Rhona Reiss, the former Director of Education at the American Occupational Therapy Association, had nearly 35 year in her field when she completed her Ph.D. and could not secure another job. Unemployed and facing the demands of caring for a child and sick parent, Reiss turned to an escort service for a temporary job. Now that the high-class prostitution ring she worked for is under investigation, Reiss’s career is in ruins.
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POPLINE, a federally-funded data base at Johns Hopkins University, recently banned abortion as a search term. POPLINE is the world’s largest database on reproductive health, providing access to over 360,000 records and articles on family planning, fertility and sexually transmitted diseases. Although the ban has been lifted, questions remain over the process that led to the term’s exclusion. POPLINE is maintained by the INFO Project at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health/Center for Communication Programs and is funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
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New rules ensuring that 5 percent of all small business contracts go to women has sparked controversy. Female-owned businesses, defined as at least 51 percent controlled or owned by females, were awarded 3.4 percent, or about $11 billion, in government contracts in 2006. The failure to hit the 5 percent mark, according to Congressional figures, deprived female owners of roughly $5 billion annually. For more, please click here.
Women’s colleges are facing a new challenge, students who enter as female, but become male. Rey, a student at Barnard, exposes the personal and intuitional challenges of becoming transmale at an elite women’s college. For more, please click here.
A new tradition is emerging in Kenya to replace female genital cutting, one that incorporates coming of age ceremonies and sex-ed. For more, please click here.
A recent report shows that women represent an increasing share of bankruptcy filings. Last year, women represented 39 percent of bankruptcy filings, compared with 28 percent for men; 33 percent of the filings were made by married couples. The statistics may be a result of the increasing number of women in the work force or the increasing number of adult single women. For more information, please click here.
Emerging events in politics over the last few months have brought to light the question: where exactly does society stand on gender matters? From Hillary’s campaign to Eliot Spitzer’s resignation, women are standing on both sides of the debate. For more, please click here.
