Taliban May Be Willing to Promote Women’s Education as Part of Peace Talks [Afghanistan]

Aug 12, 2012 1:00 PM  

According to a document sent to The Sunday Times, the Taliban might be, could be, fingers-crossed ready to promote women's education as part of a bid to restart peace talks with the West. Though The Times couldn't independently verify the paper's authenticity, it reportedly demonstrates current thinking among among Taliban leaders (the paper claims that a source with links to the Quetta shura, the Taliban's Pakistan-based leadership council, provided the latest policy paper).

The paper states, "Women are also a big part of our human society," and that, therefore, "the Islamic emirate will create a level ground for women's education in light of its constitution." During its years in power, the Taliban prevented women from working outside the home. More recently, girls have been attending school despite some violent backlashes and inadequate funding. The paper, if it actually does reflect the Taliban's thinking, could help consolidate some of the educational opportunities that have opened up for women in Afghanistan.

Report: Paper reveals Taliban softening stance on girls' education [MSNBC]

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Racist Assholes Predictably Take To Twitter After U.S. Defeat of Japanese Women's Soccer Team [Racism]

Unsurprising, but still BLERGHHH. Shortly after Nadeshiko Japan, the nation's women's soccer team, lost Thursday's game to the U.S. 2-1, the terms "Jap," "Pearl Harbor" and "Hiroshima" trended on the relentless shit soufflé that is Twitter. And why not? There's no better way to celebrate a victory than namecheck historical war tragedies (literally the opposite of the point of the Olympics uniting the nations of the world, by the way) that occurred at least 40 years before any of the players were even born, right? Right?

The tweets, some of which were collected on the Japan Daily Press, are largely along the lines of "That's for Pearl Harbor," but a few contain references to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ("Haven't felt this good about beating Japan since..." et cetera.) "Long live the greatest country: America" adds one Twitter user— whose existence, ironically, is precisely what might make one question that statement. Go figure!

Last year was no better, apparently: when the Japanese women's soccer team took the World Cup against the U.S. in Germany, Japan Daily Press writer Adam Westlake remembers reading Tweets like: "Japan may have won the World Cup, but the U.S. scored the first two points with Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

So... yeah, WAY TO GO, racists! It's important to make every international event into an ugly and ignorant shitstorm.

'Japan's Olympic soccer loss brings out the Twitter racism' [Japan Daily Press]

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Why Don't Women's Magazines Care More About Their Websites? [Mag Hag]

Bonnie Fuller, head of HollywoodLife.com and former editor of multiple mags like Glamour and Marie Claire, has some thoughts about why most women's magazines have lackluster websites. While it should be noted that her most recent column for Ad Age is partially just a giant advertisement for her website and editorial skills (Sample quote: "Coming from magazines, I have to say that editing a digitally native women's site is incredibly freeing..." How nice for you, Bonnie!), she makes some good points. "Even though young women's magazines had owned the hearts and minds of their audiences on the newsstand for decades, anticipating and responding to their every need, they have not established themselves as daily indispensable online destinations for their readers," she writes. "The question is why?"

Naturally, Fuller has a few ideas: Most editors probably come from print backgrounds and therefore work in a monthly mindset, where snagging subscribers to the magazine is more important than page views. Their websites aren't technically structured for easy posting. There are staffing issues: a site like Fuller's employs fifteen staffers who post constantly, whereas women's magazines usually only hire a few staffers to run their websites.

The most interesting point she brings up is this:

I also believe it's hard for traditional women's media sites to flourish in the online arena when they may also be seen as competitors to their own mother magazine brands. If their parent organizations see their mothership magazines as the primary revenue source, then they might see investing in sites that draw readers' eyeballs but not the equivalent revenue as a bad investment.

I definitely experienced that uneasy dichotomy when I worked at print publications. At first, I was shocked by the animosity between web editors and print editors who were basically forced to compete against each other for attention and resources from higher-ups, but that's an unfortunate but obvious consequence of the type of mismanagement Fuller is talking about.

Fuller's piece inspired me to check out the sites she mentioned: Glamour.com, Cosmopolitan.com, MarieClaire.com and Elle.com. It's not that the websites are clueless about their web content; it's more that they're clearly not focused on becoming a breaking news destination. Marie Claire pretty much only promotes print content or related extras on their homepage, but the other sites seem like they're doing a fine job of producing regular, original posts. Glamour in particular covers a fair amount of celeb gossip and news, and someone over there definitely knows the value of an SEO-worthy headline: one of their most popular stories right now is "Kristen Stewart is reportedly dealing with the cheating drama by eating THIS. Is this your go-tobreakup food, too?" (Yes, I clicked. It's ice cream. BORING.) Cosmo's also got the hang of the clickable headline, with posts like "Surprising Foods That Can Eff With Your Sex Drive" and "Match The Sexy Olympian With His, Err, Bulge."

But clickable headlines might not be enough, or at least not enough to encourage subscription sales. The Wall Street Journal reported today that magazines' newsstand sales dropped 9.6% in the first half of this year, a worse decline than ever before. Even Cosmopolitan, America's #1 women's magazine, saw its newsstand sales drop 5.5% to 1.3 million.

"Lucky for us, it appears the women's traditional media sites have affectively [Sic. Insert sad joke about lack of proofreading online here] made the decision not to compete for their own readers — the millennial generation — in the online space," Fuller writes. "But with these print titles experiencing double-digit newsstand drops in the past year, can they afford NOT to get with the program." Will women's magazines follow the example of magazines that have successful, heavily-staffed digital sides, like The Atlantic and Wired?

The Reason Women's Magazines Are Missing Millennials Online? No News [Ad Age]

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Fierce Women's Judo Competitors Offend One Man's Delicate Sensibilities [Olympics]

Oh no! Olympic disaster! Some sensible old chap over at the Daily Telegraph was having a corking good time watching the ladies do their precious little Olympic lady-follies when he came across a phenomenon so depraved, so disturbing and unnatural, that he was all, "'ERE! WOT'S ALL THIS THEN!?" and upended his beans on toast all over the davenport. It was women...fighting. Like blokes!

His next thought: Take to the internet and ALERT THE LADS POSTHASTE. I'm just going to paste most of his Telegraph column here because it is hella short and dumb:

Watching Gemma Gibbons gaining Britain's first judo medal in 12 years, I found myself wondering: is women fighting each other violently a perfectly wholesome spectator sport? This wasn't a bit of pretend wrestling. Gemma and her American opponent, Kayla Harrison, were properly grappling with each other, throwing each other with full force onto the mat. They both showed pure, naked, fierce, animalistic aggression of a sort that one doesn't naturally associate with women—or girls for that matter. Quite honestly my initial reaction was one of shock.

...With those judo contestants—and I realise this will probably sound appallingly sexist—I couldn't help wondering about their soft limbs battered black and blue with bruises. Would it bother me to see one of my own daughters savagely attacking another woman on a judo mat for people's entertainment? I'm really not sure. Possibly. On the other hand I might be proud of her skill. I know full well that, as a bloke, it's none of my business, but it's what I thought and felt.

Okay. First of all, enough with this rhetorical strategy where you act like acknowledging sexism makes it impossible for you to actually be sexist. Bullcorn. This reaction—abject horror at the prospect of women becoming big, strong, aggressive, capable, active, and even violent—is a sexist reaction. It is an ancient point of view. It is as musty and dank as the folds of great grandmamma's third best chemise after a long day of scouring.

Even though I'm sure Mr. Brown doesn't consciously intend it this way, there's something blatantly proprietary (and not-so-subtly sexual) about this whole thing. "But but but what if my woman-thing gets messed up and then it's not as pretty when I eventually have sex with it!?!?" But good news! Don't even worry about it, bro. These Olympic judo medalists will definitely never fuck you.

To be clear: Anything on earth that a woman is capable of doing is womanly. It is impossible for a woman to be unwomanly because a woman is a woman. Therefore, anything a woman does is womanly by default. Fighting is womanly. Winning fights is womanly. Bruises are womanly. Savagery is womanly. Unwholesomeness is womanly. Athleticism is womanly. And not giving a shit what some poor delicate flower of a newspaper columnist thinks about your womanliness is super fucking womanly.

Women's judo: it's disturbing to watch these girls beat each other up [Telegraph]

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Women's College Dean Says Same-Sex Education Is Better for Businesswomen [Running In Heels]

65-year-old Cathy E. Minehan, dean of the all-women Simmons College School of Management, a small Boston college which launched the first MBA program designed for women in 1975, says that women have a better chance of succeeding professionally without men around.

In a coed academic environment, "male leadership roles remain unchallenged, and women are left with 'play the game our way, or go home,'" she told the Wall Street Journal.

Before taking over Simmons last summer, Minehan was the chief of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and spent almost 40 years working in banking in Boston and New York. She said she chose the dean position over retiring because she'd "always had this interest in what you can do, systemically, to make it easier for women to be successful in business."

Minehan is clearly (and rightfully) proud of what Simmons' women have accomplished — "If Harvard wants a case about a woman leader, they usually are looking at stuff we've developed," she said — but her views on same-sex education seem a bit antiquated. "Why is it better to address those systemic issues in an all-women environment when so much of the business world is dominated by men?" the WSJ asked her. "How is that good training for real life?" Here's her response:

Just think about mission-driven education in general-for example, historically black colleges. The schools provide not only a first-class education, but also an environment and culture in which it's easier to talk about some subjects.

[At Simmons, students] can develop tools to navigate better in the business world because they understand the subtleties of a male-dominated culture in a way that they might not understand in classrooms that are dominated by men.

An example: negotiations. Women don't negotiate the same way that men do. We teach classic negotiation theory, classic negotiation practice, but we also teach about the situation women will find in [the outside world] and then how to deal with it.

When (shockingly) asked about Marissa Meyer, Minehan said the whole being pregnant while also CEO thing wasn't such a big deal. "If she's smart enough to run Yahoo, which the board seems to think she is, she's smart enough to figure this out," she said.

We've written at length about how Meyer's refusal to talk about her gender can be frustrating, but the idea that only women should have to learn about "the subtleties of a male-dominated culture" in an academic setting is disheartening in a different way. It's doubtful that "gender-blind" Meyer would ever step foot on Simmons' campus.

Why an All-Female School May Be Best Training Ground [WSJ]

Image via StokketeShutterstock.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

The New York Stock Exchange Really Needs to Move the Women's Restroom [Running In Heels]

Aug 2, 2012 3:10 PM  

No doubt that the goals of the Moving the Needle campaign are noble. Their aim is to help diversify US corporations by creating opportunities for a diverse set of candidates to network with established businesses.

As stated on their website, the goal is not to implement quotas to or put women or people of color in token positions, but rather to create value through diversity that will "improve all facets of a board's and company's performance and ultimately enhance the shareholders' investment value."

After all, in 2010 people of color were 11.9% of Executive/Senior Level Officials and Managers and 20.1% of all First/Mid-Level Officials and Managers. And only 16% of Fortune 500 board members were women.

The New York Stock Exchange is one organization that is embracing the Move the Needle program in order to help it diversify. But women familiar with the NYSE have a problem that is representative of the institutionalized sexism that often undermines efforts like Move the Needle.

The problem is the bathrooms.

Yes, the bathrooms. During a meeting designed to highlight the efforts to expand the number of female board members, some of the high-powered and successful women in attendance noticed that the women's bathrooms were so far away from the floor of the exchange that the path had to be marked with multiple signs so women could find their way-all the way from the conveniently-located mens room through three winding corridors to the "Female Clerks Rest Room".

Given the fast-paced nature of the stock exchange, it seems that this workplace in particular would benefit from having restrooms that are available for quick and efficient access.
Perhaps one of the first steps the NYSE needs to make to Move the Needle would be to move the ladies' restroom.

Follow one woman as she photographs the journey from the trading floor to the women's restroom.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

These Three Court Rulings on Women's Health Will Give You a Rage Headache [War On Women]

Happy Day After No Copay Day! Everyone hug your now-likely-much-cheaper birth control and jump around screaming like you just randomly ran into it at a bar! Dance together in a circle! Get all of your celebrating out now, because I've got some pretty sobering, not-awesome news: in the past week, three separate, terribly depressing court rulings have ignored science and put both abortion rights and birth control access at risk. Again.

The New York Times nicely sums up the trio of giant bummers happening at about the same time that health care becomes more affordable to millions of women. And while all of them can be appealed, none of them should be ignored.

First, let's take an imaginary trip to Arizona (because no one should ever take a real trip there). On Monday, a district judge there ruled that the state's ban on all abortions after 20 weeks with no exceptions for rape, incest, the health of the mother, or fetal abnormality can go into effect, even though it directly defies the Supreme Court ruling that states can't ban abortion before viability (before the fetus can survive on its own outside of a woman's body), which doesn't occur until about 24 weeks' gestation. The law's especially cruel considering the fact that many fetal abnormalities and health risks to the mother can't be determined until beyond that point in a pregnancy, and, as others have mentioned, the new law will condemn some couples to give birth to nonviable fetuses and basically watch them die. It also requires women whose pregnancies are risks to their own health to either leave the state or deal with a debilitating pregnancy Arizona mandates they carry to term. Judge James Teilborg, a Bill Clinton appointee (!!!) characterized the ban not as a "ban," but as a "regulation," which is constitutional. Teilborg also acquiesced to flimsy, unaccepted scientific evidence that fetuses, at 20 weeks, can feel pain (most doctors who didn't get their medical degree from It Says Right There In The Bible! University agree that they can't). But what about women, you may ask, can they feel pain? The answer is no. No, women cannot feel pain. Shhh. Thankfully, yesterday a 9th Circuit judge showed some damn sense and issued an emergency injunction blocking the law.

The next stop on our Tour de Ugh lands us in South Dakota (which, unlike Arizona, is a terribly underrated state that everyone should visit, if only for the Mitchell Corn Palace), which currently has a law on the books requiring doctors to lie to women by telling them that having abortions puts them at higher risk of suicide than women who just go on ahead with 9 months of a pregnancy they do not want. Last Tuesday, the Eighth Circuit Court in St. Louis ruled that this is just fine; doctors don't have free speech rights that can be trampled upon, because it's totally within the purview of elected state legislators to use their positions to practice medicine on women they don't know and have never met. You read that right — it's just fine for states to require doctors to lie to patients. This could be read as bad news, or it could be read as excellent news, because I guess that means that now I can push for that law that requires doctors to tell dudes that if they hog, like, three seats on the subway by sitting with their lets too ridiculously wide open, it will cause their dicks to shrink. What's real is what is most comforting to my existing world view!

And, finally, let's not forget about a secular Colorado heating and air conditioning business (because — duh — there's no such thing as a churchy heating and air conditioning business, unless we're talking about that giant heating business located far below ground, the one that Satan uses to bake naughty people) that was granted the right to deny its female employees birth control coverage on the grounds that the owner of the business finds it icky. Religious freedom means freedom of oppression. It means the freedom to make other people's choices for them. In the Colorado case, thankfully, the judge specified that his injunction allows Hercules Industries to refuse to follow Obamacare's guidelines, but it doesn't stop the administration from enforcing them on anyone else. Like anyone adamantly against whore pills will listen to that.

So enjoy the free birth control while it lasts, and don't take it for granted. There are entire teams of jerks working feverishly to take it away from you, and they won't stop until everyone's either pregnant or chaste.

[NYT]

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

U.S. Women’s Gymnasts Are Getting Serious Twitter Love from All the Important Celebrities [Gymnastics]

After the U.S. women's gymnastics teamwon gold Tuesday night, their Twitter accounts were inundated with congratulatory tweets from pretty much every famous person that matters. Those eager to get in line and offer social media high-fives to the victorious young women included President Obama, Oprah, Justin Fucking Bieber, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian, Bruce "The Reanimator" Jenner, and Snooki, because winning a gold medal at the Olympics isn't officially an accomplishment until at least three reality-TV stars publicly acknowledge it. The team was understandably thrilled about all of this because, well, they're kids and they just won Olympic gold.

For the complete list of tweet exchanges between gushing celebrities and the gymnasts, take a little gander at the litany machine machine that is Buzzfeed. Here, for your perusing convenience, are some of the most notable congratulations.

Lady Gaga was especially starstruck and then dispensed digital kisses:

@mckaylamaroney tweeted at me! Why didnt anybody tell me!!! DEAD. You were brilliant give all the girls a kiss for me

Wes Welker realized that people who get hit in the head for a living aren't the only tough humans:

I have a new respect for the women's gymnastics team. Those girls are TOUGH.

And the President played it straight, offering a very hearty thanks to the team for making America look awesome:

@Jordyn_Wieber, @GabrielleDoug, @Aly_Raisman, @McKaylaMaroney, @Kyla_Ross96: Congratulations! You've made us all proud. #TeamUSA

Meanwhile, Team U.S.A. continues to be really ecstatic about their new hardware.

The U.S. Women's Gymnasts Have Been Tweeting With Every Famous Person [Buzzfeed]

@doreeshafrir [Twitter]

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.