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APRIL 2012 | IN THIS ISSUE Women in the News |
Introduction
In a continued effort to both inform and be a resource for the community, The WNY Women's Foundation will be producing this newsletter for you monthly. Every other month, we will include news that affects the programs and initiatives that we are directly involved with (WNYWF Update), and the next month's newsletter will include pertinent articles on advocacy, family sustaining jobs, childcare, out of school time, new research and reports, and other information we think you might enjoy to keep you informed (Women in the News). Please feel free to send us your comments, or suggestions for items to include in the next newsletter, and please "share" this with your friends, by clicking on one of the images at the top of the newsletter. |
 Womens enews.org: 1970s Laws Are Today's Ammo for Women's Rights
By Cynthia L. Cooper
WeNews correspondent
Friday, March 16, 2012
It's Women's History Month and a mighty time in this ongoing saga occurred not so long ago, during the 1970s. It all began at Newsweek Magazine, when the men got the bylines and women did the research.
When women today grapple with gender inequity they often find themselves turning to a rich 10-year-period of modern history: the 1970s. That decade, said Ariela Migdal, a senior staff attorney at today's Women's Rights Project of the ACLU, "gave us the tools for how we can continue uprooting the bias." U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of the leading sex-discrimination litigators and strategists of the 1970s, says the culture was ripe for legal reforms. "There was a spirit that things were not right and they should be changed," Ginsburg told a symposium at Columbia Law School here in February.
Ginsburg, hired as the first tenured woman law professor at Columbia Law School in 1972, simultaneously guided the American Civil Liberties Union Women's Rights Project, which she co-founded. In the 1970s she argued six pioneering sex discrimination cases before the then all-male U.S. Supreme Court, winning five.
By 1980--the same year that Ginsburg was named a federal judge by President Jimmy Carter--the legal landscape for women's rights and opportunities had changed for the better.
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The Buffalo News: Orth Urges Lives of Caring, Empathy by Students
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Maureen Orth - Courtesy of The Buffalo News |
By Harold McNeil
March 15, 2012
Caring and empathy are the cornerstones of social justice, Maureen Orth, an award-winning journalist and author, told young women Wednesday evening at Nardin Academy. Abundant opportunities await students of the all-girls Catholic high school, but the fruits of their education should not just accrue to them, but to others, Orth said.
Orth was the keynote speaker for the school's annual forum on social justice, which was attended by about 500 people.
Orth, who grew up in the San Francisco Bay area and graduated from the University of California-Berkeley in 1964, served for two years in the Peace Corps in Medellin, Colombia, where she helped build Escuela Marina Orth, a school that was named in her honor.
"I learned so much there about the way God does not discriminate when he hands out brains or talent, or how happy you could be with far less than what we Americans have come to demand and expect, and also how very important it is to learn to empathize and to look at the world from another person's point of view," Orth said.
Click here to read the rest of the article |
 New York Times: Cultural Constraints on Women Leaders
Way of the World
By CHRYSTIA FREELAND | REUTERS
Published: March 15, 2012
NEW YORK - NEW YORK With hindsight, we may find that the 2016 U.S. presidential race began last week, when Hillary Rodham Clinton made a politically electrifying point. "Why extremists always focus on women remains a mystery to me," she said at the Women in the World conference in New York. "But they all seem to. It doesn't matter what country they're in or what religion they claim. They want to control women."
At a time when birth control has re-emerged as a political issue in the United States, 94 years after the first legal ruling to permit it, Mrs. Clinton's comments were an inspiring rallying cry for worried American women. But what about the mystery she identified? Why, as the secretary of state asserted, do extremists, from the Taliban to conservative Christians, want to control women?
An intriguing new study by two professors at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto suggests a possible answer. (Disclosure: I am on the school's dean's advisory board.) Soo Min Toh and Geoffrey Leonardelli didn't set out to discover why extremists want to control women. Their question was more familiar: Why aren't there more female leaders?
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The Buffalo News: Eva Doyle, The Truth-Seeker
By Charity Vogel, 2012
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Eva Davis - Courtesy of Charles Lewis/Buffalo News |
Eva M. Doyle tells the second-graders gathered in the Central Library on a recent weekday afternoon that she is going to teach them to count.
Second graders? Counting?
In Swahili.
Or, as she calls it, using the language's own term, "Kiswahili."
Moja. Mbili. Tatu. Nne. Tano.
The children repeat back after her: Moja. Mbili. Tatu. Nne. Tano.
Their voices are light, fluttery with shyness at first, but they build in strength and confidence. Moja! Mbili! Tatu! Nne! Tano!
"Good," Doyle says. She tells them she was so inspired by counting in the African language that she wrote a counting book, called "Jambo," or "Hello," just for kids.
She holds the slim booklet up.
"I wrote this in seven hours one day," says Doyle. "It was a snowy day, and I said to myself, 'I'm going to write a book.'"
The children smile. A few giggle.
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The Economist: Women in Business: Waving a Big Stick
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Viviane Reding - EU Justice Commissioner |
"I DON'T like quotas, but I like what quotas do," says Viviane Reding, the European Union's justice commissioner. A year ago she invited publicly listed firms to sign a pledge to increase the proportion of women on their boards to 30% by 2015 and 40% by 2020. If there was no significant progress within a year, she said at the time, "you can count on my regulatory creativity." So far only 24 firms have signed.
So on March 5th Ms Reding (pictured) announced the launch of a three-month public consultation to ask what kind of measures the EU should take to get more women into boardrooms. The commission will then decide on further action later this year. There is no mention of quotas yet, but the consultation document seems to be paving the road to them. Among other things, it asks: "Which objectives (eg, 20%, 30%, 40%, 60%) should be defined for the share of the underrepresented sex?"
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Yahoo! Sports: Augusta National's conundrum: Should the golf club purposely not invite a woman?
By Dan Wetzel, March 28, 2012
 | Ginni Rometty became IBM's first female CEO on Jan. 1, 2012
(AP photo) |
This is the most exclusive golf club in the world, just three hundred or so names and they are prominent - Warren Bufffett, Bill Gates, Lynn Swann, T. Boone Pickens and so on.
Here are two other traditions.
Historically, the sitting CEO of International Business Machines (IBM) is offered an invitation for membership. The club has never had a female member, even in the face of repeated public protests.
Now here's the conundrum.
On Jan. 1, 2012, IBM named Virginia "Ginni" M. Rometty, a woman, as CEO. Bloomberg News Service, which first reported this, says she golfs, at least a little bit.
What will, or can, Augusta National do?
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Newsweek: The Daily Beast: Can Aung San Suu Kyi, Now Free, Lead Burma to Democracy?
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Aung San Suu Kyi |
Aung San Suu Kyi gave up her husband, her children, and 22 years of her life to fight for democracy in Burma. With elections just weeks away, filmmaker Rebecca Frayn reports on this woman's long story of sacrifice as it reaches an extraordinary climax.
As the jubilant crowds surged around Aung San Suu Kyi on her release from house arrest in 2010, I couldn't but think of David and Goliath. How had such a fragile figure of a woman singlehandedly managed to withstand the might of one of the world's most brutal military regimes for the past 22 years? She has had three particularly close brushes with death at its hands: in 1989 she faced down the guns of hostile soldiers who had been ordered to shoot her where she stood; a few years later she survived a hunger strike intended to get her fellow party workers released from prison; and more recently still, in 2003, she miraculously escaped an assassination attempt while on the campaign trail. Her resolute determination to establish democracy in Burma has rightfully earned her a place alongside Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi. Yet behind Suu Kyi's apparently unshakable courage lies a story of immense personal sacrifice. For during her long years under house arrest in Rangoon, her two sons were growing up in England without her, while her husband, the Oxford academic Michael Aris, died in 1999 without ever being allowed to say goodbye. Few of us could imagine being asked to choose our country over our family, as she has effectively had to do. Fewer still could imagine living so stoically with the ongoing consequences of that choice.
Click here to read the rest of the article |
Women in the World: Newsweek's Third Annual Women in the World Summit Draws World Leaders
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Madeleine Albright and Charlie Rose
Click to View Video |
There was no shortage of memorable moments from Newsweek and The Daily Beast's Women in the World Summit this past week in New York City. Amid three days of rich and remarkable programs, some moments stood out uniquely-particular turns of phrase that can embody a moment, galvanize a movement, and spread like wildfire online. Here Charlie Rose interviews Madeleine Albright about the toll war takes on women, even as they are the key to maintaining civil society.
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Girls Can Change the World
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Sarah Brown, Dr. Ida Odinga of Kenya, and Shelly Esque of Intel discuss the importance of educating girls throughout the world, and what it takes to break down the barriers preventing some girls from receiving an education.Moderated by: Juju Chang, Correspondent, ABC News' Nightline Sarah Brown, CEO, Office of Gordon and SarahBrown, and President, PiggyBankKidsShelly M. Esque, Vice President, Corporate Affairs, Intel; President, Intel FoundationDr. Ida Betty Odinga, MGH
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Making Justice Real in the World
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What happens when women assume authority in the justice pipeline, and how do they make real change happen? Two powerful champions of justice, both lawyers who happen to be sisters,talk about their approaches to creating a more just future.Moderated by: Cynthia McFadden, Co-Anchor, ABC News' NightlineKamala D. Harris, Attorney General, CaliforniaMaya L. Harris, Vice President for Democracy, Rights and Justice,Ford Foundation
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Forbes: Why Women's Organizations Need to Sister Up and Pay Speakers
The primary issue is that we women chronically undervalue ourselves, chronically undercharge for our services, and chronically say yes to projects that don't pay or aren't connected to our goals and priorities. The organizations we join should be our first line of access and support for turning that behavior around. And the organization needs to model it.
We too need to take personal responsibility for finding our pause button to say, "You know, thank you for the invitation. I'm focusing now on paid speaking and training gigs, so if you'd like to brainstorm how we can meet both our needs, I'm in."
The secondary issue is that the organization itself does not become as profitable as it could be. It's common to develop paid sponsorships for conferences and bigger special events while also charging members a registration fee. But couldn't that strategy also work to pay for monthly or quarterly professional development events?
Conversely, this work for free phenomenon seems to correlate with the fact that women are likely to pay more for products and services. In Sex Discrimination and Gender Bias - Why Do Women Pay More Than Men at Marie Claire Lea Goldman writes:
"... being a woman in this country has become an increasingly expensive proposition. It's not just dry cleaning and haircuts where women get socked: We pay more for home mortgages, health insurance, and cars and car repairs (even when we mind our credit, eat right and exercise, and do our homework), not to mention everyday items like deodorant and disposable razors. California, which in 1996 became the first state to ban gender pricing, found that women paid about $1,351 annually in extra costs and fees. Apply that figure to the rest of the women in the country and the total burden is staggering - roughly $151 billion in markups, more than what the federal government spent on education last year and greater than the budgets of 43 states."
Statistically we are 4 times less likely than men to negotiate our salaries and exact better deals for ourselves, but isn't it curious that we have no trouble asking our sisters to work for free?
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