UK women may be ‘given’ right to breastfeed in public

Ministers are debating a law which would make it illegal to prevent women from breastfeeding in public, and award statutory breastfeeding breaks to new mothers in paid work. More here.

Newsweek on Trans issues

Newsweek has a lot articles on trans issues here. Great that these issues are being covered in the mainstream media– quite striking to see Judith Butler being quoted! Lots of interesting material to be found in the stories of trans-people who are profiled. Perhaps especially relevant to this blog are comments from a woman who “lost 20 IQ” points in other people’s eyes when she stopped being a man; and another who found that people in shops who had previously deferred to her (at the time, his) engineering expertise now refused to believe that she knew what she was talking about.

Are working mothers a third gender?

Excellent column by Ellen Goodman here on bias against working mothers. She discusses a recent study in which employers were presented with nearly identical top-notch resumes. Into some of them, leadership in the Parent-Teacher Association was added– no other changes made. Women with PTA on their resumes were half as likely to be hired as childless women or fathers, with or without children. It also appears from this column that the “glass ceiling” isn’t so much a problem for childless women. Goodman considers (though rejects) the thought that working mothers are a third gender. (‘Working mother’ here refers to mothers who do paid work– a problematic choice of term, admittedly.) She doesn’t elaborate, but one interesting thought would build on Sally Haslanger’s notion of ameliorative concepts: we should use the gender concepts that best suit our legitimate purposes. If we want to analyse discrimination, perhaps these studies suggest that a gender *working mother* may be of use.

On women in philosophy – stats and other blogging

Thanks to Esa for the following links to other blogging about women in philosophy:
Report of the APA session on women in philosophy on Berit Brogaard’s blog here.

Some further (and rather controversial) discussion on the topic of women in philsophy can be found on Weatherson’s blog here and also here.

The Haslanger paper that is discussed can be found here.