Saturday, June 9, 2012

Women's Views on News

Women's Views on News

Concerns at rise in sexual assaults in Tahrir Square

Posted: 08 Jun 2012 05:30 AM PDT

Rachel Salmon
WVoN co-editor

Egyptian activists are worried about increasing reports of attacks on women in Tahrir Square over the past week, following the sentencing of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

A young woman was reported to have been dragged into a side-street by around 200 men and assaulted.

A woman journalist who tried to help her had to be driven from the square at speed after she also came under attack.

Women have lost political ground over the last 16 months, despite playing a leading role in the ousting of Mubarak in February 2011.

Only 12 of the 498 seats in the Egyptian parliament were won by women in parliamentary elections earlier this year – a paltry 2.4 per cent, well below the global average of 19 per cent.

Nearly half of the seats were won by the Freedom and Justice party of the Muslim Brotherhood, one of whom recently denounced the ban on genital cutting in Egypt in 2008.

Their spokeswoman Manal Abul Hassan was quoted as saying that there is “no problem whatsoever” in having only a handful of women in parliament.

“Social justice will be delivered anyway,” she said, adding that it is up to “fathers, brothers and husbands to march and protest on behalf” of women.

Little wonder that some  Egyptian women are now wondering if they weren’t better off under Mubarak, who espoused western values and whose wife campaigned for quotas for women in elections and the right of wives to sue for divorce.

Now the Egyptian Parliament is talking about reducing the age when a girl can marry from 18 to 14, and awarding divorced men custody of children over eight.

But a group of activists met on Wednesday to try and stop the attacks in Tahrir Square.

“Enough is enough,” said Abdel-Fatah Mahmoud, a 22-year-old engineering student, who is organising patrols of the square to stop attacks on women.

“It has gone overboard. No matter what is behind this, it is unacceptable. It shouldn’t be happening on our streets let alone Tahrir.”

Activists believe that the attacks are being carried out by opponents of the protests, who want to deter people from attending.

“I think it is getting worse because people don’t want to acknowledge it is happening or do something to reduce it,” said Seif. “It is our job to put an end to it, at least in Tahrir.”

Natasha Trethewey named 19th US poet laureate

Posted: 08 Jun 2012 04:00 AM PDT

Emine Dilek
WVoN co-editor 

Natasha Trethewey was yesterday appointed the 19th official US poet by the Library of Congress. She is the first African-American to be appointed to the position since 1993.

An English and creative writing professor at Emory University in Atlanta, she began writing poetry at the age of 19 after her mother was killed by her second husband.

She has also written about the interracial marriage of her parents – her mother was black and her father was white – that was still a crime in her native Mississippi in the mid-1960s.

Librarian of Congress, James Billington, who made the appointment, acknowledged the personal nature of her writing when he said:

“Her poems dig beneath the surface of history—personal or communal, from childhood or from a century ago—to explore the human struggles that we all face.”

Trethewey won the Pulitzer Prize for her book of poems titled "Native Guard" in 2007. These focused on the unrecorded history of the Louisiana Native Guard, a black Civil War regiment assigned to guard white Confederate soldiers on Ship Island off Mississippi's Gulf Coast.

The Confederate prisoners were later memorialized on the island, but not the black Union soldiers.

Trethewey's other honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.

She has also received the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the Lillian Smith Award for Poetry.

The Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry is appointed annually by the Librarian of the United States Congress and serves from October to May.

Families of victims of Canada’s biggest serial killer disappointed with inquiry

Posted: 08 Jun 2012 02:30 AM PDT

Rachel Salmon
WVoN co-editor

Families of the victims of Canada's most prolific serial killer say they feel cheated by the inquiry set up to look into the mishandling of the original murder investigations.

Robert Pickton killed at least 33 women on his pig farm between 1998 and 2002, but the relatives of his victims, which included sex workers, claim they were met by suspicion and racism when they reported them missing to the police.

The investigation has been plagued by controversy.

Groups representing sex workers and aboriginals pulled out of the inquiry before it started, in protest at the provincial government’s refusal to pay for counsel to represent them (see WVoN story).

There were also allegations that male staff sexually harassed women workers, and the Commissioner, Wally Oppal, made an ill-judged cameo appearance in a slasher film, as the victim of a serial killer.

The victims' families claim senior police officers initially refused to believe a serial killer was at work.

The inquiry lasted seven months and heard 83 witnesses.  What became clear was that turf wars between local and federal police had hampered the investigation.

At the inquiry, police from the different jurisdictions blamed each other and claimed they could not remember details from so long ago.

Lilliane Beaudoin, the sister of Diane Rock, whose blood was found on Pickton's pig farm said:

“It's been one disaster after another. I've never spent so many frustrating days in my life as here, going home and crying and thinking what's going on?"

Oppal must produce his recommendations by 31 October.

"I’m satisfied that we’ll come up with a positive report so that we can make policing better, so that we can ensure that those people who haven’t been listened to will be listened to in the future,” he said.

But Lori-Ann Ellis, whose sister-in-law Cara was murdered by Pickton was not convinced.

"To be honest, I think this whole inquiry meant to appease the families: OK, we'll give you the damn inquiry now shut up and go away," Ellis said. "But foolishly, I still have hope.

"If the report is written as shoddily as the inquiry was handled, God bless all those women out there.

"But if the report is written in such a way that it really does bring forward some positive recommendations then all the tears that were shed in there are worth it," she said.

Women are using more technology but creating less

Posted: 08 Jun 2012 01:00 AM PDT

Ed Knight
WVoN co-editor

Although women are the main users of social networking, it seems that they will have increasingly little say in how it is made because of a drop in the numbers taking computer science degrees.

Facebook's director of engineering Jocelyn Goldfein, puts this down to a lack of female role models in computer sciences.

“The reason there aren’t more women computer scientists is because there aren’t more women computer scientists,” she says.

While young men interested in computers are presented with famed industry-gods such as Apple founders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, Microsoft's Bill Gates, and inventor of the world wide web Sir Tim Berners-Lee, there are no commonly recognised equivalents for women.

Associating the woman programmer with the end-product is key to encouraging young women, Goldfein argues.

“If they realise that when I click on a photo and it pops up, that was made by a woman, think how powerful that would be.”

She has previously suggested three initiatives which enabled a small California college to increase its women computer science majors from 15% to 42% in less than five years.

This included tracking experienced students separately from beginners to reduce intimidation, taking women students to conferences where they could meet role models, and presenting them with research opportunities as soon as possible.

This is has had some success in the US, which has previously seen a decrease in women computer science graduates since the 1980s, despite a technology sector growing enormously in that time.

In the UK, however, the differing university system does not mean attracting students to computer science classes so they can select the subject as a 'major', as in the US, but  attracting young women earlier, in secondary school.

Statistics from UK exam body, AQA, show that between 2004 and 2009 the number of girls taking A-Level computing halved.

Professor Dame Wendy Hall of Southampton University claims this is fundamentally a cultural problem, with girls no longer perceiving computer science as an empowering subject.

“Girls have been further put off by dumbing down computing to IT literacy,” Hall says. “They think that if they study computing they are going to become secretaries.”

Just as the perceptions of women are an issue, so too are those of men. Cue the lawsuit by investment partner Ellen Pao for sexual harassment and gender discrimination claim against her employer Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, venture capitalist firm of choice to Silicon Valley.

If substantiated, this claim points to an old-time sexism within the technology and software industries, often lauded for their meritocracy.

Since the early 1990s these industries have come to entirely reshape the US and UK economies. Just how much women are involved remains to be seen.