This past election day has highlighted a seismic shift which is making women happy, all over this country. This has been a most female year, a banner year, in that more women are running for office in record numbers. Indeed, this year, there have been more nominees for the one office in the land which has the biggest gender disparity — the state governor’s office.
This year, there are eleven women who have been nominated to run for the office of governor in their states. And there are additionally sixteen more women running in gubernatorial primaries.
"Women in Congress are just more likely to prioritize issues that have a direct connection to women — violence against women, family leave policy, those kind of things," Michele Swers, a political science professor at Georgetown, told Vox.
In the end, it's partially a numbers game, but also much more. "The story of this election is not just the number of women candidates running," said Stephanie Schriock, president of EMILY's List, a group that tries to elect more pro-choice Democratic women, to HuffPost, "it's the strength of those women, their stories and the experiences they will bring into office." LINK
Of course what makes this particularly satisfying is that this goes a long way towards normalizing women as candidates and diminishes, however slowly, the odd questions women candidates have to face about who would look after their family and their children if they got into office. Or even outright harassment by men on the campaign trail.
Not all women running are likely to win. However:
But experts say just having more women run for office can narrow a subtler gender gap: how voters put different expectations on female candidates than they do male candidates. Research shows that voters require a women to come across as likable, which is not a qualification voters demand in male candidates. Female politicians say the focus on what they wear, how they come across as assertive or not, and how they present their family (or lack of children) is a magnified concern for them. Hillary Clinton, I wrote shortly after the election, wasn’t necessarily wrong when she said “misogyny played a role” in her election loss.
Sexism and Public Harassment:
- Upskirting is already illegal in Scotland and narrowly missed becoming a crime in England and Wales. However, it will be introduced again and brought forth for consideration and debate in the UK Parliament. In South Korea, women have been secretly filmed and their images have been uploaded onto a shareable website. What set off the protest is that a woman had secretly filmed a nude male model. The police investigation identified and arrested the perpetrator. And yet, women have been filing complaints about being photographed anonymously, and the perpetrators are rarely caught. As part of the protest, the women put on a mock court performance, pointedly mocking the judicial privileging of men in such forms of sex crimes, in that they are rarely caught, and rarely punished.
Relatedly,
“This is for sure going to be growing, we already have had a large number of ladies asking about the training and asking to get a bike,” said Marwan Al-Mutlaq, trading manager at the Harley-Davidson Saudi flagship. “And we have already established the ‘Ladies of Harley’ Riyadh chapter, so they can go on their own group rides too.”
The chapter opened with eight founding female members - but they anticipate that number will soon burgeon. In preparation, the store has acquired a selection of protective gear and female-specific clothes, along with marketing posters featuring women alongside men on motorcycles, resembling any such retail location one might see in the West.
VIOLENCE against women:
- The Violence Against Women Act was authored by Joe Biden and signed into law by president Bill Clinton, in 1994. It has been reauthorized, with bipartisan support over the years, including in 2000,2005,2013. It is up for re-authorization again this year. As the expiration date begins to appear on the horizon, to date, thus far, not a single Republican has stepped up to co-author a re-authorization. VAWA has had a huge affect on American society’s perception of violence towards women. The law is important to American women because it:
Among its provisions, the 2018 bill would provide law enforcement with more tools to remove firearms from domestic abusers who are not legally allowed to own them. Gun violence prevention groups say this is a critical area of focus, as firearms are the most commonly used weapons in domestic violence homicides. In the U.S., a woman is killed by an intimate partner with a gun every 16 hours.
The legislation would also dramatically increase funding for local rape prevention efforts, at a time of increased attention to the issue of sexual assault and harassment due to the Me Too movement.
SNIP
The bill also would provide grants for alternative justice, encouraging organizations to examine new ways to seek accountability from perpetrators of violence outside the traditional criminal justice response. The goal of alternative justice, advocates say, is to develop a process in which abusers could take responsibility for their actions while providing relief to those who have been harmed. LINK
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A video of a man beating his wife went viral and sparked national outrage in Brazil. He is seen beating her in the car while it was in the parking garage of their apartment complex. The elevator camera then caught him beating her in the elevator. The whole time Tatiane Spitzner kept trying to get away from her violent husband. Then the video cuts to the outside of the apartment and she is seen falling to her death. Her husband — Luís Felipe Manvailer — is then seen going out and dragging her body into the elevator where he is seen wiping her blood off his face, and is later even, seen cleaning up her blood from inside the elevator. The video has ignited a national debate in Brazil, about violence against women and domestic abuse. Also —
According to The New York Times, Manvailer was quickly apprehended by police and is currently being investigated for the murder of his wife. Manvailer denies killing Spitzner. He told police his wife jumped off the balcony, the Times reports.
Women’s Health and Reproductive Health:
- Women suffering from heart attack have a higher rate of survival if they see a female ER doctor. According to the AMA, only a quarter of the ER doctors in the U.S. are women. A recent study found that female ER doctors are in some ways performing better than their male counterparts, and that a patient is more likely to survive if they saw a female physician. This probably speaks to systemic bias whereby male doctors are not listening as closely to the complaints of their female patients as they do their male ones.
- Late last month, the government in India officially brought an end to a tax on women’s sanitary products that had been enacted in July of 2017 and was widely unpopular. Women will now be able to buy sanitary pads completely tax free in India, the result of a fierce campaign by activists who said the tax unfairly punished women and girls and put girls at an educational disadvantage because, without sanitary products, they typically have to miss a few days of school each month
- In Argentina, after a 16 hour debate in their legislature, their senators rejected legalizing abortion in the first 14 weeks of a woman’s pregnancy. Women stood outside in the cold and the rain through out the process, wearing green scarves and green paint on their faces singing “now that we are together, now they see us.” In spite of the defeat, the fact of the serious debate was a sign that the long and strong grip of shame, stigma and secrecy surrounding abortion has been fracturing and disintegrating. The green wave is made of up a broad coalition of feminists and civil society groups, and has been energized by young women who have rejected harassment in the streets, opened up conversations on social media about sexual violence, sex education in schools, access to contraceptives and legalizing abortion.
In the U.S —
What were they thinking?
Random Misogyny:
A woman was found in Central Sulawesi, where she had been held captive by a local shaman. When found, she was being held in a hole. She was 28 years old, and had been missing for 15 years.
The woman, identified only as HS, was found in a crevice between several very large rocks near Galumpang village, Tolitoli regency, Central Sulawesi, after police received a report that she was being hidden by an 83-year-old village shaman named Jago.
The victim’s family had long lost hope that she would be found and had given up, but after detaining and interrogating Jago, police discovered that HS was being held in the hole, the entrance to which measured around 1 by 1.5 meters, and rescued her.
Having A uterus should not be a handicap:
MISOGYNY and the work place:
Forget the glass ceiling. Women of color face a concrete ceiling.
India is mapping the value of women's unpaid work.
Women journalists are fighting harassment in Japan
When It Comes to Sexual Harassment, Academia Is Fundamentally Broken:
The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) recently published a report titled “Sexual Harassment of Women: Climate, Culture, and Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.” [...]
The report lays out why academia is fundamentally broken and incapable of dealing with harassment; if we are to be truly committed to rooting out harassment and welcoming people from all backgrounds in STEM, the system needs a complete overhaul. No amount of “diversity” initiatives and studies on understanding why women and girls choose not to stay in STEM fields will make a real difference if we do not remove the rot from academic institutions. [...]
Despite acknowledging the prevalence of racism and racial harassment in addition to sexual harassment, it falls short in fully understanding and coming to terms with them. The report and its reception also demonstrate some fundamental flaws with the academic system: naming a problem does not mean you’ve solved it, and powerful institutions like NASEM often pay lip service to issues of diversity and inclusion without necessarily doing the hard work of following their own advice. It is now incumbent upon the NASEM to follow the guidance of its own report and address sexual harassment within its own ranks.
A Book to look forward to —
Jessica Valenti is getting ready to write a book on misogyny:
“I think we tend to forget that living in a misogynist world where women are raped and women are sexually harassed; those aren’t just issues or statistics, those are things that profoundly impact your life and ability to work and be a part of the public sphere,” says Valenti, pointing to feminist philosopher Dr. Kate Manne’s distinction between sexism and misogyny, in which sexism is the system but misogyny is the”‘enforcement mechanism” that keeps women subordinate. “So how can we expect women to be able to complete this tremendous feminist project, if in the meantime we are dealing with all different kinds of misogyny that are sometimes literally punching us in the face?”
The plumed and the beautiful:
Birders the world over have been helping e-Bird (a large citizen-scientist organization) to count the species over spring migration when birds fly from the south to the Northern latitudes. In Prospect Park, a group of women, indeed members of the Feminist Bird Club did their bit to collect data for e-Bird.
Also —
Petition:
A petition from change.org. Stop attacks on witness and lawyers of India’s 8-year-old rape victim from Kathua.
I’d like to thank the WOW Team for their very generous help in putting this diary together.
Thank you to Besame, BMScott, Tara the Antisocial Social Worker, Angmar, ramara, SandraLLAP
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