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The Biggest Myth About the Gender Wage Gap

Category: Business

The real gap isn’t between men and women doing the same job. It’s between the different jobs that men and women take.

It might be the most famous statistic about female workers in the United States: Women earn “only 72 percent as much as their male counterparts.”

It’s also famously false. A new survey from PayScale this morning finds that the wage gap nearly evaporates when you control for occupation and experience among the most common jobs, especially among less experienced workers. It is only as careers advance, they found, that men outpaced female earnings as they made their way toward the executive suite.

So, women aren’t starting off behind their male counterparts, so much as they’re choosing different jobs and losing ground later in their careers.

The irony is that as women advance in their own careers, they might be more likely to fall behind, but they are also more likely to negotiate. That popular refrain that women don’t know how to ask for a raise? That’s bunk, too, the researchers concluded. Nearly a third of women — and 29 percent of men — have asked for raises, and even more female executives have done the same. In female-dominated sectors like health care and education more, half of women have negotiated for salary, benefits, or a promotion .

Still, inequalities persist. Comparing men and women job-by-job conceals the fact that men still dominate many of the highest-paying jobs. PayScale studied more than 120 occupation categories, from “machinist” to “dietician.” Nine of the ten lowest-paying jobs (e.g.: child-care worker, library assistant) were disproportionately female. Nine of the ten highest-paying jobs (e.g.: software architect, psychiatrist) were majority male. Nurse anesthetist was the best-paid position held mostly by women; but an estimated 69 percent of better-paid anesthesiologists were male.

The highest-paid job in PayScale’s controlled set is anesthesiologists, who are 69 percent male and 31 percent female — creating a 38 percent percentage-point “jobs gap.” Here is the jobs gap for the ten highest-paid positions.

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PayScale’s study is a necessary chaser to BLS and Census data, because the government “compares all weekly earnings, even though women and men do different things,” said PayScale chief economist Katie Bardaro. “We’re trying to compare men and women with the same education, same management responsibilities, similar employers, in companies with a similar number of employees.” After controlling for these factors, “the gender wage gap disappears for most positions,” she said.

In one job, they had enough data to show a statistically significant wage advantage for female workers. That is “dental hygienist.”

But even if the gender gap disappears after controlling for experience and job selection, it’s hard to imagine that men thoroughly dominating the highest-paying positions is a good outcome. For example, the expectation that women more than men bear the responsibility to raise children gently nudges thousands of highly educated women out of full-time work.

There is a wage difference. But it might not be the wage difference that you thought. The real gap isn’t between men and women doing the same job. The real gap is between men and women doing different jobs and following different careers.

That gap should continue to tighten. Women have earned the majority of bachelor’s degrees for the last few years. They’re well-positioned to benefit from a growing professional service economy, and working moms are already the primary breadwinners in 40 percent of households with kids, an all-time high. But if women are more likely to go into health care than manufacturing, more likely to work in human resources than software, and more likely to leave their careers early to start a family, the gaps will persist.

Ideally, some day soon, it won’t take a statistical “control” to show that men and women are fundamental equal partners — and equal competitors — in the work force. It will just be the obvious truth.

Derek Thompson is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees business coverage for TheAtlantic.com.

Facebook can’t keep turning a blind eye to the women-haters it enables

Category: topic

By dealing with violent misogyny on a “case by case” basis, Facebook sends the message that the wider ideas are OK, writes Jane Fae.

This piece contains descriptions of, and links to, extremely disturbing imagery of sexual violence from the very start. Reader discretion is strongly advised.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but what do you do after raping a deaf mute? Simple: Break her fingers so she can’t tell anyone!

That – and here I’ll apologise both for that opening and for what follows – is vile. Beyond belief that it be accepted as humour in this day and age. (Although I’ll note, in passing, that it is also staple fare for some of our supposedly “edgier” comics, who get away with such stuff because their quick-fire style means they deliver one obscenity and are on to the next before you realise what you’ve just heard).

And its by no means the worst. Facebook is awash with such viciousness. Images of women beaten, bruised, murdered, raped in all their technicolour glory.

If you have a strong stomach, WomenActionMedia! (WAM!) have been collecting examples.

Only, these are jokes, doncha know? Because they carry witty captions such as “She Broke My Heart. I Broke Her Nose”, or “Women deserve equal rights. And lefts”.

I am not even going to try and analyse. Some of it makes me angry beyond words; some just makes me want to cry.

Instead, let’s pull back a little and understand why, suddenly, the issue is making news. I first encountered instances of this particular misogynistic trope on the #silentnomore hashtag: that was an attempt by women, including survivors of abuse and violence, to create a space where they could speak about their experiences.

Bad idea. Women speaking to women clearly enraged some men, who bombarded the topic with “what about us?” rhetoric – and witty links to this sort of imagery. I complained to Twitter: nothing happened. The pictures stayed.

Meanwhile, over on Facebook, these pics have been proliferating. Sometimes, its blokes – y’know, regular kind of guys – sharing them “for a laff”. Sometimes, they are used more aggressively, to attack and humiliate “uppity women”. Women, in turn, have been noticing. A joint campaign, organised by Everyday Sexism, WAM! and Soraya Chemaly has condemned this material as gender-based hate speech: their campaign, asking advertisers to boycott Facebook, is gaining support and increasing in effectiveness.You can follow what’s happening on #FBrape.

As for Facebook, they have spluttered highmindedly about the difficulty of negotiating a pathway between interest groups: how they must balance individual rights against the imperative of free speech. Interviewed by the BBC, one spokesperson rejected calls for them to censor “disturbing content”, or “crude attempts at humour”, because “while it may be vulgar and offensive, distasteful content on its own does not violate our policies”.

Still, they acknowledge officially that much of this material is “abhorrent to many of us who work at Facebook”. A spokesperson added: “These cases test all of us, because they can be deeply jarring.”

Do you not feel their pain, caught between a rock and a hard place?

Besides, they claim, the vast majority of this content has been taken down already. Although, in what looks like a serious attempt to have their cake and eat it, they further add: “removing content is not the solution to getting rid of ignorance. Having the freedom to debate serious issues like this is how we fight prejudice”.

Silly me! I must have missed out on the serious debate about whether it is appropriate to break a woman’s nose if she fails to make a sandwich right, first time of asking.

There is no serious issue in play here, beyond what should be the limits of free speech and what is acceptable within a relatively open online space. I have a smidgeon of sympathy for the US-based Facebook, nailed to a US legal perspective on free speech whereby only material that shows direct harm can be prosecuted.

But that’s only half the story. Facebook has a long track record of somewhat heavy-handedly imposing heteronormative values and attitudes. Breastfeeding groups have been taken down, as have all manner of pages celebrating the female body in art and more generally, while soft porn remains. As does some hate speech, magically disappearing only when a journalist mentions it to their press office.

Laura, organiser at EverydaySexism, tells me today about the different treatment of two cases. Complaints about the content of “Black bitches and dogs” led to content being removed on a picture by picture basis: whereas the organiser of “Amazing Women” found her page supporting the #FBrape campaign, with some images added as political statement, taken down – and her personal account suspended.

Suspicion remains that Facebook have only intervened more publicly in response to the #FBrape campaign, issuing soothing words to calm their advertisers.

In the end, though, what’s truly problematic is this idea that all speech is equal, and speech that encourages abuse and violence against women is every bit as worthwhile and protection-worthy as any other form of speech. It isn’t – that’s an 18th century argument still getting too much unquestioning support in an internet age. Speech and publication mean something very different from what the US founding fathers meant. It’s a very laddish argument, which is not to say that women may not also support it: but the fact that Facebook relies on it means they are not listening to women and to an alternative perspective that women may put.

That’s the real issue here. Facebook needs to start listening to women. No joke.

Jane Fae's picture

Jane Fae is a feminist writer. She tweets as @JaneFae. Via NewStatesman

Is Erick Erickson Terribly, Embarrassingly Wrong About Women?

Category: topic

On Fox News today, Erick Erickson told host Lou Dobbs that liberals were being “anti-science” by celebrating the fact that America’s working mothers are the primary breadwinners in 40 percent of households:

“I’m so used to liberals telling conservatives that they’re anti-science. But liberals who defend this and say it is not a bad thing are very anti-science. When you look at biology — when you look at the natural world — the roles of a male and a female in society and in other animals, the male typically is the dominant role. The female, it’s not antithesis, or it’s not competing, it’s a complementary role. We’re lost the ability to have complementary relationships … and it’s tearing us apart.”

Oh. My. God. Let’s treat this Ron Burgundy moment with some data.

First, there is something troubling about this statistic. The majority of female breadwinners are single moms, who face an extraordinary tension between working pay and raising children. But I didn’t hear Erickson mention the phrase “single moms.” He was talking about women earning more than men. And the fact that some married women are out-earning their husbands isn’t tragic. It’s inevitable. And it’s good.

Historically, the roles of a male and female in society have been clearly delineated. Up to the 1960s, mothers did the vast majority of housework and child-care and dads did the vast majority of paid work. But today, mostly due the rise of female education and labor participation, all three activities are much more evenly shared. In other words, contra Erickson, married couples are more “complementary” than ever.

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Here’s the thing about this chart. This isn’t a picture of the “unnatural” world that Erickson fears. This is the natural world! If anything, the unnatural world is the one where law deprives women of the right to vote until 1920 and where we discourage women from working alongside men or doing anything besides raising kids and cooking dinner.

The fact that dual-earner households introduce new challenges for couples is a social development — one The Atlantic debates all the time. It’s perfectly reasonable to point out that dividing chores and child-work between two equal partners is a different task — and possibly more challenging — than an arrangement where the husband works all day, comes home to a clean house, and plays with his kid for an hour. But these time-use questions have nothing to do with the contention that “science” shouldn’t allow women to “compete” with men in the workforce. Far from “tearing us apart,” it’s widely acknowledged that dual-earner households allow families to live more comfortably.

Women might be complementary in Erickson’s worldview, but they’re primary when it comes to economic growth. The increase in female labor force participation in the last half century has added nearly 2 percentage points per year to GDP growth in the U.S., according to one study. The nice thing about the rise of working women is that no matter how retrograde your opinion of them, they’re still making all of us richer.

Pew Study Shows Women Leading Breadwinners in 40 Percent of Households

Category: Business

The phenomenon of women bringing home the bacon is nothing new. But a new study shows that women are now the leading – or only — breadwinners in 40 percent of American households.

Women earn more than men in almost a quarter of U.S. households, a huge leap from 50 years ago, when only a handful of women brought home more income, according to a study released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center.

Women are now the leading or solo breadwinners in 40 percent of households, compared with just 11 percent in 1960, according to Census Bureau data analyzed by Pew.

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That’s both good and bad, depending which part of the ladder you’re on: At the top, educated women are catching up with men in the workforce, but on the bottom rungs are more single moms than ever—most of them living near the poverty line.

“It’s a long-term trend since the ’60s that the breadwinner moms have gone up,” said Wendy Wang, a Pew research associate and the lead author of the report.

Seventy-one percent of husbands are working in households where women make more money than their spouses, and they have a median family income of $80,000, according to 2011 data.

In 1960, only 4 percent of women made more than their husbands; it’s now 23 percent. That translates into 5.1 million married “breadwinner moms.” Of those making more than their husbands, 49 percent have at least a college degree, 65 percent are white and 67 percent are between the ages of 30 and 50.

Women, who for generations were not in the workforce in the same numbers as men, are still catching up. The Pew study noted that despite the fact that women are now equally or better educated than their husbands, most men still earn more than their spouses.

While Oprah Winfrey and Marissa Meyer are often mentioned as high-profile examples of that trend, the other end of the economic spectrum is driving the numbers.

The other part of the female breadwinner equation focuses on the steep rise in unwed mothers. In 1960, only 5 percent of women with children were unmarried. In 2010, that number had increased to 41 percent, according to research from the National Center for Health Statistics cited in the Pew report. The median income for a single mother who has never been married was $17,400 as of 2011. That can include income from a job, child support and government assistance.

In 1960, only 4 percent of women made more than their husbands; it’s now 23 percent. That translates into 5.1 million married “breadwinner moms.”

Of the never-married mothers, 49 percent have a high school education or less, and 46 percent are 30 or younger; 40 percent were black, 24 percent Hispanic and 32 percent white.

The Pew survey also gauged opinion on more women becoming the primary breadwinner.”The public is really conflicted about the trend,” Wang said.

Overall, survey respondents liked the economic benefits to their families but also worried that work might take a toll on their children and marriages. About 67 percent said the change made it easier for families to earn enough money to live comfortably; about 28 percent said it was harder for families to earn enough, and 2 percent said it made no difference, according to Pew.

by Amy Langfield

The Dangers of Asbestos Have Become Political

Category: Current

My husband, Bruce, was a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives until October 10^th, 2000 when he died of pleural mesothelioma––a rare disease caused by asbestos exposure. He was exposed during his work as a laborer, a job he took so he could put himself through college. While many only know of asbestos cancers like mesothelioma from late-night television commercials, there are a growing number of people experiencing the real fate this deadly disease carries.

asbestos

Mesothelioma is known as being a fast mover after diagnosis, taking most victims’ lives just four to eighteen months later. Asbestos victims rely on compensation from personal injury trusts through asbestos claims to cover their insurmountable medical expenses, but sadly many victims only receive a small percentage of what companies owe them. This places a huge burden on the victims and their families.

Recently, asbestos companies are using their political influence to push a new bill in Congress, led by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). It is called the “Furthering Asbestos Claim Transparency (FACT) Act.” In short, these companies want to use this bill as a means to delay medical payments, which results in most victims dying before they seek justice. The parties in support of this bill are hiding behind this notion of “transparency”, but the reality is this bill places burdensome reporting requirements on victims applying to the bankruptcy trusts. This requirement is not two-sided, however. The same companies who are to blame won’t have comparable requirements, creating a one-sided and unfair bill designed to debilitate those who have already been injured. Personally identifiable information such as the last four digits of social security numbers, private work history, and personal information of children exposed at an early age would become public, making victims vulnerable to identity theft and discrimination.

This is just the latest attempt by big companies and individuals like the Koch brothers to avoid responsibility for their heinous wrongdoings. Just last week the House Judiciary Committee began fast-tracking this bill. Even though the Committee promised to hold a public hearing to provide an opportunity for a patient and two widows to testify, they instead sent the bill to a full committee markup and vote without bothering to hear the victims’ side of the story.

The time is now for us to take a stand. I am a spokesperson for the Asbestos Cancer Victims’ Rights Campaign. The ACVRC is a national campaign dedicated to protecting the rights and privacy of asbestos victims and their families. By joining our fight, you can help us defeat this unfair legislation and the potentially dangerous precedent it sets.

I work with the ACVRC to honor Bruce’s legacy as well as do what I can to help other patients and families protect their legal and constitutional rights. While awareness and information surrounding mesothelioma have improved considerably, we need to continue raising our voices. Starting with signing our petition, I encourage you to join our effort. With your help, we can put a stop to this legislation. Together, we can work towards building a better tomorrow and truly make a lasting difference.

Susan Vento of Cancer Victims Rights

Moms with elite education opting out of careers

Category: Femen

VANDERBILT (US) — Female graduates from top-ranked universities who become mothers are working less despite the promise of higher wages, new research finds.

The battle for work-life balance among female white-collar employees, especially those with children, is something women have struggled with for decades. Though past studies have found little evidence that women are opting out of the workforce in general, first-of-its-kind research shows that female graduates of elite universities are working much fewer hours than those from less selective institutions.

“Even though elite graduates are more likely to earn advanced degrees, marry at later ages and have higher expected earnings, they are still opting out of full-time work at much higher rates than other graduates, especially if they have children,” says Joni Hersch, professor of law and economics and of management at Vanderbilt University.

Hersch’s research, published in the Vanderbilt Law School, Law and Economics Research Paper Series, finds that 60 percent of female graduates from elite colleges are working full time compared to 68 percent of women from other schools.

It’s all about the kids

The presence of children strongly influences how much a woman works. Labor market activity is lower for women with children, but the gap between those women with and without children is largest for elite graduates. Among elite graduates, married women without children are 20 percentage points more likely to be employed than their elite counterparts with children, while among non-elite graduates, the difference in the likelihood of employment is 13.5 percentage points.

MBA moms work least of all

Hersch found that when comparing graduates from elite and less selective schools, the largest gap in full-time labor market activity is among women who also earned a master’s in business degree.

“Married MBA mothers with a bachelor’s degree from the most selective schools are 30 percentage points less likely to be employed full time than are graduates of less selective schools,” says Hersch.

The full-time employment rate for MBA moms who earned bachelor’s degrees from a tier-one institution is 35 percent. In contrast, the full-time employment rate for those from a less-selective institution is 66 percent. The gap remains even after taking into account the selectivity of MBA institution, personal characteristics, current or prior occupation, undergraduate major, spouse’s characteristics, number and age of children, and family background.

Fewer female CEOs?

Hersch contends these statistics show that the greater rate of opting out by MBA moms with undergraduate degrees from elite institutions has implications for women’s professional advancement.

“Elite workplaces, like Fortune 500 companies, prefer to hire graduates of elite colleges,” says Hersch. “Thus, lower labor market activity of MBAs from selective schools may have both a direct effect on the number of women reaching higher-level corporate positions as well as an indirect effect because a smaller share of women in top positions is associated with a smaller pipeline of women available to advance through the corporate hierarchy,” says Hersch.

Comparing degrees

Hersch found a similarly large gap among women who later earned a master’s in education. Sixty-six percent of tier-one graduates are employed full time compared to 82 percent of graduates from non-elite institutions.

Other factors also contribute to which women are working more hours.

“Estimates show greater labor activity among women with a bachelor’s degree in a field other than arts and humanities; those with graduate degrees; those in higher-level occupations such as management, science, education and legal; and women who are not white,” says Hersch.

Why opt out?

A common question associated with opting out is whether highly educated women are willingly choosing to exit the labor force to care for their children or whether they are “pushed out” by inflexible workplaces. But Hersch says this hypothesis of inflexible workplaces does not explain why labor market activity differs between graduates of elite and non-elite schools.

“Graduates of elite institutions are likely to have a greater range of workplace options as well as higher expected wages than graduates of less selective institutions, which would suggest that labor market activity would be higher among such women,” Hersch writes.

“Without discounting the well-known challenges of combining family and professional responsibilities, increasing workplace flexibility alone may have only a limited impact of reducing the gap between graduates of elite and non-elite schools.”

Gathering the data

Hersch gathered her data from the 2003 National Survey of College Graduates, which provided detailed information for more than 100,000 college graduates. The survey was conducted by the US Census Bureau for the National Science Foundation.

Researcher Joni Hersch says the hypothesis that women with children are “pushed out” of inflexible workplaces does not explain why labor market activity differs between graduates of elite and non-elite schools. (Credit: Even Westvang/Flickr)

To identify schools considered elite and to put these schools into tier levels, Hersch used both the Carnegie Classifications of institutions of higher education and Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges. Barron’s Profiles looks at quality indicators of each year’s entering class (SAT or ACT, high school GPA and high school class rank, and percent of applicants accepted). Barron’s then places colleges into seven categories: most competitive, highly competitive, very competitive, competitive, less competitive, noncompetitive, and special.

The Carnegie Classifications are based on factors such as the highest degree awarded; the number, type, and field diversity of post-baccalaureate degrees awarded annually; and federal research support. For example, Research universities offer a full range of baccalaureate programs through the doctorate, give high priority to research, award 50 or more doctoral degrees each year, and receive annually $40 million or more in federal support.

Source: Vanderbilt University

Physically Strong Men Are Less Likely to Share Wealth

Category: topic

UC SANTA BARBARA (US) — Upper body strength and socioeconomic status can predict men’s opinions on the redistribution of wealth, according to researchers.

“The link between body size and aggressiveness is everywhere in the animal kingdom,” says Daniel Sznycer, a postdoctoral researcher at University of California, Santa Barbara’s Center for Evolutionary Psychology and co-author of the paper. “It’s there among invertebrates, vertebrates, non-human primates, and human primates—us.”

At the level of individuals, redistribution involves a conflict over resources, so the human mind should perceive issues of economic redistribution through that lens, Sznycer continues.

“We humans are also primates and mammals and vertebrates—heirs to the selective regime on conflict. And so, this study predicts that our human minds will use estimates of fighting ability—in this case, upper body strength—to calibrate one’s own stance in such conflicts.”

In the days of our early ancestors, decisions about the distribution of resources weren’t made in courthouses or legislative offices, but through shows of strength. With this in mind, Sznycer colleagues hypothesized that upper-body strength—a proxy for the ability to physically defend or acquire resources—would predict men’s opinions about economic redistribution.

As reported in Psychological Science, the researchers collected data on bicep size, socioeconomic status, and support for economic redistribution from hundreds of people in the United States, Argentina, and Denmark. In line with their hypothesis, the data revealed that stronger men are more likely to assert their economic self-interest.

What counts as self-interest regarding redistribution, however, varies based on socioeconomic status (SES). Redistribution increases the share of resources of low-SES men, and decreases the share of resources of high-SES men.

“Men of low-SES stand to gain, whereas men of high-SES stand to lose,” Sznycer says. “What we found is that higher upper-body strength exacerbates your self-interested stance. Bigger biceps correlate with more support for redistribution among low-SES men, and with more opposition to redistribution among high-SES men.”

Conversely, men with lower upper-body strength were less likely to assert themselves. High-SES men of this group showed less resistance to redistribution, while those of low SES demonstrated less support.

“Our results demonstrate that physically weak males are more reluctant than physically strong males to assert their self-interest—just as if disputes over national policies were a matter of direct physical confrontation among small numbers of individuals, rather than abstract electoral dynamics among millions,” says Michael Bang Peterson of Aarhus University, one of the paper’s lead authors.

According to Sznycer, the paper’s other lead author, however, socioeconomic status by itself doesn’t predict people’s attitudes about redistribution. “It’s only when you combine the information about strength and socioeconomic status that you can predict these political attitudes,” says Sznycer.

“This suggests that the human mind is ecologically rational and designed for small-scale societies rather than means-end rational. In short, within our modern skulls lies a brain designed for ancestral challenges.”

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“Our results demonstrate that physically weak males are more reluctant than physically strong males to assert their self-interest—just as if disputes over national policies were a matter of direct physical confrontation among small numbers of individuals, rather than abstract electoral dynamics among millions,” says Michael Bang Peterson of Aarhus University. (Credit: “man showing his bicep” via Shutterstock)

Interestingly, the researchers found no link between upper-body strength and redistribution opinions among women. “This is consistent with the male bias in the aggressive use of force among mammals,” Sznycer says.

“Compared to males, ancestral human females derived fewer benefits and incurred higher costs when bargaining using physical aggression. Women can certainly be competitive, but they use more indirect forms of aggression.”

Sznycer also notes that finding the same results in three countries suggests the effect is driven by standard features of the human mind in tandem with particular environmental variables—here strength and resources—rather than being an idiosyncratic cultural effect. “These three countries have quite different distributive policies, and yet the way strength modulates these political attitudes is the same everywhere,” he says.

Additional researchers from UCSB and Griffith University contributed to the study.

Source: UC Santa Barbara

The great feminist revival

Category: Current

“An anti-Page 3 campaign, SlutWalks and the relaunch of Spare Rib show that feminism is as vigorous – and necessary – as ever. Why did we ever doubt it?2

I’ve lost count of all the times I’ve been told that feminism is dead. I’ve even found myself described as a “post-feminist” writer, as if I were one of the survivors of a lost golden age. I’ve never taken it very seriously, because I know that writing off political movements is a mug’s game. But now feminism is back, and in such a big way that I can’t help wondering how all those doomsayers are feeling.

A lively internet campaign to get rid of Page 3 has collected more than 100,000 signatures and received the support of the Girl Guides. Another campaign, The Women’s Room, is encouraging women to add their names to a database of female experts to counter male bias in the media. And the pioneering feminist magazine Spare Rib is being relaunched in both paper and online editions.

I’m not in the least surprised. Feminism is one of the great human rights movements, and a raft of evidence shows that it is more necessary than ever. None of the big issues has gone away since I began writing Misogynies a quarter of a century ago; I seem to have been writing about equal pay throughout my career, and I’m still waiting for a government that will enforce the transparency we need to achieve it. Domestic violence accounts for one in seven recorded crimes of violence, while the exposure of “historic” rape cases on an industrial scale suggests that a culture of impunity existed for decades at such organisations as the BBC.

Two things combined to force feminism into the semi-underground it’s now emerging from so triumphantly. Like any transformative movement, feminism threatened the status quo, unsettling powerful men in business, politics and the media who saw their interests threatened. The movement was actually very diverse, encompassing radical feminists and women who worked in traditional political movements, but we were all caricatured. The slander worked, turning off younger women who didn’t want to be associated with the feminist label.

At the same time, feminist campaigns against the most egregious forms of sexism had begun to pay off, so younger women didn’t encounter them in the way my generation had. When I asked to study economics A level in the 1970s, I was told it wasn’t taught at my all-girls state school; when I started work on a local paper, the features editor assured me it wouldn’t be long before I could stop covering court cases and write about fashion. Thanks to the efforts of 70s and 80s feminists, some of that reflexive sexism has gone into decline, or at least become less visible. For many women in their 20s or early 30s, it’s only when discussions about pay, promotion and childcare kick in that they realise it’s still a man’s world in too many ways.

Campaigners from Object and Turn Your Back On Page 3 protest outside the Sun’s offices. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

Journalism looks like a model of equal opportunities but three-quarters of news reporters on national titles are men, and women account for only a third of journalists covering politics and business. Rebekah Brooks, who was the most powerful female newspaper executive in the country until just before her arrest in the phone-hacking scandal, modelled herself on her most ambitious male colleagues — and cultivated exclusively male mentors.

For anyone who believes gender equality is no longer an issue, the economic crisis is a wakeup call. Unemployment among women rose by almost 20% between 2009 and 2012, compared with 0.32% among men. Vital services for women, including shelters for victims of domestic violence and trafficking, were among the first to feel the Coalition government’s axe. I’m sure some of the feminist energy that is around at the moment has been generated by the urgent need to protect women’s interests. But it’s also a reaction to the growth of a vast commercial sex industry, which has flooded popular culture with crude sexual images of women.

The legal side of the industry is visible in billboards advertising pole dancing clubs, targeted at high-earners in the City. But there’s also a huge illegal trade in the transport of girls and women across continents to provide sexual “services” to men in developed countries. Such things were unheard of when I wrote Misogynies and while I was aware of the horrors of female genital mutilation, I didn’t know it was happening in the UK.

In the light of all this, it would be amazing if feminism wasn’t undergoing a revival. One change for the better is the existence of the internet, which means campaigns can quickly become international. The SlutWalks movement started in Canada and was imported into the UK, where it updated the old Take Back the Night protests. I love seeing women asserting the right to be sexual on their own terms in a culture that promotes extreme images of women, from the preposterous “glamour” model Katie Price to the curiously sexless Duchess of Cambridge.

Women’s rights are human rights. It’s one of my favourite slogans. Twenty-first-century feminism is about girls’ education, safe contraception and abortion, freedom from sexual and domestic violence, and the right to enjoy public space. It’s a vibrant and radical manifesto for a supposedly defunct movement.

Joan Smith at the Guradian UK – http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/joansmith

Charlotte Raven: why feminism needs to get radical again

Category: Femen

When I go to speak to Charlotte Raven about her relaunch of feminist magazine Spare Rib – born 1972, died 1993 – I quickly realise she is talking about something much bigger. She is 43, and has been fulminating about feminism for a decade now, she says, a fact that shows in the fizz of her ideas, the way she jumps from one innovation or exhumation to another. There’s her plan to revive consciousness-raising groups, for instance, despite some of her activist friends dismissing them as “bourgeois navel-gazing”. She sees these gatherings – which burgeoned in the 70s as a place where women could discuss how specific feminist issues affected them – as a way of mending “that link between the personal and political that has just been completely broken”.

She wants to hold immersive events, with a political edge, which explains why numerous performance artists are involved in the Spare Rib project. And there will be activism, although she isn’t quite sure what the political demands will be. Raven and some friends were going to protest at the Epsom Derby next month, in memory of the militant suffragette Emily Wilding Davison, who, 100 years ago, stepped in front of the king’s horse, Anmer, and died of her injuries. “But we couldn’t think what we were going to be asking for. It was the same problem – how do you capture it in a sash? Actually, austerity is one of the really big things that we want to talk about. That’s unsexy, [but] actually, what is the damn point of having a vote if you can’t feed your bloody children?” She doesn’t care about issues such as the dearth of women on FTSE boards, she says: “I care about bloody women who are affected by the fucking benefit cuts, but I don’t really care about that other thing. I can’t pretend I do.” Her thoughts unspool wildly, entertainingly, through utopian feminism, radical feminism and collectivism. Raven clearly isn’t just looking to relaunch a magazine. She wants to start a movement.

Not that her burning ambition is immediately obvious. When I arrive at her big, beautiful house in north London at the agreed time she is initially surprised to see me, but hugs a greeting and shows me through to the garden while she rushes off to prepare for the photographer. This is an interesting moment for Raven, a dramatic turn in a dramatic life. She had a tumultuous 1990s, working as an editorial assistant to Toby Young at the Modern Review; when she started a relationship with the magazine’s co-founder, Julie Burchill, in a blaze of publicity, Young accused them of plotting to turn the publication into a “cross between the New Statesman and Spare Rib”. He therefore closed it without telling them. Raven went on to edit a short-lived relaunch, and became a columnist for this newspaper, while Burchill achieved maximum shock value, as ever, by marrying Raven’s brother Daniel. (The two women still see each other at family occasions, but I get the impression they’re not close. Raven says she’s sure “Julie will do the job of creating the unsisterly rants” when it comes to critiquing Spare Rib.) Back in the 90s, she says, she thought the party would just keep going.

Raven married the film-maker Tom Sheahan, and they have two children – a daughter, eight, and son, three. In 2006, after her father was diagnosed with the incurable neurodegenerative disorder Huntington’s disease – which causes involuntary, uncontrollable movements, along with severe cognitive problems – she tested positive for it too. Its symptoms typically appear in mid-life, her age now. She wrote movingly in 2010 about how she had considered suicide as a result, eventually deciding against it after visiting a community of HD sufferers in Venezuela. “The case for carrying on can’t be argued,” she concluded. “Suicide is rhetoric. Life is life.”

At the same time, she was wrestling with writing a confessional feminist memoir. She laboured over this for 10 years, the idea being that it would be a “consciousness-raising exercise,” she says, “in that you’d expose the truth of what it’s like from inside the prison of femininity. But the trouble is, trying to do that without making yourself just look like a cunt is actually almost impossible.” She rewrote it 20 different ways, she laughs – she says repeatedly that this was a difficult time, but hoots through the telling – “and then Caitlin Moran’s book [How To Be a Woman] came out, and I realised that was the end of the road … She got there first, and hers took six months to write, famously, and it has this great sort of jeu d’esprit, whereas mine was this intense combination of theory … and my continuing battle with my narcissism. Which Caitlin’s is about, probably as a subtext. She’s managing to conceal it with a load of good gags. And mine didn’t have enough good gags. So, over a period of time, my daughter had to tell me when we went to the [local] bookshop to put my blinkers on so I didn’t see the huge piles of How To Be a Woman.”

She had been fantasising about starting a feminist magazine anyway and, six months ago, she went to the Women’s Library and started looking through its collection. Raven has been politically engaged since childhood. While her father was making “a load of money” publishing magazines for the Duty Free industry, she and her “Marxist mother” were sitting at home, cursing him, she says. But back in the 80s and early 90s, Spare Rib never appealed to her. By this time, the magazine had been edited by a collective for years and, though it still ran groundbreaking material, – it covered issues the mainstream media wouldn’t have touched at the time – it also had a reputation for being dour. Once, early on, for instance, it ran a helpful editorial for confused readers headed: “Why is it such a depressing magazine?”

But looking at the very first issues, edited by co-founders Rosie Boycott and Marsha Rowe, Raven felt inspired. She loved the “wonderful, countercultural” tone, and determined to relaunch it. She began forming an editorial board, comprising “middle-aged punks”, a strongly feminist schoolgirl and Boycott herself, and started thinking how to fund it. Advertising was the obvious answer, but she felt this was inappropriate. The problem with mainstream feminist debate, she says, is the way it’s been commodified. She points to the furore around Pussy Riot, last year, in which the Russian anti-Putin protesters were seized on as the latest hip manifestation of feminism; soon after, their image was for sale on T-shirts under the “Free Pussy Riot” slogan. Raven believes feminism has become “a marketing device – it always was. Cosmo always used feminism to market itself. But now it feels like that’s universal. And so I think the only way of de-commodifying it is by not having bloody brands next door to it. You can’t write about feminism within that context.”

She decided to raise seed money by sending an email around to “a hundred rich friends, and get them to send it to all their rich friends”. That email was leaked last month, with journalists focusing on one of its more hair-raising assertions – that Rod Liddle and George Galloway would appear as “costumed penitents”, serving guests at a Spare Rib founders’ event. Raven says the tone of the email was actually just intended to “make Simon-bloody-Kelner [former editor of the Independent] laugh and part with a hundred quid,” and, on reflection, Liddle and Galloway would probably enjoy the experience a little too much, so that idea’s been scrapped.

The email, though, was a success. She has received nearly 1,000 responses, and the £20,000 fundraising target has been hit. The idea is to run the magazine, which will launch later this year, as a membership organisation – what Raven calls “a politicised version of crowd-funding” – where those who sign up will be consulted about content. It will also be available on newsstands, priced £3.50. Alongside this there will be a website, expected to go live at the end of July, where content will be free, and people will be able to upload their own writing for possible inclusion in the magazine.

She rushes off to find some of the emails she has been sent, and starts reading me one. “‘I want to tell you how immensely relieved and excited I am that you and others are relaunching Spare Rib. I am utterly desperate for an antidote to the suffocating proliferation of vacuous crud that spews from every vein of the media, and I know that many of my friends feel the same.’ That’s honestly absolutely representative of the people who have got in touch with us,” she says.

Charlotte Raven: the magazine will launch later in the year, but she hopes to have its website up in July. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian

Raven wants to leave behind what she sees as a 1990s form of feminism, where “you could just be as superficial as you liked, and you could call yourself a feminist, and still be obsessed with shoes. I think you’ve got to just draw a line under that and say it’s better not to be obsessed with shoes, actually.” Does she think Spare Rib can get feminism back on course? “Yeah! Absolutely! Without a doubt,” she says. “It will take a while, but it feels like the right moment suddenly. I don’t know why. But it feels like there’s a wind behind us.”

Just do it: Sheryl Sandberg’s feminist manifesto at work

Category: Business

Facebook boss Sheryl Sandberg – one of the world’s most powerful women – shares her secret of career success. Don’t hold back or sell yourself short, she says. Does her advice ring true?

Sheryl Sandberg is the tenth most powerful business woman in the world, according to Forbes, with a net worth of some £530 million, and she’s adamant that she didn’t get where she is today without a healthy dose of assertiveness, determination and ambition.

In her book, Lean in: women, work and the will to lead, Sandberg addresses the dearth of women in leadership roles and investigate just what is holding them back. Her answer: not just extermal, structural problems, but internal obstacles which she says won’t fall down unless women themselves start pushing.

In short, what is holding women back is a thousand small decisions: failing to stand up for yourself when it matters, deferring to others first, being too modest about successes, deliberately holding back because of future plans to have a family.

“A truly equal world would be one where women ran half our countries and men ran half our homes”, she declares: and the reason why this is not so, she believes, cannot simply be blamed on the patriarchal establishment.

Using stories gleaned from her similarly high-flying friends and celebrity acquaintances (there is a lot of name dropping scattered through the book), as well as her own experience, Sandberg offers a solution. Don’t hold back, but commit wholeheartedly to your future success.

A truly equal world would be one where women ran half our countries and men ran half our homes.Sheryl Sandberg

There are practicalities here too, a nod to those struggling to balance career and family life. Getting things done, she counsels, is better than trying to be perfect. Setting obtainable goals is crucial, although “dreaming is not doing”.

There is also advice on negotiating skills, and dealing with criticism wisely: charting that path to success, Sandberg warns, is like “trying to cross a minefield backward in high heels”.

To help chart that tricky course, she has set up a website encouraging women to set up their own “lean in” groups, along with videos and other resources. Jessica Bennett, from New York magazine went to one such group and was impressed.

Feel the fear and do it anyway

“She has labelled a solution for problems that are rampant among a generation raised to believe that we were on level footing – and a pragmatic approach to change it.”

Anne Marie Slaughter, who served as director of policy planning for Hillary Clinton, sparked a fierce controversy over the role of women in the workplace with her Atlantic article declaring “why women still can’t have it all”. She stepped back from her own leadership role because of her family: yet she has been equally complimentary, calling Sandberg a “feminist champion”.

But some of her critics have complained that her highly selective, unashamedly elite experience offers no help whatsoever to those who are less well off, single parents, less well educated, non-white? Women who lack the luxury of making choices?

At least, say supporters, the Facebook executive is trying to offer a partial solution to a compelling problem. In the United States, research shows that just 21 of the top Fortune 500 jobs are held by women.

Women still earn just 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man, despite President Obama’s renewed push for equal pay. In these recessionary times of unemployment and downsizing, women’s participation in the US workforce is starting to decline.

In the UK, the picture is depressingly similar. A report into women in top management positions commissioned by the Government, did reveal this week that the number of women on the boards of FTSE 100 companies is now at a record high: up from 12.5% in 2011 to 18% today.

Decades away from equality

And outside that blue chip elite, the picture is even less rosy: the workplace is still “decades away” from equality.

And as for juggling that family with a high-flying career: that is no easier, either, according to a study of 2,000 women carried out by the Association of Accounting Technicians this week.

They found the overwhelming majority of new mothers feel they haven’t got enough confidence to return to work after maternity leave. Two thirds said they felt drained of self belief, while more than half thought they were no longer capable enough after taking time off. Instead they felt trapped by the drudge work of home life, robbing them of the space for creativity and ambition at work.

Just because routines and priorities change once women have a family, said the AAT, “doesn’t neccessarily mean that one’s career should be negatively affected or sacrificed”.

And that, in essence, is Sandberg’s argument. Stop being afraid. Do it anyway. Don’t shape yourself to fit around the world: make it bend around you.

As for the very real structural, historical barriers that still hold back women’s advancement, the “million cracks” in the glass ceiling that prevented even Hillary Clinton from fulfilling her presidential ambitions, first time round at least – that is not something that finds a solution here.

Men too need a manifesto for change: this burden is not simply on womens’ shoulders. The real struggle for equality is far wider than the Sandberg white, educated, wealthy elite, and it is a struggle which they cannot win on their own.