Because, as Mr Jender says, the intelligent woman really does need it.
You can tell it’s from way back. If they put that out now it would be pink.
A Guide of Her Own August 13, 2009
Women Boxers Need Boy Cheerleaders! August 13, 2009
A group of boys from Leeds have wowed judges at an international cheerleading competition in Coventry.
The Peewee Boyz, who are thought to be the only boys’ cheerleading group in Europe, won third prize at the International Cheer Championships in July.
I’m not going to show this video to my preschool-aged son. I would never hear the end of the whinging for sparkly purple pompoms.
Women’s Boxing to Become Olympic Sport August 12, 2009
Women’s boxing is looking set to be introduced in the London 2012 Olympics. This will mean that the last Olympic men-only sport will be so no more. Hooray! (Even bigger hooray if the story didn’t involve people hitting each other but what can you do hooray!)
The International Olympic Committee’s executive board meets in Berlin on Thursday and will make recommendations to be confirmed in October.
The IOC will also look to select two new sports from a shortlist of seven – including rugby sevens, golf and squash – to be included in the 2016 Games.
In all, 17 sports federations have made requests for modifications to their programmes for 2012.
In Beijing 165 medals were available to men, compared to 124 for women.
Women’s boxing appeared in the Games as a demonstration event in 1904, but was then banned for most of the 20th century in many countries.
However, IOC president Jacque Rogge is supporting plans to stage four women’s categories in 2012.
Read more on BBC Online.
Implicit Biases: Bad News/Good News August 12, 2009
The bad news is that the effects of Implicit Biases look to be augmented by ingroup/outgroup classifications, and the results go significantly beyond what we normally discuss here. The good news is that there is even more research on how to mitigate its effects.
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Reading comments on a post at Young Female Scientist, I saw someone describe John Dovidio as a researcher at Yale who works on implicit bias and how to reduce it and its effects. A step over to Academic Search Complete took me onto a number of his articles. Though Dovidio’s work seems centered on racial biasis, it looks like it certainly provides insight into other biases.
Here is one short article by him and others which is about reducing biasis in health care providers. There are three claims in it that strike me as particularly important:
1. In the US, and presumably the UK and elsewhere, race, ethnicity and gender automatically trigger in-group/out-group classifications. And most unfortunately, “In general, people retain information in a more detailed fashion, remember more positive information, and are more forgiving of behaviors for ingroup compared to outgroup members.” This seems to me strikingly important, and explains phenomenon I was pretty sure I observed and really didn’t understand: When he and she both give exciting presentations at conferences and deal with questions very well, he will be remember better and more positively. The performances may be of equal high merit, but his may well have a greater positive impact on his career in terms of further opportunities being offered to him. (Duh!)
2. There may be components to reducing the effects of implicit biases – and indeed reducing the biases – which I – and I expect others – had not even thought about. There are several suggested in the article. One is related to something we’ve mentioned before; namely, stereotypes get more strongly activated with stress, so people interested in fairly treating someone should work on emotional control. For women in often non-cooperative/competitive fields like philosophy, this is bad news. That is, disagreeing with someone is more likely to get you a dismissive reactions. Your point may be the same as his later point, but yours may be dismissed as just some girls’ mistake. (Duh!)
3. It is not a good idea to stress what bigots they are if you hope to motivate colleagues to better behavior. And there are non-obvious reasons for this. For one thing, that increases their cognitive burden, so they’ll have less to bring to the task of being fair judges.
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Perhaps not everyone knows that the effects of race on medical treatment have been discussed a lot recently. Blacks in general should be concerned about getting less good care, going from adequate pain management to major modes of appropriate treatment.
Obama’s poll numbers climbing August 11, 2009
(I accidentally found the color map again; hence, the following is color/coloured coded. It may be tacky, but it’s my tacky. The quotes are from UPI.)
It is bad enough to hear Sarah Palin assert that the President plans on having death squads decide whether the disabled and the elderly will get medical care; what’s worse is the thought that ordinary citizens believe her. And some certainly do.
So when the news that Obama’s poll numbers were slipping finally sunk in, many of us surely were once again wondering how to deal with another intolerable situation. BUT that’s changed!!
The sun is shining again:
More than 60 percent of U.S. residents approve of the job President Barack Obama has done in his first six months in office, a Gallup Poll indicates.Sixty-three percent of respondents approve of Obama’s performance, results released Monday indicate.
Gallup tracks Obama’s overall job approval ratings each day as part of Gallup Poll Daily tracking. Since June, Obama’s approval rating slipped into the 50s, sinking to 52 percent in late July before making a modest recovery to the mid- to upper-50s in recent days, pollsters said.
Hooray! The country may do the right thing after all, if not right now at least we’re getting together on who is going in the right direction.
Now, should ‘Obama’ have been red?
News Flash: Cause of glass ceiling, lower pay, injustice against women discovered! August 11, 2009
So why do women end up with all this junk to deal with? The answer: We underestimate ourselves!
A new study shows female managers are more than three times as likely as their male counterparts to underrate their bosses’ opinions of their job performance.
And the conclusion:
“Women have imposed their own glass ceiling, and the question is why,” said Scott Taylor, an assistant professor at the University of New Mexico Anderson School of Management who conducted the study.
And it turns out there’s an age difference; women over fifty are much more like to be among the underestimaters. Thus:
”Younger women tended not to be as off-base in their predictions than middle-aged or senior women,” Taylor said.
Taylor said managers may need to learn better ways to communicate to female employees that they are valued. Women may need to learn how to better seek positive and critical feedback, he said.
Taylor says the findings could indicate why many women don’t rise to head companies or why there is a wage disparity between men and women.
This could all make one quite cross. Female Science Professor points out that these results are going to be presented today in Chicago at the annual Academy of Management conference; she remarks:
If anyone is going to be at this meeting in Chicago today and if it’s not too late, maybe someone can ask Professor Taylor if he has any alternative hypotheses that might also explain his data.
Here’s one alternative hypothesis: there’s a common cause for lower prestige (position, pay) and lower expectations. Women (and others) are, as we have discussed time and again, the subject of implicit biases that lead to a chronic underestimation of their value in the workplace. Over time that becomes internalized. It would be hard for it not to.
Anyway, poor Taylor, he may reckon his career will be helped by media attention. And media attention has focused on this.
Creepy Girls’ Toy August 11, 2009
Okay, this doesn’t quite fit out gendered toys mould. But it’s really creepy! Does it make it better or worse that the boy is also being married off in infancy?
(This is Jender’s find, I believe. I have to admit: I had a dolly with a wedding dress as a child, and it’s never occurred to me since that it was a bit wrong. Grant it, mine was a little girl doll, not a little bald baby doll. …That probably doesn’t make it better.)
We Need Your Help: Women Philosophers of Religion? August 11, 2009
Hi all, a reader who wishes to remain anonymous has come to me with the following problem: her/his colleague is putting together a [book, conference, whatever] on the theme of Philosophy of Religion. This colleague has thusfar devised a list of 19 names in Philosophy of Religion and–despite seemingly setting out explicitly to achieve gender balance–has managed only one woman on this list of 19.
Anonymous reader asks if you her/his fellow readers might please help out by dropping names of women doing quality work in Philosophy of Religion?
(Also, Anon is interested in names of non-Christian Philosophers of Religion, just to super balance the pool!)
Thanks everyone!
Seriously, it does exist August 10, 2009
It’s French, a limited edition, and costs 10,000 Euros.
And it’s DEEP PINK!
There is a small problem about who it is for. Do little girls play table football? Do men in pubs like pink table football? And who gets anything out of teams of Barbies?
Well, those are the deeper questions.**
** I think this might be a multi-modal pun. Very obvious, but utterly irresistible.
Jolie breastfeeding sculpture August 9, 2009
Hippocampa alerts us to this sculpture of Angelina Jolie breastfeeding her twins.
Here’s a quote from “a lactivist”:
“I, too, was inspired by Jolie’s nursing pic,” writes Cate Nelson of Eco Child’s Play. “As a lactivist, I think it’s fantastic when women like this show that natural human processes are even done by hot starlet MILFs.”
To be fair, the lactivist’s tongue may well have been firmly in her cheek.
Evolutionary Psychology and Feminism August 8, 2009
Have you ever suspected that evolutionary psychology – or at least some of its practitioners – are resolutely battling on the behalf of what they see as a status quo that privileges men? If so, Satoshi Kanazawa’s piece in his Psychology Today blog provides some confirming evidence. Entitled “Why modern feminism is illogical, unnecessary, and evil,” it might be meant tongue-in-cheek, but I don’t think so.
So what to do? Waste one’s time taking it apart? Well, it might just be enough to juxtapose a passage from SK’s piece with something from Bob Herbert of the NY Times. Doing that might make the differences in the quality of thought behind the pieces fairly easy to discern:
From SK:
Another fallacy on which modern feminism is based is that men have more power than women. Among mammals, the female always has more power than the male, and humans are no exception. It is true that, in all human societies, men largely control all the money, politics, and prestige. They do, because they have to, in order to impress women. Women don’t control these resources, because they don’t have to. What do women control? Men. As I mention in an earlier post, any reasonably attractive young woman exercises as much power over men as the male ruler of the world does over women.
According to police accounts, Sodini walked into a dance-aerobics class of about 30 women who were being led by a pregnant instructor. He turned out the lights and opened fire. The instructor was among the wounded.
We have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected.
We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment.
The mainstream culture is filled with the most gruesome forms of misogyny, and pornography is now a multibillion-dollar industry — much of it controlled by mainstream U.S. corporations.
…
Life in the United States is mind-bogglingly violent. But we should take particular notice of the staggering amounts of violence brought down on the nation’s women and girls each and every day for no other reason than who they are. They are attacked because they are female.
Indeed. Against the backdrop of this reality, SK’s views are just a bit weird.
How scary is health care reform? August 8, 2009
Health Care Reform is not scary, but the actions and words of its conservative opponents certainly are. In two different ways:
1. Not only are conservative activists attempting to disrupt the town hall meetings that our elected officials are trying to hold, but also there are calls that seem clearly calls to violence, and, arguably, assasination:
2. The conservatives are filling the public space with lies. The elderly will be pushed toward euthanasia, which they will want since advance medical care will be denied to them. Or, as I have heard it put, “Obama won’t let them have it; he wants them to take a pill instead.”
So far the democrats do not seem to have found a way to cope effectively with the disruptions. It is much easier to destroy civil discussion than to have it.
But some people are at work answering the false charges being made. I’m attaching a copy of a conservative letter that purports to find all sorts of awful stuff in the house bill,along with a step by step refutation. If you are going to be talking to conservatives(e.g., students) at some point soon, you may find the documents useful.
b. Response to Republican Claims
Thanks to CVille Dem at TPM.
Feminism’s Goals Have Now Officially Been Achieved! August 8, 2009
Success, sisters! I’ve been out shopping today, and I’ve seen it with my own eyes. At long last, GIRLS CAN LEARN ABOUT GEOGRAPHY TOO! (What a historic step forward!)(Seriously, someone shoot me. You can only imagine how hard it was not to let the expletives out my mouth when i saw this in the shop.)
What the US constitution really says about birth August 7, 2009
is this:
No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.
As Chris Kelly points out, that rules out anyone born in a state that was not yet a state when the Constitution was adopted. So yes, it rules out Obama. And neither were Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower, Ulysses Grant, William McKinley, James Garfield, William Howard Taft, Harry Truman, Herbert Hoover, etc etc etc. (Ah, the joy of pedantry!)
Kelly also claims that “No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President…” means that only those in existence at the time of the Constitution’s adoption can be President. He gets this by taking “at the time of the Adoption…” to modify ‘person’ or ‘citizen’ rather than ‘state’. This reading seems less natural to me, and also incompatible with the first one.
Still, fun with literal-mindedness. And yet another strike against the Originalists. What’s not to like? (Thanks Troy!)
Vibra-Bra August 7, 2009
Unapologetically Female, of which I’m becoming a great fan, brings us this item. 
The vibration is all about making your breasts perfect enough to forego a bra. Yeah, right. All about that. For other health benefits of vibration, readers may want to consult Rachel Maines’s fabulous _The Technology of Orgasm_, a history of vibrators’ use by physicians (since the time of Galen) to cure hysteria (womb wandering around the body) by inducing a “hysterical paroxysm” (which is nothing at all sexual).
Three Cheers for Sotomayor! August 6, 2009
***********
She has been confirmed by 68 votes to 31.
The political world is a tiny bit more balanced.
The earth is round, too. August 6, 2009
The American Psychological Association concluded Wednesday that there is little evidence that efforts to change a person’s sexual orientation from gay or lesbian to heterosexual are effective.
In addition, the 138-page report — covering 87 peer-reviewed studies — said that such efforts may cause harm….
In response, the group’s governing Council of Representatives passed a resolution Wednesday urging mental health professionals not to recommend to their clients that they can change their sexual orientation through therapy or any other methods.
(Thanks, Hippocampa!)
‘Ms’ in 1901! August 6, 2009
Mr Jender has passed on to me the fascinating fact that ‘Ms’ goes back to at least 1901.
On page 4 of the Springfield (Mass.) Sunday Republican of November 10, 1901, under the heading “Men, Women and Affairs,” is [an item] in which the writer suggests that “a void in the English language” may be filled by Ms., pronounced as “Mizz,” as an alternative to Miss or Mrs.
For more, see here.
Third Person Singular ‘They’ August 5, 2009
Apparently its use was first branded unacceptable by a female grammarian.
If any single person is responsible for this male-centric usage, it’s Anne Fisher, an 18th-century British schoolmistress and the first woman to write an English grammar book, according to the sociohistorical linguist Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade. Fisher’s popular guide, “A New Grammar” (1745), ran to more than 30 editions, making it one of the most successful grammars of its time. More important, it’s believed to be the first to say that the pronoun he should apply to both sexes.
A interesting article, even though it does employ a rather suspect definition of ‘feminist’. The authors seem to think that a move back to ‘they’ is pretty much inevitable, and they seem just fine with that. One suspects William Safire will not be well-pleased with this column published while he was on vacation. (For those who want more on this history, there’s an excellent paper by Ann Bodine in Cameron’s _The Feminist Critique of Language.) Thanks, Mr Jender!
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