Category: Gender studies

Racism against Asian American and Pacific Islander women

by philg

On International Women’s Day (however the term “women” might be defined), we can celebrate Eileen Gu’s successful escape from racist America to non-racist China.

Despite President Biden’s efforts, “74% of Asian American, Pacific Islander women experienced racism in past year, report says” (NBC, 3/3/2022):

As anti-Asian attacks on Asian American and Pacific Islanders continue to rise, a report released Thursday underscores how women in the racial group endure a disproportionate number of such incidents.

The research, spearheaded by the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, revealed that 74 percent of Asian American and Pacific Islander women reported having personally experienced racism or discrimination in the last 12 months, roughly the time since the Atlanta-area spa shootings, in which eight people, most of them Asian women, were murdered, the report pointed out.

Russell Jeung, a co-founder of hate incident tracking forum Stop AAPI Hate, which also worked on the report, said many are likely to be dealing with the intersectional harassment of being both Asian Americans or Pacific Islanders and women.

With an anti-racist president in the White House, who could be responsible for this?

Choimorrow said the results show that the danger that women across ethnicities in the community are in goes far beyond issues caused by racist “China virus” rhetoric and long predate the pandemic. It’s why, Choimorrow said, the solution isn’t as simple as passing hate crime legislation, like the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act.

“To be honest, if you think about it, having something like the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act also sort of reinforces that notion that this is a creation of Covid, and therefore we’re addressing it as that,” Choimorrow said. “There’s no recognition of what we have endured as people for hundreds of years. You’re not looking for the right solutions if you’re only looking at the context of the last two years.”

The article illustrates the importance of wearing masks outdoors (2/15/2022 in NYC):

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Resisting on International Women’s Day

by philg

Nostalgia for our old neighborhood, a lawn sign in front of a successful divorce plaintiff’s $1.8 million (Zillow estimate) house:

One good thing about Massachusetts family law is that it relieves quite a few people who identify as “women” from the need ever to work at a W-2 job again and thus these folks can resist on a full-time basis.

Readers: What are you doing to celebrate International Women’s Day? If you’re looking for suggestions, how about a Melinda Gates video watch marathon?

Speaking of Melinda Gates, a former Microsoft employee, “52% of women believe their gender is limiting their careers in the tech industry” (Atlas VPN):

Today we can celebrate many great women who have helped shape the world of technology as we know it. From Katherine Johnson, a mathematician whose pioneering work at NASA was instrumental in the success of sending astronauts into orbit, to Reshma Saujani, founder and CEO of the nonprofit Girls Who Code, which aims to increase the number of women in computer science — these and many other talented women continue to pave the way for others in tech.

Nevertheless, women are still largely underrepresented in the tech industry and face many obstacles when pursuing a career in the field. According to data presented by Atlas VPN, 52% of women believe their gender is limiting their career in tech, and one-fifth of women are thinking about leaving their current position.

Despite increasing discussions about gender diversity in the technology industry, men still hold the vast majority of positions in tech, even in top companies.

If “top companies” are measured by stock market valuation, see Six-year anniversary of the SSGA Gender Diversity Index ETF.

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Six-year anniversary of the SSGA Gender Diversity Index ETF

by philg

Happy 6th birthday to the SSGA Gender Diversity Index ETF (symbol: SHE):

Seeks to provide exposure to US companies that demonstrate greater gender diversity within senior leadership than other firms in their sector

Companies in the Index are ranked within each sector by three gender diversity ratios

The Index seeks to minimize variations in sector weights compared to the composition of the index’s broader investment universe by focusing on companies with the highest levels within their sectors of senior leadership gender diversity

There are nearly 200 holdings in the fund out of the roughly 3,500 significant publicly traded U.S. companies (Wilshire 5000, in which 3,500 is the new 5,000). In other words, roughly 5 percent of U.S. public companies do things the correct (gender diverse) way.

To celebrate Dr. Marissa Mayer‘s brave stewardship of Yahoo! (history, which included 30 days of daily new logos in 2013) we should get a custom chart comparing SHE to the Wilshire 5000 over the past 6 years from Yahoo! Finance.

The stocks of companies that failed to enter the gender diversity Olympics were up by roughly 107 percent in nominal dollars (but don’t forget that inflation eroded these gains; a house in our Florida neighborhood has gone up in price by much more than 107 percent in the same period and even the government’s cooked CPI number is up roughly 20 percent). Stocks of companies with people identifying as “not men” in leadership positions were up by 44 percent.

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Can Ukrainians identify as female and leave the country?

by philg

“Ukraine men ordered to stay and fight Russia as others flee” (New York Post, 2/25/2022):

Ukraine announced late Thursday that men between the ages of 18 and 60 were forbidden from leaving the nation, which has been under martial law since the start of the Russian invasion.

The Ukrainian authorities “were nice, not rude, but they said that men have a duty to defend the country,” said Erzsebet Kovacs, 50, at a train station.

I asked a Ukrainian-American friend whether this was a practical obstacle. “Why can’t anyone who wants to leave say ‘I identify as a woman’?” He responded, “It’s another example of male privilege. The border agents would probably shoot you in the balls.”

He speaks and reads Russian and travels regularly to Ukraine, yet in early January 2022 he estimated the chance of an invasion at only 10 percent, upping his risk assessment somewhat after Joe Biden hinted that a “minor incursion” would be tolerated (NBC). His U.S.-educated child: “This war makes me realize how trivial are the concerns that we’re taught to worry about in [public] school. The microaggressions, the gender pay gap, and Covid. What’s really important is where to hide money and how to get food.”

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Is skating to Elton John the best way to establish heterosexuality?

by philg

Watching figure skating is nearly impossible in our household due to shouted “Boring!” objections from the 6- and 8-year-olds (What do they love? Luge crashes, bobsled flip-overs, skiing yard sales, etc.). Eventually they go to sleep, however, and it is time for 15 minutes of replays from the rink. American sensation Nathan Chen was in the news even before the Olympics. “Straight figure skater offers sincere apology after saying it’s a ‘homosexual-dominated sport’” (Pink News, July 31, 2021):

Olympic figure skater Nathan Chen has apologised after giving an “ignorant” remark about the sport being “homosexual-dominated”.

In a video statement released on Tuesday (27 July), he acknowledged that he gave an “ignorant” response on a podcast in answer to a question about patriarchal stereotypes in skating.

Asked whether he’s ever been advised to play hockey because it’s more “masculine,” Chen replied: “Yes, certainly. Especially as a male athlete… as a straight male athlete in a fairly homosexual-dominated sport, or LGBTQ-dominated sport.

“I think that there is that connotation and there is that ‘Well we don’t really wanna watch guys skate around’, and we’d rather watch hockey or we’d rather watch females do that, which I think is pretty messed up in itself,” he continued.

“It’s a genuine sport, we spend our whole lives trying to hone this craft, and to just sort of be belittled like that is not something that is generally taken lightly.”

The clumsy comment saw Chen accused of perpetuating standards of toxic masculinity and homophobia.

“Basically Nathan Chen had the opportunity to use his in-sport privilege to: support queer athletes as an ally, talk about how figure skating is for everyone, discuss the types of expression rewarded at competition,” commented the non-binary figure skater Racheline Maltese.

“Instead he: told us he was straight, equated feminine with queer and implied they were both negative, implied he is oppressed by queerness in the sport.

So… the tabloids follow this famous person around and haven’t seen him with one or more girlfriends. He describes himself as “straight”. What music does he select for his program? I was expecting perhaps Ice Cube, Kanye West, or DaBaby. Instead it was… Elton John.

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Is it sacrilegious to step on a rainbow flag?

by philg

Happy Valentine’s Day! Let’s talk about love…

I shared some photos from a visit to Atlanta in a chat group, including the following:

A friend who lives in San Francisco:

This is hateful and disrespectful, because people step on the flag with their feet.

If we accept that Rainbow Flagism is a religion and, therefore, that the rainbow flag is a religious symbol, why is it okay to step on the flag?

Sign on a restaurant door (Flying Biscuit) at the same intersection, noting that the door “stays locked for safety purposes” (but it is wrong for nearby Buckhead to try to secede from Atlanta and run its own police!):

The free newspaper offers by Caribou Coffee (in the above photo):

The Waffle House where we ended up because it was impractical to get a table at the Flying Biscuit:

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CNN educates us regarding the glass ceiling

by philg

An immigrant friend’s comment on news from the CNN executive suite:

These are defenders of liberal morality and destroyers of glass ceilings

A Google search for

“glass ceiling” site:cnn.com

yields 2,520 results. “10 reasons single women should be mad” (2017) is typical:

Many voters are upset with the status quo this year, but single women have an especially long list of reasons to be mad. Simply being born female in the United States means you’ll probably earn less than your male peers and pay more for life’s basic necessities.

American women get less money than men. Females earn 84 cents for every dollar a male does, according to Pew Research. PayScale says the gender gap is even worse: women make only 77 cents for every dollar that men do.

(Companies aren’t smart enough to cut their payroll costs by hiring only women, who do the same quality of work for 20 percent less.)

Whether you call it a glass ceiling or a pink ghetto, the reality is there aren’t many American women who make it to the top. PayScale found that the wage gap gets worse the higher up the career ladder women go. No wonder there are fewer female millionaires and billionaires.

Only 24 CEOs at America’s 500 biggest publicly traded companies are female. And the pipeline behind them isn’t encouraging. At large corporations, only 16.5% of the top five positions are held by women, according to a CNNMoney analysis last year.

More recently we learn from these experts on gender equality about a path to an executive VP job at CNN for a person who identified as female. From “CNN’s worst-kept secret that even NYC doormen knew about: Staff at swanky apartment building where Zucker AND his staffer lover had apartments would try to stop his wife from ending up in same elevator as her” (Daily Mail):

Ousted CNN President Jeff Zucker’s relationship with his subordinate Allison Gollust was such an ‘open secret’ that even doormen at the building where they both had apartments tried to ensure that Zucker’s wife and Gollust were never in the elevator together.

Zucker resigned from his $6 million-a-year job at the network on Wednesday, following an internal investigation into his relationship with Gollust, who works as CNN’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer.

‘Jeff and I have been close friends and professional partners for over 20 years,’ she wrote. ‘Recently, our relationship changed during COVID. I regret that we didn’t disclose it at the right time.’

But media sources have said the affair was an ‘open secret’ for more than 10 years – and even the doormen at their Manhattan apartment building tried to keep Allison and Zucker’s wife, Caryn, from interacting.

Their affair reportedly stretches back to when they both worked at NBC in the late 1990s. Zucker worked at the network from 1986 to 2010, becoming executive producer of the Today show, then head of NBC Entertainment before becoming president and CEO of NBC Universal.

America’s #2 expert on COVID-19 was also tied into this story…

In 2012, Gollust was picked by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo to serve as his communications director, before Zucker brought her into work at CNN, where he became president in 2013.

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Is it better to get food poisoning at a women-owned restaurant?

by philg

Because I refused to pollute the sacred temple that is my body with a 947th slice of pizza in one month, while the kids and Senior Management had a strip mall pizza on the way to the Tampa Zoo, I went next door to a “bowl” restaurant. Here’s my Google Maps review:

The good news is that I now know why Chipotle meals always come out too hot to eat. On 12/22 around 5 pm I ordered a Mediterranean Meze bowl. The chicken was not too hot to eat. By 1:30 am I was camped out in the bathroom. The vomiting began at 2:30 am and I was afraid that I was going to die. By 9:00 am, having been up all night in and out of the bathroom, I was afraid that I wasn’t going to die. It has been 48 hours and I’m still dizzy and lightheaded. I’m guessing Clostridium perfringens is the culprit, based on the Mayo Clinic web site: “Commonly spread when serving dishes don’t keep food hot enough or food is chilled too slowly.”

After submitting this, I noticed the following:

How should learning “identifies as women-owned” change how I feel about the worst food poisoning that I can remember despite having traveled to some moderately out-of-the-way places?

In the same strip mall:

When else in a person’s life would it have been healthier to eat at “Fried Rice King”?

(The food poisoning kept me in the hotel room for about 12 hours, then at home for a day, and I was 90 percent better by Day 3. Fortunately, we had so many stops on the Tampa trip that we’d decided to drive rather than fly the Cirrus. Therefore I was able to travel back to Florida’s east coast as inert cargo in the minivan while at least one kid demanded a bathroom or food break every 45 minutes.)

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Take a weekend trip to the desert, to the gay inns, where clothing is optional (and so are masks)

by philg

Here’s a mid-December 2021 story from the LA Times:

Some excerpts from a newspaper that has supporting school closures, mandatory vaccinations, etc.:

The skin wants the sun. The skin wants warmth and touch, and then water and air, shade and cool. The skin pulls you to the desert, to the gay inns, where swimsuits are optional.

some pump gay-circuit electronica through speakers hidden in cactus gardens, that peculiarly ubiquitous and relentlessly driving sex-club music, and those places tend to be more … playful.

None of the photos show anyone wearing the masks that the newspaper says the general public should be ordered to wear.

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Should Zoom let you choose the size of your pronouns on others’ screens?

by philg

“On Being a Trans Abortion Provider” (MedPage Today):

“I’m so glad it’s all women in here.”

As a family doctor and abortion provider, I hear this all the time. I know how important it is for many of the patients I care for to be seen by someone who shares their experiences. But I am not a woman.

I am trans. Getting dressed for every shift, I put on my they/them and he/him pronoun pins. Like many trans folx, I use multiple pronouns. Often these go unseen. People assume my gender based on what they’ve been taught about which bodies look like a woman and which bodies look like a man. I get it though. Patients have a lot on their minds when they come to see me. The middle of someone’s abortion doesn’t feel like the right time to talk about the difference between gender identity and gender presentation anyway.

I can make space for patients misgendering me. I believe abortion can be a very empowering experience, and for many of my patients, the solidarity between women is a part of that. People with uteruses suffer so much violence from men. Invasive exams and procedures can trigger that trauma, especially when performed by men. A great deal of what we, as medical providers, do to people in gynecological care was developed through violence, intentional abuse, and oppression of women of color. This legacy, rooted in white supremacy, is especially on my mind when providing reproductive care. So I choose not to correct the women who misgender me while voicing their appreciation for my presence out of respect for their experience and comfort.

But what I cannot make space for is being misgendered by my colleagues. It is a daily occurrence. Sometimes followed by over-apologizing, asking me to excuse the mistake to assuage their discomfort at my own expense. It happens despite the pronoun pins and Zoom name. Despite me talking about how weird it is to give myself testosterone injections. Despite the they/he in my email signature on that email I sent months ago announcing my pronouns and asking for some basic inclusion. All of the efforts I am asked to take on to become a part of a “more just” and “more diverse” workforce and movement are for naught if the very people they are trying to include are continually made to feel othered, a hassle, or forgotten.

The author’s name is Quinn Jackson. According to baby name web sites, this is roughly equally prevalent for boys and girls. Therefore, I’m not sure why Dr. Jackson believes that putting their/his name on Zoom will cue others on the call that they/he wants to be referred to with “they/them and he/him”. Zoom lets a user pick his/her/zir/their preferred pronouns for display, but the pronouns show up in a smaller font than the name. From https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/4402698027533-Adding-and-sharing-your-pronouns

“Your pronouns will appear next to your display name in your participant video or thumbnail and next to your display name in the Participants list.”

What would work, I think, is if Zoom users could specify how prominently to display chosen pronouns. Dr. Jackson, for example, could show theirs/his in boldface 48 pt. type smack in the middle of the video image. A virtual face tattoo, essentially. Fellow participants in a Zoom call wouldn’t miss that.

(Separately, if “[p]eople with uteruses suffer so much violence from men,” as Dr. Jackson says, why is they/he injecting themselves/himself with testosterone, a hormone that leads directly to violence? (see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3693622/ )) Shouldn’t trans folx who abhor violence refrain from using this hormone?)

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