Exposing Fake Women’s Health Clinics

Exposing Fake Women’s Health Clinics from Stuart Productions on Vimeo.

Find over 20 short videos on important women’s issues: reproductive rights, sex education, clinics, religion and abortion. Be sure you check the menu of Stuart Productions. Here are a few available:

• SIECUS State by State : Abstinence only until marriage programs report
• Lessons of Hate in the Bible Belt
• Reducing Abortion (Includes our own Rep. Rosa DeLauro from Connecticut)

For more information, go to RHRealityCheck.org

More on baby gender selection and discounts

Sometimes people may wonder how librarians find the information they do.  It’s genetic. My profs in Library school called it having an I-gene. But that I-gene can really lead to some strange travels, one of which I had today.

June 22, 2009 Web excursion:

Went back to Contexts.org/ (sociology site of great interest), went to their blogs section and found a blog posting on an issue I had blogged about recently — Baby gender control. So I clicked:

http://contexts.org/socimages/2009/06/22/new-york-times-frames-sex-selection-as-culturally-asian/

At the end of the article, I learned a new term:

“By the way, on a discursive note, sex selection is called “family balancing” by some clinics. What an excellent example of re-framing!”

Love learning new terms.

So, I searched Google for “family balancing”

19,000 results the first of which was GenSelect.com

Okay, I’ll bite.  After all there’s a money back Gender Guarantee.

http://www.genselect.com/goodnews/FamilyBalancing/

Is this a hoax site? As seen on TV? BBBOnLine? Looks a bit hokey to me but I decide to plod on.

http://www.genselect.com/store/

Wow! Lots of different kits for baby boy and baby girl making. What would my old granny have said? Then I hit the jackpot:

Found a 15% Discount if I went to Mommieswithstyle.com and searched on GenSelect. So I did…

http://www.mommieswithstyle.com/do-you-want-to-pick-the-gender-of-your-next-child/

Of course, I didn’t tell you about trying to decide which kind of Mommy I am — classic, trendy, retro, or princess.

Oh my, I am glad I don’t have to debate all these choices.

Drizzle drazzle drozzle drone… Time for this one to go home.

Contexts Crawler » the motherhood penalty

Yesterday The Examiner ran a story on an article published in the  American Journal of Sociology – and winner of the 2008 Kanter Award Winner for Excellence in Work-Family Research - about the ‘motherhood penalty’:  the pattern demonstrating that working mothers make less than women without children. The study, authored by Shelley J. Correll of Stanford University, Stephen J. Benard, and In Paik also suggests that, “the mommy gap is actually bigger than the gender gap for women under 35.”

Read the post via Contexts Crawler » the motherhood penalty.

Sociological Images » Abortion Politics And The Erasure Of The Pregnant Woman

Sociological Images » Abortion Politics And The Erasure Of The Pregnant Woman.

Be sure to read the comments at the bottom. Interesting how the voice belongs to the fetus in most, ignoring the woman.

Explaining India’s Deficit of Girls : online discussion at PRB Thursday 6/11 at 1 pm

Population Reference Bureau PRB Discuss.

Chat online with Leela Visaria, researcher and president of the Asian Population Association, on the Asian countries imbalance of genders and the implications for the future.  June 11, 2009, 1 pm EDT.

India, along with China and several other countries, has a history of neglect for girls and women that produced lower female survival rates and an imbalanced ratio of males to females.

In recent years, male-to-female sex ratios at birth and among children in India have increased much more than can be explained solely by discrimination against girls. There is evidence that technologies like portable sonogram machines have made it easy to detect sex of a fetus, enabling families to abort a female fetus if they do not want a(nother) daughter. In spite of a ban on sex-detection tests and sex-selective abortion, the practice has continued, raising questions about the value and rights of women in this society.

Join Leela Visaria, researcher and president of the Asian Population Association, as she answers your questions about the issues surrounding the status of women and the imbalanced ratio of males to females in India.

Vital Voices Blog » Profile of Success – Egyptian Businesswomen’s Association Grows Its Membership to More than Fifty

June 8, 2009 from Vital Voices:

Vital Voices Blog » Profile of Success – Egyptian Businesswomen’s Association Grows Its Membership to More than Fifty

Think of all the cities in the world where the “green” movement is taking hold. Cairo, Egypt, a desert megalopolis of 17 million people, probably isn’t at the top of your list. But don’t tell Shereen Allam.

Shereen, of Maadi, Cairo, is co-owner of Eco-Tek, an innovative printer cartridge recycling company that she launched ten years ago with her husband, Mr. Ahmed Hegazy. Since then, she’s convinced scores of businesses, schools and universities all over Cairo to buy into the program, and the list of partners keeps growing. It’s a win for Shereen and a win for the environment. Eco-Tek grows its business and Cairo is spared thousands of spent printer cartridges choking its landfills. “I would love to start an environmental awareness campaign where all the official, nonprofit and individual parties get involved and a complete plant could be established to recycle all parts – plastics, metal, electronic parts, etc. This would develop the sense that by recycling you save lives, help society and generate money at the same time,” says Shereen.

With the same entrepreneurial drive that makes Eco-Tek a success, Shereen “gives back” to her country as president of AWTAD (Association for Women’s Total Advancement and Development). In just one year as a Network Hub in the MENA Businesswomen’s Network, the association grew its membership to over 50 in record time.

Women are changing the world! Read the complete blog post.

American Indian Charter Schools in California: Spitting in the eye of mainstream education – Los Angeles Times

May 31, 2009

Dave Getzschman / For the Times

Students sit in detention at American Indian Public Charter school in Oakland for offenses ranging from getting up during class or skipping a problem on a homework assignment. Students who misbehave in the slightest must stay an hour after school; if they misbehave again in the same week, they get more detention and four hours of Saturday detention.

Some of my favorite quotes from this article — you ought to read it — (or I may give you detention on Sunday!)

Reporting from Oakland — Not many schools in California recruit teachers with language like this: “We are looking for hard working people who believe in free market capitalism. . . . Multicultural specialists, ultra liberal zealots and college-tainted oppression liberators need not apply.”

Students, almost all poor, wear uniforms and are subject to disciplinary procedures redolent of military school. One local school district official was horrified to learn that a girl was forced to clean the boys’ restroom as punishment.

Do they ever have a boy clean the girl’s bathroom?

Conservatives, including columnist George Will, adore the American Indian schools, which they see as models of a “new paternalism” that could close the gap between the haves and have-nots in American education.

There’s a lot more. Read the article — or else!

New NBER Research study: What is needed to increase the number of female students in fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM)? Hire more Women Profs.

Thanks to Carol, a friend who is both a feminist and a physicist, for alerting me to these related articles on the needs and issues faced by female students entering STEM fields.

The first artcle is from the daily Web publication Slate which is owned by The Washington Post Company.

A Formula for Success : Want more women to study science? Hire more female professors.

In this article, the authors mention a new research study (linked below) which studies over 9000 cadets at the US Air Force Academy over a period of 8 years. Many of the variables that other researchers have faced in doing similar research are able to be controlled for in this study because of factors in this particular population.

The author states:

The authors found that women on average obtain scores that are 0.15 grade points lower (half the difference between an A and an A-) than their male classmates, even after accounting for students’ SAT scores. The gap in performance was widest for women taught by men. When a female instructor was put at the front of the classroom, nearly two-thirds of the grade point gender gap evaporated.

This report follows well my other recent post on women in business.

Here is the research report mentioned in the Slate article:

Sex and Science: How Professor Gender Perpetuates the Gender Gap
Scott E. Carrell † UC Davis and NBER Marianne E. Page ‡ UC Davis and NBER James E. West

USAF Academy May 7, 2009

Abstract: Why aren’t there more women in science? Female college students are currently 37 percent less likely than males to obtain a bachelor’s degree in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), and comprise only 25 percent of the STEM workforce. This paper begins to shed light on this issue by exploiting a unique dataset of college students who have been randomly assigned to professors over a wide variety of mandatory standardized courses. We focus on the role of professor gender. Our results suggest that while professor gender has little impact on male students, it has a powerful effect on female students’ performance in math and science classes, their likelihood of taking future math and science courses, and their likelihood of graduating with a STEM degree. The estimates are largest for female students with very strong math skills, who are arguably the students who are most suited to careers in science. Indeed, the gender gap in course grades and STEM majors is eradicated when high performing female students’ introductory math and science classes are taught by female professors.. In contrast, the gender of humanities professors has only minimal impact on student outcomes. We believe that these results are indicative of important environmental influences at work.

STEM departments, are you doing your research?

Rosalind Gill, “From Sexual Objectification to Sexual Subjectification: The Resexualisation of Women’s Bodies in the Media”

Ever wonder if “Girl Power” and the “new” open sexuality popularized in clothing and other outwardly visible paraphernalia is a result of the feminist movement or an insidious manipulation by media (not to mention the “p” word)? Read this illuminating article.

Rosalind Gill, “From Sexual Objectification to Sexual Subjectification: The Resexualisation of Women’s Bodies in the Media”

On the one hand, then, we are confronted by a popular culture increasingly saturated by representations of women’s bodies as objects, and on the other, a mantra-like repetition and celebration of ‘women’s success’ and ‘Girl Power’. One way of reading the re-sexualisation of women’s bodies in this strange, contradictory context is as part of a backlash against feminism. It may serve as both an attack on women — putting women back in their place — and, simultaneously as a reassurance for men threatened by girls’ increasingly good performance in public examinations and women’s success in the workplace. In an excellent, insightful analysis, Imelda Whelehan suggests that we have entered an era of ‘retrosexism’, premised on real fears about the collapse of male hegemony. She explores the nostalgic quality of much contemporary television, which harks back to a time and place peopled by real women and humorous ‘cheeky chappies’ (p. 11). She argues that representations of women, ‘from the banal to the downright offensive’ are being ‘defensively reinvented against cultural changes in women’s lives’ (p. 11).

I want to suggest that what we are seeing is not just a harking back to a safe, bygone or mythical age when ‘men were men and women were women’, but rather the construction of a new femininity (or, better, new femininities) organized around sexual confidence and autonomy.  Indeed, what is novel and striking about contemporary sexualised representations of women in popular culture is that they do not (as in the past) depict women as passive objects but as knowing, active and desiring sexual subjects.  We are witnessing, I want to argue, a shift from sexual objectification to sexual subjectification in constructions of femininity in the media and popular culture.Nowhere is this clearer than in advertising which has responded to feminist critiques by constructing a new figure to sell to young women: the sexually autonomous heterosexual young woman who plays with her sexual power and is for ever ‘up for it’.  The exhortations to young women to ‘be yourself’ and ‘please yourself’ are emblematic of this shift in which women are presented as knowing and active sexual subjects.

IntLawGrrls: Ebadi on the death penalty

IntLawGrrls: Ebadi on the death penalty

We have been observing a constant deterioration of the human rights situation since 2005. In 2008, for example, we saw that there had been a 300% increase in executions in the prior 3 years! Speaking proportionally, Iran has surpassed even China: there were 355 executions in Iran, a country of 70 million inhabitants; in China, 2,200 executions and 1.3 million inhabitants. Do the math ….

– Shirin Ebadi (right), Nobel Peace Prizewinner, in a telephone interview with Le Monde. The Iranian human rights attorney also spoke of the government’s closure of her human rights center and harassment of her staff; of the repression in Iran of religious and ethnic minorities such as Bahais, Sunni Muslims, and Kurds; and of how democracy is being “maltreated” in the runup to next month’s Presidential election.
With regard to capital punishment, Ebadi not only pointed to overall numbers in the last 3 years, but also to the executions of 26 juveniles and the death row confinement of another 138, 5 of whom are girls.

Read more at IntLawGrrls: Ebadi on the death penalty