Every once in a while, my (Lauren’s) work outside of Aequitas aligns with our mission here. Some of my recent research is particularly relevant not only to our goals for this organization but to some of the broader conversations taking place throughout our living rooms, office suites, and city council chambers. My coauthor, Sarah Guthery, and I just published a new paper.
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You might recall that Perez was among the key figures who campaigned to have Jane Austen’s likeness enshrined on British currency. You might also recall that we talked about the canceled spacewalk earlier this year. While the two were not intentionally related, Perez’s book provides a context for that situation: women’s needs were not met because the default for spacesuit design remains a man’s body. In space, as in many of the fields Perez explores, men are the default. Women are, at best, an aberration from the norm and, at worst, ignored altogether. Perez’s book provides ample evidence that the canceled spacewalk was just one symptom of a pervasive problem: the failure to study women and to account for women in the age of big data is a failure that costs women their health, careers, and—in some cases—their lives.
Read MoreThis opinion piece, “I’ve Picked My Job Over My Kids,” didn’t flit virally across the internet (at least not on any of my feeds) and it doesn’t propose a radical solution by which women really can have it all. Instead, just as the title suggests, it’s about a woman who made a series of choices and she has prioritized her career. I’ve read through this a few times in advance of writing about it and I experience it differently each time. I have read it as a lean-in narrative of a powerful professional woman, as an incendiary rejection of the notion that anyone can have it all, and as a model of (perhaps unexamined) privilege within the author’s life. Whatever you think about it – and I hope you acknowledge the complexity present in this piece – I think there are a few points worth highlighting.
Read MoreThis time of year - the couple weeks after school gets out, but before the planning for the next year really begins - when I am still just viewing lesson planners online, instead of purchasing one and beginning to fill it out, is a time when I usually catch up on my reading. And though I read a great deal of silly fiction, I always make time for some serious reading. This year, I found out some important things about girls, women, and education that I think you and I should ponder.
Read MoreOver the past two months, Ohio, Georgia, and Missouri have recently passed stricter versions of their own abortion bills – referred to popularly as “heartbeat bills” – which ban abortion after a heartbeat can be detected in a fetus (often at about six weeks and well before most women even know they are pregnant). Last Tuesday, Alabama governor Kay Ivey signed into law the nation’s strictest abortion law. It bans all abortion except in the case of “serious” health risks to the mother. This law is explicitly positioned to be appealed, which would set it on a trajectory to be heard in the United States Supreme Court. The bill’s sponsor, Republican Representative Terry Collins, said, “The bill is about challenging Roe v. Wade.” While the Supreme Court can select the cases it hears in each session, the recent proliferation of abortion-related legislation increases the likelihood that one of these cases will reach the highest court in the land, on which a majority of conservative judges currently sit.
Read MoreTwo seemingly unrelated articles from the last week illustrate the systematic obstacles women face in the fight for pay equity. The first article talks about the ways in which women sacrifice career and earning potential to assume home and care responsibilities so that their (typically male) partners can take on jobs with longer, more unpredictable hours. The second article talks about the wage increases in a few states where teachers struck or took other political action over the last year. Taken together, the two articles suggest that there are numerous ways in which women, despite being better educated and more qualified for high-paying jobs than ever before, still lose the wage war.
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