The Re-Ignited EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT

The Re-Ignited EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT
ERA is BACK ~~!!

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Same Story: Fewer Women at the Top despite all the Studes


October 28, 2010, 4:54 pm

Still Few Women at the Top in Most Big U.S. Companies

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

Even though women represent about half of the nation’s work force, most companies in the S.&P. 100 have no female or minority representation in their highest-paid executive positions, Calvert Investments concluded in a report released Thursday.

The report, “Examining the Cracks in the Ceiling: A Survey of Corporate Diversity Practices of the S.&P. 100,” found that 56 of those 100 companies did not have female or minority employees in their “C-Suite” or most senior positions, while only 14 of those companies have two or more diverse officers in those positions. The report found that white males represent 92 percent of the chief executives of the 100 companies.

“We remain disheartened by the glacial pace at which women and minorities are reaching the upper echelons of power,” the Calvert report states in its executive summary.

According to the report, women make up approximately 18 percent of director positions within the S.&P. 100 and just 8.4 percent of the highest-paid executive positions in those companies.

The report found that 38 percent of the 100 companies “demonstrate a robust commitment to diversity, both internally and externally,” with 30 percent of the companies giving their boards some oversight of diversity issues.

Among investment management companies, Calvert has long been one of the leaders in pushing for corporate diversity. “We are very concerned about the fact that women and minorities continue to be under-represented at the highest levels of management,” said Barbara J. Krumsiek, the president and C.E.O. of Calvert Group, Ltd. “Without a pipeline of female and minority executives in highly-paid, highly responsible positions, it will be very difficult to achieve board diversity, which is critical to strong governance and good management.”

WHAT DO you THINK? Why is this, since all the economics -business media has determined that it's safer and wiser to have women at the top? ...sandyo@passERA.org

Saturday, October 23, 2010

We Can't Help THEM until we Help OURSELVES Achieve the ERA !

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Would The Market Have Crashed if Women Ruled Wall Street?


Lehman Sisters Wouldn't Have Failed

Trader

Even as high-profile, high-profit professions like medicine and the law have edged toward gender parity, the financial firms on Wall Street continue to be dominated by men. But research indicates that women may be better suited than men, biochemically, to succeed as traders and fund managers.

"It is entirely possible that when it comes to making and losing money, women are less hormonal than men," John Coates, who studies the biochemical underpinnings of financial markets at Cambridge University, told Big Think. "Women would be less hormonally reactive and their risk preferences would be more stable across the business cycle than men's are."

A former Wall Street trader, Coates says his interest in the effects of hormones on trading was sparked by watching the behavior of male traders during the dot-com boom: "They had become delusional, euphoric, had racing thoughts, diminished need for sleep; they were taking way too much risk, getting hornier that usual," he recalls. "It’s not that Wall Street was selecting this type of person, because they weren’t like that before the bubble and they weren’t like that after the bubble. ... I suspected there was a chemical involved."

His research led him to the conclusion that economic bubbles "are a male phenomenon," a result of increased levels of testosterone that contribute to greater and greater confidence and appetite for risk. He says this testosterone boost is due to an evolutionary adaptation shared by males across species called the "Winner's Effect." Male animals that win a competition are statistically more likely to win in the next round, he says. That's because when two males go into a fight their testosterone levels rise—increasing lean-muscle mass and hemoglobin in their blood (and thus its capacity to carry oxygen). As well, testosterone also affects the brain, increasing confidence and appetite for risk. After the competition, the winner comes out with higher levels of testosterone, while the loser comes out with lower levels. “From an evolutionary point of view, if you’ve just lost a fight you probably shouldn’t be looking for another fight,” says Coates.

As the winning animal goes into the next round, his testosterone levels stay elevated, increasing his confidence and spurring more risk-taking. "He goes into the next round with an edge," says Coates. "His T levels bump up again, and he goes on this sort of positive feedback loop."

But increased testosterone only increases performance up to a point. "As hormones increase in your body, your performance improves, until you get to what might be called the optimal level of this hormone for performing this task," says Coates. "If the hormone continues to rise, then your performance becomes impaired," he says, adding that overconfidence and poor risk planning can be outcomes of that impairment.

The same thing holds true for traders, says Coates. "They put on a trade and get it right, their T levels bump up, they become confident and take more risk, until eventually they go overtop this curve, becoming overconfident, delusional, and they put on huge trades with terrible risk-reward tradeoffs. ... And that is precisely what you see in the markets when these bull markets are reaching their peak.” Coates says that because women have roughly 10% the amount of testosterone that men do, increasing the number of women in finance can dampen hormone-driven economic swings.

But it isn’t simply that men are more reckless traders because of testosterone. Other research finds that women are better calibrated, biochemically, to manage risk in a bear market—including the risk central to a return on investment—because of the chemical cortisol.

"People suffering chronic stress and high levels of cortisol feel anxious and the memories they recall change," says Coates. "Under the influence of high levels of stress hormones, they tend to recall mostly negative precedents," he says. Men and women produce roughly the same amounts of cortisol, and they are equally as reactive, but they respond to different events differently, says Coates.

"Men's cortisol levels respond very powerfully from competitive situations, and women not so much. Women's cortisol responses and stress responses seem more powerful from social stressors." According to this theory, which Coates has begun testing, a male's cortisol-fueled stress response might exacerbate a bear or middling market by responding with skewed memories and anxiety to events, whereas a female risk response would be more stable across a variety of circumstances.

The numbers don't lie, says Coates. "Women have been found over a long period of time to outperform men by up to two percent return—which is a lot," he says. According to BusinessWeek, hedge funds run by women turned an annual rate of return of 9% between 2000 and 2009—versus 5.82% from funds run by men over the same period. A study by U.C. Davis researchers also found that men in the financial industry make 45 percent more trades than their female counterparts do—a gap that reduces their net returns by 2.65 percentage points per year compared with the 1.72 percentage points women lose on trading fees.

So would the recession would have been as bad—or would have happened at all—if women had had a larger presence in the financial sector?

Certainly those who invested with women did better during the depths of the financial crisis; while funds run by men dropped 19%, those run by women were down only 9.6%. And mutual fund company Vanguard published a study in March indicating that men "were much more likely than women to sell their shares at stock market lows. Those sales presumably meant big losses—and missing the start of the market rally," according to the New York Times.

More Resources

— Coates, J. “From molecule to market: steroid hormones and financial risk-taking.”

— Coates, J. “Endogenous steroids and financial risk taking on a London trading floor.”

— Barber, B., and Odean, T. "Boys Will Be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence, and Common Stock Investment."

— "Equity Abandonment 2008-2009," report by Vanguard.

— "2010 Top Women Financial Advisors," Barrons.

Study: Most agree Women Have More Leadership Skills, but Biased Perceptons Prevail !


Why Women Make Better Politicians

Congress

Ninety years after the 19th Amendment guaranteed their participation in American politics, women are still greatly underrepresented in elected office—even though new research shows they may be more effective politicians than their male counterparts. According to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, women currently hold:

  • 16.8% of seats in the Senate and House of Representatives
  • 22.5% of statewide executive offices (including governors and lieutenant governors)
  • 24.6% of state legislative positions
  • 17.5% of mayoral positions in cities above 30,000 people

But an ongoing study by Sarah Anzia at Stanford University and Christopher Berry at the University of Chicago has found that districts served by women legislators are at a distinct advantage over those represented by men: U.S. congresswomen bring home roughly 9 percent more discretionary spending than congressmen. As a result, districts that elect women to the House of Representatives receive, on average, about $49 million more each year. The report finds that bringing home more federal dollars and benefits doesn't hurt women legislators' performance in policy-making—congresswomen sponsor more bills and obtain more co-sponsorships for their legislation than their male colleagues do.

This difference in performance between female and male legislators may be a result, in part, of the plain fact that it is more difficult for women to get elected. Titled the "The Jackie (and Jill) Robinson Effect," the report finds higher performance amid persistent bias has a systematic effect on who reaches the highest level—and on what they do while they're there. Jackie Robinson was one of the greatest baseball players of his day not because he was African-American, but rather because the discriminatory bias against African-Americans in baseball meant higher-level talent was needed to break those bias barriers.

"If voters are biased against female candidates, only the most talented, hardest working female candidates will succeed in the electoral process," Anzia and Berry write. On top of that, "if women perceive there to be sex discrimination in the electoral process, or if they underestimate their qualifications for office relative to men, then only the most qualified, politically ambitious females will emerge as candidates." It doesn't matter whether the sex-based selection is from actual or perceived, active or passive, origins, the report finds that "women who are elected to office will perform better, on average, than their male counterpart."

Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, attributes this difference to the fact that women are more collaborative. She tells Big Think that "women are actually more inclined towards that more modern leadership, which is collaborative problem-solving, enabling, consultative, not just trying to assert a kind of hierarchical power." Men may also employ this sort of leadership, but it is distinctly feminine, she says.

Robinson is living proof that this feminine style of leadership can be both effective and popular. Halfway through her term as president, she had an unprecedented approval rating of 93%. She achieved this not by playing down her femininity but by embracing it. "When I was elected President of Ireland, I was determined to show that I brought to it the fact that I was a woman and was going to do it with various skills and I felt that they were enabling, problem solving, being more inclined not so much to want to lead in a kind of a natural way, but rather to lead by discussion and empowerment of others—to lead by example, lead by nurturing." But there is still a double standard for women politicians, she says. "If men are bold and assertive, that’s admired. If women are, it’s called shrill."

And if there is one rule in politics, it is that action is less important than perception. But here things get complicated for female politicians in general. In terms of individual leadership traits, women are perceived to possess more of these traits than men, but that doesn't translate to being perceived as better overall leaders. In a 2008 Pew Research Center survey of eight important leadership traits, women outperformed men on five and tie on two. Americans ranked women higher in honesty, intelligence, compassion, creativity, and outgoingness—by as much as 75 percent. And in the qualities of hard work and ambition, men and women tied, according to the survey. The only quality in which men scored higher than women is decisiveness, in which men and women were separated by a mere 11 percentage points. Yet when asked the single question if men or women make better leaders, the results seemed to contradict these other findings: a mere 6 percent of the 2,250 adults surveyed say women make better political leaders than men, with 21 percent favoring men and 69 percent saying the sexes are equal in this area, which explains the report's subtitle, "A Paradox in Public Attitudes."

So what accounts for this perceptual paradox? Politics professor Michele Swers of Georgetown University tells Big Think that it's not simply a matter of if women are more effective legislators; party politics plays an essential role in who gets elected. “If you look at how people react to candidates, there are certain stereotypes that people have in their mind about what’s a women’s issue and what’s not a women’s issue, so you may be more likely to prefer a female candidate if what’s on your mind are issues like health care and education, for example,” she says. "However, when I’m in the voting booth, I’m voting for the Republican or I’m voting for the Democrat, so those gender stereotypes interact with that type of thing as well,” she adds.

A female Republican candidate, for example, might sway a voter by being Republican or by being female, and for following the policies perceived to be favored by either, Swers explains. Essentially, more women are elected to the highest ranks in politics when more are candidates from prominent political parties. The difficulty lies in producing a political system, both in the U.S. and around the world, that accomplishes this.

More Resources

— Anzia and Berry, "The Jackie (and Jill) Robinson Effect: Why Do Congresswomen Outperform Congressmen?"

— Pew Research Center, "Men or Women: Who’s the Better Leader: A Paradox in Public Attitudes?"

Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey

Big Think interview with Nancy Pelosi, Representative (D-California); Speaker of the House

Monday, October 11, 2010

The Islam Protocol for Beating a Wife !

This url explains all about this horror in a matter-of-fact way:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNSGqnAREAs


Watch as this elderly man explains to the younger man ...

1. For what REASON a man should beat his wife,

2. Where the blows only may fall,

3. The weapon to be used,

4. How he should beat her.


It is our sorrow that America can't help much there since our legislators who deny us even a hearing on the Equal Rights Amendment certainly aren't much on advising or admonishing a medieval country on their womens' rights when we are just as medieval in implementing our mantra of Equality for All in America!

Please leave your comments on this or anything else*****

Thursday, October 7, 2010

As Leaders, Women Rule [Ed: sometimes]



BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : NOVEMBER 20, 2000 ISSUE



SPECIAL REPORT

As Leaders, Women Rule
New studies find that female managers outshine their male counterparts in almost every measure

Twenty-five years after women first started pouring into the labor force--and trying to be more like men in every way, from wearing power suits to picking up golf clubs--new research is showing that men ought to be the ones doing more of the imitating. In fact, after years of analyzing what makes leaders most effective and figuring out who's got the Right Stuff, management gurus now know how to boost the odds of getting a great executive: Hire a female.

That's the essential finding of a growing number of comprehensive management studies conducted by consultants across the country for companies ranging from high-tech to manufacturing to consumer services. By and large, the studies show that women executives, when rated by their peers, underlings, and bosses, score higher than their male counterparts on a wide variety of measures--from producing high-quality work to goal-setting to mentoring employees. Using elaborate performance evaluations of execs, researchers found that women got higher ratings than men on almost every skill measured. Ironically, the researchers weren't looking to ferret out gender differences. They accidentally stumbled on the findings when they were compiling hundreds of routine performance evaluations and then analyzing the results.

The gender differences were often small, and men sometimes earned higher marks in some critical areas, such as strategic ability and technical analysis. But overall, female executives were judged more effective than their male counterparts. ''Women are scoring higher on almost everything we look at,'' says Shirley Ross, an industrial psychologist who helped oversee a study performed by Hagberg Consulting Group in Foster City, Calif. Hagberg conducts in-depth performance evaluations of senior managers for its diverse clients, including technology, health care, financial-service, and consumer-goods companies. Of the 425 high-level executives evaluated, each by about 25 people, women execs won higher ratings on 42 of the 52 skills measured.

Photo by Jamie Tanaka
Bias of Experience: "I know I'm going to get a certain quality of work," says Shukla, who recently sold her Web software company for $390 million
The growing body of new research comes at a time when talent-hungry recruiters are scrambling to find execs who can retain workers and who can excel in the smaller bureaucracies of New Economy companies. Women think through decisions better than men, are more collaborative, and seek less personal glory, says the head of IBM's Global Services Div., Douglas Elix, who hired two managers within this year--both women. Instead of being motivated by self-interest, women are more driven by ''what they can do for the company,'' Elix says. Adds Harvard Business School Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter, author of the 20-year-old management classic, Men and Women of the Corporation : ''Women get high ratings on exactly those skills needed to succeed in the global Information Age, where teamwork and partnering are so important.''

It's no surprise, then, that some executives say they're beginning to develop a new hiring bias. If forced to choose between equally qualified male and female candidates for a top-level job, they say they often pick the woman--not because of affirmative action or any particular desire to give the female a chance but because they believe she will do a better job. ''I would rather hire a woman,'' says Anu Shukla, who sold her Internet marketing-software company Rubric Inc. earlier this year for $390 million. ''I know I'm going to get a certain quality of work, I know I'm going to get a certain dedication,'' she says, quickly adding that she's fully aware that not all women execs excel. Similarly, Brent Clark, CEO of Grand Rapids-based Pell Inc., the nation's largest foot-care chain, says he would choose a woman over a man, too. Women are more stable, he says, less turf-conscious, and better at ''all sorts of intangibles that can help an organization.''

But if women are so great, why aren't more of them running the big companies? Thousands of talented women now graduate from business schools and hold substantive middle-management jobs at major corporations--45% of all managerial posts are held by females, according to the Labor Dept. Yet only two of the nation's 500 biggest companies have female CEOs: Hewlett-Packard Co.'s ( HWP) Carly Fiorina and Avon Products' ( AVP) Andrea Jung. And of the 1,000 largest corporations, only six are run by women.

UNREWARDED. For one thing, there's still a pipeline problem: Most women get stuck in jobs that involve human resources or public relations--posts that rarely lead to the top. At the same time, female managers' strengths have long been undervalued, and their contributions in the workplace have gone largely unnoticed and unrewarded. Companies are now saying they want the skills women typically bring to the job, but such rhetoric doesn't always translate into reality. Some businesses view women only as workhorses, well-suited for demanding careers in middle management but not for prime jobs. These undercurrents of bias in Corporate America infuriate many women, who then bail out rather than navigate unsupportive terrain. ''They're doing the work, but they don't make it to the top,'' says Lyn Andrews, president of WebMD Health, a consumer unit of WebMD Corp. ( HLTH ) in New York. Many start their own companies, while others seek a different work/family balance than many corporations offer. There are now more than 9 million women-owned businesses in the U.S., double the number 12 years ago.

Photo by James Keyser
Old-School Advice: One of managing director Kiely's ex-bosses told her: "You should be looking out for yourself, not your people"
The new studies offer some clues about why the cultural mismatch between women and large companies persists and why it's so critical to keep women on board. What makes the new research more compelling than other such data is that it is based on results culled from executives' actual performance evaluations rather than on opinion surveys or experiments that simulate business situations.

Because the participants had no idea that their evaluations would end up as part of a study on gender, the data are untainted, says Janet Irwin, a California management consultant who conducted one of the studies. ''We were startled by the results,'' she says.

Irwin and her colleagues discovered that women ranked higher than men on 28 of 31 measures. Irwin was stunned by women's consistently high ratings and how the scores defied conventional wisdom. Contrary to stereotypes, women outperformed men in all kinds of intellectual areas, such as producing high-quality work, recognizing trends, and generating new ideas and acting on them. ''Women's strengths are stronger than men's,'' says Irwin, ''and their weaknesses are not as pronounced.''

Several other studies showed similar patterns. Personnel Decisions International, a consulting firm in Minneapolis, looked at a huge sample--58,000 managers--and found that women outranked men in 20 of 23 areas. Larry Pfaff, a Michigan management consultant, examined evaluations from 2,482 executives from a variety of companies and found that women outperformed men on 17 of 20 measures.

Some of the researchers draw different conclusions, though, arguing that the research shows that women executives are equally effective as their male counterparts but not necessarily superior. While women score better, and the scores are statistically significant, says Susan Gebelein, executive vice-president of Personnel Decisions, those differences don't mean much in the real world. Why? Because the consulting firm has tested so many thousands of people, which can make minor differences appear more important than they really are. Women have always outscored men in such evaluations, says Gebelein, whose company began looking at gender differences in 1984. And they score highest at the most male-dominated companies because, she surmises, of the type of woman who succeeds in such environments--someone who must be superior in every way.

Robert Kabacoff, a vice-president at Management Research Group in Portland, Me., also wondered if women were getting higher test scores in these studies for reasons other than gender. They might have rated higher because they weren't being compared with men holding similar jobs, he suggests. Managers of human-resources departments often get rated higher on people skills than other supervisors, for instance. If the majority of female managers in a study work in human resources, vs. only a minority of males, the results may have more to do with job than gender.

MISUNDERSTOOD. To eliminate such potential distortions, Kabacoff conducted a differently designed study in 1998. He compared male and female managers who worked at the same companies, held similar jobs, were at the same management level, and had the same amount of supervisory experience. When he examined 1,800 supervisors in 22 management skills, he found that women outranked men on about half of the measures. Female managers were graded more effective by peers and subordinates, but bosses still judged men and women equally competent as leaders. ''Men and women seem to be doing roughly equally effective jobs, but they approach their jobs differently,'' says Kabacoff.

Certainly, many women managers are keenly aware that they inhabit a different reality at the office than men. Nancy Hawthorne, former chief financial officer at Continental Cablevision Inc., who is now a consultant, says she often felt her bosses ''wondered what the heck I was doing.'' At meetings, she often allowed subordinates to explain the details of ongoing projects. She felt her role was to delegate tasks to people around her to help them be more effective. ''I was being traffic cop and coach and facilitator,'' she said. ''I was always into building a department that hummed.''

And sometimes, women say, they were badgered about using the very skills the research found so valuable. Sandra Kiely, managing director and chief administrative officer at National City Investment Management Co. in Cleveland, recalls that one of her bosses at National City Bank warned that her management style would hurt her career. ''You should be looking out for yourself, not your people,'' he advised her.

Everyone knows that women have long excelled at teamwork, but getting results was one of the categories in which women earned their highest marks in these studies. Jackie Streeter, Apple Computer Inc.'s ( AAPL ) vice-president for engineering, says she has repeatedly volunteered to shift dozens of employees out of her division because she felt they would better fit into a different department--a move that she says ''startled'' her male colleagues. ''It's not the size of your organization that counts but the size of the results you get,'' says Streeter, who has 350 people working for her.

Photo by Jason Grow/Saba
New Business Model: Companies assume people skills aren't business skills, says management professor Fletcher, when in fact, they're inextrictable
Women are also more likely to disregard as a useless power trip another long-held management bugaboo: keeping information tightly controlled. ''It's better to overcommunicate,'' says Shukla, whose Web startup, Rubric, made 65 of her 85 employees millionaires. Rather than dispensing information on a need-to-know basis, she made sure information was shared with all of her employees. She also created the CEO lunch, inviting six to eight employees at a time to discuss the business with her.

CARING WORKS. Companies can also undercut women's strengths in another, often inadvertent way: by assuming that people skills are not business skills. In fact, they are inextricable, argues Joyce Fletcher, a professor at Simmons Graduate School of Management in Boston and author of Disappearing Acts: Gender, Power, and Relational Practice at Work . Employees who feel cared about by their bosses or are inspired by them often produce higher-quality work, consultants say. And supervisors who know how to deal with conflict get better results.

Women have been doing this kind of work for years, but their behavior is often devalued because their intentions are misunderstood, says Fletcher. A woman who takes the time to talk to an employee about a meeting he has missed, for instance, might simply be considered a nice person--not someone trying to make sure that the staff has enough information to make an important decision. Her business actions become invisible, since the staff attributes her behavior to just being kind.

Similarly, duties such as coaching and keeping people informed are often taken as a given. But these tasks can actually be the invisible glue that holds a company together, which, until the 360-degree feedback evaluation came along, rarely got examined. ''It's like somebody doing your laundry,'' says Hawthorne, the former Continental Cablevision exec. ''You rely on them to have clean clothes,'' but the work is ''invisible when it's done well.'' Because ''the guys are into glamour,'' says National City's Kiely, women often end up in charge of difficult and unglamorous tasks such as performance reviews.

Kiely bristles at some research that concluded that women aren't perceived as strategic or vision-oriented. Her strategy, she says, is to make people think something is their idea so she can get them to buy into a plan.

Another potential trap: Women's biggest strengths can also become their biggest weaknesses, says Vivian Eyre, a New York management consultant. By working so hard to get great results, they often take away time from building critical business alliances. ''Given the opportunity to stay in their offices and make sure their report is perfect or going out of their office and talking to Joe about his business, women are more likely to do their own work,'' says Eyre.

What's more, she adds, women still suffer from a lack of mentoring and being kept outside informal networks of communication. Many women admit that because they spend so much time focusing on getting results, they don't think enough about strategy and vision--qualities that Harvard's Kanter says are still the most important in a top executive. ''If women are seen as only glorified office facilitators but not as tough-minded risk-takers,'' says Kanter, ''they will be held back from the CEO jobs.''

In the end, it takes a lot more than competence to make it to the top. Getting the best performance evaluations in the company's history may not be nearly enough. ''When you actually sit down in a selection committee to choose the CEO, lots of subtle assumptions come into play,'' said Deborah Merrill Sands, co-director of Simmons' Center on Gender & Organization. Companies may say they want collaborative leaders, but they still hold deep-seated beliefs that top managers need to be heroic figures. Interpersonal skills may be recognized as important, she said, but they aren't explicitly seen as corner-office skills. ''We are in the process of changing our concepts of leadership,'' she says. ''But organizations haven't evolved that much yet.''

In fact, Kabacoff has just finished a new study showing how CEOs and corporate boards view upper management, and he found a clear double standard. Male CEOs and senior vice-presidents got high marks from their bosses when they were forceful and assertive and lower scores if they were cooperative and empathic. The opposite was true for women: Female CEOs got downgraded for being assertive and got better scores when they were cooperative. Kabacoff's conclusion? ''At the highest levels, bosses are still evaluating people in the most stereotypical ways.'' That means that even though women have proven their readiness to lead companies into the future, they're not likely to get a shot until their bosses are ready to stop living in the past.

By Rochelle Sharpe in Boston


COMMENTS, Anybody?
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Monday, October 4, 2010

Marine Servicewomen Defy Rules of Engagement

[WOMEN MARINES IN COMBAT RISK LIVES BUT W/O "COMBAT PAY"] What do YOU think? Comment at end.

support womens-rights

In Afghanistan, Female Marines Defy Gender Roles

posted by: Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux 20 hours ago
In Afghanistan, Female Marines Defy Gender Roles
A group of female Marines arrived in Afghanistan six months ago with something of a bizarre mission: to access all-female communities in rural Afghanistan that were off-limits to men, by having tea with Pashtun women in their homes. By forging such connections, the Marines hoped to assess the local need for aid and gain better strategies for opening local clinics and schools.

This mission, however, according to a long article in the New York Times , has allowed these Marines to engage in combat activities that are forbidden to female soldiers, simply because southern Afghanistan is much more dangerous than anyone expected. According to the article, the women "have shot back in firefights and ambushes, been hit by homemade bombs and lived on bases hit by mortar attacks." They have, like their male counterparts, lost weight from the stress, and some have seen marriages or relationships end. Others have, for the first time, seen fellow soldiers die.

For some women, this is the beginning of a long-sought equality that the U.S. military is still far from extending. For Captain Emily Naslund, a graduate of the Virginia Military Academy, the Marines are the ultimate proving ground, and the fact that she must say that women simply "accompany" Marine infantry groups on patrols is absurd.

"The current policy on women in combat is outdated and does not apply to the type of war we are fighting," she wrote in an email quoted in the NYT article. And although she unwillingly accepts the guidelines imposed on her by the Marines, she will continue to speak out.

Some women have said that they would not volunteer for this mission again - that the death and destruction is too much. And there are male officers and infantrymen who question the women's presence and remain resentful of the attention they have received from the news media.

But the experiences of this group of female Marines comes amid criticism of the way that the military defines "combat roles." Especially in counterinsurgency missions, there are no definite "front lines"; soldiers are in constant risk of being targeted by insurgents. Despite all of this, only a few countries allow women to serve in active combat roles, and the U.S. is clearly not one of them.

The article illustrates the extent to which women are still limited by the U.S. military - and to everyone's detriment. Women like this company of Marines show that there is nothing inherently gendered about being on the front lines of a war - but even women who openly defy these gender stereotypes still seem to be fighting an uphill battle to change these outdated cultural norms.

Saturday, October 2, 2010

GLORIA ALLRED, Esq is OUR KIND OF WOMAN!


[Your blog editor's comment below:]

ERA'S friend, Ms. Allred, began a Fast for Passing the ERA recently!! Hardly a mention in the media, run by men. Love them, but why are men so blind to injustice, not even recognizing sex discrimination when it's against THEM, according to AAUW/YWCA studies !!


Gloria Allred is a girl's best friend

By Ann O'Neill, CNN

October 1, 2010 12:03 p.m. EDT


Gloria Allred says many of her clients have been victimized by celebrity men.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

· Gloria Allred says her practice includes women harmed by celebrity men

· She originally was a schoolteacher, and came to Los Angeles from Philadelphia

· Allred represents women in the Tiger Woods scandal

· She won a $5 million verdict for a pregnant actress who was fired

Los Angeles, California (CNN) -- Her clients include mistresses, starlets and allegedly wronged women from all walks of life. So, when Gloria Allred calls a news conference, media types know they're about to hear some dish.

So it was on Wednesday, when Allred and her latest client tossed a big, juicy curveball into the tight California governor's race.

Nicandra Diaz Santillan blotted tears from her eyes as Allred announced she'd be filing a claim against her client's former employer, Republican candidate Meg Whitman, accusing her of emotional abuse and financial exploitation. It was classic Allred, and continued into the next day, with each side holding dueling news conferences and waving conflicting documents.

Allred contends the former eBay CEO knew for nine years that her housekeeper was in the country illegally, and then fired her for political motives. Whitman acknowledged she employed Diaz, but said the housekeeper deceived her about her immigration status. Whitman said she is willing to take a lie detector test.

To say Allred, 69, is well-known is an understatement. On her website, she calls herself "the most famous woman attorney practicing law in the nation today." That might be marketing hyperbole, but she's so engrained in the popular culture that she was the subject of a recent "Saturday Night Live" skit.


Nicandra Diaz Santillan meets the press with her lawyer, Gloria Allred, by her side.

These words carry real weight: "Look out, mister, I'm calling Gloria Allred."

But not all her clients are women. Allred also represented Tony Barretto, the bodyguard who emerged in 2007 as the secret witness with alleged inside dirt during Britney Spears' custody dispute.

Allred stuck by his side, whether he was on the "Today Show" or in the courtroom, Barretto recalled. "She was very attentive to everything I had to say," Barretto said. "Gloria had ideas and insight on things I never thought would come up and then she would talk to me about those things. She made me feel comfortable."

Allred frequently dresses in all red. But she has also been known to wear green, "the color of money," as a Los Angeles Times reporter once observed. She favors knits from St. John.

Some critics consider Allred a publicity hound. Snickers fill newsrooms and the law offices of rivals when she trots clients such as Rachel Uchitel and Joslyn James, reputed mistresses of Tiger Woods, in front of the cameras. Allred doesn't care what her critics say.

She also represents the female police officer who responded to a domestic violence call in Aspen, Colorado involving Charlie Sheen. She's the attorney for Jodie Fisher, the events contractor and former porn actress whose allegations of sexual harassment led to a shareholder lawsuit and the abrupt resignation of Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd.

Allred has said she is not exploiting her clients, and if they have a story to tell it's better to get their version out than let the rumors fly. Unlike a lot of other lawyers, Allred is not afraid to go public, even if powerful people don't like what her clients have to say.

"A lot of my clients have not begun as celebrities," Allred recently told CNN. "They were typical people who were essentially women in crisis, sometimes because of the celebrity man. Because they were involved with a man who was a celebrity, they have become, in a sense, celebrity victims."


Allred represents Charlotte Lewis, who contends director Roman Polanski took sexual advantage of her.

Another recent Allred target was the exiled movie director Roman Polanski, who has admitted having sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977. Authorities in Los Angeles are trying to extradite Polanski from Switzerland. He pleaded guilty to having sex with a minor, but left the United States before he could be sentenced. He's been gone more than 30 years.

In May, seated beside Allred at a news conference actress Charlotte Lewis alleged that five years after he left the U.S., Polanski had his way with her, too, in France, when she was of tender years.

"If Charlotte's allegations are accepted as true, then Mr. Polanski was able to victimize another child while he was a fugitive from justice," Allred said.

She said she never heard back from any of Polanski's representatives. Attorney Chad Hummel, who represented Polanski at the time, had no comment Thursday.

Allred said she doesn't remember if she paid attention to the Polanski case when it first happened. She had just graduated from Loyola Law School and was setting up her firm with fellow Loyola law grads Michael Maroko and Nathan Goldberg. The firm is still going strong, focusing on civil rights, employment discrimination and sexual harassment. The firm doesn't handle criminal cases, but does represent crime victims.

Allred's life story, as laid out in the first chapter of her book, "Fight Back and Win," is reminiscent of that old Virginia Slims advertising slogan, "You've come a long way, baby."

Gloria Rachel Bloom grew up in a working-class family in Southwest Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Neither parent got past the eighth grade. Her father was a Fuller Brush salesman. Her mother, who was born in Britain, stayed at home and raised her only child. She emphasized education.

Allred got into the prestigious Philadelphia High School for Girls and won a partial scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania. She met a boy at a mixer, married him during her sophomore year and gave birth to her daughter, Lisa, during her junior year. By her senior year, the couple was divorcing and she was a single mother.

Despite her honors degree in English, Allred went to work as a buyer's assistant at Gimbels department store. She wondered why a man with the same job made $15 a week more than she did.

A lot of my clients have not begun as celebrities.
--Gloria Allred, feminist attorney

She got a teaching job at Benjamin Franklin High School in Philadelphia, where most of her students were poor and black. A few years later, in 1966, recruiters from the Los Angeles school district came calling and Allred packed up her daughter and moved to L.A.

That year, she says, while on vacation in Acapulco, Mexico, she was raped at gunpoint by a Mexican doctor, became pregnant and had an illegal abortion that nearly killed her. She did not report the rape, she said, because she didn't think anyone would believe her.

She taught in the Watts neighborhood of L.A. and became involved in labor issues, and decided a law degree would help with her activism. After law school, she served as president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women. She pressed then-Gov. Jerry Brown to appoint more women as judges, and she began to take on women's cases.

One of Allred's most famous cases involved a lawsuit on behalf of an actress on the original "Melrose Place," who claimed she was wrongfully fired and discriminated against when she became pregnant. Lawyers for Aaron Spelling's production company said Hunter Tylo broke her contract by making a "material change" to her appearance.

Jurors viewed charts that producers kept of Tylo's projected weight gain showing she would weigh 144 pounds when it was time to shoot a key bikini scene. Jurors also saw scenes in which star Heather Locklear's baby bump was hidden behind furniture and leopard print sheets. Tylo revealed from the witness stand that she was eight months pregnant. She did not look it, and jurors awarded her nearly $5 million in damages.

Allred's targets: "I go after these guys who have hurt women."

Personal: Allred's daughter, Lisa Bloom, is a former Court TV anchor and CNN legal analyst who has opened her own law firm. Her granddaughter is considering law school.

Clients: Famous men who have faced the wrath of Allred and her clients include Roman Polanski, Eddie Murphy, Rob Lowe, O.J. Simpson, Scott Peterson and the late Aaron Spelling.