Since the dawn of time, or at least the dawn of the GPA, high school students have been hearing that grades matter. Now, a University of Miami study backs up that parental talking point: The better your GPA, the higher your income is likely to be 10 years after graduation.
But as @think-progress points out, this doesn’t mean that girls with good grades earn more than boys with mediocre ones.Quite the contrary, in fact:
A woman who got a 4.0 GPA in high school will only be worth about as much, income-wise, as a man who got a 2.0. A woman with a 2.0 average will make about as much as a man with a 0 GPA.
Other depressing findings: Girls have significantly higher average GPAs, but “men will still end up having significantly higher income later on,” Think Progress says.
And the GPA-gender wage gap continues through college and grad school:
A woman who is one credential ahead of a man will always be worth less in terms of income: a woman with an associate’s degree makes less than a man with a vocational degree, a woman with a bachelor’s makes less than a man with an associate’s, and a woman with an advanced degree makes less than a man with a bachelor’s. Even among recent college graduates with the same grades, majors, and career fields, men will make more in their first jobs.
The federal government has issued new rules aimed at eliminating systemic gender bias in medical research. It’s no longer enough for scientists testing drugs and doing other kinds of research to include women in clinical studies at the end of the process, the National Institutes of Health says. From now on, scientists must begin using female subjects in their very first laboratory experiments — including female animals and female-derived cells.
Researchers [have often] avoided using female animals for fear that their reproductive cycles and hormone fluctuations would confound the results of delicately calibrated experiments.
That laboratory tradition has had enormous consequences for women. Name a new drug or treatment, and odds are researchers know far more about its effect on men than on women.
It’s been 25 years or so since gender bias in medical studies emerged as a major women’s health issue. Women now make up more than half the participants in government-funded clinical research, but they are still often underrepresented in clinical trials carried out by private companies.
Partly as a result, women experience more severe side effects from new treatments, studies have shown.
Yet clinical studies are just the last stage of the lengthy process of developing drugs and medical devices. And even in NIH-funded studies, female subjects continue to be hugely underrepresented in earlier stages of lab research, Roni Caryn Rabin reports.
Bias in mammalian test subjects was evident in eight of 10 scientific disciplines in an analysis of published research conducted by Irving Zucker, a professor of psychology and integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley. The most lopsided was neuroscience, where single-sex studies of male animals outnumbered those of females by 5.5 to 1.
Even when researchers study diseases that are more prevalent in women — including anxiety, depression, thyroid disease and multiple sclerosis — they often rely on male animals, Zucker has found.
By kindergarten, girls are substantially more attentive, better behaved, more sensitive, more persistent, more flexible and more independent than boys, according to a new paper from Third Way, a Washington research group. The gap grows over the course of elementary school and feeds into academic gaps between the sexes. By eighth grade, 48 percent of girls receive a mix of A’s and B’s or better. Only 31 percent of boys do.
Andin an economy that rewards knowledge, the academic struggles of boys turn into economic struggles. Men’s wages are stagnating. Men are much more likely to be idle — neither working, looking for work nor caring for family — than they once were and much more likely to be idle than women.
How, then, do we account for persistent gender gaps in the workplace that continue to favor men, despite the academic gap that favors girls? The Upshot’s David Leonhardt explains what he thinks is going on:
The problems that stem from gender have become double-edged. The old forms of sexism, while greatly diminished, still constrain women. The job market exacts harsh financial and career penalties on anyone who decides to work part time or take time off, and the workers who do so are overwhelmingly female. …
But men have their own challenges. As the economy continues to shift away from brawn and toward brains, many men have struggled with the transition.
Screenshots from the website of the Buffalo Jills, the official cheerleading squad of the NFL’s Buffalo Bills, which has been hit with a class-action lawsuit alleging numerous wage violations under NY state law.
According to the suit brought by five Jills, not only were the cheerleaders required to provide more than 800 hours of uncompensated labor every year (at games, practices, and special appearances including private parties, The Jills Annual Golf Tournament and something called “The Man Show” at a Niagara Falls casino), but they paid for their own uniforms, makeup and gas money and weren’t even allowed to keep tips. At the same time, the women allegedly had to obey a long list of rules on everything from manicure type (french or clear polish only) to the amount of “jiggle” on their bodies (none) to “how to properly wash ‘intimate’ areas and how often to change tampons” (yes, the suit really says that).
Bills team officials declined comment, citing the pending litigation. Meanwhile, the Jills’ management company announced it was suspending activities indefinitely; otherwise, it told USA Today, it had comment.
Just how difficult is it to be a working parent in the U.S. these days? huffingtonpost has this sobering chart.
The U.S. lags significantly behind other developed countries in key areas such as paid maternity or paternity leave (it’s one of just three countries with no such provision— the other two are Oman and Papau New Guinea), paid family and sick leave, and affordable early childhood education. As a result, notes reporter Laura Bassett, the percentage of women participating in the workforce is relatively low:
In 1990, the U.S. had the sixth-highest female labor participation rate among 22 of the world’s wealthiest countries. Today, the U.S. ranks 17th.
Meanwhile, the White House Council of Economic Advisors has this new report on working families, part of the Obama administration’s ongoing campaign to explore ways of using federal workplace policy to improve the lives (and incomes) of parents and children. Yesterday, the White House hosted a daylong summit on working families, where President Obama told the audience,
“Family leave, child care, workplace flexibility, a decent wage — these are not frills, they are basic needs. They shouldn’t be bonuses. They should be part of our bottom line as a society. ”
If you want to understand why the new Lego female scientist kits are such a big step forward, compare them to earlier Lego efforts to capture the little-girls-who-like-to-build-things demographic. The absence of princess-y pastels and pixie preciousness (not to mention boobs, as in the “rock star” Lego figure above) is awesome.
For more on how the “Research Institute” line came to be, mentalfloss has the scoop here.
A new report by the advocacy group Stop Street Harassment looks at how often women and GBT men are sexually harassed when they’re out and about, minding their own business. (Hint: a lot.)
Among women, street harassment most commonly took the form of sexualized commentary like whistles, “pssssst” sounds, animal noises, and statements like “mmm, sexy”—51 percent of women reported these incidents, compared to 6 percent of men. But harassment against men often took on a different sexual element. The most frequent type of harassment reported by men came in the form of homophobic or transphobic slurs (which had been experienced by 9 percent of men in the survey).
Gay, bisexual, and trans men were much more likely than straight men to report experiencing harassment, and to experience it frequently. (Meanwhile, heterosexual men were the most likely of any group to say they had been harassed just once in their lives.)
This list was generated by participants in a court-mandated batterers-intervention program in Minnesota. The facilitator asked the men what benefits they received from abusing their wives and girlfriends; the answers — unabashed and chilling — filled a 4 x 8 whiteboard.
She’s scared and won’t go out and spend money
She won’t argue
Feeling superior: she’s accountable to me
(I) get the money
Total control in decision-making
She feels less worthy, so defers to my needs and wants
The history of the all-girl bands and the talented female jazz and big band instrumentalists who continue to struggle for recognition in a man’s world.
Because in December 2013 the all-male Iowa Supreme Court ruled that it was legal for a woman to be fired for…. wait for it…beingtoo attractive.
Melissa Nelson spent ten years working for dentist James Knight, a man twenty years older than she, and was considered a excellent employee. But her boss found her too attractive and was worried he would try to start an affair, despite the fact that Nelson had never engaged in flirtatious or other inappropritate behaviour. But Knight and his wife believed that his attraction to Nelson had become a threat to their marriage and therefore Knight decided to fire her and replace her with another woman.
Melissa Nelson then sued her former boss for sex discrimination, but the court dismissed her case and ruled that it did not count as sex discrimination as her boss hadn’t fired her because of her sex, but because of feelings.
So essentially, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that men are animals who can’t control their sexual urges. They ruled that Iowa men can’t be responsible for their sexual desires. They ruled that Iowa women have to monitor and control their bosses. They ruled that the solution to feeling attracted to your employee is to fire that employee. They ruled that women can be fired for merely inciting attraction, sex, love, FEELINGS, whatever. They ruled that Melissa Nelson could be fired on the basis of being Melissa Nelson.
As a woman you’re constantly bombarded with messages about how to become more attractive and how to improve your appearance, but now you also need to watch out, because being “too attractive” might lose you your job! And if you live in Iowa, there’s nothing you can do about it, because it’s not about gender, it’s about FEELINGS.
Professor of sociology and author Dr. Pepper Schwartz commented on the case:
“Don’t tell me this has nothing to do with gender. I don’t see women firing men because they can’t control themselves. Is this because they don’t have manly kind of urges? Or is it because they don’t have access to the same excuses, such as uncontrollable attraction and desire? Either way, it’s a gender issue. And if a woman is denied employment because of her gender, that is a protected legal status.”
Will being able to fire a woman because of her looks become a tool to keep women out of the workplace?
