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.
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You’ve likely seen the splashy, celebrity-packed Equality Can’t Wait campaign videos that recently circulated on social media. The organization is an offshoot of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which focuses on achieving parity for women across sectors: specifically, economic participation and opportunity, political empowerment, health and survival, and educational attainment. At present, the World Economic Forum estimates that it will take the United States 208 years to achieve gender equality. However, Melinda Gates just wrote a lengthy piece for the Harvard Business Review in which she details the steps she believes are necessary to achieve gender equality much sooner. She summarizes her vision as “a future in which an increased number of Americans want women to exert greater power and influence in our society.”
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.
Read MoreWe talk about gaps a lot here. The wage gap keeps women from being compensated at the same rates as their male counterparts for the same work. The pink tax results refers to increased costs for products marketed toward women – razors and pens are just two examples of the products that cost an average of 7% more when they are pink. Health care costs more for women due to the gender rating which still exists among 90% of best-selling health care plans. And we have a new disparity to consider: the commuting gap. Not only do women, on average, earn less for their work and pay more for good and services, they also tend to pay a greater cost in terms of their commutes to and from work.
Read MoreHopefully, you voted on Tuesday. Hopefully, you got to bed at a reasonable time. I stayed up far too late, compulsively refreshing election returns from CNN and The New York Times. I became deeply familiar with the Texas county map and cheered when polls in Atlanta were forced to stay open three hours later than originally scheduled. In Wednesday’s proverbial cold light of day, pundits nationwide looked for a unifying narrative to the midterms or an answer to the question of What does it mean? I don’t have that for you – and honestly I don’t think they really do either – but I will offer a couple of reflections.
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