Tag Archives: female

Google’s New Diversity Stats Are Only Slightly Less Embarrassing Than They Were Last Year

by GilbertBrisbane Posted on June 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Around this time last year, Google shocked Silicon Valley by voluntarily releasing statistics on the diversity of its workforce. The move helped shame other large tech companies into doing the same, and the picture that emerged wasn’t pretty: In most cases, only 10 percent of the companies’ overall employees were black or Latino, compared to 27 percent in the US workforce as a whole. For its own part, Google admitted that “we’re miles from where we want to be,” and pledged to do more to cultivate minority and female tech talent.

Now Google has an update: Its 2015 diversity stats, released yesterday, show that it has moved inches, not miles, toward a workforce that reflects America. The representation of female techies ticked up by 1 percentage point (from 17 to 18 percent), Asians gained 1 point, and whites, though still the majority, slipped by 1 point. Otherwise, the numbers are unchanged:

Google

“With an organization our size, year-on-year growth and meaningful change is going to take time,” Nancy Lee, Google’s vice president of people operations, told the Guardian. Last year, Google spent $115 million on diversity initiatives and dispatched its own engineers to historically black colleges and universities to teach introductory computer science courses and help graduating students prepare for job searches. But unlike Intel, another big tech company that has prioritized diversity, Google has not set firm goals for diversifying its talent pool.

“While every company cannot match Intel’s ambitious plan, they can set concrete, measurable goals, targets, and timetables,” said a statement from the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who last year played a key role in convincing Google and other companies to disclose their diversity stats. “If they don’t measure it, they don’t mean it.”

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Google’s New Diversity Stats Are Only Slightly Less Embarrassing Than They Were Last Year

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Taylor Swift: "Misogyny Is Ingrained in People From the Time They Are Born"

by SalvatoRech Posted on May 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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According to this year’s “Hot 100” list, an annual inventory in which Maxim‘s editors meticulously rank famous women by level of attractiveness, Taylor Swift is 2015’s reigning queen of female hotness. Rather than use the title to gloat about her declared hotness, Swift used the magazine’s cover to call out the double standards women face everyday and the importance of feminism in her life today: From Maxim:

Honestly, I didn’t have an accurate definition of feminism when I was younger. I didn’t quite see all the ways that feminism is vital to growing up in the world we live in. I think that when I used to say, “Oh, feminism’s not really on my radar,” it was because when I was just seen as a kid, I wasn’t as threatening. I didn’t see myself being held back until I was a woman. Or the double standards in headlines, the double standards in the way stories are told, the double standards in the way things are perceived.

Swift’s interview is especially noteworthy considering in 2012, she shied away from the label to the Daily Beast, telling the news site she didn’t view matters as a “guys versus girls” situation. This was also during a time in which the media unfairly portrayed Swift as something of a pathetic boy chaser—a female singer who used her lyrics to lament about the latest boy who got away.

Since then, she has shattered that image with very real, thoughtful insight into an industry built on sexist frameworks:

A man writing about his feelings from a vulnerable place is brave; a woman writing about her feelings from a vulnerable place is oversharing or whining. Misogyny is ingrained in people from the time they are born. So to me, feminism is probably the most important movement that you could embrace, because it’s just basically another word for equality.

This is what young girls need today. Now, we leave you with her badass new video, “Bad Blood.”

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Taylor Swift: "Misogyny Is Ingrained in People From the Time They Are Born"

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Dear Marvel and Sony: We Love Movies for Their Kick-Ass Female Heroes, Too, You Jerks

by ChristaU73 Posted on May 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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While Kevin Drum is focused on getting better, we’ve invited some of the remarkable writers and thinkers who have traded links and ideas with him from Blogosphere 1.0 to this day to contribute posts and keep the conversation going. Today we’re honored to present a post from Shakesville founder Melissa McEwan.

Each time WikiLeaks posts another round of emails from the Sony hack, there is a garbage trove of misogyny: unequal pay, gendered and racist harassment, Aaron Sorkin waxing sexist, Angelina Jolie dismissed as a spoiled brat. Found among the latest collection was a dispatch from Marvel CEO Ike Perlmutter to Sony CEO Michael Lynton on the subject of female-centered superhero films, and if it’s not exactly as awful as you’re already imagining, that’s possibly because it’s even worse. Sent under the simple subject line “Female Movies,” Perlmutter writes:

Michael,

As we discussed on the phone, below are just a few examples. There are more.

Thanks,

Ike

1. Electra (Marvel) – Very bad idea and the end result was very, very bad. http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=elektra.htm

2. Catwoman (WB/DC) – Catwoman was one of the most important female character within the Batmanfranchise. This film was a disaster. http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=catwoman.htm

3. Supergirl – (DC) Supergirl was one of the most important female super hero in Superman franchise. This Movie came out in 1984 and did $14 million total domestic with opening weekend of $5.5 million. Again, another disaster.

Best, Ike

Case closed, your honor! At Women and Hollywood, Laura Berger quite rightly notes that Perlmutter’s list is highly selective and narrowly defined. “It seems fair to assume,” writes Berger, “that Perlmutter is referring specifically to female superhero movies. If that’s the case, why is something like ‘The Hunger Games’ omitted from this list? The extremely lucrative franchise is led by a woman, and while Katniss isn’t technically a superheroine, she’s certainly marketed as one. Isn’t ‘The Hunger Games’ a more relevant example of how female-led films fare at the box office today than, say, ‘Supergirl,’ which was released over 30 years ago?” Emphasis original.

At ThinkProgress, Jessica Goldstein shows how easily one could selectively compile a list of male-centered superhero flops if one were inclined to make the incredulous assertion, based exclusively on box office returns and not on the inherent quality of the films, that male-centered superhero films don’t work.

The three films on Perlmutter’s list frankly just weren’t very good. Which has to do with their female heroes only insomuch as studios don’t generally dedicate equivalent creative and financial resources to female-centered superhero films, because they don’t want to “waste” them on films they fear won’t succeed at the box office. Thus the vicious cycle continues: Many female-centered superhero films are set up to fail, and then when one fails, the blame is directed at the women at its center, rather than the misogyny at her back.

This is a conversation that happens around every genre of “hero” film: Superhero films, action films, fantasy films, adventure films. The wildly successful male-centered flicks get rattled off as evidence of what “works,” and implicit condemnation of what (allegedly) doesn’t.

Many of the wildly successful male-centered franchises have, however, a token female character—carefully segregated from other women and girls, lest they get any ideas about taking over the world, I suppose.

And we are ever meant to understand that all of the dedicated superfans of these films watched them because of the men, always the men. What Perlmutter and his cohort don’t understand, don’t consider, or simply don’t care about is that there are plenty of us who watched those films for the women.

When I watched the Superman series, I wasn’t watching those films for Christopher Reeve; I was watching them for Margot Kidder’s Lois Lane, who I was certain was the coolest woman with the most amazing voice who had ever lived. When I watched the Star Wars trilogy, I had zero interest in Luke; I showed up for Leia. When I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark, I was watching it as much for Marion as I was for Indy. When I watched Dragonslayer (which admittedly was a commercial flop, but later became a cult classic) over and over until I could say every line, I was all about Valerian. When I watched Romancing the Stone, I was cheering for THE JOAN WILDER.

There were female heroes in my favorite films, and they were the reason I watched them. I imagine there are plenty of little girls (and little boys) who watch The Avengers not because of the guys, but because of the one, remarkable, exceptional (in every sense of the word) female hero in their midst. That doesn’t show up in the numbers—nor, apparently, in the imaginations of the men who make creative decisions based on numbers.

The thing about many of the films I mentioned is that they’re generally regarded as good movies. They were made with monumental investments of care and attention. And they didn’t have to be male-centered, but they got that care and attention because they were.

What would happen if a female-centered hero were given the same mighty powers? Welp.

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Dear Marvel and Sony: We Love Movies for Their Kick-Ass Female Heroes, Too, You Jerks

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Uber wants to empower women using … Uber

by ZDISammieivpwm Posted on March 10, 2015

Uber wants to empower women using … Uber

By on 10 Mar 2015commentsShare

Right now, plenty of people are down on Uber for things like disregarding the safety of women, having a douche-y nightmare human as a CEO, and destroying (consensual!) taxi sex. So it’s sort of surprising that the mega-startup announced today, in partnership with U.N. Women, that it’s committed to creating 1 million Uber-driving jobs for women around the world over the next five years.

On one hand, yes: Creating opportunities for women to support themselves financially, especially in developing countries where said opportunities may be few and far between, is a really, really worthy goal. Also, having more women drivers is an excellent step toward the increased safety of female passengers. On the other hand, there have been many protests that Uber drivers can’t support themselves on what they make from the startup alone and that these types of “disruptive,” “sharing economy” startups are nothing new at all, in terms of exploitation of labor. In light of all that, this offer seems a little … lackluster.

Read Uber’s (rather sparse) announcement of its new initiative here, or watch the video below. Just like when your shitty ex-boyfriend promises that things will be totally different this time around, I might recommend a little healthy skepticism.

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Uber wants to empower women using … Uber

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Welcome Back to Silicon Valley’s Biggest Sausage Fest

by KrystynDanford Posted on September 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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The TechCrunch Disrupt conference now underway in San Francisco is arguably the most important annual gathering for tech startups. It’s also a notoriously hostile environment for women, as made clear by last year’s conference, whose hackathon produced an app called “Titstare,” which let the user “take photos of yourself staring at tits,” not to mention “Circle Shake,” an app that measures how fast guys can masturbate. The TC Disrupt crowd tends to be 80 to 90 percent male, as you might infer from my bathroom-line photo yesterday. Mike Judge lampooned the conference’s “brogrammer” vibe in his HBO comedy series, Silicon Valley.

This year, the organizers of TechCrunch Disrupt have worked to prevent an embarrassing repeat of the Titstare debacle by publishing and enforcing a detailed “anti-harassment policy.” An attendee of this weekend’s hackathon told me that TechCrunch cited the policy when it quietly nixed a plan by a group of hackers to create a “Bitcoin for strippers” app. Even so, TechCrunch hasn’t been able to completely scrub the event of everything that might be perceived as sexist. This morning, for example, guys entering the conference were mobbed and hugged by groups of women shouting “Groopie!”—they’d been hired to promote a mobile video app:

“I don’t really see the point of booth babes,” says Jenna Williams, a recruiter for the smart-home company leeo, a major outlier in that 40 percent of its tech employees are women. “If they get a question about the technology and can’t answer it, it’s not a good way to represent your product.”

Anne Ward, a software developer attending TC Disrupt for the third year, says men at tech conferences often assume that she’s a marketer, not a code jockey, and they expect her to prove her tech chops when she insists she’s a programmer. She counsels younger female techies on how to navigate the conference scene: Don’t be surprised when male geeks mistake professional interest for personal interest. And if they try to quiz your tech chops by dropping a lot of coding acronyms, just say: “Oh, I see we are using TLAs (three-letter acronyms) instead of having a real conversation.”

(One woman who literally wrote the book on coding recently wrote a hilarious Medium post about this sort of thing, culled from the anonymous gossip site Secret).

To its credit, TC Disrupt has drawn a slightly larger proportion of women this year, according to longtime attendees. Yesterday, a panel of venture capitalists discussed the gender gap onstage for a few minutes, and several panels have featured the female founders of prominent statups, such as Elizabeth Holmes of the blood test company Theranos. Today, the makers of a documentary about “debugging the gender gap” distributed flyers:

A flyer at a conference table at TechCrunch Disrupt

Still, several female techies told me that the conference organizers could do much more to help women play meaningful roles. The panel discussions, they said, felt like lip service—outlining the problem but offering few solutions. A better approach would be to “start pulling in women who are founders as keynote speakers,” says Hanna Aase, the founder of video-profile platform Wonderloop. “That’s what really shows the serious side of what we are doing.” (TechCrunch Disrupt doesn’t feature “keynote speakers,” but more than 80 percent of the people named in the printed conference agenda are men).

Ultimately, Ward says, more women will be willing to go into tech if they see others like themselves rising to the top. Earlier this year, she spoke on a “women in engineering” panel at Developer Week. “I saw tears in the eyes of women in the audience,” she says. “It was seeing them be lifted up instead of put down. Like, ‘Oh, wait, I should be here.'”

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Welcome Back to Silicon Valley’s Biggest Sausage Fest

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Emma Watson Crashes United Nations Website With Her Goodwill Ambassador Announcement

by HopeSweeney Posted on July 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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Emma Watson—the humanitarian and staunch feminist who you may recognize from such films as The Bling Ring, Noah, and the Harry Potter movies—is now working with the United Nations on gender equality and female empowerment.

On Monday, UN Women and Watson announced that she had been appointed as a celebrity Goodwill Ambassador. The 24-year-old British actress will work on the “empowerment of young women and will serve as an advocate for UN Women’s HeForShe campaign,” according to the UN Women’s press release. (The HeForShe campaign enlists men and boys to stand up for gender equality.) In 2012, Watson became an ambassador for the Campaign for Female Education.

The announcement drew enough web traffic to crash the UN Women website. “We apologize & hope to be back up soon,” the UN entity tweeted. Here is Watson’s full statement on her new gig:

Being asked to serve as UN Women’s Goodwill Ambassador is truly humbling. The chance to make a real difference is not an opportunity that everyone is given and is one I have no intention of taking lightly. Women’s rights are something so inextricably linked with who I am, so deeply personal and rooted in my life that I can’t imagine an opportunity more exciting. I still have so much to learn, but as I progress I hope to bring more of my individual knowledge, experience, and awareness to this role.

(Watson expressed her excitement on Twitter with a blushing emoticon.)

Other celebrity Goodwill Ambassadors for the UN include Liam Neeson, “Twitter Nazi hunter” Mia Farrow, and Orlando Bloom. I reached out to UN Women to ask about what other initiatives we can expect to see Watson working on. I will update this post if/when I get a response.

Below is video of Watson visiting slum homes and a fair trade group in Bangladesh: “I still find it hard to convey what fair trade means to those producing our fashion—it’s just so impressive to see how the women have used fair trade clothing to escape poverty and empower themselves and their children,” Watson said. “I was moved and inspired.”

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Emma Watson Crashes United Nations Website With Her Goodwill Ambassador Announcement

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READ: The Police Report From the Incident That Spurred Elliot Rodger to Mount His Killing Spree

by BettyUeshcb Posted on June 11, 2014

Mother Jones

Elliot Rodger had pondered mass murder for years before last month’s killing spree near Santa Barbara, which left seven dead and another 13 wounded. But it was a violent clash with people who snubbed him at a party 10 months earlier that convinced him to plow ahead with the plan. A police report obtained by Mother Jones through a public-records request sheds fresh light on this incident and raises new questions about how the local police handled clues that surfaced prior to Rodger’s deadly rampage, which ended with him committing suicide.

In July 2013, Rodger, a lonely 21-year-old virgin, attended a party in Isla Vista, a seaside town that’s home to University of California, Santa Barbara. In his 141-page manifesto, Rodger recalled the outing as a “last ditch effort” to lose his virginity before turning 22. (“I was giving the female gender one last chance to provide me with the pleasures I deserved from them.”) But the girls at the party ignored him. Rodger grew livid and climbed up onto a 10-foot ledge where he pretended to pick off party goers with an imaginary gun. He then tried to push several women off the edge, but a group of men intervened and shoved him off instead.

Rodger, who broke his ankle in the fall, initially tried to flee. He later staggered back toward the party to look for his Gucci sunglasses, but he was so drunk that he got lost and ended up in another fight in front of the house next door. “They called me names like ‘faggot’ and ‘pussy’, typical things those types of scumbags would say,” he wrote in his manifesto. “A whole group of the obnoxious brutes came up and dragged me onto their driveway, pushing and hitting me.”

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READ: The Police Report From the Incident That Spurred Elliot Rodger to Mount His Killing Spree

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Male Doctors Bill Medicare for More Services Than Female Doctors

by TamelaTMXX Posted on April 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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Via German Lopez, today brings us an interesting study from Andrew Fitch of NerdWallet. Long story short, he finds that male doctors get paid a lot more by Medicare than female doctors.

Obviously there are several reasons for this. Chief among them: Higher paid specialties tend to be dominated by men, and men see more Medicare patients than women. But here’s the most interesting bit:

Male doctors perform more services per patient treated. To explore this, NerdWallet Health devised a metric to calculate a physician’s average “service volume” per patient. We found that male doctors billed Medicare, on average, for one more procedure per patient than female physicians (5.7 services performed per patient by male doctors vs. 4.7 services per patient by female doctors).

This gap in service volume is true across specialties. Male doctors performed more services per patient than female doctors across nearly all specialties. In a specialty like pathology — where doctors infrequently provide services directly to patients — we found no variation in average service volume.

On average, male doctors bill 5.7 services per patient vs. 4.7 for women! That’s a huge gap. And it’s not just that cardiologists tend to bill for more services than, say, pulmonologists. Even within specialties, men bill for more services than women.

But why? Are they just generally more aggressive? Are they gaming the system? Do sicker patients prefer male doctors for some reason? If this analysis turns out to be true, it would sure be fascinating for someone to follow up and try to figure out what’s going on.

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Male Doctors Bill Medicare for More Services Than Female Doctors

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Millions of Women Now Pay Nothing for Birth Control. Thanks Obamacare!

by Jane Adams Posted on December 11, 2013

Mother Jones

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The percentage of privately insured women who didn’t pay a dime for birth control pills almost tripled this year, rising from 15 percent in 2012 to 40 percent in 2013. That’s according to a new study from the Guttmacher Institute, a think tank that backs abortion rights. The study, which was published in the journal Contraception, examined the effects of an Affordable Care Act rule requiring private insurers to cover contraceptive products and counseling with no co-pay.

This same rule has come under sustained, delirious assault by Republicans who paint it as an attack on employers’ religious beliefs. During the debt ceiling crisis this fall, some House Republicans were willing to let the government default if the final financial deal did not include a “conscience clause” allowing employers to sidestep the mandate if it violated their religious beliefs. (The Obama administration has already exempted a narrowly defined set of religious institutions.)

That battle will come to a head this spring, when the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. Citing their Christian beliefs, owners of the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores are refusing to provide their female employees with insurance that covers contraceptive services. A decision in favor of Hobby Lobby could blow a hole in the contraception mandate, allowing any private employer to withold birth control coverage simply by citing their religious beliefs.

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Millions of Women Now Pay Nothing for Birth Control. Thanks Obamacare!

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for November 12, 2013

by ReinaSherrill Posted on November 12, 2013

Mother Jones

An Infantry Training Battalion student looks for an enemy in nearby trees during Patrol Week near Camp Geiger, N.C., on Oct. 28, 2013. patrol week is a five-day training event that teaches infantry students basic offensive, defensive and patrolling techniques. Delta Company is the first infantry training company to fully integrate female Marines into an entire training cycle. This and future companies will evaluate the performance of the female Marines as part of ongoing research into opening combat-related job fields to women. U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Tyler L. Main/Released.

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for November 12, 2013

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