Category: gender

Posted on

She’s the Boss

If diversity itself wasn’t a worthwhile goal to some companies, maybe the better financial performance of a diverse board will motivate more companies to getting some women involved:

The study, which looked at three financial measures, found that companies with more women directors outperformed companies with fewer by 53 percent in return on equity, by 42 percent in return on sales, and by 66 percent in return on invested capital.

The study was done by Catalyst, a non-profit research organization whose goal is to expand business opportunities for women.

Posted on

Santhi Soundarajan

Santhi Soundarajan, a female runner in India who was stripped of her Olympic medal has, perhaps, tried to commit suicide. She ingested pesticide but it’s not clear that she did so in a suicide attempt, and may have taken it for stomach pain. There are more details in an India Times article.

The Indian Olympic Association (IOA) announced she failed a sex test and implied Santhi had deceived the sporting world by competing as a woman when she was a man, effectively ending her career.

But Santhi, who returned home to live in humiliation, insisted along with her parents and coaches she had done nothing wrong. . .

Seven of the eight women who tested positive for Y chromosomes during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics had AIS. They were allowed to compete.

Because the International Olympics no longer do these tests, exactly in order to prevent this kind of outcome, and The Hindu reports that endocrine test results were probably not in when she was disqualified.

Posted on

Forbes’ Top 100 Women

Forbes has just published their list of the Top 100 Most Powerful women. Among them, politicans and CEOs, a couple of Queens (of Jordan, & the UK), a judge (Ginsburg), a few anchors (Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric), and Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma, activist and Nobel Peace laureate (who is probably my favorite woman on the list).

Interesting, though, to see “Chairman” so frequently after a name. I guess “Chairperson” just doesn’t trip off the tongue the same way.

Posted on

Don’t Get Married

Had I known this before, I might have told Betty we had to wait until she learned to do more chores:

Within marriages, the study finds that women do about twice as much housework as men, even after adjusting for employment status and other factors. While men living with their partners do more housework than married men, women still shoulder the burden of household chores. (bolded for emphasis by yours truly)

What’s interesting, however, is that in cohabitating couples, the chores are split more evenly.

Every study I’ve read backs this up, and that women do more chores than their husbands seems to be true despite childcare breakdowns and employment status. One woman I know worked fulltime and made most of the family’s money and still came home to do most of the chores.

Posted on

Gender Traitor

Recently I did a talk that one of my queer femme friends attended, and at some point during the talk I mentioned what a hard time I had with Betty’s femininity because it brought up my own issues with my own “failed” femininity. Afterwards, she asked, “Well don’t I drive you nuts, then?” or something like that.

& The funny thing is: no, she doesn’t. Aside from her being a nice person who takes people as they come (moreso even than most other open-minded folks I know), she’s a queer femme. & The girls who were the bane of my existence – and the women who still are – were almost always straight femmes. Because queer femmes are somehow different than their straight sisters. For starters, they flirt with me, & I can flirt with them, & even though everyone knows nothing is happening, there’s a script of sorts that jives with everyone involved. Queer femmes have met other women with my gender before, & a lot of the time, they’ve dated them too. Our genders are mutually complimentary, you might say. Butches seem occasonally puzzled by me, or they seem to understand me, or they accept me as some kind of liminal butch, but they certainly aren’t threatened. Gay men – femme and masculine – seem to get that I’m not a jerk. (Or, as a gay friend said when he met me, “Oh, so you’re hip?” – after which we didn’t really need to discuss anything about my gender or SO beyond that.)

But it’s straight feminine women I can’t seem to have an un-awkward conversation with; often I feel like they’re worried I’m going to hit on them, and/or that their boyfriend is going to like me better than them (because of that “one of the guys” thing). Sometimes I swear they’re worried about both simultaneously. Straight feminine women seem to have way more invested in a kind of combative, competitive relationship between women – you know, who is the prettiest, the most feminine, the most fashion sense, or who gets the most attention from boys. Mostly I feel like I’m being asked to a duel but I haven’t got a pistol & I don’t the rules and I don’t know who I challenged and certainly didn’t mean to. It’s really like being in a culture that I don’t know & I’m not familiar with, the way that sometimes, as a white person, another white person will say something racist to you as if assuming you agree, or as a straight person, having another straight person make a homophobic joke assuming you’ll think it’s funny, too. Straight women like to complain about “what a guy” their man is, & how they don’t understand them at all, especially how they don’t hear anything when they’re playing a computer game or the like. And when I’ve said something along the lines of, “yeah, well I tend to tune out when I’m playing The Sims,” I get stares all around as if they’ve discovered a traitor in their midst.

And I am, I guess, a gender traitor. I don’t have much in common with the people who are assumedly “my tribe” – other heterosexual women. I don’t know how to talk to them. I don’t know how to make them feel better about themselves, or reassure them that I really dress the way I do on purpose. But it hadn’t occurred to me that it wasn’t all feminine women I felt that way about until my friend asked me that question. Looking back, it’s often been queer femmes who have helped me think about femininity in ways that didn’t just piss me off.

Posted on

Black Men Can’t Read?

It turns out young black men have a better chance of getting made fun of for reading books than for playing sports. Not news, I know, but the commentary on how that fact intersects with gender is:

John Thomas, superintendent of the Aliquippa School District, said the notion that black men who read books are less masculine is one that should be dispelled in the African-American community. “It’s just as powerful to carry a book as it is to carry a football or a basketball, because the power of knowledge is in the books,” he said. “If we prepare our bodies for the gridiron or the basketball court, to me it’s just as important to prepare your mind to survive in society. The body will soon wear out for athletic competition, but knowledge you have will carry you through life.”

What’s interesting to me is that the cultural forces that would discourage black men from learning – because being brainy isn’t considered “masculine” or “strong” – are exactly the opposite of the ones at play that have historically kept women from learning, who are/were told that being too brainy makes a woman “unfeminine.”

& When cultural forces say being smart isn’t masculine to one group, & too masculine to another, you know there’s something rotten in Denmark.

Posted on

Ruining India’s Women

A recent working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) of India has posited that rural women in India, who tend not to be literate, learn a lot if they watch cable:

Women who were exposed to cable television over a 6- to 7-month period in India were less likely to report a preference for sons or complacency with domestic violence, and more likely to report autonomy in household decision-making, according to the working paper. In addition, more girls enrolled in school and fertility rates dropped.

But of course they’re talking about Indian television, not American, so let’s not send them Baywatch.

Posted on

Teaching

By a somewhat unusual series of events, I’m going to be teaching a Women’s & Gender Studies class this fall at Merrimack College in N. Andover… Massachusetts. I wasn’t expecting to, which is why I won’t be moving there, which means instead about a six hour commute – that’s one way! – in order to do so. But I couldn’t turn it down, since it would give me the chance to work with the very cool Gordene Mackenzie, of Nancy & Gordene from GenderTalk, as she runs the program there. Since I’m writing again, I’m always pleased to have good writing time – both on the train & during the time I’ll be on campus. I’m very much looking forward to it, and hopefully I’ll get to see some of my friends who live in the Boston area while I’m there.

Posted on

Non-Trans Woman in Men’s Prison

Okay, I’ll admit it: I was entirely astonished to read the story of Virginia Grace Soto over on Autumn Sandeen’s blog. Ms. Sota was born and raised female, but due to her androgynous appearance, was housed with men, in the men’s jail, in DC. Again, Ms. Sota is NOT TRANS. From the DC-area MetroWeekly (where you can see a photo of Ms. Soto as well):

Despite being strip searched and having female genitalia, Soto’s androgynous appearance led to assumptions that placed the 47-year-old in a male facility where she had to shower with four other men. Her pleas to be moved to a female facility were repeatedly ignored.

There is no mention as to whether Soto is straight or gay, though I’m going to guess that the guards acted out of homophobia (on the assumption that all gender variant people are homosexual, which of course isn’t true at all). The good thing is that three of them will be fired over their misconduct, at least.

But the underlying issue of course is that we have no standards in place for people who are not obviously gendered male or female, or whose male appearance doesn’t correspond to their female genitalia, or vice versa. Sandeen quotes local trans activist Ruby Corado:

“It’s the perfect example of how not having a plan on how to deal with individuals that do not fit in the binary gender of this society, of being male or female, creates [problems],” she says.

Exactly. Solutions? If anyone has any resources links of people who are working on prison issues concerning gender, please post them in the comments section.

Posted on

Air Force Double Rape

Cassandra Hernandez says she was raped once by three of her fellow Air Force airmen, and now she’s being raped again by the Air Force itself, who have given the three men accused of her rape immunity in exchange for testimony against Hernandez herself. She chose not to testify against the men because of “severe stress” and what she got in return was charges of indecent behavior that may cause her to lose her job.

& What did she do? She went to a party in one of the airmen’s rooms. But if she was there, & they were there, doesn’t that mean they’re guilty too? Apparently not.

From the Feminist Daily News & KHOU.