Women Lose More Jobs in Recessions

The U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee recently released a report confirming that women are more vulnerable to job loss during recession. Unlike the economic downturns of the 1980s and 1990s, the 2001 recession was particularly detrimental to women because they not only lost more jobs than men but also did not see their employment rates recover to their pre-recession peak. Since women bring home more than one-third of family income and single mothers are often the sole breadwinners, women’s unemployment also has harsh implications for the economic security of families and communities. Greater job losses for women translate into reduced government revenue and cuts in spending on programs and services that benefit women and their families.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/business/22jobs.html?scp=1&sq=women+and+jobs&st=nyt
http://jec.senate.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.View&FileStore_id=80a7a0cd-6125-495d-bca5-09af2c0393f9

Girls Can Do Math

A new study published in Science magazine has debunked the myth that boys are better than girls in mathematics. Janet S. Hyde of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her colleagues compared the standardized test scores of more than seven million girls and boys from second through eleventh grade and found no difference in their performances. Studies twenty years ago showed that although girls and boys performed equally well on math in elementary school, girls fell behind in high school. The researchers attributed the advance to increasing numbers of girls taking advanced math classes such as Calculus.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25836419/
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/321/5888/494

Study Suggests Strategies for Hiring Women in Sciences

A recent study tracking the career paths of more than 3,000 male and female applicants for jobs in science, mathematics and engineering fields found that women were less likely to apply and more likely to decline job offers than men. The study, conducted by sociologists Christy M. Glass of Utah State University and Krista Lynn Minnotte of the University of North Dakota, suggested strategies for recruiting more women into science and technology jobs. Although they determined that employers were willing to hire women, there was a lack of understanding of where and how to market jobs to female candidates. Recommendations ranged from advertising job postings in publications specifically geared towards women in the sciences to including at least one woman on search committees.
http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/08/05/women
http://aaa.main.usu.edu/Assessment/Fac_Vitas/SSWA/GlassChristy.pdf http://wfnetwork.bc.edu/leaders_entry.php?id=6453&area=All

Bush Abortion Proposal Sets Conditions on Federal Aid

In an effort to strengthen the capacity of health care providers to deny abortion services, the Bush administration recently proposed the introduction of a new rule that would require hospitals, clinics, researchers and medical schools to sign “written certifications” that they do not discriminate against hospitals and other institutions that have policies against providing abortion. Such certification would be a prerequisite to receiving funds under any program run by the Department of Health and Human Services. It would also be required of state and local governments, forbidden to discriminate, in areas like grant-making, against hospitals and other institutions that have policies against providing abortion. The administration stated the proposal is necessary to ensure that federal money does not “support morally coercive or discriminatory practices or policies in violation of federal law.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/washington/15rule.html?ei=5124&en=0eb76de0ec6ae964&ex=1373860800&adxnnl=1&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink&adxnnlx=1216673737-QZ/a+/6fuaBD6RFcGuARlQ
http://www.nationalpartnership.org/site/PageServer?pagename=newsroom_pr_PressRelease_080715

Women Leaving Science Careers

The Center for Work-Life Policy has found that more than half of women who choose careers in science, engineering, and technology drop out. The study identifies five major causes—hostile “macho” work environments, severe isolation, lack of career path guidance and orientation, systems of reward that emphasize risk-taking, and extreme work pressures—and proposes fourteen new initiatives to address these challenges. The paper “Athena Factor: Reversing the Brain Drain in Science, Engineering, and Technology,” is published by the Harvard Business Review.

http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3100

http://www.worklifepolicy.org/index.php/section/research_pubs

http://www.worklifepolicy.org/documents/AthenaPressRelease-April30.pdf

High-Ranking Women Lose Jobs on Wall Street

Recent instability in the financial services sector has had a negative impact on women in corporate leadership. One of the highest-ranking women on Wall Street, Lehman Brothers chief financial officer Erin Callan, was recently removed from her post after the company suffered a $2.8 billion loss in the second quarter. The change came just months after Morgan Stanley forced the retirement of co-president Zoe Cruz. While no one should be allowed to remain in a job just to fill a quota, experts say that the expectations for women executives are higher and that women have to be “twice as credentialed” to even be considered for top jobs. Although women make up 46% of the workforce, only 15.4% of them hold Fortune 500 senior officer positions. “There’s so few women [that] when one of them gets fired [from an executive position], the percentage drops 10 percent,” said Gail Evans, former CNN executive vice president.
http://www.mainstreet.com/wall-street-women-under-siege

UN Security Council Declares Rape a Weapon of War

The UN Security Council passed a resolution last week classifying rape as a weapon of war. The resolution was unanimous and describes rape as "a tactic of war to humiliate, dominate, instill fear in, disperse and/or forcibly relocate civilian members of a community or ethnic group.” In the Democratic Republic of the Congo alone, approximately forty women are raped each day, sometimes by the peacekeepers who are supposed to be protecting them. In addition to harming the health and safety of women, sexual violence also destroys the economic and social stability of war-torn nations.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7464462.stm
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/06/20/1213770867927.html
http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=91692457&m=91692436

The Myth of Women "Opting Out" of the Workplace

When Lisa Seftel was planning for her first child, she and her employer made a deal that she would work three days in the office and two days at home. This arrangement would allow her to have full employer benefits and share the childcare with her husband. In 2003, however, her employer went back on his word, telling her she could work five days a week in the office or three days at home. Like so many other women, Seftel was forced to quit her job because she could not afford to pay for childcare and would lose her family’s health insurance if she worked only three days. While a plethora of news reports has explained the recent trend of women leaving the workforce as "opting out," new research has emerged showing that the workplace is at fault for failing to meet women’s needs.
http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm?aid=3640

Forced Unpaid Maternity Leave for Detroit Police Officers

Female police officers in Detroit often hide their pregnancies because they face the prospect of unpaid leave. The Detroit Police Department designates pregnancy an “off the job injury” and requires pregnant officers to leave their positions until after they have given birth. A state legislator has introduced a bill that would overturn the policy and the department faces possible legal action by an officer who was forced to take unpaid leave.
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080606/METRO/806060360/1409/METRO

Women Denied Health Coverage Over C-Section

A Colorado woman who had given birth by Caesarian section, was denied health coverage based on her likelihood of needing the procedure again. A letter from the prospective insurer, Golden Rule, explained that she would only qualify if she had been sterilized after the Caesarean, or if she were over 40 years of age and had given birth two or more years before applying. With C-sections being performed in the U.S. at an all-time high rate of 31.1%, large numbers of women are now being rendered uninsurable or faced with higher premiums.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/health/01insure.html?pagewanted=1&_r=4

Abortion Ban

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).

For more information please click here.

Women Business Owners Dispute Contracting Rules

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.

When Girls Will Be Boys

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.

In Kenya, a refuge from female cutting

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.

Harsh statistics should propel women to plan ahead

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.

Postfeminism and Other Fairy Tales

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.

Corner of Finance Where Women Are Climbing

Women now manage 10 of the 50 largest endowments and foundations. As chief investment officers who handle billions of dollars for big university endowments and private foundations they have made great strides in the past decade.
For more, please click here.