This Month in Gender Equity: December 2019
We return this month with our series that recaps our favorite (or least favorite) moments in gender equity from news, media, and longreads all over the internet. You’ll see installments for This Month in Gender Equity the third week of each month. If you have ideas or contributions, leave a comment or tweet at us!
Gender, Not Children, 'Holds Women Academics Back’
A UK study of more than 2,000 academics looks at patterns of promotion from the level of junior (untenured) faculty to senior (tenured) faculty. The major finding of the study was that, controlling for parenthood, gender was still the more significant predictor of promotion. This means that when people of different genders have similar credentials, qualifications for their jobs, and life circumstances, men are still likely to be promoted and to be promoted more quickly in academia. The researchers also controlled for household chores and the degree to which each academic in the sample was responsible for completing those chores. The finding regarding gender held. While that’s not surprising to us here at AEC, it is important to continue to quantify the gender gap in academia, as in other fields.
99 Years is Too LONG
The World Economic Forum put out their Global Gender Gap Report recently and the events were… let’s just call it not great. There are many interesting facts in it, but the one that stuck out to me is that, unless there are some insane medical advances in the world, I’m not ever going to see economic gender parity. Not only that, the country that I live in, the USA, doesn’t even make the top 10 in advancing gender parity. While not surprising, this was very disappointing. This report was a reminder of why we need to continue to advance the cause of gender parity by mentoring, training, and elevating other women and by calling out policies that economically and socially disadvantage women when we see them. Do you smell a resolution for 2020? Because I do!
Women’s Lack of Pain Care Hurts Us All
This is a topic that I feel passionately about, having gone through pain management issues with my mom while she was dealing with cancer. Study after study finds that women’s pain, even when reported as severe to health care providers, is dismissed and downplayed as being hysteria or overly dramatic. This also applies to girls, many of whom are struggling with juggling menstrual pain and school. This article lays out how these biases start at a very young age, when girls are perceived as experiencing less pain than boys during the same procedures. Confronting these biases will take the medical community’s recognition of the problem, women’s advocacy at standing up for themselves, and greater education on the biases starting early.