institute, “companies with at least one woman on the board would have outperformed in terms of share price performance, those with no women on the board over the course of the past six years.”

Politics

Fox News Op-Ed: Men Are Less Interested In Marriage Because ‘Women Aren’t Women Anymore’

By Sy Mukherjee on Nov 26, 2012 at 10:42 am

In an editorial posted to FoxNews.com, self-described author and “social critic” Suzanne Venker makes some bold claims regarding the state of marriage in contemporary society. In a piece titled “The war on men,” Venker argues that women’s emerging roles as breadwinners and their continuing strides towards gender equality have caused them to become irritable and unappealing to so-called “marriageable men.”

Venker writes that while men have stayed static in their social behaviors and outlook, women have undergone radical transformations and become more independent, more likely to work, and more competitive — behaviors which have supposedly turned off men to the idea of marriage since women are just not acting like “traditional women” anymore:

The so-called dearth of good men (read: marriageable men) has been a hot subject in the media as of late. Much of the coverage has been in response to the fact that for the first time in history, women have become the majority of the U.S. workforce. They’re also getting most of the college degrees. The problem? This new phenomenon has changed the dance between men and women.

As the author of three books on the American family and its intersection with pop culture, I’ve spent thirteen years examining social agendas as they pertain to sex, parenting, and gender roles. During this time, I’ve spoken with hundreds, if not thousands, of men and women. And in doing so, I’ve accidentally stumbled upon a subculture of men who’ve told me, in no uncertain terms, that they’re never getting married. When I ask them why, the answer is always the same.

Women aren’t women anymore. [...]

In a nutshell, women are angry. They’re also defensive, though often unknowingly. That’s because they’ve been raised to think of men as the enemy. Armed with this new attitude, women pushed men off their pedestal (women had their own pedestal, but feminists convinced them otherwise) and climbed up to take what they were taught to believe was rightfully theirs. Now the men have nowhere to go. [...]

Contrary to what feminists like Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men, say, the so-called rise of women has not threatened men. It has pissed them off. It has also undermined their ability to become self-sufficient in the hopes of someday supporting a family. Men want to love women, not compete with them. They want to provide for and protect their families – it’s in their DNA. But modern women won’t let them.

Venker’s website states that she has regularly come under fire for promoting parenting theories that broach subjects that are “off-limits,” such as the dubious claim that women cannot rear children while also maintaining a challenging career. Her bio also states that she graduated from Boston University in 1997, but gives no indication that she has expert or academic experience in relational or child-rearing psychology.

Of course, Venker’s claims in her FoxNews.com editorial resort to crude and dubious caricatures of gender relations, partiucarly regarding workforce competition and men feeling “threatened” by employed women. While women have, in fact, been greatly expanding their presence in the workforce, pay equity between the sexes remains elusive.

This is not the first time that Fox News has put forth sexist, condescending statements about women. Earlier this month, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade claimed that the channel’s female news anchors were plucked out of Victoria’s Secret catalogs.

Health

VIEWPOINT: The Emerging Pro-Choice Majority

By Zack Beauchamp on Nov 12, 2012 at 12:11 pm

Abortion rights, we’re told, are our Great Divider. America is cleaved in two. Fifty unremitting percent on either side. There is no United States of America, only pro and anti choice America.

But what if that’s not true? Or, more precisely, what if that won’t be true for much longer?

The 2012 election has been touted as a watershed moment for the Democratic Party, but it may have been one for the pro-choice cause as well. And it’s not because the would-be rape caucus was defeated or that pro-choice candidates won big, though those help. Rather, it’s that there’s good reasons to believe the coalition Obama has built is not only durable, but also staunchly pro-choice. If that’s true, it could signify the start of a major shift on what had previously been thought to have been a fundamental fault line in American politics.

Let’s start with the exit polling. The 2012 electorate was overwhelmingly pro-choice; 59 percent said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while only 36 percent said the reverse. The critical swing states followed the pattern, with some like Virginia falling to the left of the national average. Exit polls should be taken with a grain of salt, of course, but these numbers undeniably suggest American voters are more pro-choice than previously thought, especially in the states up for grabs in Presidential and Senatorial elections.

These data throw a monkey wrench in the conventional wisdom about abortion rights — namely, that it’s an issue that the GOP could use to make inroads with the new Obama coalition. Young voters, women, African-Americans, and Latinos have average-to-conservative views on choice, we’re told. But many identified as pro-choice in 2012. What gives?

Part of the answer is that the general picture is wrong: these key Democratic groups generally track the national average on abortion or tilt left. Though some polls suggest young voters are likely to support restricting abortion rights, the most systematic evidence suggests Milllenials are as, if not more, likely to support keeping abortion legal in all or most cases as the general population. Ditto with women. While African-Americans used to lean right, the most recent polling suggests a decisive pro-choice shift.

Even Latinos, who generally (though not always) tend to oppose abortion rights, have more complicated views than pundits generally let on. While first and second generation Latino-Americans tend to oppose abortion in most or all cases, third generation and higher Latinos support abortion rights by a 19 point margin. Since the Latino population boom is currently being fueled by birth rather than immigration, the third generation cohort seems likely to grow over time. Not incidentally, Latinos who voted in the 2012 election supported keeping abortion legal by a 2:1 margin (though, for it’s worth, the poll didn’t include Texas).

Read more

Election

Boyfriend President: How Both Parties Try To Woo Women By Linking Voting To Sex

By Annie-Rose Strasser and Aviva Shen on Oct 26, 2012 at 12:11 pm

Twenty six year-old director Lena Dunham sparked a conservative backlash Friday with her new Obama campaign ad, “Your First Time,” which plays on the idea of having sex for the first time to talk about voting for Obama in 2008.

Your first time shouldn’t be with just anybody. You want to do it with a great guy. It should be with a guy with beautiful…someone who really cares about and understands women. A guy who cares whether you get health insurance, and specifically whether you get birth control…My first time voting was amazing. It was this line in the sand. Before I was a girl, now I was a woman. I went to the polling station, pulled the curtain, I voted for Barack Obama.

Watch it:

The right-wing blogosphere erupted in outrage over Dunham’s coy sexualization of voting. Breitbart.com called Dunham’s video “astoundingly tasteless,” while the Right Scoop condemned it as “disgusting” and “a new low.” Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly questioned on Twitter whether it was “appropriate.” The National Review called it “cringeworthy.” Minnesota Republican Party deputy chair went so far as to say the video was proof that Obama was being advised by Satan.

But Dunham’s president-boyfriend metaphor is hardly out of the ordinary; in fact, conservatives have been harping on essentially the same theme all election season, dodging direct references to sex but sexualizing the office of the presidency and a woman’s political life. Here are the top five examples:

1. “The Breakup”
Here’s one from the Republican National Committee of a woman ‘breaking up’ with a cardboard cutout of President Obama. Among her complaints are that he’s “constantly on the golf course” and even makes a reference to Obama being seen “out with Sarah Jessica Parker and George Clooney.”

2. “Boyfriend”
From women’s group Independent Women’s Voice, this ad portrays Obama as an unreliable boyfriend who makes empty promises to this young woman. “You can’t change him,” a friend advises before the woman complains, “Why do I always fall for guys like this?”

Read more

Election

OOPS: Akin’s Site Touts Democratic Operative As A Female Supporter

By Aviva Shen on Sep 18, 2012 at 1:42 pm


Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) has been struggling to rebound from the outrage sparked by his claim that women can’t get pregnant from “legitimate rape.” In an apparent effort to win over women voters, Akin’s website features a large picture of the Senate candidate with three women under a banner proclaiming, “I’m A Women [sic] And I Support Todd.”

But the spelling isn’t the only mistake on the page. One of the women ostensibly supporting Akin in the picture is actually a Democratic operative:

The site displayed a large photo showing Akin standing with his wife and two other women. The headline over it read: “I’m a women[SIC], and I support Todd.”
The problem is, one of the women in the photo doesn’t—and his campaign apparently knew it.

Corinne Matti, who is pictured on Akin’s site standing to Akin’s left, is a “tracker” for the Missouri Democratic Party. Her job, which she does openly, is to attend Akin’s public events and report back to the Democrats. She has been doing it for more than a year.

“I suspect they were so desperate to find women that they had to borrow one of ours,” quipped McCaskill spokeswoman Caitlin Legacki.

The Akin campaign told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that the webpage wasn’t meant to go public when it did and the photo could have been a stand-in. Akin has been essentially disowned by the GOP as other Republicans try to distance themselves from the offensive remarks. His opponent, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) is overwhelmingly favored by female voters.

Election

Group At Conservative Conference Urge Women To ‘Go Home And Put Some Clothes On’

By Adam Peck and Scott Keyes on Sep 14, 2012 at 12:10 pm

A pamphlet on display at the conservative Values Voter Summit.

WASHINGTON, DC — Literature being handed out at the Values Voter Summit on Friday attacks women for being “immodest” and extolled them to “go home and put some clothes on!”

In flyers and brochures on display at Values Voters, the social conservative conference where Republican Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan spoke, an organization called Modesty Matters criticized women for dressing “immodestly” at church, and blamed women for causing men to stare lustfully at them.

Women must “embrace MODESTY in dress and behavior,” one of the handouts read. Women dressed immodestly in church are “an insult to a holy God,” another said.

Other excerpts:

- From the “Modesty: It’s nothing to be ashamed of” pamphlet:“Since men are particularly visual, immodesty in church can trigger lustful thoughts.”

“My men’s bible study group talks frequently about controlling our lust, thoughts, and eyes. Yes the problem and responsibility are ours, but is it really reasonable for the women of the church to make it THIS difficult for us?”

- From the “True Woman Manifesto”: “All women, whether married of single, are to model femininity in their various relationships, by exhibiting a distinctive modesty, responsiveness, and gentleness of spirit.”

The Family Research Council provided Modesty Matters with a table at the conference to distribute these pamphlets.

Republicans have repeatedly voted to cut funding for contraception, outlaw abortions, and defund Planned Parenthood. Now another far-right groups are eyeing a new battleground: the wardrobe.

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