Six on History: Women's History is Every Month
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On this International Women's Day, only twelve countries had full equal rights for women in front of the law. While this number has been growing in the last couple of years, it is still very low. The same is true for female Fortune 500 CEOs, whose numbers have been rising quickly. Yet, women headed only 15 percent of these companies in March 2022 - still far from equal representation of the sexes. Both our charts today have more info.
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"This year, Spain and Greece were the newcomers among those offering full legal equality to men and women. Both countries equalized parental leave entitlements between the sexes. The United States ranked at 91.3 percent below countries like Peru and Albania. It lost points because of a lack of laws guaranteeing equal pay and equal pensions in addition to having notoriously bad laws around parental leave."
Read the full article"In World War II, millions of men went to fight and millions of women joined the workforce. There was just one small problem. Kids. With their parents out of the house, who would take care of the children? The U.S. government faced this challenge during World War II, leading to the first and only universal child care program in American history.
Colloquially known as the Lanham Act, this bill funded "war nurseries" that looked after children whose mothers worked long hours. Professor Chris Herbst studies child care policy. He says despite initial pushback, the program yielded positive outcomes for working moms and provided high-quality care for kids. However, the program did not last long. Except in California.
Professor Natalie Fousekis, author of Demanding Child Care: Women's Activism and the Politics of Welfare, 1940-1971, studies women's history. She says while California extended the program, the federal government eventually changed the funding mechanism and ended the child care program for many employed women."
"In World War II, millions of men went to fight and millions of women joined the workforce. There was just one small problem. Kids. With their parents out of the house, who would take care of the children? The U.S. government faced this challenge during World War II, leading to the first and only universal child care program in American history.
Colloquially known as the Lanham Act, this bill funded "war nurseries" that looked after children whose mothers worked long hours. Professor Chris Herbst studies child care policy. He says despite initial pushback, the program yielded positive outcomes for working moms and provided high-quality care for kids. However, the program did not last long. Except in California.
Professor Natalie Fousekis, author of Demanding Child Care: Women's Activism and the Politics of Welfare, 1940-1971, studies women's history. She says while California extended the program, the federal government eventually changed the funding mechanism and ended the child care program for many employed women."
" ... They live in shelters too, and in shared rental rooms, and under roadside tarps when no indoor accommodation will admit them. Vrindavan is about 100 miles south of Delhi, but the widows come here from all over India, particularly the state of West Bengal, where allegiance to Krishna is intense. Sometimes they arrive accompanied by gurus they trust. Sometimes their relatives bring them, depositing the family widow in an ashram or on a street corner and driving away.
Even relatives who don’t literally drive a widow from the family home can make it plain every day that her role among them has ended—that a widow in India, forever burdened by the misfortune of having outlived her husband, is “physically alive but socially dead,” in the words of Delhi psychologist Vasantha Patri, who has written about the plight of India’s widows. So, because Vrindavan is known as a “city of widows,” a possible source of hot meals and companionship and purpose, they also come alone, on buses or trains, as they have for generations. “None of us wants to go back to our families,” a spidery woman named Kanaklata Adhikari declared in firm Bengali from her bed in the shelter room she shares with seven other widows. “We never talk to our families. We are our family.”
"Unwell Women. By Elinor Cleghorn. Dutton; 400 pages; $28. Weidenfeld & Nicolson; £16.99
"When serena williams struggled to breathe after giving birth in 2017, she knew something was wrong. She also suspected what it was. Six years earlier the tennis champion had endured a pulmonary embolism, or blood clot. But a nurse thought she was delirious from pain medication. Instead of the ct scan Ms Williams wanted, a doctor did a fruitless ultrasound. Eventually the scan was ordered—and revealed clots in the arteries of her lungs.
In “Unwell Women”, Elinor Cleghorn shows that Ms Williams’s problem—not being listened to—is as old as medicine. The author began stitching together the history of women’s health after being diagnosed with lupus in 2010; her pain had been dismissed for seven years. The result combines her own story with a feminist history of illness and a plea for better listening. It shows how centuries of ignorance and condescension led to failings that endure today.
Within this panorama, the focus is on women’s health in Britain and America. In the early 20th century some travelled to Germany to try a new treatment called “Dämmerschlaf”, or “twilight sleep”, which promised “painless” births. Given two anaesthetics, morphine and scopolamine (a drug with amnesic effects), women lay awake in darkened rooms as their children were born, but would not remember the pain. The technique was controversial: labour was expected to be laborious, even though Queen Victoria had publicly endorsed the use of chloroform in 1853. She inhaled the gas for 53 minutes, pronouncing it “delightful beyond measure” after her eighth child was born. Women’s choices over where and how to give birth are interrogated and judged even now.
Childbirth was the focus of women’s health care for much of history, but medicine’s shortcomings, and Ms Cleghorn’s book, go wider. The immune system is another concern. Women are more prone to autoimmune diseases; they suffer disproportionately from illnesses such as lupus, multiple sclerosis and chronic fatigue syndrome. New research suggests this susceptibility could be down to the x chromosome—almost all biological females have two—which influences the production of auto-antibodies. Conversely, the chromosome may explain why women are less likely to suffer badly from viral infections such as covid-19, which kills more men.
As Ms Williams’s example shows, birth can still be botched and hazardous. “Unwell Women” calls for improvements in women’s care in reproduction and beyond. The pandemic has demonstrated what medicine can achieve with the right resources and incentives; it is an apt time to shine a light on the stubborn gaps in understanding of women’s bodies."
"Sexual harassment allegations against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, including at least three from current or former aides, are a reminder of just how commonplace unwanted touching, propositioning and other inappropriate behavior is in the workplace.
My recent research explores the prevalence of toxic work environments – like the one described in Albany, New York – and just how startlingly common sexual harassment at work is.
I discovered that even when women try to find justice by suing their alleged abusers, their cases rarely see a courtroom.
An all-too-common experienceMy own extensive review of numerous studies, surveys and reports shows that sexual harassment at work is a very common occurrence for women, regardless of age or income level.
The numerous studies and surveys reveal that the share of women who experience sexual harassment at work could be as low as 25% or as high as 75%. The actual numbers varied considerably, depending on industry, location and how the question was worded, but they were generally quite high.
This kind of unlawful conduct occurs across all sectors of the economy, but recent studies show a high prevalence of sexually hostile conduct associated with workers in the gig economy and the fast-food industry.
Winning claims gets harderPerhaps most troubling is the perception – and unfortunate reality – that engaging in this conduct will result in no real consequences. Indeed, among women who have experienced unwanted sexual advances in the workplace, almost all reported that male harassers usually go unpunished.
My review of case law and data bears this out.
The vast majority of sexual harassment claims are pursued through the civil courts and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Unlike prosecution under criminal law, civil plaintiffs may sue for damages, and the burden of proof is lower in these cases.
Additionally, criminal cases typically require more egregious conduct, such as a sexual assault, though some claims may proceed in both courts.
Under Title VII, harassment victims may sue their employer for sexual conduct that is deemed unwelcome, severe or pervasive, and when the employer has failed to properly act.
The Supreme Court raises the barBut, as the Supreme Court has become increasingly conservative under Chief Justice John Roberts, it has added additional procedural hurdles for all employment discrimination victims, including those pursuing sexual harassment claims.
Most notably, in cases brought in 2007 and 2009, the Supreme Court articulated a rigid new standard for bringing civil claims – that the plaintiffs must allege a “plausible” claim for relief – which makes it far harder for workplace victims to bring them.
The plausibility standard is particularly difficult for employment discrimination plaintiffs to satisfy. These claims often require a showing of discriminatory intent, which can be difficult to establish early in a case.
The court also made it harder for women to aggregate their discrimination claims after it raised the threshold for all class-action lawsuits in a 2011 case involving Walmart. This raised the bar for women who sue their employers alleging pay and promotion discrimination. The same higher standard now applies to class-action sexual harassment claims as well.
It’s often easier for a victim to prevail when a supervisor is involved in the unlawful conduct because, where a hostile work environment is established, the burden of proof shifts to the employer to show that it acted responsibly. But in 2013, the court changed who counts as a supervisor in the workplace, limiting it to someone with the power to hire, fire, promote or otherwise tangibly affect the accuser’s employment.
An analysis found that this quickly resulted in 43 case dismissals.
What happens to the thousands of other cases is less clear because of the many variables and mixed reporting standards. Cases may be dismissed early in the case, during discovery or even right before trial. Compiling this data in any meaningful way can be difficult, if not impossible.
To add to this problem, many other cases are settled, often pursuant to a nondisclosure agreement, which means the parties can’t talk about what’s in it, so the exact outcome in these cases may never be publicly known. Indeed, many potential claims may even be settled before a case is ever filed, further skewing any case data in this area.
My analysis of some individual harassment claims is still quite revealing and shows that the courts are – in many instances – failing to give these claims the attention they deserve. These courts seem to be requiring an almost impossible level of detail by the plaintiffs early in the case.
For example, in one recent case, a federal court dismissed a claim in which the alleged victim, a customer service agent and administrative assistant, asserted in part that her co-worker rubbed his genitals against her buttocks. In rejecting the claim, the court found the allegations insufficient, concluding that the victim “fails [to] offer sufficient factual detail that would allow the court to reasonably infer the frequency in which [the co-worker’s] actions occurred over the course of her employment with [the employer].”
Another court dismissed a claim in which the alleged victim, who worked as a janitor at a manufacturing facility, maintained that she was instructed by a manager not to speak with other workers without permission “because she was a married woman” and that her fellow employees would be “trying to sniff that.” The court held that the worker did not allege enough detail in the complaint to provide sufficient “facts to raise her right to relief above the speculative level.”
And in a case in which a prison worker alleged that she was required to observe while “a female visitor masturbated in front of a male inmate” and overheard lewd language, the court found that there was not “a plausible hostile environment claim,” at least partially as a result of the court’s belief that the worker could not establish that any of the conduct occurred “because of Plaintiff’s sex.” In reaching this decision, the court specifically relied on the newly rigid plausibility standard adopted by the Supreme Court.
