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By Bryce Covert
Yesterday the Senate proved two things: a majority of senators think women need more support in their quest to be paid equally with men, but that's not enough to actually get them support in the face of a GOP that stubbornly stands in the way. It may seem pretty tough to side with unequal pay for equal work, yet that's where 47 senators stand. The biggest concern offered that they offered up after they blocked the Paycheck Fairness Act? That the bill would have led to an unnecessary and soul-crushing number of lawsuits against employers. But the country actually needs to see more lawsuits against the gender wage gap, not fewer.We need more equal pay litigation, not less.
Some feel that women are adequately protected from pay discrimination, since we have laws saying it's illegal to pay women less than men for the same work, and therefore this Act was redundant. They should think again. Sen. Suzanne Collins was absolutely right when she told reporters after the vote, "We already have on the books the Equal Pay...Read More »By Elizabeth Flock
You'd think that since 1916-the year a woman was first elected to U.S. Congress-there would have been some serious progress.
Women in the workforce, after all, have been on a steady rise.
Not so in Congress, where women hold less than 17 percent of seats to this day, according to the Rutgers Center for American Women and Politics. In 2010, the number of women elected to the House actually declined.
[See a collection of political cartoons on the 2012 campaign.]
"Politics is lagging behind society," says Barbara Palmer, associate professor of political science at Baldwin-Wallace College and co-author of the upcoming book Women and Congressional Elections: A Century of Change.
Palmer and Southern Methodist University professor Dennis Simon have been studying the political glass ceiling for over a decade. Voters, they said, mostly aren't to blame for the lack of progress. But they shared five other very real reasons more women aren't in Washington:
...Read More »- By Lylah M. Alphonse, Senior Editor, Yahoo! Shine | Healthy Living | Mon, Jun 11, 2012 4:49 PM EDT | CommentsAs I walk to the rifle range, I find myself thinking, "I am way outside of my comfort zone. I am way outside of my comfort zone. I am waaaaay outside of my comfort zone." As I get closer and see the four weapons laid out on what look like short picnic tables, pointed toward far-away paper targets, the voice in my head changes: "I don't know if I want to do this. I don't know if I want to do this. Do I really want to do this?"
I learned to shoot a semiautomatic pistol like this one. Here's what it was like.
I'm in favor of gun control. I'm OK with hunting, though I have never wanted to try it myself. I have a hard time accepting the idea of keeping a handgun for personal protection. I'm afraid of guns, in fact. But I want to understand how they work, understand if my fear makes any sense, and so I sign myself up for "Women on Target," a day-long firearms safety and recreational shooting course run by the NRA.
When I told my friends that I was planning to spend an entire day learning how to shoot, their reactions ranged from dismay ("I can't believe you'd do that!...Read More » - By Lylah M. Alphonse, Senior Editor, Yahoo! Shine | Work + Money | Mon, Jun 11, 2012 2:56 PM EDT | CommentsPeople are usually reluctant to admit their real feelings in surveys, but there's no doubt that our experiences and our prejudices play a part in the way we vote. In order to figure out whether racial bias affected Barack Obama's results in the 2008 presidential election, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a doctoral candidate in economics at Harvard University, passed over easy-to-manipulate surveys and looked at data from another source: online searches.
President Barack Obama giving the 2012 State of the Union address. (AP Photo/Saul Loeb)
Related: My 3-year-old has race issues. Where did she learn to think that way?
When most people are searching for information online, they're likely to be alone and less likely to censor their thoughts, he explains. "You may have typed things into Google that you would hesitate to admit in polite company," he writes in a New York Times article. "I certainly have. The majority of Americans have as well: We Google the word 'porn' more often than the word 'weather'."
He chose a common racial insult that starts with "N" and looked for searches ...Read More » - By Lylah M. Alphonse, Senior Editor, Yahoo! Shine | Healthy Living | Wed, Jun 6, 2012 1:23 PM EDT | CommentsIt's one of the pillars of the pro-life argument: If life begins at conception and the morning-after pill prevents a fertilized egg from implanting in a woman's uterus -- as it says it does, right on the label -- then using emergency contraception like Plan B is tantamount to abortion.
Contrary to what it says on the label, Plan B doesn't prevent implantation.
But a closer look at a decade's worth of research shows that the morning-after pill doesn't actually work that way. Which means that one of biggest battles in the political war over women's reproductive health -- an idea that has sparked anti-abortion legislation around the country and outrage over President Obama's health care mandate -- is based entirely on outdated, incorrect data.
After sifting through the science, some of it more than 10 years old, The New York Times has found that the federally approved labels and medical authorities aren't telling patients what the research really shows: That emergency contraception pills delay ovulation and thicken cervical mucus (making it harder for sperm t...Read More »
