Tag Archives: women

The Ever Evolving Saga of the Philadelphia Flyers Ice Girls

by LavadaGrattan Posted on October 2, 2014

Mother Jones

The NHL’s Philadelphia Flyers have been embroiled in controversy over the past few days—not because of anything hockey-related, but because of the team’s treatment of its ice girls, the women who clean the ice in crop tops and short shorts during stoppages in play. After the Flyers’ ice girls were replaced with “ice men” earlier this fall and fans booed relentlessly, the team announced Tuesday that the ice girls would be reinstated.

A little background: For years, several NHL teams have employed women who, in addition to shoveling ice, are responsible for things like greeting fans at the doors and leading cheers on the sidelines. Earlier this year, after writing an article about how five NFL cheerleading squads had sued their teams for labor violations (examples include having to pass a “jiggle test”—more on that here), I received an email from a former Flyers ice girl. “Speaking from personal experience,” she wrote, “ice girls are treated very similarly.” I went on to speak with three ice girls from the Flyers, and four from the Los Angeles Kings, who were then competing for the Stanley Cup.

Read more from MoJo about life as an ice girl.

The Flyers ice girls had mixed experiences overall but corroborated a few disturbing trends, which I wrote about in a June article. They were paid $50 per game, with their game-day duties lasting about seven hours. They got cold when greeting fans at the doors in skimpy uniforms, but were told that they couldn’t put jackets on. In 2012, when the Flyers hosted a three-day outdoor festival called the Winter Classic, they walked around in shorts, wearing two pairs of stockings, in 20-degree weather. They weren’t allowed to eat in public, despite the long hours and cold.

When I asked both Kings and Flyers ice girls why they continued to do the work, the response was unanimous: Despite the working conditions, there was something uniquely thrilling about being the center of attention on the ice, about being icons to a community of fans.

At the team’s first preseason game of the year, on September 22, the Flyers surprised fans with a change: The ice girls had been eliminated, and in their place, a team of men in bright orange jackets cleaned the ice. The team gave no reason for the change, and as the video below suggests, fans weren’t too happy about it.

At the game three days later, more booing:

In the meantime, I spoke with a couple of former ice girls about the team’s reactions. “The ones that actually wanted to try out weren’t too happy that there wasn’t going to be a team this year,” said one. “They thought it was unfair. I couldn’t care less. I don’t know why you’d want to go back to that abusive relationship.”

One veteran acknowledged that the issues from my June article were valid, and “sometimes it sucks that we have to stand outdoors in the cold.” But still, she had been thinking about trying out for the team again, and she was frustrated with herself and her teammates for having complained: “I’m sure you talked to some of the girls that do come back every year and they shot us all in the foot by expressing their unhappiness. I’m also guilty of that. Look where it got us.”

The Flyers maintained their radio silence until the third game, on Tuesday night. As fans started to boo the ice men, a sign appeared on the scoreboard announcing tryouts for—you guessed it—a new team of ice girls. Fans roared in approval.

On the ice team’s website, candidates are encouraged to submit a photo and résumé and come to auditions this Sunday with “professional-looking hair and make-up.” Applicants will be judged, among other things, on their ability to skate, turn, stop, do crossovers, and “push a wheel barrel on/off the ice surface”

Still, the response to the team’s announcement on Twitter wasn’t entirely enthusiastic. A sample of reactions:

Of course, the fans’ reactions, and the dozens of articles about the Flyers ice team, stem from bigger, messier questions: What should we make of ice girls and cheerleaders in 2014? What about the women who want to cheer? And what happens if those women also happen to have some complaints about the job?

Regardless, it seems that most reasonable folks would support simple changes, like paying ice girls more than $50 for seven hours of work, and maybe even letting them put layers on if they’re unbearably cold. But when I emailed Ike Richman, the VP of public relations for the team, to ask if the ice team’s working conditions or pay would change this year, he simply replied, “The organization has declined to answer any of your detailed questions. Thanks.”

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The Ever Evolving Saga of the Philadelphia Flyers Ice Girls

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Joseph Gordon-Levitt on What It Means For Him to Be a Proud, Male Feminist

by JuliNiesagjojq Posted on September 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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Joseph Gordon-Levitt produced a thoughtful video exploring what it means for him to identify as a feminist and the nuances surrounding the label.

“To me it just means that your gender doesn’t have to define who you are,” Gordon-Levitt explains. “That you can be whatever you want to be, whoever you want to be, regardless of your gender.”

Acknowledging feminism’s complexities, the actor goes onto dispel notions positioning feminism as somehow “anti-men” and that the movement might even be old-fashioned.

“The facts are pretty contrary to this, if you actually look at the evidence of salaries vs. salaries for men,” he sayd. “There’s still a definite disparity.”

Earlier this year, Gordon-Levitt first revealed he was a proud feminist on the Ellen Degeneres Show, explaining his mother’s influence on his views of women and gender equality.

“It’s worth paying attention to the roles that are sort of dictated to us and realize that we don’t have to fit into those roles — we can be anybody we want,” he told Degeneres.

Just another reminder to Pharell, boys and girls can both be feminists, too.

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Joseph Gordon-Levitt on What It Means For Him to Be a Proud, Male Feminist

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The Mysterious Case of the Missing Emails (Non-IRS Version)

by anunturijob Posted on September 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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In the famous case of Lois Lerner’s missing IRS emails, it really does appear that the whole affair was the result of nothing more than a genuine hard drive crash combined with outdated IT procedures for saving backup tapes. Needless to say, this hasn’t stopped Republicans from yelling endlessly about conspiracy theories and the deliberate erasure of damning messages.

So let’s see. How do you think they’ll react to a case in which it appears that emails really were deliberately erased and hard drives really were destroyed? Before you take a guess, it’s only fair to let you know that this case involves a pair of Republicans: New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, who was the DA of New Mexico’s Third Judicial district before her election, and Amy Orlando, a close friend of Martinez’s who was her chief deputy DA and then briefly succeeded her as DA. Andy Kroll tells the rest of the story:

On Tuesday, Mark D’Antonio, the current DA in New Mexico’s Third Judicial district, released the findings of an internal investigation that concluded that large amounts of emails—potentially including those sought by the Democrats—had been “deleted and/or removed” during the period when the office was briefly run by Orlando, Martinez’s onetime deputy. Two of the four hard drives used by Orlando’s administration—hard drives that might have contained the requested emails—were missing. And investigators noted that all emails in the DA’s office were supposed to be backed up by a “special tape drive” in the office, but the back-up tapes were “blank and appear to have been erased.”

The report also noted that, under Orlando, the DA’s office misled a reporter who’d made his own request for similar records. The DA’s office told the reporter that the records he wanted didn’t exist because the office’s server “is routinely cleaned.” But after interviewing IT staffers, investigators concluded this statement “was inaccurate because IT personnel stated that servers were not routinely ‘cleaned’ and that the data should exist on a server.”

You may now submit your guesses about how conservatives will respond to all this. I’m predicting crickets at best, a smear campaign against D’Antonio at worst.

More here – 

The Mysterious Case of the Missing Emails (Non-IRS Version)

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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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Chart of the Day: When Women Fail, They Pay a Bigger Price Than Men

by AlissaQdkhqo Posted on August 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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The chart below is not part of a study that examines a statistically random set of data. It’s quite informal, and probably suffers from some inherent sampling biases. Nonetheless, it’s pretty astonishing:

Here’s the background: Kieran Snyder asked men and women working in the tech industry to share their performance reviews with her. Virtually all of them were high performers who got generally strong reviews. But it wasn’t all positive:

In the 177 reviews where people receive critical feedback, men and women receive different kinds. The critical feedback men receive is heavily geared towards suggestions for additional skills to develop….The women’s reviews include another, sharper element that is absent from the men’s:

“You can come across as abrasive sometimes. I know you don’t mean to, but you need to pay attention to your tone.”

Etc.

This kind of negative personality criticism—watch your tone! step back! stop being so judgmental!—shows up twice in the 83 critical reviews received by men. It shows up in 71 of the 94 critical reviews received by women.

This comes via Shane Ferro, who concludes that there’s probably good reason for women to be more cautious than men in their professional lives. It’s easy to tell women they shouldn’t be afraid to fail. “But we as a society (men and women), need to stop judging women so harshly for their flaws. For them to be equally good, it has to be okay that they are equally bad sometimes.”

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Chart of the Day: When Women Fail, They Pay a Bigger Price Than Men

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26 Percent of Women Scientists Say They’ve Been Sexually Assaulted Doing Fieldwork

by BethPhclkj Posted on August 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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One of the most difficult parts of getting a Ph.D. is finishing your dissertation. Those last three months were certainly the hardest of my life. Beyond the mountain of work a dissertation requires, graduate students also have to face feelings of inadequacy, disappointment, and anxiety about the looming job search. Sometimes, they need a gentle, supportive push to quit stressing about every last comma and—after years of blood, sweat, and tears—finally turn it in.

So when Kate Clancy, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, chided an old friend who was still a graduate student about taking that last step to finish her thesis, she thought she was doing her a favor. But she was floored by her friend’s response.

Clancy remembers her friend saying, “Well, I was sexually assaulted in the field, and every time I open the dissertation files I have flashbacks.” On this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, Clancy goes on to say that conversation “was the first time that it really hit me how much these kinds of experiences can not only emotionally traumatize women, but also explicitly hold them back in their research.”

So she joined up with three fellow female scientists to study the extent to which sexual harassment and sexual assault occur in the field. On this week’s podcast, the four coauthors—Clancy, anthropologists Robin Nelson and Julienne Rutherford, and evolutionary biologist Katie Hinde—discuss their recently published survey of scientists who have worked in the field.

Their results were eye-opening and immediately generated headlines. “Around 70 percent of women from our sample reported experiencing harassment and about 40 percent of men,” Clancy says. Additionally, 26 percent of women and 6 percent of men reported being sexually assaulted (defined as “unwanted physical contact”) while doing field research. Nearly all of the women who reported assault or harassment were students, post-docs, or employees—rather than faculty members.

Field work is a highly-sought-after experience during scientific training in biology, anthropology, and other disciplines. As the study authors note, many universities require at least one field work module to earn a degree, and scientists who engage in field research publish more and secure more grants than those who do not. What’s more, despite the fact that more women enter and complete Ph.D. programs in biology and anthropology, women are less likely than men to maintain fieldwork throughout their careers.

There’s been a lot of debate concerning why, with an increasing number of Ph.D.s going to women, women remain underrepresented in the top tiers of science. This is a complicated and thorny issue, but Clancy and colleagues have added yet another data point: Women might be leaving some disciplines in order to avoid unwanted sexual comments and contact, especially in the field.

Visual representation of “respondents to the survey, their experiences, and who were aware of, made use of, and were satisfied by mechanisms to report unwanted physical contact.” PlosOne

So how did the researchers arrive at these results?

Relying on social media and other outlets to recruit survey-takers, Clancy and her colleagues managed to collect 666 responses, 77.5 percent of them from women.

As the authors note, their sample might overrepresent people who have had negative experiences, as these individuals might be more likely to respond to the survey request. But it might also be an underestimate: “We received information from some folks who said, ‘I would love to do your survey, but I can’t do your survey because it would trigger me in having to think about this traumatic experience that I had in the field,'” says Nelson, who is an assistant professor at Skidmore College.

Importantly, the study’s findings go beyond simply documenting that women are far more likely than men to be sexually harassed or assaulted in the field. Women were also more likely to report that they were harassed or assaulted by superiors. Men, by contrast, were more likely to be harassed by their peers. “There is a whole literature on sort of the directionality of sexual harassment, and there’s much greater psychological harm when it’s a vertical abuse, meaning coming from someone higher up in the hierarchy,” Clancy explains. “And so not only are women experiencing harassment and assault in greater numbers than men, but the actual nature of the assault potentially can cause greater psychological harm.”

What’s so special about field work that might explain these findings? “Our data can’t speak to specific environments within the lab or the office,” says Rutherford, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago. “But there are some aspects of field work that I think contribute to these kinds of behaviors, and that is there is often a certain amount of confusion about who is in charge…some field sites are run by investigators from multiple universities, and research institutions; there might be a field school where you’ll have students from many different universities—so the overseeing institution may not be clear to any individual participant in any stage in their training or in the hierarchy. So that confusion contributes to, I think, a loosening of boundaries.” And then, of course, there are the practical considerations: Scientists are far away from home, their families, other responsibilities, and social networks that both serve to keep bad behaviors in check and provide support to victims of abuse.

Indeed, the study found that only about 1 in 5 respondents who had been harassed or assaulted were “aware of a mechanism to easily report” the incidents at the time. And of those who did file reports, less than 20 percent said they were satisfied with the outcome.

So what are the next steps? “We put this paper out there as a start of a conversation,” says Hinde, an assistant professor at Harvard. “Solutions are going to be effected by our community coming together agreeing that this is a problem, that these aren’t just occasional isolated incidences or the rare bad apple, but something that we need to systematically address with culture-change.”

You can listen to the full interview with Kate Clancy, Robin Nelson, Julienne Rutherford, and Katie Hinde below:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a short interview with University of Chicago geoscientist Ray Pierrehumbert, who argues that we’ve been worrying too much about methane emissions from natural gas, and a discussion of a study finding that kids’ drawings at age four are an “indicator” of their intelligence 10 years later.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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26 Percent of Women Scientists Say They’ve Been Sexually Assaulted Doing Fieldwork

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Voter Fraud Literally Less Likely Than Being Hit By Lightning

by Eve6nx7b Posted on August 6, 2014

Mother Jones

Justin Levitt has been tracking allegations of voter fraud for years. “To be clear,” he says, “I’m not just talking about prosecutions. I track any specific, credible allegation that someone may have pretended to be someone else at the polls, in any way that an ID law could fix.” So far, he’s found 31 cases representing around 200 individuals. If every one of them turns out be a genuine case of fraud, that’s a fraud rate of:

Of course, Levitt might be off by an order of magnitude. Or maybe even two or three orders of magnitude. That would put the fraud rate at 0.02 percent. On the other hand, these are just allegations. If past performance holds true, nearly all of them will turn out to be clerical mistakes, which means we’re back to 0.00002 percent. This compares to many thousands of voters who have been turned away from the polls for lack of ID in just the past few years.

Also worth noting: every single one of these cases involves just one or a few people. There’s not a single credible case in the past 15 years of any kind of organized voter impersonation scam of the kind that might actually affect the outcome of an election. There’s just no there there.

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Voter Fraud Literally Less Likely Than Being Hit By Lightning

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Blame Spanking Advocates for Child Migrants’ Lack of Rights

by LorriKelso Posted on August 5, 2014

Mother Jones

Since last fall, tens of thousands of migrant kids have streamed across the southern US border fleeing violence in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. When they arrive, many are held in overcrowded, unsanitary, and freezing-cold detention centers, and most are left to fend for themselves in immigration hearings because they lack legal representation. The US treatment of migrant kids might be better if the country had ratified an international treaty called the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. That document that would have required lawmakers to consider the “best interests of the child” in crafting policy. But despite decades of pressure from human rights activists, the United States has refused to sign on to the treaty, largely because social conservatives believe it would force Americans to give up spanking.


70,000 Kids Will Show Up Alone at Our Border This Year. What Happens to Them?


Map: These Are the Places Central American Child Migrants Are Fleeing


Why Our Immigration Courts Can’t Handle the Child Migrant Crisis


Are the Kids Showing Up at the Border Really Refugees?


Child Migrants Have Been Coming to America Alone Since Ellis Island

See MoJo‘s full coverage of the surge of unaccompanied child migrants from Central America.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has long been a conservative hobby-horse, an issue seized on by conservatives fired up by home-schooling advocate Michael Farris. Farris believes, among other things, that if the United States signed the treaty, “parents would no longer be able to administer reasonable spankings to their children,” parents wouldn’t be able to keep their kids out of sex education, and that children could choose their own religion. Such issues are red meat for conservatives—so much so that treaty opposition is even a plank in the Iowa GOP platform. GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney came out against it in 2012.

This kind of conservative opposition is one reason why the United States and Somalia are the only countries in the world that haven’t ratified the child-protection treaty. While conservatives’ fears of UN-mandated sex ed and spanking-free childhoods are largely hypothetical, the consequences of not supporting the treaty are now becoming ever more real as the US confronts the humanitarian crisis on its southern border.

Naureen Shah, a legislative counsel at the ACLU, says that if the United States had to conform to the convention’s “best interests” provision, the White House and Congress would be pressured to prioritize reuniting kids with their family members in the US, instead of rushing to deport them. Ratifying the treaty could also spur the US to improve the kids’ detention conditions so “they can get rest and access to education,” she says, as opposed to languishing in “detention conditions that are almost criminal.” Felice Gaer, the vice chair of the UN Committee Against Torture, agrees.

US law does not require undocumented children to be provided with an attorney to help them through immigration proceedings, leaving them vulnerable to judges rushing to send them back home. (President Barack Obama did recently request $15 million from Congress to provide some of the children legal counsel.) Under the treaty, children seeking asylum are supposed to be provided with legal representation, according to the panel that oversees implementation of the agreement. That’s one reason why ratifying it might “put more pressure on the State Department to take a much bigger role” to live up to these obligations, Shah says. The Obama administration has technically signed the treaty, signaling symbolic support for its child protection provisions, but the Senate has not ratified it, which would require implementing the treaty into enforceable domestic law.

Ratifying the treaty isn’t a sure-fire guarantee that migrant kids would get better treatment. After all, the United States is already in violation of other international human rights treaties it has ratified that prohibit the country from returning immigrants to countries where they will be tortured, persecuted, or killed, says Michelle Brané, an immigration detention expert at the Women’s Refugee Commission. Many of the kids crossing the US border are fleeing targeted violence. Nevertheless, “if we signed onto this children’s treaty,” the ACLU’s Shah says, “it would be even more crystal clear that the US has these obligations” to protect the child migrants. Right now, though, American politicians seem more interested in spanking kids than helping some of them.

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Blame Spanking Advocates for Child Migrants’ Lack of Rights

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Garden of Life Vitamin Code Raw One for Women Multivitamin, 75 Capsules

by Myrna Posted on August 1, 2014

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This Is the Lamest Defense of GMO Foods Ever

by OtiliaCroft Posted on July 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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Over on our environment blog, Chris Mooney posts an excerpt from an interview in which Neil deGrasse Tyson defends GMO foods:

“Practically every food you buy in a store for consumption by humans is genetically modified food,” asserts Tyson. “There are no wild, seedless watermelons. There’s no wild cows…You list all the fruit, and all the vegetables, and ask yourself, is there a wild counterpart to this? If there is, it’s not as large, it’s not as sweet, it’s not as juicy, and it has way more seeds in it. We have systematically genetically modified all the foods, the vegetables and animals that we have eaten ever since we cultivated them. It’s called artificial selection.”

This is a very common defense of GMO foods, but I’ve always found it to be the weakest, least compelling argument possible. It’s so weak, in fact, that I always wonder if people who make it are even operating in good faith.

It’s true that we’ve been breeding new and better strains of plants and animals forever. But this isn’t a defense of GMO. On the contrary, it’s precisely the point that GMO critics make. We have about 10,000 years of evidence that traditional breeding methods are basically safe. That’s why anyone can do it and it remains virtually unregulated. We have no such guarantee with artificial methods of recombinant DNA. Both the technique itself and its possible risks are completely different, and Tyson surely knows this. If he truly believed what he said, he’d be in favor of removing all regulation of GMO foods and allowing anyone to experiment with it. Why not, after all, if it’s really as safe as Gregor Mendel cross-breeding pea plants?

As it happens, I mostly agree with Tyson’s main point. Although I have issues surrounding the way GMO seeds are distributed and legally protected, the question of whether GMO foods are safe for human consumption seems reasonably well settled. The technology is new enough, and our testing is still short-term enough, that I would continue to err on the side of caution when it comes to approving GMO foods. Still, GMO breeds created under our current regulatory regime are basically safe to eat, and I think that lefty critics of GMO foods should stop cherry picking the evidence to scare people into thinking otherwise.

(Please send all hate mail to Tom Philpott. He can select just the juiciest ones to send along to me.)

But even with that said, we shouldn’t pretend that millennia of creating enhanced and hybrid breeds tells us anything very useful about the safety of cutting-edge laboratory DNA splicing techniques. It really doesn’t.

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This Is the Lamest Defense of GMO Foods Ever

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