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MSNBC reports an important update to the controversial abortion bill of South Carolina (we blogged the original report here).

New version of bill require doctors to list where women can get procedure

COLUMBIA, S.C. - A state Senate panel on Thursday dropped a measure from an abortion bill that would have made South Carolina the only state to require women to review an ultrasound image of the fetus before terminating a pregnancy.

Under the new proposal, a doctor would be required to tell a woman she has a right to have an ultrasound and see the images.

“It’s not forcing a woman to do something against her will,” said Sen. Linda Short, the only woman in the Senate and a member of the subcommittee that dropped the measure.

Short, a Democrat, expects the new version of the bill to easily pass the Senate, leading to a showdown with the House, whose members have passed a version that includes the ultrasound requirement.

The bill’s sponsor in the House said the Senate version was unacceptable.

A mandated review “provides an opportunity for a patient to pause,” said Rep. Greg Delleney, a Republican.

Proponents believe women would change their minds after seeing an ultrasound and choose to keep the child or offer it for adoption. Critics consider it a way to intimidate women who already have made an agonizing decision.

Last week, the attorney general told lawmakers it would be illegal for the state to force a woman to view an ultrasound image against her will.

On Thursday, Attorney General Henry McMaster said he thought the Senate’s bill could withstand a legal challenge.

Some states already make ultrasound images available to women before an abortion.

The Senate subcommittee unanimously approved the amended bill that would require a doctor to provide a list of places to get a free ultrasound if a woman chooses the procedure. Ultrasounds are done in most cases to verify the fetus’ age.

The bill now heads to the Senate Medical Affairs Committee.

Women’sEnews has some notable Cheers and Jeers for the week.

If Dr Keroack’s resignation calls for cheers, the fact that 23% rise in pregnancy discrimination complaints indicates the sad state of affairs in the country. Following is the report:

Dr. Eric Keroack, who has been embroiled in controversy since he was appointed as the Health and Human Services Department's chief family planning officer in November, abruptly resigned his post on March 29, Reuters reported.

Keroack's selection by President Bush was met with strong criticism from women's groups over his anti-abortion stance and his previous work with five Massachusetts "crisis pregnancy" centers. Massachusetts state Medicaid officials took an undisclosed action against Keroack earlier in the week, which led to his departure.

In his federal position, Keroack oversaw $283 million in family planning grants used to provide contraception to low-income women, but his opposition to contraception provoked 107 House Democrats and three Republicans to call for his resignation in December.

"It's a good day for women's health," Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said. "Keroack was unqualified to run the nation's family planning program. The nation's family planning program should be run by a champion for women's health and safety."

Continue reading "Pregnancy Bias Claims Rise" »

A detailed report on EEOC perspective appears on the National Law Journal.

By Tresa Baldas

The federal government has launched an initiative aimed at cracking down on discriminatory hiring practices in the workplace -- a program that could land unsuspecting employers in court, employment attorneys are warning.

That's what happened to Walgreen Co. this month, lawyers note, when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission hit the national pharmacy chain with a class action alleging widespread racial bias against thousands of African-American workers. EEOC v. Walgreen Co., No. 07-172, (S.D. Ill.).

The suit came one week after the EEOC announced "E-RACE" (Eradicating Racism and Colorism from Employment), an initiative that will have federal investigators paying much closer attention to how minorities are hired and promoted.

FOCUS ON HIRING

Specifically, the EEOC will focus on hiring decisions that are based on names, arrest and conviction records, employment and personality tests and credit scores -- all of which may disparately impact people of color.

For example, an African-American might be denied a job when an arrest record shows up on a background check or if a credit score turns out to be low. Such criteria, which have a disparate impact on minorities, were not considered in the past. But employers are increasingly considering such factors when hiring, and may unwittingly be denying jobs to large classes of minorities.

Many states have laws that restrict employers from asking about or considering criminal records when hiring. The EEOC holds that if an employer denies a job to an applicant because he or she has a criminal record, it could be considered discrimination if the person is a minority.

The EEOC also has a new specialized task force -- formed last year -- that will handle evidence turned up by E-RACE. Regional attorneys and directors will investigate in more detail and attempt to establish a pattern of discrimination within industries or employers, and present it to headquarters for possible litigation.

"I don't want employers to get the impression that they're some kind of bull's-eye," said EEOC attorney Paula Bruner, special assistant to the EEOC chairwoman. "We want them to be aware they need to step up in terms of their compliance with our laws."

According to the EEOC, race discrimination complaints continue to be the number one complaint made to the EEOC. In 2006, a total of 27,238 such complaints were filed. The EEOC also has seen a substantial increase over the past 15 years in discrimination claims based on color, which have soared from 374 in 1992 to 1,241 in 2006.

Continue reading "EEOC Cracks Down on Discriminatory Hiring Practices" »

New Jersey Police Department has come under fire for having harassed black youths based on their race. And has decided to settle the matter with a big check. The report follows:

Bias suit vs. police settled for $275,000

BY ALESHA WILLIAMS

MANALAPAN — A lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey against the Police Department alleging that three black youths were harassed because of their race has been settled for $275,000.

Court records indicate each of the youths will receive about $62,000, with the remainder, nearly $91,000, going to the ACLU for legal services.

But township police maintain there was no wrongdoing. The decision to settle was made by the attorney for the department's insurance company, department attorney Mitchell Ansell said.

The suit was filed in August 2004 on behalf of Sean Anderson, then 12, of Jersey City, Diamond Yorker, then 17, of Manalapan, and Randy Reina, then 18, of Edison.

It charged that on the night of June 21, 2003, Officers Pete Chalfin and Steve Turner
singled the trio out from three white friends while they were all walking on Parkview Way near Buck's Head Park.

According to the complaint, the officers sent the three white youths home, saying, "You don't have to see this," as they proceeded to search and question only the black youths. Reina allegedly was warned not to set foot in Manalapan again. The police ultimately left without charging anyone.

Continue reading "NJ Police settles race case" »

Seattle Times offers a very insightful critique of race relations in the (post)modern America.

We can't address discrimination with policies that ignore color

By Kenneth Einar Himma

Many whites believe governments shouldn't consider race in making any decisions. They typically believe in colorblindness as a state policy, because they think we have solved all race problems since they don't know anyone who still believes the pernicious view that blacks are inferior.

Although attitudes about race have changed for the better, there are still serious problems of race facing us. A government policy of colorblindness not only ignores these problems, but can make them even worse.

A person can consciously believe all races are equal but still have subconscious preferences that cause discrimination. Discrimination can result from racist attitudes; but it can also result from common prejudices and preferences that people don't' even know they have.

It is common for people who reject racist ideologies to unknowingly harbor disparaging stereotypes about race that affect their behavior. This is what happens when someone immediately thinks of a young black man upon hearing about a violent crime, or when a woman reacts to a young black man's presence by clutching her purse tightly.

An important ongoing study shows that most people have automatic preferences for their own race. Project Implicit administers a series of implicit association tests (IAT) that identify and measure unconscious attitudes about persons belonging to various groups. This study shows that more than 80 percent of whites display a subconscious preference for whites over blacks. In a nation in which whites are disproportionately responsible for making hiring decisions for the most lucrative and desirable positions, this results in unfair affirmative action for whites.

Conscious racial prejudice is much more culpable than subconscious preferences. Conscious prejudice is based on false and malicious views about other races, while these subconscious preferences are the result of a common tendency to mistrust difference and gravitate toward similarity in people.

But the prevalence of such preferences among whites results in much injustice — despite the progress made over the past 50 years. Here are just a few examples of continuing race discrimination.

Continue reading "When the policies ignore color" »

An engineer who specialized in airplanes filed a lawsuit against Boeing, claiming he had to work in a hostile work environment, News 4 WOAI learned Tuesday.

According to the lawsuit, Zuhair Ahmed was working at Boeing here in San Antonio when the September 11th attacks happened in 2001. Ahmed claims after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, his co-workers began making fun of his religion and race.

Ahmed claims in the lawsuit, co-workers and supervisors at Boeing began harassing and discriminating against him because of his African and Sudanese origin. Ahmed is also Muslim, according to the suit.

In March 2005, Ahmed claims in the lawsuit he was fired after a work-related injury.

Boeing officials told News 4 WOAI they cannot comment on the lawsuit because it has not been served yet.

The company has policies in place prohibiting harassment and discrimination, Boeing officials said.

Iowa Senate has a heartening news.

By Todd Dorman
Lee Newspapers

DES MOINES - A bill prohibiting discrimination against gays and lesbians in Iowa won Senate approval Monday over the objections of critics who predicted the measure would harm small businesses and open the door to lawsuits.

Backers of the bill, mostly Democrats, pushed it to passage on a 32-17 vote. They portrayed the legislation as a needed strike against discrimination that would also make the state more economically attractive.

The bill, Senate File 427, would add the words "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" to the Iowa’s Civil Rights Act, which currently bars discrimination based on age, race, creed, color, sex, national origin, religion and disability.

The act specifically targets discrimination tied to employment, housing, public accommodations, education and credit.

"Today, we have the opportunity to reaffirm that in Iowa, job performance is what counts, not what you look like, not what church you attend, not how old you are or who you love," said Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal, D-Council Bluffs, who led debate on the bill.

"It is difficult to convince a talented young person to come to Iowa or stay in Iowa when they can be discriminated against simply because of who they are," Gronstal said.

Exhausting most other options to rationally forbid abortion, a new law actually ridicules basic minimum standards of empathy. And of women’s rights.

That--after hours of debate--the South Carolina House could approve a bill that would mandate women to see a fetal ultrasound before deciding for abortion, speaks for the dismal state of women in the country today. More disappointing is the manner in which the voting passed the bill: 91-23, clearly indicating a sexist dominance in the juridical mainland.

Opponents of the bill decry it as “emotional blackmail”. The reality is worse than that. Such a bill that aims at controlling women’s freedom to choose--in a supervisory manner exploiting institutionally framed legal and ethical terms—actually throttles women’s freedom.

If only the legislators could wake up to realize that women’s freedoms are indeed human freedoms, such a bill would not have been envisaged, let alone passed.

Detailed story follows:

S.C. House: View fetal image prior to abortion Bill would mandate that women see ultrasound before terminating pregnancy By AARON GOULD SHEININ

Women seeking abortions would have to see a fetal ultrasound before the procedure under a bill given key approval in the S.C. House Wednesday.

After three hours of passionate debate, the House voted 91-23 to require women to sign a statement swearing they had seen an ultrasound image of their fetus before getting an abortion.

A half-dozen other states offer ultrasound images to abortion patients, legislative staffers said. But those states do not require abortion patients view them.

Supporters of the measure hope that image will spur more women to forgo abortion. Opponents called the bill “emotional blackmail.”

Third and final approval of the bill in the House could come as early as today, sending the bill to the Senate. There, the proposal faces stiffer opposition; individual senators hold great power to delay or derail legislation.

Abortion foes celebrated Wednesday’s vote.

“It was better than I expected,” Rep. Greg Delleney, R-Chester, said after he and other lawmakers, mostly Republicans, beat back a series of amendments from Democrats.

“Many of the pro-life groups contacted people around the state, and people were praying about this. Hundreds, if not thousands, were praying for it.”

Debate was impassioned.

Rep. Todd Rutherford, D-Richland, railed against Republicans for opposing his amendment to exempt victims of rape and incest from the required ultrasound viewing.

Forcing a victim of a crime to see the results is tantamount to forcing her to relive the ordeal, Rutherford said. “You all are doing it to her once again.”

But Delleney said the fetus is no less precious.

Rep. Bob Leach, R-Greenville, accused Rutherford of manufactured indignity. “I’ll be nominating you for actor of the year,” Leach said.

When Rutherford raised his voice in response, Speaker Pro Tem Doug Smith, R-Spartanburg, had to quiet both men and remind them to debate with civility.

Rep. Cathy Harvin, D-Clarendon, said the 111 men in the 124-member House never could understand the dueling emotions the issue raises.

“There are 111 of you in this body who will never be able to know the joy a woman experiences when she discovers she is with child,” Harvin said. “There are 111 of you who will never know the horror, that experience, that horror of being impregnated when it’s not something they desire, and then be taken and forced to observe the evidence of the crime.”

Theology, Scripture and wrenching personal stories poured from the podium through much of the debate.

Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter, D-Orangeburg, quoted the book of Micah to bolster her argument against the bill.

“What does the Lord require of you but to do justice?” Cobb-Hunter quoted. “Love kindness and walk humbly with your God.”

Abortion-rights opponents used the same sentiment later Wednesday to suggest the bill is a mistake. In a news release after the bill passed, the Columbia Christians for Life said the bill “may reduce abortions, but it will also prolong the practice of ‘legalized’ abortion.”

“God’s requirement in the case of murder is justice, not regulation,” the release said.

Damned if imprisoned. Doubly damned, if imprisoned. Thats the reality check for the current crisis that posits ethical consequences of incarceration in a country infamously holding records of sorts when it comes to imprisoning the members of minority race.

ZNet has a scholarly and detailed account:

Reverse Reparations: Race, Place, and the Vicious Circle of Mass Incarceration
by Paul Street

“TOWNS PUT DREAMS IN PRISONS”
Sometimes it's the silences that speak the loudest. Consider, for example, a page-one article that appeared in the New York Times in the summer of 2001 under the title "Rural Towns Turn to Prisons to Re-ignite Their Economies." According to this piece, non-metropolitan America was relying like never before on prison construction for jobs and economic development. Formerly, Times reporter Peter Kilborn noted, rural communities had depended for employment and economic development on agriculture, manufacturing, and/or mining. Now, however, they were counting on mass incarceration to deliver the goods. Reporting that “245 prisons sprouted in 212 of the nation’s 2,290 rural counties” during the 1990s, Kilborn quoted the cheerful city manager of Sayre, Oklahoma, which had just opened a prized new maximum-security lockdown. "There's no more recession-proof form of economic development," this local official told Kilborn, than incarceration because "nothing's going to stop crime."

By Kilborn’s account, “prisons have been helping to revive large stretches of rural America. More than a Wal-Mart or a meatpacking plant, state, federal, and private prisons, typically housing 1,000 inmates and providing 300 jobs, can put a town on solid economic footing.” Thanks to money brought in through taxes on prisoners’ telephone calls, sales taxes paid by prisoners and prison staff, and to water, sewer, and landfill fees, Killborn added, Sayre’s city budget increased from $755,000 in 1996 to $1,250,000 in 2001, permitting the town to set aside 15 percent of its revenues for capital improvements. No such savings or investment were possible before the prison, when Sayre “was surviving largely on federal crop support payments to its dwindling farm population” in the wake of the collapse of the state’s oil and gas industry(1).

A different story on the same topic appeared under the title "Ionia Finds Stability in Prisons" in the Detroit News just 12 days before Kilborn’s piece. It told the enlightening tale of how the semi-rural Michigan town of Ionia, located halfway between Lansing and Grand Rapids, had recently become one of the state's fastest growing and "most improved" communities thanks its five thriving penitentiaries together employing 1,584 workers who collectively made $102 million a year. "The state's urban centers dump their felons," the Detroit News reported, "in prison towns and forget about them. Suburbs balk at housing felons, envisioning escapees trampling through their gardens and hiding out in their tool sheds." But "Ionia," the paper noted, "sees things from the other end of the spectrum. The prisons bring, of all things, security." According to Detroit News reporter Francis Donnelly, Ionia’s “penitentiaries, five veritable Great Lakes of cash, provide sustenance to every sector of [Ionia’s] once-dry economy: jobs for residents, customers for stores, revenue for the city government,” including “nearly $1.2 million of the city’s $3.8 million budget” (2).

A February 2001 Chicago Tribune article titled “Towns Put Dreams in Prisons” told a comparable story from Illinois. In “downstate” Hoopeston, Illinois, the Tribune reported, there was “talk of the mothballed canneries that once made this a boom town and whether any of that bustling spirit might return if the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) comes to town.” “You don’t like to think about incarceration,” Hoopeston’s mayor told the Tribune, “but this is an opportunity for Hoopeston. We’ve been plagued by plant closings.” The mayor, the Tribune reported, was lobbying IDOC to permit his town to host a prison so that it could enjoy some of the economic benefits that came to Ina, Illinois when the “Big Muddy” prison was constructed in 1993.

Before “Big Muddy” went up, the Tribune noted, Ina “took in just $17,000 a year in motor fuel tax revenue. Now the figure is more like $72,000. Last year’s municipal budget appropriation was $380,000. More than half of that money is prison revenue. Streets that were paved in chipped gravel and oil for generations soon will all be covered in asphalt. An $850,000 community center that doubles as a gym and computer lab for the school across the street is being paid for with prison money.”

Continue reading "Vicious Circle of Mass Incarceration" »

Johnnie Cochran's law firm has been sued for discrimination:

LOS ANGELES - The law firm founded by the late Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. , who successfully defended O.J. Simpson against murder charges, has been sued for discrimination.

Attorney Shawn Chapman Holley claimed in her lawsuit filed last week in Los Angeles County Superior Court that the firm's leaders discriminated against her because she is black and eventually fired her. After Cochran's death in 2005, the firm's leadership was turned over to white men who discriminated against black lawyers and black clients, the lawsuit said.

"In deference to the memory of Johnnie Cochran and in deference to his family, I do not intend to engage in the public airing of our disagreements," Holley said in a statement through her lawyer. "The lawsuit speaks for itself, and this matter will be litigated in the courts."

A call to the Cochran firm in Los Angeles was not immediately returned. Randy H. McMurray, a partner in the firm, told the Los Angeles Times the allegations were not true and that Holley was not fired.

"We probably have the most diverse law firm in California. I don't know what race we would be discriminating against," he said, adding that he and another partner in the Los Angeles office are black.

According to the lawsuit, Holley was appointed to be a liaison between the civil and criminal sides of the firm two years ago. She had worked with Cochran for 17 years.

Holley became concerned about the firm's criminal representation but when she aired these concerns, she was demoted. Five managers of the firm, four of whom "are Caucasian males" approved the demotion, the suit said.

In January 2006, Holley was fired, the suit said.

Cochran founded the firm in 1965. For years, Cochran was famous in Los Angeles for winning a number of cases that led to historic financial settlements and changes in police procedure.

He became nationally known after successfully defending Simpson against charges he murdered his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman.

How aware are the liberals when it comes to queer culture? Alternet takes a stab.

Queer 101: A Guide for Heteros By Cameron Scott, AlterNet. As last November's election neared and a Democratic victory appeared more and more likely, Republicans warned that Speaker Pelosi would impose her "San Francisco values" on average Americans. Americans to the right of the left coast felt in their gut that San Francisco values were a shameful thing, without really knowing what they were.

Even San Franciscans scratched their heads a bit. The local paper's sex columnist, Violet Blue, pointed out that it meant sex. She argued that the twist in conservatives' panties resulted from San Franciscans' sex-positive outlook. Blue offered a paean to some of the city's sexual rituals, several of which, such as the Folsom Street Fair, are primarily gay.

But even Violet Blue didn't tell the whole truth: The phrase "San Francisco values" came directly from the right's well-worn gay-baiting playbook. In a story called "San Francisco Values Front and Center," the right's faithful warrior Bill O'Reilly shifts from talking about the city's ousting of ROTC clubs from several high schools into a discussion of gay marriage. He includes standard playbook comparisons of gay unions to polygamy, "triads" and incest.

So why hasn't anybody called a spade a spade? Many in Middle America have come to believe homosexual values must be abhorrent, based on the right's insistence that all homosexuals are radical perverts.

Blindness to difference has allowed the right wing to invent a sinister stereotype of "homosexuals" that has only tenuous links to reality. Radical right groups generate bogus statistics by conflating gay men and lesbians (the claim that homosexuals are more likely to have STDs should more accurately say that lesbians have the lowest rates of STDs of any group) and gay men and men who molest boys (imagine if they consistently referred to men who molest girls as "straight men"). The right gets away with their smears because they have persuaded Americans that sex and desire have no role in polite society.

Continue reading "Queer 101 for the Liberals" »

Taking yet another lead on creating a safer space, New Jersey state has a progressive ruling on school sex harassment scenario.

N.J. High Court Applies Hostile Work Environment Standard to School Sex Harassment
Henry Gottlieb
New Jersey Law Journal

School districts can be held liable in damages for student-on-student gay bashing and other forms of sexual harassment if teachers know about it and fail to react promptly, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled last week.

At the same time, the court declined to impose strict liability. Instead, liability will depend on how well educators respond to such situations.

"When a student is subjected to severe or pervasive bullying on the school bus, in the classroom, or at the playground and a school district fails to adequately respond to that misconduct, that student has a right to redress," Chief Justice James Zazzali wrote for the unanimous court in L.W. v. Toms River Regional Schools, A-111. "However, school districts will be shielded from liability, when their preventive and remedial actions are reasonable in light of the totality of the circumstances."

The plaintiff was a Toms River, N.J., student who complained to authorities in grammar, middle and high school that his peers abused him for years with anti-gay comments like "homo" and "faggot" and occasionally assaulted him -- treatment so bad that he felt compelled to miss classes and avoid school buses and after-school activities.

Administrators tried to deal with the problem with lectures, detentions and an occasional suspension to tormentors without effecting an end to the problem until the plaintiff transferred to an out-of-town school.

In response to a suit, the state Division on Civil Rights found that the Law Against Discrimination covered the case and it imposed $60,000 in fines on the school district.

The state Supreme Court agreed that the case was covered by the LAD and the leading case on hostile work environment sexual harassment, Lehmann v. Toys 'R' Us, Inc., 132 N.J.587.

The LAD permits a cause of action against a school district for student-on-student harassment based on an individual's perceived sexual orientation if the school district fails to reasonably address that harassment, the court said.

Continue reading "NJ Court rules against hostile schools" »

Regardless of whether sexual conducts were proven or not, resulting discussions can cost the job of the involved. And a jury has justly ruled against a university resident who asserted that he had ended his “affair” at the workplace. More on UCLA site.

Jury rules UCLA handled harassment case properly

By Carolyn McGough

In response to a lawsuit accusing UCLA of improperly responding to an alleged case of sexual harassment, a Los Angeles jury ruled 10-2 in favor of the university, saying its actions investigating the accusations made by a former psychiatric resident had been appropriate.

Dr. David Martorano filed the lawsuit, asserting that after he ended an affair with his female supervisor, Dr. Heather Krell, rumors circulated that resulted in the university taking away the position of chief resident of the psychiatry department, a job that had been promised to him.

Martorano also said Krell damaged his reputation by accusing him of making up their affair.

Krell filed a countersuit, alleging invasion of privacy and slander, and maintained that she and Martorano never had sex.

In an internal investigation into the incident, UCLA determined there was no sexual harassment.

Martorano was not given the position of chief resident because “regardless of whether or not Martorano and Krell had sex, even the perception that people are getting chief residencies because they are sleeping together is not acceptable,” said Alan Zuckerman, a University of California attorney who represented UCLA.

Jurors reached their decision Thursday, concluding that UCLA properly responded to allegations.

“UCLA immediately investigated the case. UCLA has officials trained and looking into these (harassment) situations, and when the allegation was reported to the university it immediately began investigating and interviewed all parties involved,” said UCLA spokeswoman Carol Stogsdill.

UCLA officials said in a statement they were pleased with the decision.

“UCLA is pleased that jurors in the Martorano v. UCLA-Krell case have found the university’s actions in responding to accusations of sexual harassment to be swift, thorough, appropriate and lawful,” the statement read.

Both Martorano and Krell said they were pleased with the outcome of the case, though neither was awarded any money.

Jurors said they believed Krell and Martorano had an affair that violated UCLA’s policies, but Krell lied about it, juror Ruven Domenech said.

Continue reading "UCLA case: Affair at workplace can cost the job" »

Just how difficult it is to be a mom in a postfeminist era? Or are the mothers going to redefine the movement now? New York Times probes into the new shift.

By KARA JESELLA

A BABY was passed around like the hors d’oeuvres — in this case, bruschetta, a fruit plate — among the 10 mothers who crowded into Ann Clark’s Sacramento home on a Tuesday night this month. No matter if the baby was crying; this was a child-friendly crowd.

The mothers all held jobs outside the home (pastry chef, singer in a band, lawyer, hairstylist, nanny) and many had flexible schedules to make it easier to care for their children. Like hundreds of others who have gathered over the last nine months, they huddled around a television to view “The Motherhood Manifesto,” a documentary about the obstacles still facing working mothers, including many of those in the room.

“I’m home with a 2-year-old, so there may be an interruption,” said Ms. Clark, 35, a social worker with two children and a three-day-a-week office job, as she recounted the viewing party the next day and talked about how she related to the mothers in the movie. Like them, she said, her financial situation felt precarious. She wasn’t sure she could count on keeping her part-time position next fall.

“These are issues I’m aware of and feel strongly about,” she said of the movie’s focus on subjects like universal child care, maternity and paternity leave, and workplace discrimination against mothers. That is why she joined MomsRising.org, the mother’s advocacy organization that made the documentary. “It’s a great opportunity to connect with friends — mothers — and together have a chance to change things,” she said.

For years, mothers have been taking to the Internet to blog or post messages about the travails of motherhood, commiserating, fuming or laughing about their shared lives. But in the last year there has been a marked increase in those who are going beyond simply expressing their feelings. In a throwback to their mothers’ — or was it their grandmothers’? — time, they are organizing about family and work issues.

A generation of mothers who are largely perceived as postfeminist in every way, from sex to economic discrimination, has begun a consciousness-raising that is almost old-fashioned were it not for the technology involved. Raised to believe that girls could accomplish anything, these women have reached parenthood, only to find they faced many of the same pay, equity and work-family balance issues that were being fought over decades before. From that awakening, they say, has come the inkling of a new movement.

Continue reading "Moms Rising: A new feminist shift" »

Connecticut lawmakers are considering a bill prohibiting transgender discrimination.

(Hartford-AP) State lawmakers are again considering a bill that would prohibit discrimination based on gender identity.

One transgendered woman told the legislature's Judiciary Committee of how she struggled to find a job, despite having a PhD in chemistry. Time after time, she would apply for jobs, only to be turned down after the interview.

The bill adds gender identity or expression to the law that prohibits discrimination based on race, gender, religion, age and other characteristics.

Although the same legislation passed in the Judiciary Committee last year, it died later in the legislative process. Advocates hope this will be the year that the bill finally passes.

Three years ago, the state's hate crime law was expanded to protect transgendered people, who identify and express themselves as the opposite sex.

Saeed Shabazz invokes Dr Dubois to highlight the most lingering issue of contemporary America.

(FinalCall.com) - Eminent scholar, intellectual and founder of the NAACP’s The Crisis news publication, Dr. W.E.B. Dubois wrote the following statement in The Forethought of his book, “The Souls of Black Folk” in 1903: “Here in lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being Black here in the dawning of the 20th century. This meaning is not without interest to you, gentle reader, for the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line.”

Observers and analysts say that seven years into the 21st century the problem is still the “color-line” in America.

A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released in December 2006, stated that “most Americans, White and Black, see racism as a lingering problem in the United States.” CNN also used as a consultant University of Connecticut professor Jack Dovidio, who has researched racism for 30 years, according to his website. He estimated that approximately 80 percent of White Americans have racist feelings they may not recognize.

The survey questioned 328 Blacks and 703 Whites and determined that 84 percent of Blacks and 66 percent of Whites considered racism to be a “very serious” or “somewhat serious” problem, and 51 percent of Blacks and 26 percent of Whites claim to have “been a victim of discrimination.” Percentages were lower when people were asked if they knew anyone who was “racially biased”—only 31 percent of Blacks and 21 percent of Whites said they did. Only 12 percent of Blacks and 13 percent of Whites surveyed further admitted to being racially-biased themselves.

CNN’s Paula Zahn wrote on Dec. 19 that after comedian Michael Richard’s racist rant at a Los Angeles comedy club in November, she discussed with her staff “what would possibly drive a person to say such vile and hateful things?” She said the discussions with her staff raised a series of questions: Is there an inner racist in most of us?; and, is racism thriving today? So, armed with their poll, they went throughout the nation, holding town hall meetings. According to Prof. Dovidio, the results of CNN’s poll found that “We’ve reached a point that racism is like a virus that has mutated into a new form that we don’t recognize.”

Reaction to the CNN poll was swift. In her article on GOPUSA.com, Star Parker, president of the Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education and author of the book “White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay,” asked “what was the point?” concerning the CNN program on racism.

“The point had to be to communicate with White America, because there certainly was no news for Blacks,” she said. “I just couldn’t help wondering if Zahn and the CNN crew really thought any of this was prime-time worthy news,” Ms. Parker stated.

However, on Dec. 14, two days after the poll’s release, a group representing Black conservatives, Project 21, issued a press release that stated: “The CNN report serves only one purpose, and that is to convince the public at large—specifically White people—that they are evil racists. It is a vulgar exercise to try to find racism in the fiber of every White.”

Ms. Zahn continued to raise questions concerning race. On Feb. 2, two days before Super Bowl 41, she devoted program time to the issue of Black coaches in the NFL; Blacks being tasered by police in Houston, and whether the fact that a Black celebrity may face jail-time because of a fatal car accident, when White celebrities in the same situation only faced civil charges.

The Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr., founder and president of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition; Bob Law, former national radio talk show host and New York State co-chair of the Millions More Movement; and Mychal Massie, Project 21 chairman, were queried on whether CNN was the proper vehicle for the issue of racism in America.

“CNN does not have a single show hosted by an African American,” Rev. Jackson said, throwing the issue of racism right back into CNN’s lap. On whether he felt the shows were having any particular affect on the consciousness of Blacks, he said, “I think Black people look at these shows as just that, shows.” He said that his organization continues to put pressure on all of the networks to step up to the plate and hire more Blacks.

“We are applying pressure and opening doors,” Rev. Jackson said.

Mr. Law stated that “We all know that racism is real, but the real discussion should be centered around the question, ‘What is wrong with White folks?’ Why is it necessary for them to continue to look for White advantage, after decades—no, centuries—of White privilege?”

“Why is it that Whites are still racist—still using race as a tool—anything else is a bogus discussion,” Mr. Law stressed. He also added that CNN isn’t talking about anything that is real, but rather what we get from them are tricks.

CNN is promoting a racial divide and a double-standard, offered Mr. Massie. “And the liberal media is standing by quietly,” he said. “When I speak of credibility of a news organization, I am speaking of an organization that knows its responsibility to provide balanced news. CNN goes out of its way to create a news environment for its own benefit, which is not to show Blacks in a positive light; always there is a stereotypical slant,” Mr. Massie said.

Meanwhile, in New York City, the Rev. Al Sharpton of the National Action Network continues to hammer home the issues of race as they impact on the lives of Blacks.

On Nov. 23, Rev. Sharpton explained to CNN why he wouldn’t accept an apology from Mr. Richards: “This is not about accepting an apology. This is about starting a process to really deal with racism in this country.” Rev. Sharpton spoke out again when U.S. Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) recently referred to Illinois Sen. Barack Obama as “articulate and clean.” Rev. Sharpton, on Feb. 4, again tackled the issue of race, when he told reporters he may seek to file a class-action lawsuit over a report from The New York Times (NYT) that the New York Police Department (NYPD) had “stopped more than 500,000 people in 2006, more than five times as many as they did four years ago.”

The NYT reported that 55 percent of the people stopped were Black, while 30 percent were Latino. “Is there a measure of profiling based on race that permeates in the NYPD?” Rev. Sharpton asked.

There are other reports that observers say reflect a racist trend. On Feb. 1, the federal office of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission released a report stating that federal job discrimination complaints by workers against private employers rose in 2006 for the first time in four years. Allegations of racial discrimination rose 35 percent with over 27,000 charges. “These figures tell us that discrimination remains a persistent problem in the 21st century workplace,” stated an official of the EEOC.

Continue reading "The problem of the Continuing Color Line" »

A uniquely inspiring narration about the travel from the "world of religion" to the "world of reason", Infidel has been reviewed by NY Times. The book written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali is poised to receive the kind of attention that Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran did. If Nafisi found inspiration in Austen and Nabakov to write about women plights in Iran, Hirsi Ali took cue from Nancy Drew mysteries to sketch emancipation of Muslim women from Somalia to Netherlands. Worth a read. At least William Grimes recommends it highly.

No Rest for a Feminist Fighting Radical Islam By WILLIAM GRIMES

Ayaan Hirsi Ali came to the attention of the wider world in an extraordinary way. In 2004 a Muslim fanatic, after shooting the filmmaker Theo van Gogh dead on an Amsterdam street, pinned a letter to Mr. van Gogh’s chest with a knife. Addressed to Ms. Hirsi Ali, the letter called for holy war against the West and, more specifically, for her death.

A Somali by birth and a recently elected member of the Dutch Parliament, Ms. Hirsi Ali had waged a personal crusade to improve the lot of Muslim women. Her warnings about the dangers posed to the Netherlands by unassimilated Muslims made her Public Enemy No. 1 for Muslim extremists, a feminist counterpart to Salman Rushdie.

The circuitous, violence-filled path that led Ms. Hirsi Ali from Somalia to the Netherlands is the subject of “Infidel,” her brave, inspiring and beautifully written memoir. Narrated in clear, vigorous prose, it traces the author’s geographical journey from Mogadishu to Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya, and her desperate flight to the Netherlands to escape an arranged marriage.

At the same time, Ms. Hirsi Ali describes a journey “from the world of faith to the world of reason,” a long, often bitter struggle to come to terms with her religion and the clan-based traditional society that defined her world and that of millions of Muslims all over.

Ms. Hirsi Ali, now 37, belongs to the Osman Mahamud subclan of the Darod clan. Its members, by tradition, are born to rule, which may explain the author’s self-possessed, imperious gaze on the cover of her book. Her mother came from a family of nomads, and Ms. Hirsi Ali grew up listening to desert folk tales narrated by her grandmother, who, like many Somalis, followed a “diluted, relaxed” version of Islam that included traditional magic spirits and genies. It also required that young girls undergo genital mutilation, which Ms. Hirsi Ali, a victim of the practice, describes in horrific detail.

Somalia’s troubled politics provided Ms. Hirsi Ali with an eventful childhood. Her father, an opponent of the country’s Soviet-backed dictator, spent years in prison. The family, living on clan charity, moved to Saudi Arabia, where Ms. Hirsi Ali recoiled at the local interpretation of Islam, and later to Ethiopia and Kenya, where Ms. Hirsi Ali added Swahili and English to her growing list of languages. Without knowing it, she was becoming a permanent outsider, a misfit wherever she traveled.

Continue reading "Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Journy of an Infidel " »

The Seattle Times on religious tension in workplace. AP Wire refers to this here.

A Muslim immigrant working on contract for Microsoft filed a complaint against the company last month, saying he was interrogated about his Muslim-inspired, anti-war Web site, then abruptly fired.

Two former Kentridge High School students, whose Bible club was denied a charter at the school in part because it required members to swear allegiance to Jesus Christ, are awaiting a federal-court decision in their lawsuit.

And 14 months ago, the Red Robin restaurant chain settled with a server it had fired from its Bellevue restaurant for refusing to cover up wrist tattoos he said are part of his ancient Egyptian Kemetic faith.

Here and elsewhere across the country, complaints alleging religious discrimination are up dramatically, with confrontations arising over how people publicly observe their faith, when and where they pray, how they dress, what hours they work — and generally what they believe.

Between 2002 and 2006, the number of religious-discrimination complaints filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) nationally rose more than 30 percent from the previous five years.

For Washington state, complaints rose 60 percent for the same period. In fact, religious complaints in the state for 2006 were the highest they've been in at least 15 years.

"We're seeing an increase in religious charges involving all different faiths — across the board," said Kathryn Olson, supervisory trial attorney with the EEOC in Seattle.

Among the factors fueling the tensions are fallout from the war on terror, the growing convergence of politics and religion and an increasingly diverse population.

"I tell my [employer] clients all the time: Nothing will spread more quickly in the workplace than religious harassment," said Rick Liebman, an employment attorney in Portland.

"Where a person may not even think about making a joke about a co-worker's race or sex, they seem to have no compunction to picking on other people over their religion."

Not surprisingly, a majority of the complaints have come from Muslims. But the numbers also reflect growing tensions around the Christian faith.

Flora Wilson Bridges, an associate professor at Seattle University, said she believes those tensions are arising in part because conservative Christians have become more provocative — less tolerant of those with whom they disagree and more determined to impose their values on others. As they have become more emboldened, they've also become more inclined to take their battles to court.

Continue reading "Religious Discriminations on the Rise" »

San Diego Business Journal discusses five steps to updating Sexual Harassment Prevention Training.

Educating Supervisors Is Key to Complying With State Law AB1825

Question: As a small business, do I have to worry about the new sexual harassment training laws? What should I do to make sure my company is compliant?

Answer: Every small business runs the risk of sexual harassment claims without proper training of its employees. Although California state law AB1825 only requires supervisor sexual harassment training for companies with at least 50 employees, there are things you can do to protect your business and your personnel regardless of your company’s size.

For starters, distribute and enforce your company’s anti-harassment and Equal Employment Opportunities policies, as well as your complaint-resolution process.

Make sure supervisors know how to respond to employee complaints.

Explain to supervisors the unique aspects of California harassment law, which places greater responsibility on their actions and inactions. Make sure they understand about both types of sexual harassment (quid pro quo and hostile work environment).

Continue reading "Updating Sexual Harassment Prevention Training" »

Target Corp. has agreed to pay $775,000 to settle a lawsuit charging that the retailer created and condoned a racially hostile work environment at its store in Springfield, Pennsylvania.

The suit, filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleged that 14 black employees at the store were subjected to inappropriate comments and verbal berating by a white manager. The suit also claimed that Michael Hill, who was training to be a store manager, was forced to resign as a result of retaliation he faced after complaining about the racial harassment.

As part of the settlement, Target will provide managers and supervisors at the Springfield store with training regarding Target's company's equal employment opportunity policy. Target will also post a notice about the settlement, ensure that its complaint procedure is effectively communicated to the workforce, and take remedial action if an employee violates its equal employment opportunity policy. In settling the lawsuit, Target denied any wrongdoing.

Purdue students perform 'Vagina Monologues' to benefit YWCA domestic violence prevention program

Provocative, controversial, emotional and hilarious -- all can be used to describe Eve Ensler's critically acclaimed play The Vagina Monologues.

For women in Greater Lafayette, the play can be described as a lifesaver, too.

For the past five years, Purdue University students have organized productions of The Vagina Monologues on campus. Proceeds of the almost-always sold-out shows have gone to Greater Lafayette's YWCA Domestic Violence Intervention and Prevention Program. In the past two years, the YWCA received about $20,000 from Purdue's productions.

"The money goes to the women's shelter," said Nohemi Lugo, Hispanic advocate in the domestic violence program. "The money provides women with food, clothing and legal issues like child custody and divorce. It also goes to our staff, support groups and reflections groups, parenting classes and anger management classes."

The 2007 Purdue edition of The Vagina Monologues will be at 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 6 p.m. Feb. 11 at Loeb Playhouse inside Purdue's Stewart Center.

This production of The Vagina Monologues is the first at the 1,000-seat Loeb Playhouse. The play started out in the small Matthews Hall, Room 215, for three years before moving on to the large lecture hall in the Class of 1950 building. Sold-out shows and lackluster acoustics have brought the play to its largest venue yet.

Leslie Foutz, a junior studying English, was one of the thousands who caught The Vagina Monologues in the Class of 1950 building. The show and Ensler's words resulted in her participation this year. Foutz said The Vagina Monologues is presented in a fun, entertaining manner while it touches on serious, emotional topics such as domestic violence, rape, torture and other grievous human rights violations toward women around the world.

"You're crying and laughing at the same show," Foutz said.

Foutz is one of 21 women who will perform in this year's show. The number of actresses has been around 20 for the last few years, said director Kelly George, a senior majoring in psychology and women's studies.

What started as a one-woman show by Ensler in 1996 quickly grew to small productions featuring three women usually dressed in black and sitting on stools. By 1998, Ensler created the V-Day celebration and allowed her play to be performed to benefit non-profit organizations. The playwright made her work more inclusive with much larger casts.

"Everyone who wants to be in the play, can," George said.

With 23 monologues in the play, most performers will do one monologue each, George said. The women are standing behind one of three microphones. The pieces are memorized or on notecards. Some works are "choral" and utilize the voices of multiple actresses. The core monologues including "I Was Twelve, My Mother Slapped Me," "I Was There in the Room," and "Because He Liked to Look At It" are the same each year, but many of the pieces are revised annually. There are several "optional" monologues and a brand new one called "2007 Spotlight Monologue." The new work speaks on the 2007 V-Day theme of "Reclaiming Peace."

"With so much conflict going on around the world, especially with America and Iraq, women are being greatly affected in combat zones," George said. "The monologue talks about the correlation of violence in the street leading to violence in the home."

George and her cast hope for a large and diverse audience. They believe women and men will be enlightened by the topics in the play.

"Everyone benefits from this show. I have no problem asking my students to go," said Adryan Glasgow, a post-colonial literature graduate student and four-time cast member.

The YWCA will benefit financially from the show. Lugo is impressed and thankful of the Purdue students' efforts.

"I think it's awesome that they're doing this," she said. "It speaks a lot about the youth and it's great they're helping us out and believing in our cause."

Does domestic violence start with the young? Chicago Tribune has an insightful account.

A classroom campaign and new hot line are part of a nationwide push to prevent abuse

By Bonnie Miller Rubin

Scrapping his usual lesson for the day, a South Shore high school teacher asked his students a question: Is it ever OK to be abusive with a boyfriend or girlfriend?

A 16-year-old boy spoke up. "If she does something to provoke you, then you have to put her in her place," he said nonchalantly. "I'm not going to hit her in the face ... but I'm not going to run, either."

With that, a candid discussion got under way that gave teacher Scott Steward an earful.

"A guy may need to get a little physical ... to know where his girlfriend is at all times," one boy argued.

"It's a way to show how he cares about you," another said.

Until recently, most interventions for domestic abuse were geared to older perpetrators and victims. But increased awareness of violence among teens is sparking a flurry of initiatives for teens, including the lesson plan taught by Steward.

In a related program, the country's first national abuse hot line for teens will open Thursday.

When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention surveyed 14,000 high school students as part of a 2005 study, 9.2 percent said they had been "hit, slapped or physically hurt" by their dating partners in the previous 12 months. Perhaps surprisingly, the incidence was about the same among girls and boys.

In Chicago, 15.4 percent of high school students reported being a victim, mirroring higher rates in some other big cities.

But experts said hitting isn't the only form of abuse. Today, a boy might send text messages to a girl's cell phone 30 times an hour to keep track of where she is and what she's doing.

Such examples underscore why experts believe efforts to prevent abuse and help victims must be tailored to the age group. Parents often are clueless about the technology used by teens, which can help conceal high-risk situations.

Continue reading "When domestic violence starts young" »

Speech codes squelching campus speech, survey shows
By Melanie Bengtson

Speech codes at America’s colleges and universities are inhibiting students’ freedom of expression, according to a recent report released by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

“The state of the First Amendment on campuses is not in good shape,” said Samantha Harris, FIRE’s director of legal and public advocacy.

The report, Spotlight on Speech Codes 2006: The State of Free Speech on Our Nation’s Campuses, compiles FIRE’s analysis of policies at more than 330 schools nationwide. The report, released Dec. 6, concluded that more than 68% of schools had policies that “clearly and substantially restrict freedom of speech.”

Continue reading "Speech codes squelching campus speech" »

A top NYC restaurant has been accused of harboring anti-gay bias.

Chic, elegant, and trendy, nothing screams "gay friendly" more than the upper echelon of the urban fine dining experience-at least on the surface. But for those working behind the scenes, that sleek exterior may mask a macho atmosphere that can include homophobia. As anyone who’s seen TV’s Hell’s Kitchen can attest, such sleekness often belies working conditions that enforce a rigid pecking order, a subculture of macho posturing, and even cases of outright discrimination against one group or another.

The gritty, not-very-pretty reality behind the gilded wallpaper and orchid floral arrangements at some of the finest dining spaces was revealed when a Manhattan waiter, Joseph Bassani, recently filed a lawsuit against Jean-Georges for forcing him to have simulated sex with a prostitute during a private party. Jean-Georges isn’t just any restaurant, or even any top restaurant. It has garnered the ultimate accolade, four stars from the New York Times, and is generally considered by foodies one of the top four or five restaurants in the city.

According to the lawsuit, "The prostitute, who was naked, pushed him onto the top of one of the dining room tables (and) straddled him. Bassani shut his eyes and waited for the assault to end." But that assault was allegedly only the worst of many such instances in which the waitron said he was harassed due to his sexual preference. Bassani claimed that his co-workers often called him a "whore" and that a supervisor once mockingly attributed his recent weight loss to his having contracted full-blown AIDS.

Continue reading "Top NYC Restaurant Accused of Anti-Gay Bias" »

Reports of domestic violence increase in number, brutality

By Adam Silverman
Julie Robare was terrified for nearly two decades that she was just one beating away from becoming a murder victim.

An abusive boyfriend -- a man Robare met as a teenager who started off sweet and grew more possessive and vicious as the years slid by -- fractured Robare's ribs, broke her nose, shattered one of her wrists, repeatedly strangled her into unconsciousness, left her with countless black eyes.

He pointed a gun at her, chased her with a machete, kept her captive in their home for days. One time in Florida, he told her he was going to throw her corpse into a canal swarming with alligators so no one ever would find her remains.

Robare was too terrified to leave. She knew the abuse she would suffer with the boyfriend and how to manage the pain and humiliation; she had no idea how demonic the boyfriend might become if she moved out. So she stayed.

"Seventeen years I was with him, I feared for my life," Robare said.

Vermont has seen many more Julie Robares lately.

The number of reported incidents of domestic violence and the brutality of individual attacks has been growing steadily for a decade. Occurrences jumped nearly 50 percent between 1997 and 2006, with the largest increase -- 15 percent -- recorded between 2005 and last year, according to data from the Vermont Network Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault.

Continue reading "DV cases increase in Vermont" »

A story on how the South Asian communities are grappling with DV issues.


Support groups help South Asian community fight domestic violence
BY LEEMA THOMAS-JOSEPH
Newsday Staff Writer

When "Asma" was 26 years old, her parents found her a suitable husband. She left her native town in South India and in 2001 moved to Pennsylvania to be with her life partner.

But her in-laws were part of the bridal package. Asma's dream of building a new life with her spouse soon turned into a nightmare.

"My father-in-law, mother-in-law and sister-in-law, they were treating me very badly. I wasn't interested in living in a joint family setup. I couldn't put up with the [verbal] abuse anymore."

Within a year, the marriage headed toward a breakup. And after her daughter was born, Asma, who asked that her real name not be used, moved with the child to Brooklyn and started her medical residency.

Sensing that her daughter needed a father, Asma and her parents, all practicing Muslims, felt she should remarry. Her parents arranged for her to meet a man from Atlanta. They wed in July 2004.

"Before the marriage, he told me he's going to be very nice to my daughter and be a good father to her. I never expected he would change so much after getting married."

Initially, "he was extremely verbally abusive," she said, but, after she became pregnant in February 2005, "he started physically abusing me. He'd slap me and push me. Hit me on my belly," she said.

The abuse continued, eventually forcing her to take legal measures after her husband fled the country with their newborn son.

Recalling her story of survival recently, Asma said the experience left her feeling depressed and in "a deep, dark pit." A friend referred her to the Domestic Harmony Committee, an anti-domestic-violence group based at the Islamic Center of Long Island in Westbury. The group became her lifeline to safety and sanity. It played a crucial role in her life, Asma said during a recent interview.

Continue reading "South Asians fight domestic violence" »

Is feminist art going to be institutionalized or just going to gain wider acceptance? NY Times has a story following MOMA's new initiatives.

By HOLLAND COTTER

“Well, this is quite a turnout for an ‘ism,’ ” said the art historian and critic Lucy Lippard on Friday morning as she looked out at the people filling the Roy and Niuta Titus Theater at the Museum of Modern Art and spilling into the aisles. “Especially in a museum not notorious for its historical support of women.”

Ms. Lippard, now in her 70s, was a keynote speaker for a two-day symposium organized by the museum that was titled “The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts.” The event itself was an unofficial curtain-raiser for what is shaping up as a watershed year for the exhibition — and institutionalization, skeptics say — of feminist art.

For the first time in its history this art will be given full-dress museum survey treatment, and not in just one major show but in two. On March 4 “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution” opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, followed on March 23 by “Global Feminisms” at the Brooklyn Museum. (On the same day the Brooklyn Museum will officially open its new Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art and a permanent gallery for “The Dinner Party,” Judy Chicago’s seminal proto-feminist work.)

Such long-withheld recognition has been awaited with a mixture of resignation and impatient resentment. Everyone knows that our big museums are our most conservative cultural institutions. And feminism, routinely mocked by the public media for 35 years as indissolubly linked with radicalism and bad art, has been a hard sell.

But curators and critics have increasingly come to see that feminism has generated the most influential art impulses of the late 20th and early 21st century. There is almost no new work that has not in some way been shaped by it. When you look at Matthew Barney, you’re basically seeing pilfered elements of feminist art, unacknowledged as such.

The MoMA symposium was sold out weeks in advance. Ms. Lippard and the art historian Linda Nochlin appeared, like tutelary deities, at the beginning and end respectively; in between came panels with about 20 speakers. The audience was made up almost entirely of women, among them many veterans of the women’s art movement of the 1970s and a healthy sprinkling of younger students, artists and scholars. It was clear that people were hungry to hear about and think about feminist art, whatever that once was, is now or might be.

Continue reading "Feminist Art Finally Takes Center Stage" »

Kmart's infamous line of children's t-shirts are not just making an accurate reflection of capitalism's representation of women, but is being promoted to sell well. Since pictures speak a thousand words, we'll merely let the image do the telling.


A report follows:

A T-Shirt, that is being sold at the Kmart stores which shows a picture of a stick figure boy pushing a girl over with the words “Problem Solved” has caused a demonstration outside a store in Alexis Road in Toledo, Ohio. Over fifty demonstrators turned up with signs reading "Attention Shoppers: Kmart has an attitude problem. Recall violent merchandise" and "Attention! Domestic violence in Aisle 7." The t-shirt is designed to be worn by young children and has already received complaints from many parents but the store so far has refused to remove the offending shirt. Many drivers passing by honked their support towards the demonstrators, many of which are parents of youngsters that have died through violence and members of the Toledo chapter of the National Organization for Women. Kmart claims that the T-Shirt is intended to be light hearted but many people are complaining that the T-Shirts show that domestic violence is acceptable.

Parents of children who have been killed through violence gave a letter of complaint that was addressed to Aylwin Lewis who is the chief executive and president of Sears Holdings Corporation, the parent firm of the Kmart stores to a man named Charlie because they were not allowed into the building. A spokesman for Kmart said "We've heard and respect the opinions of our customers and the item is no longer available at Kmart. And we have no plans to reorder it." This store is the only store where demonstrators have protested about the T-Shirts but there have been complaints in other areas. A mother said that if such shirts were available at Kmart then "No wonder kids do the things they do." Another parent added "I think people need to speak out about corporations selling violence."

Today's NY Times has an insightful review of an instructive book, "The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present" (Harriet A. Washington. 501 pages. Doubleday. $27.95)

White Doctors, Black Subjects: Abuse Disguised as Research

By Denise Grady The most notorious medical experiment in American history was surely the Tuskegee syphilis study, in which 400 black men with syphilis were left untreated for 40 years, from 1932 until 1972, so government doctors could study the course of the disease. The experiment ended only because a journalist exposed it, igniting a firestorm of public outrage over its racism and cruelty. By then, as many as 100 of the men had already died of syphilis.

Tuskegee was just part of a pattern of experimental abuse, one of many shameful chapters in what Harriet A. Washington calls “the long, unhappy history of medical research with black Americans.”

Ms. Washington, a journalist and research scholar in ethics, writes in “Medical Apartheid” that this history has left blacks with an ugly legacy of distrust for research and even treatment, and that it is a lingering stain on the history of medicine.

She does not oppose medical research or blacks’ inclusion in it. On the contrary, she calls research “utterly essential,” and blacks’ participation necessary. “African-Americans,” she writes, “desperately need the medical advantages and revelations that only ethical, essentially therapeutic research initiatives can give them.”

But first, she argues, the air must be cleared. She is certainly the one to do it. She has unearthed an enormous amount of shocking information and shaped it into a riveting, carefully documented book.

Continue reading "Abuse Disguised as Research" »

A new Yale University study has found that discrimination against black doctors is pervasive and results in demoralization.

Black doctors often feel devalued, stereotyped and rejected on the job, a new Yale study has found, and pervasive discrimination can leave them demoralized and likely to seek career change.

Although race allowed them to connect better with some colleagues, patients and staff, the doctors said they were left out of crucial information and social networks that could lead to promotion.

"I do not see us in those leadership pipelines," one doctor told the researchers. "We're not in the corridors of power and it has nothing to do with intellectual capacity or ambition."

"Increasing racial and ethnic diversity in the physician workforce is a national priority and has been offered as one solution to addressing health inequities," says researcher Marcella Nunez-Smith, MD, who authored the study. "But any efforts to increase numbers also needs to address the role of race within health-care institutions to successfully recruit and retain ethnic and racial minority physicians."

The study was based on interviews with 25 doctors of African, African-American and Afro-Caribbean descent and published in this month's Annals of Internal Medicine.

In her column “Broadly Speaking”, Adda Birnir compares sexism with racism in an instructive manner, while making the intersections appear as relevant as they actually are:

Sexual harassment is tricky because of three considerations: the nature of the activity, whether the action is welcome and, most importantly, the context. Noam Rudnick, writing for the Hippolytic blog, compared Schlessinger’s actions to instances of unwanted sexual advances perpetrated on a female undergraduate by a male undergraduate at Toad’s Place. But unwanted sexual advances and sexual harassment are not the same. A guy inappropriately grabbing a girl at Toad’s is not an example of sexual harassment because Toad’s is a social space where it is reasonable and expected that people are making sexual advances toward one another. Because of its context, such an action is harassment of a sexual nature, not sexual harassment.

Basha Rubin, writing for the Broad Recognition blog, countered Rudnick’s comments by saying that it does a disservice to women in the workplace to compare Schlessinger’s actions to sexual advances at a nightclub, because it gives credence to the idea that a male boss who sexually harasses a female employee is simply incapable of controlling his sexual desire. The workplace is not a space where it is typically appropriate to express one’s sexual interest. For this reason, harassment at the workplace is critically different from harassment at Toad’s.

So if sexual harassment is based on a drive for power, why does it so often take a sexual form? I find that comparing sexism to racism is instructive because it allows for a case study in which sexual desire is not a factor. To answer this question, I would like to compare these instances of sexual harassment to the Michael Richards case. This past November, Richards, who played Kramer on “Seinfeld,” gained notoriety for shouting racist slurs at audience members during a stand-up comedy performance. Apparently frustrated by what he deemed to be rude interruptions by a group of black male audience members, Richards stopped his act to yell angrily at the men, calling them all sorts of names, including the N-word.

Continue reading "Sexism’s power struggle mirrors historical racism" »

Goodyear Tire company has settled a gender discrimination case.

Goodyear Tire Company agreed to a $925,000 settlement to be disbursed among some 800 women who were not hired for entry-level, tire-building jobs at the company’s plant in Danville, Virginia. The lawsuit, which was filed by the US Department of Labor on behalf of the complainants, alleged that the company practiced gender-discriminatory hiring from January 1998 to June 1999.

Because Goodyear is a federal contractor and therefore prohibited from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, or national origin, the Department of Labor brought the case against the company. Charles E. James Sr., deputy assistant labor secretary for the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, said the settlement serves to put "federal contractors on notice that the Labor Department is serious about eliminating systemic discrimination," Women's eNews reports.

In addition to the settlement sum, Goodyear will also offer entry-level jobs to as many as 60 women who meet the company's employment requirements, the Beacon Journal reports.

The Supreme Court is currently reviewing a second gender-discrimination lawsuit against Goodyear Tire Company, in which the plaintiff allegedly worked for the company for 19 years for a salary that was significantly less than that of her male counterparts who had the same or less experience.

The Virginian-Pilot reports that two patrons have sued a Virginia Beach nightclub alleging race discrimination.

Two patrons who were turned away from a Virginia Beach nightclub have filed a federal discrimination lawsuit alleging they were denied entry because of their race.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court, seeks unspecified monetary damages and an injunction stopping the owner of Kokoamos from enforcing his entry rules.

Kokoamos owner Barry Davis has said he was simply enforcing a dress code, which prohibits cornrows, dreadlocks and braids.

However, the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the suit on behalf of Kim Hines and Myron Evans, says the rule essentially prohibits mostly blacks from entering the club, located on Marina Shores Drive, off North Great Neck Road.

ACLU attorney Rebecca K. Glenberg said Thursday that efforts to resolve the issue outside of court have been unsuccessful since the hairstyle issue came to light last summer.

“We are concerned that dress codes can be used as a pretext for racial discrimination,” she said. “This sort of restriction obviously excludes a lot of African Americans.”

Continue reading "Nightclub sued for race discrimination" »

Opulence of wealth has truly married the filth of mind in an extravaganza that ridicules the last remnants of decency in our vulgar capitalism. As a result, even the age-old diplomacy that shrouded the despicable aspects of money market has given way to a new exhibitionist class society, and to that effect, New York Magazine has begun to celebrate classism and sexism.

An event titled “Natural Selection Speed Date—Rich Guys and Hot Girls” is being organized by Pocket Change and New York Magazine. Scheduled for February 7th, this Darwinian slip unashamedly declares that “Women want money in a man, men want beauty in a woman – this is a factual force of nature.”

Yes, you read it right. The Pocket Change event goes on to celebrate what it finds desirable, in its own words: “This genetic cleansing is how the wealthy stay beautiful.” Not only the event not finds such “genetic cleansing” criminal by intent and design, but it also decides to rejoice over the sordid class difference to commemorate the wealthy men, and their prize catches.

New York Magazine/Pocket Change may have found this beautiful and desirable, but we are sure for millions of sensible people, this is outright ugly, hideous and mocking. What’s worse, such an event is sexist to its core and inhuman in its essence.

In conversation with Womensrightsblog, a Pocket Change newsletter subscriber Patricia Delhannon reverberated the views of most readers that were suppressed by mainstream publications such as New York Magazine in the due course of their decision to go ahead with such an event:

"I am personally a realistic woman, I recognize gender differences and I have never really called myself a feminist. I do however believe in the strength of women and (find) this is offensive and I feel offended as a woman. I'm not really experienced at any type of social action, but thought at least something should be done. I think as women, we can't support this or even allow this type of thing to take place.”

The leading precept of this event is that men who will enter into this exclusive contest will be solely judged by their wealth. Each must have all the following properties: a minimum of half a million earning, with invested assets of more than 1 million and trust money worth more than 4 million dollars.

What happens to women who want to enter the contest? Do they also need to be “successful”? Hell no. They are not expected to be working. They should only be rich in their “beauty”, which will be judged by celebrity matchmaker Janis Spindel.

So we are back in the ages where men are supposed to earn and women to be their slaves. Precisely, going by this “Natural Selection” event that will judge the “Rich Guys and Hot Girls”.

Readers of such media are bound to get shocked in a city that witnesses deaths due to winter, homelessness and lack of health coverage. But are the media any more bothered? Hardly, saving a few.

Faking Good Breeding has covered the story. So has Sex and The Upper East Side. And finally, Feministing has a compelling note.

But that’s mostly about it. Have we just been rendered less sensitive or are we choosing to get less educated? Jack Tuckner of Tuckner, Sipser, Weinstock & Sipser, LLP, says:

“Ideally, our corporate media should find interest in running this sordid story, and that would be wonderful; but decisions are often made to run stories for their own pecuniary reasons that have nothing to do with its newsworthiness or utility. This is the world of Girls Gone Wild shown increasingly on network television. This is the world where a nanosecond of Janet Jackson's breast is considered scandalous but Viagra advertisements depicting men staring lasciviously at women's lingerie are shown during the same Super Bowl presentation with nary a whimper of protest.”

A Virginia state legislator Frank D. Hargrove told a Charlottesville newspaper, "Slavery ended nearly 140 years ago with the Civil War, and our black citizens should get over it." "Terrence Says" blog responds to the statement by asking some pertinent questions:

While I don't obsess, and quite truthfully, rarely think of African Captivity in America, usually when a racist like Hargrove and people of his ilk tell Black people, whose ancestors were captives in America, to "get over slavery" it is usually a pitiful attempt to belittle and transfer blame.

The State of Virginia, as did many other states, allowed African captivity to flourish. Instead of perceiving an apology as an act of reconciliation for the advancement of humanity, unfortunately, antagonists are reminded of the dastardly deeds of their forefathers. Telling Blacks "to get over slavery" is blame reversal and a coping mechanism for them.

Should we (Blacks) be paralyzed by such events in American history? Certainly not. But even for Blacks, like me, who could care less about an apology and are not holding our breaths for an apology for our ancestors, admonishing Blacks to "get over slavery" is counterproductive to improving race relations and mean-spirited.

What they also fail to realize is that true efforts by America to make all citizens equal didn't occur until the mid-to-late 60's. Are we supposed to forget that too? In reality, if Hargrove and people of his ilk had their way, African Captivity would still be very much an institution in America.

In the bigger scheme of things, I think that it is important for African-Americans to not get terribly bent-out-of-shape ie. offended by such comments. We should not surrender too much of our power to these racist idiots - especially one's that have one foot in the grave. Hopefully, they'll be going back to the hell they came from in (over) due time.

Almost a perfectionist in his profession, but his dirty spots are beginning to be noticed now. A classic case of race bias in the invisible workplaces.


A Top Chef’s Kitchen Is Far Too Hot, Some Workers Say

By KIM SEVERSON and ADAM B. ELLICK

DANIEL BOULUD can’t stand to see a detail out of place. As pans slam around him during dinner service in the Upper East Side restaurant that bears his first name, he will pause to request that a spoon be polished. How best to marry braised endive to seared beef can absorb him as utterly as the lilies in the dining room that haven’t opened on schedule.

He’s also a man who has cultivated the news media over his 23 years in New York. He is quick to get on the phone with a writer and can engineer a smart publicity move, like creating the world’s most expensive hamburger, which won him worldwide attention in 2003.

Outside the restaurant, Mr. Boulud is known for his generosity. Last year he helped raise nearly $2 million, much of it for Citymeals-on-Wheels, on whose board he sits.

On top of all that, Mr. Boulud is a social animal. His fellow four-star chefs would vote him the guy most likely to lead the conga line.

In short, he is a perfectionist who is accustomed to being liked. All of which helps explain why Mr. Boulud, 51, cannot grasp why a group of restaurant-worker advocates keep showing up outside Daniel with a 12-foot inflatable cockroach, singing “We Shall Overcome” and chanting that he is a racist.

“Racism is a vicious charge,” Mr. Boulud said in an interview. “It is too easy to accuse someone of that, and it is very hard to defend yourself.”

And yet Mr. Boulud is being forced to do just that. In December, seven current and former employees filed suit in Federal District Court in Manhattan accusing him of discrimination. Similar charges against Mr. Boulud are before the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

According to the lawsuit, dining room workers at Daniel have been denied promotion because they were Latino or Bangladeshi. The employees also say that Mr. Boulud and other managers yelled racial slurs. At one point, they say, Spanish was banned among employees; only English and French were allowed. Those are examples, they say, of how the working culture at Daniel favors white Europeans at the expense of other groups.

Continue reading "A Top Chef’s Kitchen Is Far Too Hot" »

Just about time for someone like Christopher Edley Jr. to challenge the race-blind populist policies, for the anti-affirmative action amendments may be populist, but certainly not popular.

At Berkeley Law, a Challenge to Overcome All Barriers

By JONATHAN D. GLATER

BERKELEY, Calif.: Growing up in Philadelphia in the 1960s, Christopher Edley Jr., dean of the flagship law school of the University of California, learned early about racial discrimination. After all, his father, one of the few African-American graduates in Harvard Law School’s class of 1953, could not get a job in a Philadelphia law firm.

“They’d hired William T. Coleman from Harvard a couple of years earlier,” Mr. Edley recalled, referring to the former transportation secretary, and ardent defender of civil rights. “And they were waiting to see how that experiment worked out before hiring another one.”

Mr. Edley’s father went on to become a prosecutor in Philadelphia, then the first black program officer at the Ford Foundation and president of the United Negro College Fund. He was never, Mr. Edley said, bitter about the obstacles in his way. But civil rights and related subjects were the topics of discussion around the dinner table. From age 5, the son wanted to be a lawyer.

Now Mr. Edley, in his third year at Boalt Hall, as the law school here is known, finds himself defending affirmative action policies intended to overcome barriers like those his father confronted.

The job is a challenge; under California law, the law school cannot use race as a factor in admissions. But tackling that challenge was an important reason he took it.

Continue reading "An alternative discourse at Berkeley Law" »

NY Times published a story today about a top firm mired with controversies.

Gay Lawyer’s Suit Accuses Firm of Bias

By JULIE CRESWELL

An associate at one of the country’s most prestigious law firms, Sullivan & Cromwell, filed a state lawsuit in Manhattan yesterday accusing the firm of a systematic campaign of discrimination and retaliation against him because of his sexual orientation.

Aaron B. Charney, 28, who is a fourth-year associate, asserts in the lawsuit, filed in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan, that several partners in Sullivan & Cromwell’s highly regarded mergers and acquisitions practice subjected him to “lewd and illegal conduct,” beginning in the fall of 2005. He is seeking a jury trial and unspecified compensatory and punitive damages.

In his lawsuit, Mr. Charney accuses members of the firm of demanding he be terminated for carrying on an “unnatural” gay relationship with another Sullivan & Cromwell associate; Mr. Charney denies the relationship. The suit also contends that after he filed a formal internal complaint, members of the firm suggested that he move to a foreign office and then fabricated reviews to accuse him of overbilling clients, among other things.

While Mr. Charney has not been terminated, he says he was told he should not come to the office while an internal investigation is continuing.

Continue reading "Gay Lawyer’s Suit Accuses Firm of Bias" »

Wal-Mart policies continue to hurt. Costco Wholesale employees are not amused, and a lawsuit on behalf of 700 female workers, has been finally granted. More on New York Times this Friday:

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE and MICHAEL BARBARO

A federal judge granted class-action status yesterday to a lawsuit filed on behalf of more than 700 female workers at Costco Wholesale claiming that the retailer had systematically discriminated against women seeking jobs as managers.

In the lawsuit, the lead plaintiff — a former assistant store manager who was upset about not being made a store manager — asserts that Costco discriminated against women in promotions because 13 percent of the company’s store managers were women, while nearly half of its employees were women.

The lawsuit undercuts Costco’s image as one of retailing’s most benevolent companies, with generous wages and benefits that make it more attractive for employees than competitors like Wal-Mart Stores.

In her ruling yesterday, Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of Federal District Court in San Francisco concluded that the case should be certified as a class action because “plaintiffs have presented strong evidence of a common culture at Costco which disadvantages women.”

The lawsuit, filed in August 2004, contends that at Costco, the highest-paid store management positions — assistant general manager and general manager — are doled out through an informal, word-of-mouth system that favors men over women.

Unlike most competitors, Costco neither posts openings for such positions nor accepts applications for them, the lawsuit said. Instead, it said, a largely male group of senior executives handpicks managers.

Brad Seligman, the plaintiffs’ lead lawyer, said, “Costco has a blind spot in its employment policies, which has allowed a glass ceiling to fester.” He called on the company, based in Issaquah, Wash., to start posting jobs and to adopt objective standards to determine who should qualify to be a store manager.

Continue reading "Costco Bias Suit Is Given Class-Action Status" »

Boston Globe editorializes:
Ideally, the nation's public schools should be havens where discrimination and poverty are overcome by hard academic work. But many public schools are dragging along, starved for books, anemic from high drop out rates, and struggling to boost students to grade-level achievement.

The full article:

IN NOVEMBER, Michigan voters faced a ballot question drenched in controversy. Proposal 2 called for changing the state constitution to ban programs that discriminate against or give "preferential treatment" to people based on race, gender, ethnicity, or national origin. In other words, a constitutional ban on affirmative action.

The choice was reduced to one dimension: Either America treats everyone fairly or it doesn't.

"Vote YES . . . if you are sick and tired of handouts and unfair quotas," one blogger advised. On Election Day, 58 percent voted yes.

A blow for education

It was a hard slap for Michigan's public colleges and universities. In 2003, affirmative action survived a tough legal fight when the Supreme Court ruled in two cases that the University of Michigan could, in limited ways, consider race in its admissions processes. Notably, Sandra Day O'Connor said that, yes, race still matters, and deliberately seeking racial diversity is still a social good. But she warned that race shouldn't matter forever; in 25 years, society should have moved on.

Then Ward Connerly showed up. A former University of California regent and an African-American, he led a successful fight to end affirmative action in California. He supported Proposal 2 in Michigan. And last month, he said he would be visiting nine other states -- Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, Oregon, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Utah -- to consider launching similar campaigns.

Continue reading "Affirmatively active" »

Maternity company settles suit alleging pregnancy discrimination

PHILADELPHIA - A maternity-clothing retailer has agreed to pay $375,000 to settle a lawsuit alleging it refused to hire qualified applicants because they were pregnant - and then fired an assistant manager who complained about it.

The suit filed last year against Philadelphia-based Mothers Work Inc. was based on alleged incidents at a Motherhood Maternity store in Florida.

Continue reading "Mothers Work Inc. settles pregnancy suit" »

Racism against American Indians is well alive. A recent meet highlighted the issue.

American Indians address racism

BY JOHN R. CRANE
Racism against American Indians is alive and well in Cortez and the Four Corners and a solution must be found, said attendees at a meeting Wednesday night to address prejudice against American Indians.

Violence and prejudice against American Indians has been a fact of life in Montezuma County for too long, said Art Neskahi, founder and director of Southwest Intertribal Voice.

Three attacks on American Indians occurred in Cortez around Thanksgiving. One involved a homeless man who suffered fractured ribs after being assaulted by two Hispanic male youths. In the others, two white males attacked two homeless American Indian men, and two white males assaulted an American Indian couple from Luckachukai, Ariz., throwing the female on the ground and kicking her.

No one has been charged in the attacks, mostly due to lack of victims' identification of suspects.

"This has been going on a long time," Neskahi said. "I'm hoping to figure out what we can do so our children don't have to go through this."

Continue reading "American Indians address racism" »

Pentagon has concerns over the judiciary. And none at all heartening. The senior official who recently expressed his dismay at nation's top law firms, is a victim of his own motives that are suspect.

Looked from another angle, here is an official who actually wants that human rights be denied to people under the country's legal system that claims to espouse freedom and justice. Is it typical of "responsible" officials at power corridors, or is he an exception? Considering that Charles Stimson is a senior Pentagon official, either of the case appears to be dangerous.

New York Times has a detailed report today:

Official Attacks Top Law Firms Over Detainees
By NEIL A. LEWIS

WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 — The senior Pentagon official in charge of military detainees suspected of terrorism said in an interview this week that he was dismayed that lawyers at many of the nation’s top firms were representing prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that the firms’ corporate clients should consider ending their business ties.

The comments by Charles D. Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, produced an instant torrent of anger from lawyers, legal ethics specialists and bar association officials, who said Friday that his comments were repellent and displayed an ignorance of the duties of lawyers to represent people in legal trouble.

“This is prejudicial to the administration of justice,” said Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University and an authority on legal ethics. “It’s possible that lawyers willing to undertake what has been long viewed as an admirable chore will decline to do so for fear of antagonizing important clients.

“We have a senior government official suggesting that representing these people somehow compromises American interests, and he even names the firms, giving a target to corporate America.”

Mr. Stimson made his remarks in an interview on Thursday with Federal News Radio, a local Washington-based station that is aimed at an audience of government employees.

Continue reading "Pentagon Official Upset with Law Firms" »

Taylor Mason of New Music First, writes about the discrimination suit pending against Sony-BMG.

Former BMG marketing rep Tamieka Blair is expected to file a racial discrimination lawsuit against Sony BMG Music, alleging her wrongful termination upon the merging of Sony and BMG in 2004, according to Billboard.

The suit follows on the heels of the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's (EEOC) finding that Blair was "a victim of race discrimination" last fall when an investigation by the EEOC revealed that 42 percent of African American employees of the sales enterprise unit were involuntarily terminated after the merger. Though Sony offered their employees a voluntary separation package, Blair was under the impression that her field marketing position in the BMG sales unit was secure and hesitated to accept the package out of fear that it might signal that she wanted to leave. The EEOC’s investigation concluded that Sony BMG "failed to provide a verifiable explanation for the overwhelmingly negative impact on black BMG employees, that is, that 42 percent of blacks and no whites were involuntarily terminated," the letter states. Officials at Sony BMG told the EEOC that they "sought to retain the 'best players,' but there is no documented procedure regarding the retention of said 'best players.'" At this time, there are no related claims pending on Sony BMG with the EEOC. The EEOC stated that they worked with associated parties after the conclusion, but there was no settlement.

A recent Harvard Law School report discusses an innovative method to tackle potential increase in domestic violence perpetrators.

Domestic violence monitoring initiative proposed by Rosenfeld is signed into law.

Domestic abusers who violate their restraining orders will be required to wear a GPS tracking device, according to a new Massachusetts state law spearheaded by HLS lecturer Diane Rosenfeld '96. Signed into law on January 4, the GPS initiative was first presented to the Governor’s Commission on Sexual and Domestic Violence by Rosenfeld in early 2005.

Under the new law, if a domestic abuser enters a geographic "exclusion zone"—a court-determined restricted area, such as a victim’s home or workplace, or a child’s school—the GPS device will immediately alert both the domestic abuse victim and the police. According to existing Massachusetts law, any individual who violates his restraining order is eligible for a $5,000 fine and a prison sentence of more than two years.

Rosenfeld has also championed legislation that would create a universal danger assessment program, allowing police departments to screen every domestic abuse situation for "lethality factors"—common warning signs gathered from domestic homicide cases over the past 25 years.

Rosenfeld emphasized that the goal of the GPS law is to prevent future violence, while allowing battered women to stay in their homes and their communities without fear. "This legislation puts the responsibility for battering where it belongs—on the offender," she said.

Former Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey, who chaired the Governor’s Commission on Sexual and Domestic Violence, called the GPS bill a longtime personal priority. Many victims of domestic violence continue to be abused even after they have obtained restraining orders against their batterers, Healey said. The victims are often forced into hiding, fleeing their jobs, their homes and their families.

KERRY HEALY AND JARRETT BARRIOS
Technology against violence

By Kerry Healy and Jarrett Barrios | January 11, 2007

WHEN assessing domestic violence cases, threats to kill a woman and her children, abuse during pregnancy, and sexual jealousy are all lethality factors taken into account. Had they been used in issuing and enforcing Lien Lam's restraining order against her estranged husband, perhaps her infant daughter and the woman baby-sitting her would not be recovering from burns inflicted by the baby's father, Dung Van Tran, who is also recovering from burns.

According to court records, the Boston man had a long history of abusive violence toward his estranged wife, including violations of restraining orders. What can be done to stop those who seem bent on continuing their abusive behavior when their partner seeks to end the relationship? With the help of Diane Rosenfeld of Harvard Law School, we looked at how to improve the criminal justice system's response to domestic violence. On the last day of the 2005-2006 legislative session, a bill we filed was signed into law that will help remedy the loss of a victim's safety.

Under the new law, an offender who violates a domestic violence order of protection can be required by a judge to wear a device that provides Global Positioning System monitoring. The GPS helps enforce the restraining order by preventing the batterer from entering "liberty zones," such as the battered partner's domicile and place of work, their children's schools, and the residences of extended family members. Probation agents will monitor offenders to ensure that they do not breach these zones. If they do, a record of a restraining order violation will be made, thus making stalking and further violent attacks more difficult. Further, police and the victim are automatically phoned if the offender breaches the battered partner's liberty zone, thus minimizing the victim's fears of an unexpected confrontation with the batterer.

Continue reading "Technology against domestic violence" »

Diverse Issues in Higher Education quotes a new study by a UCLA Professor which may prompt a lawsuit. The reason: Hollywood’s institutionalized discriminations.

“Spiderperson 4”— Coming to a Theater Near You
Hollywood has given us “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (1967) and “Crash” (2005) — just two of the several movies that have tackled issues of race. But now a California scholar is hurling charges of racism and sexism against casting directors for “gender and race-based casting.” A Title VII lawsuit is just around the corner.

The study, “Hollywood's Race/Ethnicity and Gender-Based Casting: Prospects for a Title VII Lawsuit,” conducted by Russell K. Robinson, acting professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles, is intended to confront hidden discrimination — but is he taking political correctness to the extreme? The study points out that 82 percent of lead roles in major motion pictures are filled by Whites, while Blacks claim only 11 percent of the roles. That stat would be hard to argue, but the same report also considers denying an actress a role intended for a man to be discriminatory.
Just imagine British actor Hugh Grant in “Big Momma’s House” or Halle Berry as “The Terminator.” It just doesn’t work.

It’s true, more often than not, that Hollywood promotes stereotypes; and Robinson, a former entertainment lawyer, sees sinister forces lurking behind the camera.
“What appears to be audience preferences for White, male protagonists are socially constructed choices based in part on the industry’s history of discrimination and stereotyping in casting,” he says. 
Let the legal battle begin.

An interesting dialogue is initiated by Inside Higher Ed that deals with who have the responsibility to teach America about race relations.

One thing is certain: Americans have strong perceptions — and misperceptions — about the meaning and significance of race. Attempting to poke holes in prejudices and provide the latest scientific and scholarly understanding of the issue, the American Anthropological Association has created an interactive educational program called RACE: Are We So Different? Also featured is a traveling museum exhibition, and project organizers are developing educational materials for teachers and organizing future conferences.

“We have taken a comprehensive look at race in America and have spent five and a half years pulling this together,” said Peggy Overbey, the program’s project director.

The project’s Web site presents quizzes, timelines and other interactive activities designed to consider questions on the history of race in America, human variation across the planet, and race as a “lived experience.”

Continue reading "To Teach America About Race" »

San Antonio faces a surge in the rate of domestic violence incidents. And this has put the administration in a fix. District Attorney is exasperated. She says “I am fed up with me who kill their wives”. Here is the detailed report:

Alarming Number of Domestic Violence Cases in SA

An alarming number of wives and girlfriends are dying at the hands of so-called "loved ones."

In San Antonio, the rate of domestic violence murders has almost doubled since 2005. Out of 119 total murders in the city in 2006, 31 people were killed by an acquaintance, 25 were the victims of domestic violence.

From jealous boyfriends to ex-husbands who cannot deal with a divorce, the numbers are frustrating for those who have waged a battle to stop domestic violence.

"Well, I'm fed up with men who kill their wives," said District Attorney Susan Reed. She added, "We have been working to make awareness of domestic violence a high priority."

In November, 50 billboards went up around the city to help bring awareness to the domestic violence problem. A year ago the Family Justice Center opened its doors. The facility is devoted to helping victims and families of domestic violence opened up.

Despite these moves, the numbers aren't going down.

The goal is to get to those living in an abusive relationship before things get out of control. Reed said only then can the lives of hundreds of San Antonio victims be saved.

By Jack Tuckner, Esq.

In NY Times today, the article "For $7.93 an Hour, It’s Worth a Trip Across a State Line" is an empirical study that proves the thesis that affluent, business folk who identity as Republicans (including our fearless leader, his coterie of wealthy, power-hungry, morally vacuous advisors and congressional heavyweights), are hypocritical, mean-spirited, duplicitous, full-of-baloney landowners who want it all for themselves at whatever the cost.

The article describes how the state of Washington pays the highest minimum wage in the nation, almost $8.00 per hour, which is almost $3.00 per hour more than the minimum wage paid in neighboring Idaho. When the law raising the wage was passed almost 10 years ago, business owners decried voter’s largesse and predicted dire consequences and shriveling profits. Instead, business is booming in Washington “far beyond” the expectations of the worried rich. Another fascinating study in the power politics of money.

The complete story:

By Timothy Egan

Liberty Lake, Wash., Jan. 9 — Just eight miles separate this town on the Washington side of the state border from Post Falls on the Idaho side. But the towns are nearly $3 an hour apart in the required minimum wage. Washington pays the highest in the nation, just under $8 an hour, and Idaho has among the lowest, matching 21 states that have not raised the hourly wage beyond the federal minimum of $5.15.

Nearly a decade ago, when voters in Washington approved a measure that would give the state’s lowest-paid workers a raise nearly every year, many business leaders predicted that small towns on this side of the state line would suffer.

But instead of shriveling up, small-business owners in Washington say they have prospered far beyond their expectations. In fact, as a significant increase in the national minimum wage heads toward law, businesses here at the dividing line between two economies — a real-life laboratory for the debate — have found that raising prices to compensate for higher wages does not necessarily lead to losses in jobs and profits.

Continue reading "Capital in the Capitol: The Power Politics of Money" »

Finally, some good words to contain the Fascist Standards of Beauty. Health guidelines have been suggested for models to that effect. Eric Wilson of New York Times has a detailed story.

The fashion industry sells modish trapeze dresses and $800 platform ankle boots. But it also sells women an ideal of beauty embodied by the models who walk the runways and appear in fashion magazines.

And since the fall, American designers have been under increasing pressure to respond to a wave of dangerously thin models who have set the aesthetic standards of global fashion.

Now the industry has decided to issue guidelines to designers, aimed at promoting healthier behavior among its highly paid clothes hangers.

The guidelines, which fall short of modeling restrictions announced in recent months by fashion show organizers in Madrid and Milan, were introduced yesterday at a meeting of the Council of Fashion Designers of America in Manhattan. But the group’s recommendations, which will be sent to designers next week in anticipation of the fall fashion shows that begin in New York on Feb. 2, seem unlikely to satisfy many critics of fashion’s embrace of ultra-thinness.

According to participants at the meeting, the recommendations are likely to include scheduling fashion-show fittings with younger models during daylight hours, rather than late at night, to help them get more sleep; urging designers to identify models with eating disorders; and introducing more nutritious backstage catering, where a diet of Champagne and cigarettes is the norm.

Continue reading "Health Guidelines Suggested for Models" »

Researches indicate majority of homeless people in the country are victims of domestic violence. Time to focus.
A perceptive analysis by Fred Gray for Petoskeynews.com

By far the largest segment of the homeless population in Northern Michigan, as well as in the rest of the country, is made up of women and children who have suffered from domestic violence.

For the past 30 years, the Women's Resource Center of Northern Michigan has provided support for battered women and their children, including shelter, and has sought to educate the public of the problem.

The center recognizes that men can be victims as well, and are eligible for their services, although their numbers are far fewer than women.

Recently the Continuum of Care, a collaborative group that represents 19 organizations in Emmet and Charlevoix counties working to alleviate homelessness, included in its 10-year plan specific strategies toward ending homelessness for victims of domestic abuse

“We are committed to ending domestic violence in our community as well as offering supportive services to people that are experiencing it,” said Jamie Winters, chairperson of the Continuum of Care as well as safe home coordinator of the Women's Resource Center.

Continue reading "Domestic violence a major cause of homelessness" »

New York City is still languishing in poverty, and the infant mortality continues to be a matter of concern. And yet, this is one of the least spoken truth.
Helen Klein for Courier-Life decides to break a story about Brooklyn’s darkest shame, its dying babies.

A human tragedy continues to unfold in central Brooklyn.

The communities at the heart of the borough persist as an epicenter of infant mortality, due in large part to the fact that access to quality, timely health care is limited, both for mothers-to-be and their young infants.

Sadly, this situation endures despite the fact that there have been some gains made in certain areas, thanks to intensive grass-roots efforts at working with mothers-to-be in neighborhoods traditionally under-served in the arena of health.

Indeed, the risk of death is more than three times as high for a black baby in his or her first year of life as it is for that baby’s white counterpart, and more than twice as high for a Puerto Rican infant as for a Caucasian infant, according to Ngosi Moses, the executive director of the Brooklyn Perinatal Network (BPN).

The impact of this on Brooklyn residents is anything but theoretic. The borough is second to the Bronx in the rate of infant mortality (with an average of 6.6 infant deaths per 1,000 live births, compared to 7.1 in the Bronx), according to the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH).

In addition, Moses stressed, six of the 10 community districts in the city with the highest infant mortality rates are in Brooklyn, with five in central Brooklyn. “Some parts have had improvements, but not what we would like to see,” noted Moses.

Even more frightening, while New York City infant mortality rates have decreased overall (to 6.1 per 1,000 live births in 2004, a six percent reduction from 2003), the rate for black infants has risen, particularly in certain neighborhoods, Moses said.

“One of our big concerns is that national trends in black infant mortality went up, and it also went up in New York City,” she explained. “We have seen disparities increase from two-fold to three-fold.”

Increasing Disparity

Using DOHMH statistics from 2004, Moses pointed out that the disparity in infant mortality rate between blacks and whites, “Has been increasing over the past four years as blacks’ infant mortality rate increased by 16 percent while the white infant mortality rate declined by almost the same amount (15 percent) over the same period.”

Continue reading "Brooklyn's darkest shame: Its dying babies" »

Supreme Court has agreed to hear Coca-Cola's appeal in a race discrimination case. 0

The Supreme Court Friday agreed to consider a discrimination case in which a Coca-Cola bottling company fired a black employee, one of seven cases the court added to its docket. Coca-Cola asked the Supreme Court to hear the lawsuit, which involves allegations that a supervisor of employee Stephen Peters was motivated by racial bias and influenced a human resources manager to fire the worker.

Such circumstances are sometimes referred to as "cat's paw" or "rubber stamp" liability. Coca-Cola fired Peters for insubordination after he refused a request to work on a weekend during his scheduled days off.

A federal appeals court reinstated a lawsuit brought on Peters' behalf by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The appeals court said a federal judge placed too much emphasis on the fact that Peters' immediate supervisor made no express recommendation to fire him.

In asking the court to hear the case, the company asked the justices to consider when an employer may be held liable for intentional discrimination when the person who fired an employee harbored no discriminatory bias. Peters worked at the Coca-Cola facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The case is BCI Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Los Angeles v. EEOC, 06-341.

Another Possible Hall of Shame.
Sports announcer Jim Lampley has been accused of domestic violence.
News follows:

LOS ANGELES - Sports announcer Jim Lampley denied wrongdoing Thursday after being arrested for investigation of felony domestic violence.

The 57-year-old Lampley was taken into custody Wednesday and booked on the felony charge and investigation of violating a restraining order and dissuading a witness, both misdemeanors, said Mary Helmen, the supervisor of investigators of the San Diego County Sheriff's Department's domestic violence unit.

Sheriff's Capt. Glenn Revell said Lampley was released from the Vista Detention Facility after posting $35,500 bail.
"The circumstances are that there was an altercation between Mr. Lampley and a 28-year-old female with whom he reportedly has a dating relationship," said Revell, adding he could release no additional details pending the presentation of a completed investigation to the district attorney's office.

According to court records, Candice Sanders wrote in an application for a restraining order that Lampley attacked her in her Encinitas apartment on New Year's Eve.

"I received injuries to my head, neck and back from his throwing me against the walls and door," she wrote.

Continue reading "Jim Lampley accused of domestic violence" »

Planning is underway for establishing animal shelter for pets of domestic violence victims in North Carolina. A news report:

WILMINGTON (AP) -- Some groups in New Hanover County are trying to raise money to provide help for pets of domestic violence victims.

The idea is to make it easier for people to get out of abusive situations.
Assistant District Attorney Joy Alford says any time an offender can gain the upper hand or control over their victim, they will use any means to do it.

Rick Hairston, executive director of Carolina Canines for Service, says that probably half of the more than a thousand victims who passed through Domestic Violence Shelter and Services doors in 2006 had pets.

Hairston says Carolina Canines' existing kennel doesn't have enough room to take on a project to help those victims and other families. Carolina Canines' volunteers will be on call 24 hours a day to pick up the animals once the shelter opens. The New Hanover County sheriff's office is donating a K-9 vehicle to pick up the animals and a cell phone for an on-call volunteer.

Actor Tyrese Gibson has been accused of domestic violence by his girlfriend. News report says:

Washington, Jan 5(ANI): Tyrese Gibson is in the center of a domestic violence investigation, after his pregnant girlfriend whose identity remains undisclosed, alleged that the 2 Fast 2 Furious star got violent with her during a verbal dispute.

The three-month pregnant live-in girlfriend claimed that the actor hit her twice in her arm and leg after the verbal quarrel in his Hancock Park home, following which he left the place and has not been seen since.

She was taken to a hospital, where the Los Angeles police say that she was examined and discharged with no visible injuries.

No arrests have taken place and the police are looking out for the actor for further inquiries.

Continue reading "Tyrese Gibson accused of domestic violence " »

Chronicle of Higher Education reports that a former Dean has accused University of Wisconsin at Whitewater of race bias. A federal lawsuit has been filed.

A former dean at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater has filed a federal racial-discrimination lawsuit against the university, after campus officials demoted him when an audit found he had misspent university money, the Associated Press reported late Tuesday.

Lee J. Jones began working as dean of graduate studies and continuing education at Whitewater in 2004. In the fall of 2005 the university completed the audit and stripped him of his dean’s position, reassigning him as a tenured professor of education. Mr. Jones then filed a racial-discrimination complaint with Wisconsin’s Equal Rights Division, saying the audit had “found no intentional wrongdoing” and charging that his demotion had been “motivated by unlawful race discrimination.” He resigned from the university last April.

In 1999 Mr. Jones helped found Brothers of the Academy, a nationwide group aimed at increasing the number of black men who earn Ph.D.’s and work in academe.

Even as bickerings continue over minimum wage of workers in the United States and no headway is made in the direction of improving the lots of huge majority of working class population, the salaries of the chief executives in big companies have tended to grow at an exponential rate. In fact, studies suggest they have increased 600 percent over the last two decades!

In a recent article in New York Times, more lights are shed.

Compensation Experts Offer Ways to Help Curb Executive Salaries By ERIC DASH

Nothing, it seems, can put the brakes on runaway executive pay.

Shareholder advocates and lawmakers have harshly criticized huge compensation packages. Better disclosure has led only to bigger gains. Even when investors get the chance, they rarely vote against outsized pay.

Despite the growing attention over the last 25 years, the average chief executive’s compensation at big companies has increased more than 600 percent, to $8 million dollars a year after adjusting for inflation. Meanwhile, the ratio between the average pay for a top executive and a worker, which held steady in the 30 years before 1980, has more than quadrupled, to a multiple of 170, according to recent academic research.

“I don’t actually believe we have made any real progress — or very, very little,” said Robert A. G. Monks, a longtime corporate governance advocate. “If we cannot effectively monitor and control what the principal executives are paid, we are kidding ourselves if we can control anything else.”

So what can be done to tie pay more closely to performance, and cut back on excessive benefits and perks?

Executive compensation issues are tricky; the devil is often deep in the footnotes of proxy statements, employment agreements and stock option plans. It will take a concerted effort by both investors and boards to effect real change. Otherwise, lawmakers have threatened to get involved. “It’s not like Iraq, where everybody says it is bad, but nobody says what to do,” said Lucian Bebchuk, a Harvard Law School professor who has been an outspoken critic of executive pay. “The problem is making the process and the people who play a key role in making the decisions want to make improvements.”

Here are eight steps that compensation experts say might help rein in executive pay:

HIRE INDEPENDENT ADVISERS Despite what appears to be an obvious conflict of interest, it is still common for a compensation consultant, hired by the company’s top managers for lucrative actuarial or benefits work, to also help the board evaluate those same executives’ pay.

New Securities and Exchange Commission rules will require companies to disclose the name of their pay adviser. But unlike the rules for auditors, they stop short of requiring them to parse out their other financial ties to the company.

“You certainly don’t want the outside adviser to the compensation committee to become beholden to the company,” James F. Reda, an independent compensation consultant, said.

Continue reading "The Gap Widens: CEOs have the cake and eat it too" »

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According to Justice Department, domestic violence rate has fallen sharply in the US during the last decade. The International Herald Tribune says it could be thus owing to implementation of 1994 Violence Against Women Act that facilitated better police training and more funding for prosecution.
However, what is alarming is that racial disparities remain at large. Following is the detailed report:

WASHINGTON: Domestic violence rates fell sharply between 1993 and 2004, the Justice Department said, noting that American Indian women and native Alaskan women are far more likely to be victimized than whites and other minorities .

The Bureau of Justice Statistics said that "intimate partner violence" rates fell by more than 50 percent. The decline mirrored a decade-long trend in other violent crimes, and the department did not suggest a cause.

"There's still generally no consensus about why any crime in general has dropped," said Shannan Catalano, the study's author said Thursday. "It's safe to say it's more than one factor that went into it."

Some experts attribute the decline to better training for police and more funding for prosecution, two key elements of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act. Investigators increasingly are better trained to handle abuse cases and bring them to court.

"For the first time, there are entire domestic violence units in law enforcement," said Lonna Stevens, director of the Sheila Wellstone Institute, a domestic violence organization. "We've had protocols and policies developed for responding to this."

In 1993, there were about 5.8 incidents of nonfatal violence for every 1,000 U.S. residents above the age of 12. By 2004, that number had fallen to 2.6, the agency said. Homicides fell by about 30 percent, from 2,269 in 1993 to 1,544 in 2004.

The Justice Department defines intimate partner violence as violence by a current or former spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend or a same-sex partner.

Stevens said police have been less successful responding to and deterring abusive behavior in some minority communities, where racism and cultural differences can keep reporting rates low.

Over the 12-year reporting period, about 18 out of every 1,000 American Indian and native Alaskan women were victimized — a violence rate three times higher than among white women.

Black women were more likely than white women to be abused but the study also found that they were more likely to report their abuse to the police than white women.

Women in their early 20s and women who were divorced or separated had the greatest risk of being abused, the study found. Violence was also more common in low-income households.

Asian males, white males and the elderly reported the lowest rates of partner violence.

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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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" »