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Washington Blade says among others, what caused biggest headlines were the midterm Democratic victories raising gay hopes, the gay elections, hate crimes and Mary Cheney’s pregnancy. More written by JOEY DIGUGLIELMO :

Mark Foley wasn’t the only gay story of 2006. The year will be remembered for the Democratic victories in the midterm elections, the somber 25th anniversary of AIDS and big changes in the way gays are treated by some of the world’s major religions.

In no particular order, here are the Blade’s picks for the biggest gay news stories of the year.

Democrats retake Congress

November’s midterm elections, in which Democrats won majorities in both houses of Congress after 12 years of Republican control, were viewed by many gays as a tremendous victory.

While it remains to be seen how much of a priority gay issues will be for the new Congress, members are expected to take up pro-gay legislation in 2007, including the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which calls for banning private sector employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity; and the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act, which calls for giving the federal government authority to prosecute hate crimes based on a victim’s sexual orientation, gender identity or disability.

At least eight other gay- or HIV-related bills have been introduced in Congress in recent years but have died in committee after Republican leaders refused to bring them up for a vote.

25th anniversary of AIDS

June 5 marked a quarter-century since AIDS was first reported by the Center for Disease Control in 1981.

Since then, activists pointed to several key developments to celebrate in the ongoing fight against the epidemic. The Ryan White CARE Act, the federal government’s largest program for providing medical treatment and support to uninsured and low-income people with HIV and AIDS, was reauthorized by Congress this month after a lengthy delay. HIV-positive people who have access to drug cocktails developed in 1996 are also living longer without AIDS than was conceivable at the disease’s outset, raising the hope that eventually HIV may become a chronic but manageable disease with which the infected can expect normal life spans.

Despite some undeniable advances, HIV and AIDS continue to wreak havoc in the U.S. among gay men, especially black gay men.

Of the more than 1 million Americans living with HIV, 74 percent are men and between 67-72 percent of them contracted the disease through gay sex, according to government statistics. National estimates suggest that 25 percent of white gay men in the U.S. are living with HIV compared to 50 percent of black gay men.

Blacks are about 12 to 13 percent of the U.S. population but account for 47 percent of Americans living with HIV.

AIDS activists are concerned that there’s a false perception among young gay men, who were either not yet born or too young to experience the toll the early years of the disease took on the gay community, that AIDS has become a manageable disease.

Continue reading "LGBT Headlines of 2006" »

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Posted In: Discrimination, LGBT, News

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By Jack Tuckner, Esq.

According to the National Priorities Project, which maintains a cost-of-war counter, as of today, the disgraceful Iraqi occupation has cost us 354 billion dollars and counting. If we wanted to use the money differently, we could have medically insured 212 million children for a year, hired over 6 million public school teachers, built over 3 million additional housing units, provided over 17 million four year college scholarships for deserving youth. In today's New York Times, Michael Wines reports an all too familiar story that we regularly read, cluck our tongues while eating our breakfast cereal and promptly forget in our mad rush to keep up with the bills and our kids' extracurricular soccer schedules. So--a brief New Year's reminder of how wacked-out we all are in our priorities as individuals, as a nation, as a species.

According to the article, 10,000 children under the age of five died last year in Ethiopia alone from malnutrition-related causes. Imagine the gut-wrenching awfulness of being one of those kids' parents, let alone what's it's like to be one of the many dying children. Possibly worse, almost half of Ethiopia's children are malnourished, and most don't die. Instead, they grow up sickly, weak and physically and intellectually stunted in a land that runs on manual labor. "Their hunger is neither a temporary inconvenience nor a quick death sentence. Rather, it is a chronic, lifelong, irreversible handicap that scuttles their futures and cripples Ethiopia's hopes to join the developed world." And Ethiopia has one of the most comprehensive programs on the continent to alleviate starvation.

We can all point to profound impoverishment, slavery, sex-selective violence, religious war carnage, speciesism, global deforestation and genocide to rationalize our collective inertia: the planet earth has always been a place of pervasive suffering and a brief, hardscrabble life for most of its inhabitants since we modern homo sapiens first walked upright out of our caves a mere 150,000 years ago. In geologic time, that's a blink of an eye but more than enough time for us to screw up the planet and create such ravishingly impressive inequities among ourselves that most of the world lives still lives in misery and despair, we've killed 260 million of our own men, women and children up to and excluding the atrocities of the 20th century (according to Professor Emeritus of Political Science Rudolf Rummel of the University of Hawaii) and all of it in the equally obscene and spiritually indefensible names of organized religion and power accumulation in one form or another.

Yet we continue as a nation to blithely accept the perverted corruption that passes for policy that is our current leadership (informed as it is by our own apathy, lethargia and culture of indulgence), because we only see the world through the prism of our consumer-driven, might-makes-right, jingoistic American lens. So, Goldman Sachs financial traders rake in record bonuses (average $650,000.00 per man--almost all of them men--what do these people actually do for a living--I always forget--how do they add value commensurate with these windfalls?)--while homelessness surges, 5 million US kids don't have health insurance and the rich pols in Washington again vote down a raise in the minimum wage so working people can actually earn a "living" wage. How many children might be saved in Africa--how much civilization could we purchase internationally and domestically for the rapidly increasing $354,000,000,000.00 it's cost us so far to perpetrate an illegal war on a blameless people, killing, maiming and destroying the infrastructure of a beautiful and ancient civilization, unleashing all holy hell in the process, minting thousands of righteously driven new terrorists and cultivating an international revulsion for our barbarous and piratical ways, and all with nary a high-level decision making, unelected rich person being held accountable. Nobody. Nothing. Oh well. Fast fade to commercial then back for more "reality" television viewing to distract us from reality.

One day--there'll be a backlash. Given our corporate media's penchant for serving its hegemonous, insatiable, unidimensional, ethically-compromised masters we can't expect the truth to make it through that US-currency-driven vetting process. Ultimately, the righteous anger of the world's dispossessed (and their conscious supporters everywhere) will move the earth to a place of less abject suffering and more true intelligence-driven-equality for all of us as well as this sorely abused old planet. It may take a cataclysm of sorts (full-blown economic depression, nuclear terrorism, global warming catastrophe, etc.) to catalyze such times but indeed it's coming. In the interim, we'd all serve our progeny if we daily asked ourselves what we can do to speak truth to power, to serve and empower the powerless, in whatever form that may take, and to question authority relentlessly with a view toward righting some fundamental wrongs, before it's too late--before we find ourselves, in the words of Bill Maher, totally screwed, blued and tattooed.

The complete story from NYT:

Malnutrition Is Cheating Its Survivors, and Africa’s Future

Continue reading "Our indifference, their malnutrition" »

New York Times has an article on the difficulties of being a woman in the business of construction. Things sure seem to be changing, but not much better than they historically have been.

One Degree in Fine Arts, and One in Plumbing
By JOSEPH P. FRIED

WHEN Elaine Ward became an apprentice plumber in 1986, the only female plumber most Americans had ever seen was Josephine the Plumber, a character in 1960s and ’70s commercials for Comet cleanser.

But Ms. Ward’s choice of a vocation wasn’t the only thing that made her unusual. After all, how many plumbers of either sex have a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree?

Today, Ms. Ward remains anomalous. She is still one of a small number of women who work as plumbers in New York City; one of an even smaller number of women who own plumbing businesses in the city; and, according to the Buildings Department, one of very few women licensed by the city as master plumbers.

That rank, held by about 1,400 plumbers, and achieved in part on the basis of a city-administered written and practical test, exceeds the journeywoman status that Ms. Ward worked under for a decade before starting her company in 2001. For a plumbing contracting business in the city to operate legally, at least 51 percent of it must be owned by one or more licensed master plumbers.

Continue reading "Women plumbers: More distress than progress" »

American Medical News in its January 2007 issue deliberates on the need for every physician practice group to have an equal opportunity provisions in its employee handbook.

Steven M. Harris writes: It seems as if every other call I receive these days is from a client telling me about a complaint charging his medical practice with some form of discrimination.

And with that complaint often comes a claim of retaliation -- that the employee who felt discriminated against also felt that those in the practice engaged in mistreatment because he or she filed the complaint or spoke up about something wrong in the practice.

One client who successfully fought a discrimination and retaliation complaint then asked how he could minimize the adverse effect of such claims. I advised him that the best strategy is to include an equal employment opportunity provision in the practice's employee handbook, or to create a stand-alone equal employment opportunity policy. That way, the practice could demonstrate a commitment against discrimination and retaliation. Also, it might allow complaints to be handled internally, rather than involving outsiders.

At the very least, every physician practice group should have an equal employment opportunity provision in its employee handbook. Here is an example:

"[Employer] provides equal opportunity for all employees and applicants for employment and makes all employment decisions without regard to race, religion, color, age, sex, national origin, disability or any other status protected by federal, state or local law."

Most employers find that the equal employment opportunity provision is not enough and therefore choose to create a policy stressing that the physician practice group prohibits any form of retaliation against any employee for filing, in good faith, a complaint under the equal employment opportunity policy, or for assisting in a complaint investigation.

In 2006, the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control [NCIPC] reported that 5.3 million women between the ages of 18 years and older experienced domestic violence in the U.S.

PR Leap furthers the discussion on some truths about domestic violence:

Annmarie Edwards, author and community leader, launches a new program focused on raising $100,000.00 for the “Zero Tolerance for Domestic Violence Campaign”, part of Interlace, a non-profit organization located in Asheville, NC. Edwards is giving 50% of the proceeds from the sale of her e-book, 50 Ways to Maximize Your Potential in support of Interlace and their efforts fighting domestic violence.

Continue reading "More truths about Domestic Violence" »

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Posted In: Domestic Violence

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A LA Times Op-Ed throws some fresh perspectives on the Brown vs. the Board legacy

The 1954 opinion did not establish colorblindness as a legal principle. There is no ambiguity to be decided in the high court's current cases.
By Goodwin Liu

MOST AMERICANS recognize Brown vs. Board of Education as the 1954 decision that outlawed state-sanctioned segregation in public education. The decision inspired race-conscious government efforts in the 1960s and 1970s to integrate public schools and to bring racial minorities into the mainstream of American life.

But now, as the Supreme Court considers the constitutionality of race-conscious school integration plans in Louisville and Seattle, some say Brown stands for a different proposition. According to the U.S. government's brief opposing the integration plans, Brown "held that intentionally classifying students on the basis of race violates the equal protection clause." In oral arguments this month, this position won a sympathetic ear from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who likened the children in Seattle and Louisville to the children in Brown because "they're being assigned on the basis of their race."

To suggest, as some observers have, that Brown was ambiguous on whether government may be color-conscious or must be colorblind is engaging and provocative. But it is also wrong. Colorblindness may be defended in various ways, but a grounding in Brown vs. Board of Education is not one of them.

Continue reading "The meaning of Brown vs. the Board" »

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New York Times continues its discussions on gender inequality series. Latest is about the stagnation in pay gap.

Gender Pay Gap, Once Narrowing, Is Stuck in Place
By DAVID LEONHARDT

Throughout the 1980s and early '90s, women of all economic levels — poor, middle class and rich — were steadily gaining ground on their male counterparts in the work force. By the mid-'90s, women earned more than 75 cents for every dollar in hourly pay that men did, up from 65 cents just 15 years earlier.

Largely without notice, however, one big group of women has stopped making progress: those with a four-year college degree. The gap between their pay and the pay of male college graduates has actually widened slightly since the mid-'90s.

For women without a college education, the pay gap with men has narrowed only slightly over the same span.

These trends suggest that all the recent high-profile achievements — the first female secretary of state, the first female lead anchor of a nightly newscast, the first female president of Princeton, and, next month, the first female speaker of the House — do not reflect what is happening to most women, researchers say.

A decade ago, it was possible to imagine that men and women with similar qualifications might one day soon be making nearly identical salaries. Today, that is far harder to envision.

"Nothing happened to the pay gap from the mid-1950s to the late '70s," said Francine D. Blau, an economist at Cornell and a leading researcher of gender and pay. "Then the '80s stood out as a period of sharp increases in women's pay. And it's much less impressive after that."

Continue reading "Gender and Pay Gap in America" »

North Carolina-based News 14 reports that 59 victims of domestic violence are being honored this Christmas in Durham. The city hall tree has been decorated with ornaments that carry the names of the victims.

Read the complete story:

-- Janice Carmack's name could have been on any one of the ornaments hanging on a Christmas tree in Durham's City Hall.

"I'm no different from any of those women. I'm just very, very fortunate and blessed," she said.

The ornaments represent 59 reported victims who lost their lives to domestic violence across the state this year. Carmack is a survivor.

"My husband has a mental disability and I excused his behavior because of that," said Carmack.
From Charlotte to Winston-Salem to Fayetteville, the City of Durham commemorated those who did not make it out alive with a memorial tree lighting ceremony.

Each name was read as an ornament was hung. It was a time to remember and a time to deliver a message.

"Domestic violence is about abusers and about us as a community standing up to them and holding them accountable to their behavior and that is what's going to stop domestic violence," said Marie Brodie with the North Carolina Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

It's watching a dramatization and standing in front of the tree, Carmack has a message of her own, get out and get help.

"Please reach out before it's too late for you and especially if you have children," she said.

It's a survivor's story in honor of those gone and their families who won't have their loved ones this holiday season.

City of Durham employees, community members, and organizations helped create the 59 ornaments that are hanging on the tree. It's on display in city hall until after Christmas.

Bay Windows has some hilarious quotes for this month. Well, some are pretty sad, actually. Check these out!

"I think Mary is going to be a loving soul to her child. And I’m happy for her.”
— President George W. Bush, commenting on the pregnancy of Mary Cheney, the openly lesbian daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney, People magazine, Dec. 15. Cheney and her partner Heather Poe will co-parent the baby.

"Yes, he does. But he also believes that every human life is sacred and that every child who comes into this world deserves love. And he believes that Mary Cheney’s child will, in fact, have loving parents.”
— White House spokesman Tony Snow, on whether President Bush still believes that the ideal setting in which to raise a child is one with married, heterosexual parents, as he has stated in the past, The Los Angeles Times, Dec. 15.

"There were two things everyone said to me: ‘Don’t tell anyone you’re gay,’ and ‘Don’t tell them you’re 32. I couldn’t lie. And I still booked the series. If I had lied or tried to be closeted, I would have always thought, I only booked this job because I was lying.”
— Actor Eric Millegan of the FOX drama Bones, E! Online, Dec. 14.

“Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality. That’s why most of the medical (not socio-spiritual) blame for today’s rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise in soy formula and other soy products.”
— Columnist Jim Rutz, alleging the dangers of soy products, WorldNetDaily.com, Dec. 12.

“I don’t see the need for new or special legislation. My experience over the past several years as governor has convinced me that ENDA would be an overly broad law that would open a litigation floodgate and unfairly penalize employers at the hands of activist judges.”
— Gov. Mitt Romney, reversing his previous position in support of federal legislation to prevent anti-gay workplace discrimination, National Review Online, Dec. 14.

“Given that Romney has been making opposition to same-sex marriage his political calling card this year, his ideological bisexuality looks as foolish in its G-rated way as that of [Ted] Haggard, the evangelical leader who was caught keeping time with a male prostitute.”
— Columnist Frank Rich on Gov. Mitt Romney’s rightward shift on gay civil rights, The New York Times, Dec. 17

"And he really is John Kerry’s successor as a candidate from Massachusetts. He’ll say anything and everything to get elected.”
— Conservative gay pundit Andrew Sullivan, on Gov. Mitt Romney’s shifting positions on social issues, AndrewSullivan.com, Dec. 14.

The spur in Family Responsibility Discrimination cases has attracted the attention of American Public Media.

A new area of anti-discrimination cases has arisen suddenly, and employers and their attorneys are looking for ways to understand the law and train their managers. Hillary Wicai reports.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island stated in a press release that the Rhode Island Department of Education has not properly looked over an abstinence-only-until-marriage course of schoolwork that threatens to harm students, particularly GLBT students and those students in gay families. The course of study was developed by Heritage of Rhode Island, a family and faith-oriented organization that believes "one of the biggest hazards to our children’s futures is their sexual health and related high-risk behaviors," according to their official Web site.

One of the major problems the ACLU has with Heritage of Rhode Island’s course is that it "isolates" GLBT students and students in gay families. The reason, says the press release, is that it suggests "that marriage is responsible for better health, lower rates of injury and illness, lower rates of depression and an increased [according to Heritage’s course] ’likelihood that fathers and mothers have good relationships with their children.’"

The ACLU states that they believe this focus "appears to be a roadmap to instilling depression, if not fear, in gay and lesbian teens who cannot benefit from marriage and in other students who live in non-traditional households." Rhode Island has non-discrimination policies for GLBT youth, which this coursework "undermines," according to ACLU Rhode Island Executive Director Steven Brown. ACLU believes this curriculum also places teens in danger of having accidental pregnancies and STDs.

Continue reading "ACLU Accuses Rhode Island Department of Education of ’Isolating’ GLBT Students" »

Studies show that research supports are provided less to women scientists than their male counterparts. In addition, qualitative growth of women in academia has not been significant in proportion to their numerical presence.

New York Times today has an article about women in science:

Women in Science: The Battle Moves to the Trenches
By CORNELIA DEAN

HOUSTON — Since the 1970s, women have surged into science and engineering classes in larger and larger numbers, even at top-tier institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where half the undergraduate science majors and more than a third of the engineering students are women. Half of the nation’s medical students are women, and for decades the numbers have been rising similarly in disciplines like biology and mathematics.

Yet studies show that women in science still routinely receive less research support than their male colleagues, and they have not reached the top academic ranks in numbers anything like their growing presence would suggest.

For example, at top-tier institutions only about 15 percent of full professors in social, behavioral or life sciences are women, “and these are the only fields in science and engineering where the proportion of women reaches into the double digits,” an expert panel convened by the National Academy of Sciences reported in September. And at each step on the academic ladder, more women than men leave science and engineering.

So in government agencies, at scientific organizations and on university campuses, female scientists are asking why, and wondering what they can do about it. The Association for Women in Science, the National Science Foundation and the National Research Council are among the groups tackling these issues. In just the past two months, conferences have been held at Columbia University and the City University of New York graduate center. Harvard has a yearlong lecture series on “Women, Science and Society.”

This fall, female scientists at Rice University here gathered promising women who are graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to help them learn skills that they will need to deal with the perils of job hunting, promotion and tenure in high-stakes academic science.

“The reality is there are barriers that women face,” said Kathleen S. Matthews, the dean of natural sciences at Rice, who spoke at the meeting’s opening dinner. “There are circles and communities of engagement where women are by and large not included.”

Organizers of these events dismiss the idea voiced in 2005 by Lawrence H. Summers, then president of Harvard, that women over all are handicapped as scientists because as a group they are somehow innately deficient in mathematics. The organizers point to ample evidence that any performance gap between men and women is changeable and is shrinking to the vanishing point.

Instead, they talk about what they have to know and do to get ahead. They talk about unspoken, even unconscious sexism that means they must be better than men to be thought as good — that they must, as one Rice participant put it, literally and figuratively wear a suit and heels, while men can relax in jeans.

They muse on the importance of mentoring and other professional support and talk about ways women can provide it for each other if they do not receive it from their professors or advisers.

And they obsess about what they call “the two body problem,” the extreme difficulty of reconciling a demanding career in science with marriage and a family — especially, as is more often the case for women than men in science, when the spouse also has scientific ambitions.

Continue reading "Women in Science: Structural Disparity" »

New York Times has a recent article on women with passion for their innovative professions. It takes lots of time, loads of money, efficient managers, and huge amount of patience and hard work to click in jobs that one loves to be doing. Especially so, if one is a woman in a competitive world.

A Passion Becomes a Business. Now for the Hard Part of Making It Profitable.

By ELIZABETH OLSON

Pursuing one’s passion for a living may involve taking a circuitous, costly and time-consuming route, but for some entrepreneurs, it is worth the journey.

For Dorothy A. Marcic, a business professor at Vanderbilt University, the turning point came when she returned to the United States in 1996 after four years in Prague, and decided to take voice lessons, something she had long wanted to do.

Today, Ms. Marcic, 57, no longer teaches and has opened her own production company for “Respect,” a musical she wrote about how women are portrayed in popular culture.

“It took a lot more time, a lot more money” than she originally thought it would, she said, “and it was a real risk.”

“You always don’t know what you’re getting into,” she said.

Nonetheless, she is preparing to produce another musical she wrote.

People can turn their passions into a business at any age, and do. Matthew Lautar, 32, of College Park, Md., knew he wanted to be a tattoo artist from age 17, and is in the process of becoming his own boss. Two decades ago, Theresa Kant, 46, of Murfreesboro, Tenn., found that she loved calligraphy, and much later turned that interest into a going concern. Lorinda Knight, 65, did not use her 1963 art degree from Smith College until 10 years ago when she decided to open a contemporary arts gallery in Spokane, Wash.

There is no precise information on how many pursue their passions, and even federal self-employment or small-business ownership data does not reveal whether passions or pragmatism are at work.

But there are a few indicators. The 2004 Census Bureau data lists 923,144 people as being self-employed in the arts, entertainment and recreation. And an AARP study, also from 2004, found that 5.6 million people over age 50 were self-employed, although the study did not break down the areas in which they worked.

A well-padded bank account or, at least, a pension can cushion the financial uncertainty that comes with pursuing one’s dreams — so many defer them to their later years. Then again, sometimes a true professional love arrives later in life, as in Ms. Marcic’s case.

That happened when she researched a talk about equality between men and women for a 1999 conference, and realized the story of 20th-century women could be found in the era’s popular songs.

She analyzed the Top 40 lists for each decade starting in 1900, tracing how women’s neediness and dependency in ballads like Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man,” evolved to more independence in songs like Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman” and finally to women standing on their own, found in hits like Mariah Carey’s “Hero.”

She landed a book contract to write about her findings, “Respect: Women and Popular Music,” and she combined the music and narrative as a one-woman show that she performed around the United States and elsewhere for several years.

At first, she kept her day job, gradually going to part-time work before she quit. She loved the show, but she was losing money, she said. “I didn’t really know what I was doing,” she said. “My bank account went down every month for five years.”

To recoup some of her losses, which she estimates at well over $100,000, she even thought about going back to teaching for a regular paycheck, but she said, “I wanted to be a playwright.” So she sought professional advice, then wrote a script for a four-woman musical, including herself in one of the roles, and put up $20,000 to attract a producer.

Finally, in July of 2004, “Respect” went commercial with productions in Boston, Cleveland and Orlando. The Cleveland production closed, but the musical is expected to open in Detroit and Atlanta in coming months.

Continue reading "Women with passion, hardship, and relative success " »

The dominant view that women will just need to be in the business for few years for them to attain power parity is entirely flawed. Even after three decades of women in business, and despite a significant number of women MBAs from top B-schools, the status has not changed much. Women sure haven’t come a long way…

And that’s possibly because of a multitude of factors. But so far as the Fortune 500 companies are concerned, that’s also owing to the protectionist sexism that guards the old male power corridors tight. Julie Creswell of New York Times writes about “a dearth of female bosses”:

LIKE so many other women who entered corporate America in the 1970s, Carol Bartz simply wanted to make a little money. She did not harbor secret desires to run her own company or become chief executive of a large corporation. She just wanted to do a good job.

After working her way through college at the University of Wisconsin in Madison as a cocktail waitress (required uniform: red miniskirt, black fishnets and red feather in hair), Ms. Bartz graduated with a computer science degree in 1971. Tall, blonde, boisterous and ambitious, she entered the work force at a time when the promise of new professional opportunities for women was in the air.

What Ms. Bartz says she discovered, however, was that male counterparts and supervisors shook the corporate ladder ever more fiercely with each rung that she and other pioneering women of her generation ascended. But by combining a first-rate mind with hard work and decisive career moves, she managed to duck, bob and weave her way through Silicon Valley’s male-dominated technology industry in the 1980s.

By the early 1990s, Ms. Bartz had become one of the first women to run a large corporation. She garnered accolades from Wall Street and her peers for turning Autodesk into a leading international software company. This spring, Ms. Bartz stepped down as Autodesk’s chief executive, but she remains the executive chairwoman of its board.

Despite her hard-won reputation as an astute businesswoman, Ms. Bartz found herself repeatedly skipped over during a recent meeting of business and political leaders in Washington. The reason was that the men at the table assumed that she was an office assistant, not a fellow executive. “Happens all of the time,” Ms. Bartz says dryly, recalling the incident. “Sometimes I stand up. Sometimes I just ignore it.”

The contours of her long, bumpy journey to the chief executive’s suite reflect some of the gains women have made in navigating corporate hierarchies over the last 30 years, but also illustrate how rare it still is for a woman to get the keys to a company’s most powerful corner office. For decades, the pat explanation was that women simply had not been in the work force long enough; with patience, the pipeline would fill.

A look at the pipeline suggests otherwise. While top business schools are churning out an increasing number of female M.B.A.’s, only about 16 percent of corporate officers at Fortune 500 companies are women, according to Catalyst, an organization that studies women in the workplace. The numbers are even sparer at the top of the pyramid: women fill only nine, or less than 2 percent, of the chief executive jobs at Fortune 500 companies.

“There have been women in the pipeline for 20 to 25 years; progress has been slower than anybody thought it ever would be,” laments Julie H. Daum, the North American board practice leader for Spencer Stuart, the executive search firm. She says she does not expect the situation to change anytime soon. “It’s not as if we’re in the beginning of something that’s going to explode and that there are going to be lots of women in the c-suite,” she said. “I think we’re still way far removed from where we should be and from where women would like to be.”

No one disputes that more women have highly visible roles as chief executives. During the past year alone, several women joined the ultra-exclusive C.E.O. club, taking the reins at large, prominent Fortune 500 companies. In June, Irene B. Rosenfeld was named the chief executive of Kraft Foods, a job that once eluded her earlier in her career at Kraft; she joined a competitor before she returned to the company. Two months earlier, Patricia A. Woertz jumped from the Chevron Corporation to become chief executive at the chemical giant Archer Daniels Midland. Those two anointments were followed by Indra Nooyi’s ascent to the top seat at PepsiCo.

Even so, those women remain statistical anomalies. And the complex question of why women remain so underrepresented in the corporate suite yields a variety of possible answers. A number of women leave their careers — sometimes by choice, sometimes not — to focus on rearing families. The remaining pool suffers from a lack of networking or mentoring programs, others contend.

Continue reading "Female Bosses: The Struggle So far in Vain" »

A report from Colorado:

An Aurora man is facing several charges for breaking into his ex-girlfriends home and taking her Siamese fighting fish and putting it in the garbage disposal and turning it on as she watched in horror.

Uriah Williams, 23, is free on three-thousand dollars bond. He could not be reached for comment.

Prosecutors say the case is serious because he was allegedly trying to intimidate his ex-girlfriend.

He will be back in court January 9th on charges of first-degree criminal trespass and aggravated cruelty to animals.

Prosecutors declined to name Williams' 24-year-old ex-girlfriend, since she's a victim of alleged domestic violence.