Women's Views on News |
- Abortion legislation to be tabled in Ireland
- Advertisers out of step with women
- Oklahoma Senate passes Personhood Bill
- Factory girls – powering the industrialisation of China
- With today’s job cuts, will women ever reach the boardroom?
- Story links, February 20, 2012
| Abortion legislation to be tabled in Ireland Posted: 20 Feb 2012 12:00 PM PST
Legislation to provide for limited access to abortion in Ireland is to be introduced to the Irish parliament for debate this week. The legislation would make abortion legal only in cases were there is a proven "real and substantial risk to the life" of the pregnant woman. Abortion is completely illegal in Ireland and is a highly divisive issue that successive Irish governments have deliberately avoided since the mid-90s. The Offences Against the Person’s Act 1861 is the major source of abortion law in the country, which states that any person “performing, attempting and or assisting in an abortion is liable to penal servitude for life”. The same legislation also governs abortion in Northern Ireland, where they are also illegal except in circumstances of risk to mental or physical health. A 1983 referendum of the Irish constitution elevated the life of the undefined "unborn" to the equal status of the pregnant woman. As a result, family planning groups and student groups were banned from offering abortion counselling, information and aid in travelling to Britain to procure abortions. The ban was not lifted until 1992. The proposed legislation that will be debated in the Irish Parliament comes two years after the European Court of Human Rights found that Ireland had failed to properly implement the constitutional right to abortion that had been acknowledged by the Irish Supreme Court ruling in the infamous “X Case“, 20 years before. On February 6, 1992, a court issued an order preventing a 14-year-old rape victim, known as "X", from travelling to England for an abortion, despite acknowledging that the girl was suicidal. Days later, amid public outcry over the ruling the Supreme Court ruled that under the constitution, abortion was legal where there was a real and substantial threat to the life of the woman. In the end the girl “X” at the centre of the case miscarried. If the legislation does pass it will do little to reduce the numbers of Irish women travelling abroad for abortion which the Abortion Support Network estimate at about 4000 annually. The Bill will be voted on in the Irish house of Parliament on April 19. |
| Advertisers out of step with women Posted: 20 Feb 2012 08:30 AM PST
According to She-conomy.com, US women account for 85% of all consumer purchases including homes, PCs and vacations. Specifically, their figures show that women make the main decisions on the following consumer purchases:
Despite this, apparently many women feel their needs and aspirations are not taken into account by marketeers and so in an attempt to show that women exist as a market, Visible Technologies is to host a free webinar focused on women’s social influence and spending patterns. Certainly, my experience reflects this: most of the advertising to which I am subjected as a woman is either sexist or ill-informed. Numerous examples of 'sexist' advertising can be found in the travel industry – whether it be cars, airlines or trains. A visitor from another planet could be forgiven for thinking that women do not drive cars, do not fly and do not take train journeys. Even worse is that when women are present, we are presented as 'arm candy‘ for the men. A small ray of hope can be found in the recent banning by the Advertising Standards Authority of a Ryanair advert on the grounds that:
Meanwhile, ill-informed ads are also annoying, such as those targeted at older women and men. These ads are based on what I call the ‘Saga model‘, which assumes that any woman (or man for that matter) aged 50 is wealthy, child-free and has ample leisure time to enjoy the fruits of their hard-earned labour. In my world most people 50 and over are still working (or perhaps more accurately looking for work) and/or have caring responsibilities (children, grandchildren, older relatives). It is to be hoped that the webinar, which takes place on February 21, will address the sexism and ill-informed personas that advertisers routinely use to promote products and thus help them to better connect with this powerful audience. Debbie DeGabrielle, CMO, Visible Technologies commented:
Quite apart from engaging with the consumer in the ‘channel of their choice’, surely the real problem is that most companies and advertising agencies are run by men? For example, the board of Virgin Atlantic boasts only four women out of 14, and Ryanair only one woman out of nine. Also, according to the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, the overall percentage of women on advertising company executive boards is a paltry 22.4%. Thus, without an equal presence of women on the boards of companies and advertising agencies, it is not surprising that sexist and ill-informed advertising is perpetuated by a male centric view of the world. Given that, in the UK at least, women are about to find staying on the career ladder ever more difficult due to public sector cuts and a potential reduction in employment rights, I don't see a change in sexist and/or ill-informed advertising practices arriving any time soon. More information on the webinar can be found here. |
| Oklahoma Senate passes Personhood Bill Posted: 20 Feb 2012 07:00 AM PST
The Oklahoma senate in the United States has passed a personhood bill that would define human life as beginning from the moment of conception. Effectively this would ban abortion. The bill was passed in the state senate with a margin of 34-8, showing the support for pro-life politics among Oklahoma’s majority Republican leaders. It must still be approved by Oklahoma’s House before passing into law, but with Republicans outnumbering Democrats there as well as in the Senate, the bill seems likely to pass this second stage. Oklahoma’s Republican Governor Mary Fallin has not yet commented on the bill, but she is known to have previously backed anti-abortion legislation. “Oklahoma is a conservative pro-life state – we are proud to stand up for what we know is right,” said senate Pro Tempore President Brian Bingman, a Republican. “This bill is one of many Senate Republicans have advanced which affirms the right to life and I am proud to support it,” he added. Oklahoma’s bill was intended to guarantee the same treatment to zygotes – its legislators prefer to use the loaded and inaccurate term “unborn children” – as to its adult citizens, granting them the “rights, privileges, and immunities available to other persons”. The legislation in Oklahoma follows similar anti-abortion bills approved by Virginia the previous day. Together these would ban emergency contraception and require women seeking abortions to be forcibly penetrated in medically unnecessary ultrasound scans. Personhood amendments have been rejected in state-wide ballots on a number of occasions, most recently in Mississippi in November 2011. Further referenda for similar amendments are scheduled for later this year in Ohio, Florida and South Dakota. In Oklahoma and Virginia legislators have decided to skip the risky step of asking a divided public and take matters into their own hands. Both bills have attracted media attention recently as the result of women Democrat senators tacking on humorous amendments with a serious message. Virginia senator Janet Howell added an amendment to the ultrasound bill that would require men seeking treatment for erectile dysfunction to undergo an equally unnecessary and invasive rectal examination, as well as a cardiac test. In Oklahoma, senator Constance Johnson added an amendment to the personhood bill that would have made it a crime against unborn children for men to waste sperm. The joke was lost on the Oklahoma and Virginia legislatures, where senators and representatives preferred to ignore the suggestion that women deserve equal autonomy over their bodies to men. |
| Factory girls – powering the industrialisation of China Posted: 20 Feb 2012 05:00 AM PST
They are part of the largest migration in human history. Young women are pouring into China's cities from the countryside and powering the race towards industrialisation. And in her book Factory Girls, Leslie T Chang finds out what drives them. Twenty-five years ago, the idea of a young women 'going out', leaving the village and travelling thousands of miles to work in a large city, would have brought shame on the family. Now it is shameful not to go. Boredom not starvation is emptying the villages of young people. "There was nothing to do at home so I went out," they say. They want to see the world. They want to learn new skills. Going out is hard. Migrant workers may be the rural elite, but in the cities they are the lowest rank. Many work over 50 hours a week for 50 to 80 dollars a month. "Get hurt, sick or pregnant and you're on your own." But it is also an adventure. The breakneck pace of economic development creates opportunities. The young women we meet in the book live in Dongguan, a large city in southern China, which opened its first factory in 1978 and now makes 30 per cent of the world's disk drives. Over the past two decades economic growth has averaged 15 per cent a year. No-one is quite sure how many people live there. The government estimates in the region of 1.7m residents and seven million migrants, 70 per cent of whom are women. Many plants, like the city-factory of Yue Yuen, which makes trainers, employ mainly migrants, and it is possible to live for months in Dongguan without meeting a single resident. A worker hired by Yue Yuen may never work anywhere else and many spend their days without venturing outside. The factory has its own shops, a hospital and even a water bottling plant. The girls sleep ten to a dormitory. Only line leaders and above are allowed to live inside the factory with a child. The workers have had to speed up to accommodate the accelerated pace of the global fashion cycle. In 2007 it took ten hours to make a pair of trainers. Four years earlier it had taken 25 days. Living arrangements have been reshuffled, so the girls no longer share dorms with their friends but with colleagues on the production line. "Only the strongest survive." The girls have to work fast. Jobs are divided strictly along gender lines. Discrimination is ubiquitous. Few factories employ women over 25 on the production lines, so they have to make it into a white collar job by then. And as few are well-educated this means learning computers or English on top of a 13-hour working day. Self-help books not Confucian proverbs make sense of the world. White collar classes practice not calligraphy but the art of sitting, dressing, drinking tea and public speaking. The neat segments that divide up the Chinese lunar year have been replaced with the Christmas rush and the summer season. The girls often talk of leaving, but when they return home there is nothing for them. Parents do not understand the city, and the girls are selective in what they say about their new lives. Wealth brings them status and power within the family. At the lunar New Year, the girls give money to elderly relatives – in the past older people gave to the young. The girls have more choice about when and who they marry. But finding the right partner is a struggle. They have high expectations of romance, but prostitution takes place on an industrial scale. One hotel employed 10,000 women as prostitutes. Chang, a journalist on the Wall Street Journal, spent six years in China, and at least two of them researching this book and getting to know the young women. She uses her own family story to illustrate modern Chinese history: the way the turmoil of the past century has tended to make Chinese people live in the present, blocking out the horrors of the past; and the way her grandfather and later her father 'went out'. The result provides a deep insight into the contradictions and complexities of modern Chinese life. Seen through the eyes of the teenage migrants, Factory Girls shows us how China is making the sharp transitioin from the village, where everything is done collectively, to the city, where 'I can only rely on myself'. |
| With today’s job cuts, will women ever reach the boardroom? Posted: 20 Feb 2012 03:00 AM PST
Despite widespread reports (here and here) about the impact of UK public sector job cuts on women, John Philpott, the chief economic adviser at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), is dismissive. Speaking about the most recent unemployment figures published by the Office for National Statistics, Philpott commented in hrmagazine:
He justifies this viewpoint by pointing out that the rise in unemployment figures is more or less equal for men and women at 89,000 and 90,000 respectively. Mary-Ann Stevenson of Coventry Women's Voices agrees, but points out that unemployment for women is about to increase at a faster rate:
To be fair, Philpott accepts that the rise in the unemployment rate for women may change in view of future public sector downsizing in the 'coming months and years'. However, for Stevenson, the real problem is the adverse affect of public sector job cuts on women's chances of carving out professional careers:
So not only will the forthcoming public sector job cuts directly affect the female workforce as a whole, but will also indirectly impact on the future career prospects of women trying to carve out careers within workplaces that recognise and support women through a robust equality and diversity ethos. This is evidenced by recent proposals from the government to reduce the so-called burden (as they see it) on private sector employers in terms of employment law. For example, micro-companies may well become exempt from employment regulations in order to encourage them to employ staff, such as no-fault dismissal for organisations with 10 or fewer employees. If this becomes law, then pregnant women or those with caring responsibilities, for example, may well find themselves firstly pushed out of public sector employment because of the cuts, and then also out of the private sector because of the reduction in employment protection. Given the British Prime Minister’s recent comment that ‘the case is overwhelming that companies and countries run better if you have men and women working together at the top’, removing the protection of employment legislation seems to be a counter-intuitive step. Therefore, if women cannot keep their place on the career ladder because they are, well, women, then the chance of addressing the very real inequalities that have resulted in one in ten of Britain’s biggest firms still having all-male boards seems as far away as ever. |
| Story links, February 20, 2012 Posted: 20 Feb 2012 01:15 AM PST
They won't necessarily be from that day, but usually will not be more than a few days old. The following are the ones we’ve found today. Story links: Saudi Arabia may send women to Games, ESPNW, February 18, 2012 Women speak up and take control of their health, WeNews, February 19, 2012 One in five women in north east continue smoking through pregnancy, Daily Mail, February 18, 2012 London Olympics organiser emphasises women’s roles, Los Angeles Times, February 17, 2012 For women under 30, most births occur outside marriage, New York Times, February 17, 2012 New labor rules for home care workers on the table, WeNews, February 20, 2012 Special police force trained to protect women in Istanbul, Today’s Zaman, February 19, 2012 Battling abuse and a community’s disapproval, IRIN, February 20, 2012 Women empowerment to ensure strong Pakistan, Pakistan Observer, February 20, 2012 Students tackle violence against women in the Vagina Monologues, Harvard Crimson, February 19, 2012 |
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