Math ability, in some societies, is gendered. That is, many people believe that boys and men are better at math than girls and women and, further, that this difference is biological (hormonal, neurological, or somehow encoded on the Y chromosome).
But actual data about gender differences in math ability tell a very different story. Natalie Angier and Kenneth Chang reviewed these differences in the New York Times. They report the following (based on the US unless otherwise noted):
• There is no difference in math aptitude before age 7. Starting in adolescence, some differences appear (boys score approximately 30-35 points higher than girls on the math portion of the SAT). But, scores on different subcategories of math vary tremendously (often with girls outperforming boys consistently).
• When boys do better, they are usually also doing worse. Boys are also more likely than girls to get nearly all the answers wrong. So they overpopulate both tails of the bell curve; boys are both better, and worse, than girls at math.
• That means that how we test for math ability is a political choice. If you report who is best at math, the answer is boys. If you report average math ability, it’s about the same.
• How you decide to test math ability is also political. Even though boys outperform girls on the SAT, it turns out those scores do not predict math performance in classes. Girls frequently outperform boys in the classroom.
• And, since girls often outperform boys in a practical setting, math aptitude (even measured at the levels of outstanding instead of average performance) doesn’t explain sex disparities in science careers (most of which, incidentally, only require you to be pretty good at math, as opposed to wildly genius at it). In any case, scoring high in math is only loosely related to who opts for a scientific career, especially for girls. Many high scoring girls don’t go into science, and many poor scoring boys do.Math ability, in some societies, is gendered. That is, many people believe that boys... more
Minister for Women Harriet Harman, who is known for her staunch feminist views, has been nominated for the annual Rear of the Year award.
The MP makes an unusual candidate considering she has previously sought for pictures of Page 3 girls banned from the workplace to protect the sensitivity of some staff.
Last year's winners were singers Rachel Stevens and Russell Watson. Other previous winners include Denise van Outen and Charlotte Church.
Thi Nguyen, 35-year-old Eldersburg woman, has been charged with sex crimes for allegedly engaging in sex with a 14-year-old boy. She faces counts of third-degree sex offense and sex abuse of a minor. Nguyen’s husband discovered information regarding the alleged sex and alerted police.Thi Nguyen, 35-year-old Eldersburg woman, has been charged with sex crimes for... more
Thi Nguyen, 35-year-old Eldersburg woman, has been charged with sex crimes for allegedly engaging in sex with a 14-year-old boy. She faces counts of third-degree sex offense and sex abuse of a minor. Nguyen's husband discovered information regarding the alleged sex and alerted police.
Police say the 14 year old Prince George's County boy was staying with the Sykesville couple last summer to learn how to fix cars from Nguyen's husband who is an auto mechanic. Some time later Nguyen's husband discovered several photos and online chats between the teen and his wife. Those photos showed Nguyen and the teen together in the back seat of a car.
According to investigators 14 year old admitted to having sexual intercourse with Nguyen ten to 15 times.
A court date has yet to be set. Nguyen is currently out on bond but could face up to 45 years in prison is convicted.Thi Nguyen, 35-year-old Eldersburg woman, has been charged with sex crimes for... more
What's wrong with your vagina? If you answered "nothing," you're probably wrong. According to the beauty-industrial complex, it's ugly, and it smells bad. But don't worry—there's nothing that money can't fix.What's wrong with your vagina? If you answered "nothing," you're... more
Now with the 2010 Oscars coming in March, could Bigelow be the first woman to win the Best Director Academy Award?Now with the 2010 Oscars coming in March, could Bigelow be the first woman to win the... more
"One of the most prestigious academic journals devoted to Shakespearean authorship studies has just added a new candidate to the centuries-old debate about who else plausibly might have written the works we associate with the little-educated merchant and actor from Stratford-Upon-Avon.
The nominee is a complete shocker: Amelia Bassano Lanier, a converso (clandestine Jew) and the illegitimate daughter of an Italian-born, Elizabethan court musician.
Dozens of luminaries (Sigmund Freud, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain among them) over the years have joined the so-called anti-Stratfordian camp, convinced, as Henry James put it, “that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practised on a patient world.”
Until now, most of the proposed alternatives have been aristocrats such as William Stanley, the sixth earl of Derby, and Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford – championed by the New York-based Oxford Society, publishers of the annual journal The Oxfordian.
“When you look at the plays without preconceptions of the author,” observes the journal's newly appointed editor, Michael Egan, “we'd have to say this is a highly educated person, well travelled, with intricate knowledge of the courts and aristocratic life. Where did an obscure provincial boy gain all this information?”
The Oxfordian's current issue profiles Stanley and de Vere along with another perennial choice, playwright Christopher Marlowe. But it's the addition of the female, Jewish contender – a pioneering woman poet – that will turn heads.
The principal proponent of this theory is 55-year-old John Hudson, a British Shakespeare scholar and director of the New York theatre ensemble the Dark Lady Players. In The Oxfordian, Mr. Hudson argues that if Bassano (Lanier was her married name) did not write all of the plays, she was certainly a major collaborator.
Her name is not new to Shakespeare studies. In 1979, British historian A.L. Rowse suggested that Bassano, with her family's Mediterranean skin colouring, was the famous “dark lady of the sonnets,” Shakespeare's mistress. Ridiculed at the time, that view is now commonplace among scholars.
Mr. Hudson goes further: He maintains that Bassano wrote the sonnets about herself; as with the plays, Shakespeare was simply a front used to hide her identity...""One of the most prestigious academic journals devoted to Shakespearean... more
In the mid-'70s, when women (among them Claudia Weill, Joan Micklin Silver, Joan Darling) were getting the chance to direct mainstream movies, Pauline Kael cautioned against expecting great things right away. Filmmakers needed a chance to learn and develop, she said, and there was always a chance they might not, or might simply become proficient hacks. It didn't matter, she was quoted as saying, whether there was a king or a queen on top of the garbage heap.
Daphne Merkin's profile of Nancy Meyers in the New York Times Magazine a few weeks back was an attempt to claim that a Garbage Queen was a step forward. The trouble with the piece, as with almost every plight-of-women-in-film article, is that the relentless focus on Hollywood winds up saying that the women directors working outside the mainstream don't exist....
Thinking of the women who made films in the last year, I (Charles Taylor) came up with Claire Denis, Lucrecia Martel, Agnès Varda, Lynn Shelton, So Yong Kim, Catherine Breillat, Karyn Kusama, Havana Marking, Anne Fontaine, Drew Barrymore and Andrea Arnold. I'm sure I'm leaving out plenty of others. And that list doesn't include other contemporary women directors like Sofia Coppola, Nicole Holofcener, Lynne Ramsay, Barbara Kopple, Darnell Martin, Stacy Cochran, Kasi Lemmons, Gillian Armstrong, Catherine Hardwicke, Allison Anders, Lynne Stopkewich, Kimberly Peirce and Patty Jenkins.
Those names carry their own untold stories, the years between projects (during which many got by on TV work), the films that didn't get released, the projects that went to more established directors (to think we lost Lynne Ramsay's "The Lovely Bones" only to get Peter Jackson's disaster). But it's not a list you come up with if your idea of a movie is limited to what's at the multiplex.
What's so insidious about making Nancy Meyers Hollywood's little-engine-that-could is that her films present perhaps a particularly retrograde notion of womanhood..."In the mid-'70s, when women (among them Claudia Weill, Joan Micklin Silver, Joan... more
Kathleen Hanna? Bikini Killer? Le Tigress? Riot Grrrl? Any of these names rink a bell? New York University’s Fales Library recognize them, and is archiving precious documents of the Riott Grrrl Manifesto and its offshoot movement in the early 1990s. Why does NYU care? They say because “the Riott Grrrl Collection will support scholarship in feminism, punk activism, queer theory, music history and more.” Right when I thought the last Riot Grrls were dying off like an exotic species of birds they were, we get this news.Kathleen Hanna? Bikini Killer? Le Tigress? Riot Grrrl? Any of these names rink a... more
"The classic image of sexual harassment is Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill; it's not two men or even two women," says Dr. Liza H. Gold, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University who serves as an expert in sexual-harassment suits. And yet the experience of men harassed by men may help to illustrate the realities of all such cases. When women are the victims, they may face assumptions that the abuse is the result of an affair gone wrong, hurt feelings, or mixed signals. In truth, sexual harassment of both genders has more to do with issues of control and abuses of power for the purpose of humiliation than with sexual attraction.
By exposing the men to taunts about their genitalia, sexually suggestive simulations, and lewd comments, the men perpetrating the harassment are seeking to embarrass and target the male victims—not sexually stimulate or "flirt" with them. "Sexual harassment is about using power in a way to hurt somebody," says Marcia McCormick, associate professor at Saint Louis University School of Law, who specializes in employment law and gender issues. In the Cheesecake Factory suit there were no allegations that supervisors were attracted to the other men—the sexual harassment was a form of intimidation, McCormick says."The classic image of sexual harassment is Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill;... more
One of the compliments aimed at the new Disney movie, The Princess and the Frog, is that the heroine isn’t just a pretty face, but in fact an entrepreneur who wants to open her own restaurant and is uninterested in catching a man. This observation was made to me, for example, when I was interviewed for a story by CNN reporter Breenana Hare, who suggested that this new princess was making a break with the old princesses in more than one way.
I replied that this “new” kind of princess had been on the scene for a while. Belle, from Beauty and the Beast, according to imdb, was “a bookworm who dream[t] of life outside her provincial village,” not of a prince charming. That was 20 years ago. Both Pocohantas and Mulan were adventurous and brave. Most princesses, these days, are not perfect embodiments of femininity, they balance their femininity with a bit of masculinity. It’s ‘cess + sass as a rule.
But, to be fair, these princesses aren’t radical. They aren’t pushing the envelope of femininity. They are only reflecting the fact that ideal femininity in the West has changed such that the perfect woman now incorporates some masculine character traits. “Some” is the operative word here. Today’s ideal woman is still feminine, but she works, wears pants, and plays sports. She may even be a sports fan and drink beer. But she also preserves her femininity, especially those aspects of femininity that mark her as “for” a (just barely and totally benevolently of course) dominant male. She still doesn’t disagree too vigorously or laugh too loud. She marries a man who is slightly older, more educated, larger, taller, and makes a bit more money at his job that is just slightly higher prestige. And, no matter what, she looks, dresses, and moves in pretty, feminine ways. Barbie and the Three Musketeers is another, non-Disney example of this phenomenon:Is “princess” being redefined?
One of the compliments aimed at the new... more
a very interesting and well produced video discussing the implications of video games being targeted primarily at men.a very interesting and well produced video discussing the implications of video games... more
Dr Kaivalya Desai was cleared of sexual assault at Sheffield Crown Court (pictured)
A respected family doctor who 'provided a shoulder to cry on' for his patients during an unblemished 29-year career has been cleared of a sexual assault charge.
Dr Kaivalya Desai, aged 61, believed old-fashioned sympathy, which he referred to as 'in-house help and counselling', was the best way to calm anxious patients.
However, his career was in danger of ruin when a woman patient in her early 20s complained that he had put a comforting arm around her while she was crying.
Sheffield Crown Court heard the patient was suffering from depression and relationship problems and finding it difficult to care for her two young children.
Through a video interview played to the jury during a three-day trial she admitted the GP held her hand, which he had done before, and she thought nothing of it.He told the court he often held the hands of his patients to comfort them.
He said: 'If I feel the patient is crying a lot and is very stressed then yes I would hold their hand and help them. I feel it is a human thing.
'If someone is depressed or crying a physical touch tells them they are not alone in the world.'
He said he offered the woman comfort by holding her hand, gave her a tissue to wipe her eyes, and put an arm around her shoulders.
She ran from the health centre in tears and told her partner who called the police.
It took a jury at Sheffield Crown Court just 30 minutes to throw out her allegation.
Dr Desai said afterwards: 'I am delighted with the verdict. In my 29 years of practice I have always sought to provide the best standard of care for my patients.' http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1238264/GP-hugged-crying-patient-cleared-sexual-assault.htmlDr Kaivalya Desai was cleared of sexual assault at Sheffield Crown Court (pictured)
A... more
Hardly anyone noticed this summer when former president Jimmy Carter explained why he had decided to leave the Baptist Church. However “painful and difficult,” wrote Carter in an essay that appeared in the Guardian, his break with the denomination to which he had belonged for sixty years had begun to seem like the only possible response to past opinions expressed and codified by the Southern Baptist Convention. “It was an unavoidable decision when the convention’s leaders, quoting a few carefully selected Bible verses and claiming that Eve was created second to Adam and responsible for original sin, ordained that women must be ‘subservient’ to their husbands and prohibited from serving as deacons, pastors, or chaplains in the military service. This was in conflict with my belief—confirmed in the holy scriptures—that we are all equal in the eyes of God.”
Considerably more attention was generated some months earlier by another story about how religion conceives and enforces its view of a woman’s place. The horrific attack on two Afghan girls en route to school—the young women were severely disfigured by acid allegedly thrown by Taliban fighters—was widely reported and discussed. Obviously, the assault was more brutal, shocking, and newsworthy than an elderly white guy’s regretful decision to separate himself from the misguided pronouncements of some other elderly white guys. And just as clearly, the Taliban’s plans for women far exceed the darkest imaginings of the Southern Baptists, whose tenets—“a wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband”—seem genial and reassuringly vague when compared to the restrictions that the Taliban impose, and seek to impose, on women, regulations that narrow the parameters of daily life down to a space in which anyone, male or female, would suffocate. Under Taliban rule Afghan women cannot work, attend school, leave home without a male chaperone, or ride in a taxi. Minor infractions, such as showing an ankle, are punished by public whippings. More serious violations, such as adultery, are capital crimes for which the sentence is death by hanging or stoning.
The acid attack on the schoolgirls offered graphic and persuasive confirmation of one reason why we have gone to war, or in any case one reason we’ve been given: according to some, once we defeat the Taliban, every Afghan girl can go to school. That’s the outcome everyone wants, though it is less often mentioned that literacy rates among Afghan women were appallingly low long before the Taliban, back in the 1980s when we were still arming the mujahideen—including many future Taliban warriors—to fight against the Russians. The Taliban’s demonic and demonizing attitude toward women represents merely the most current extreme manifestation of the grotesque misogyny fostered throughout history by religion and patriarchal tribal culture. Both the Taliban and the Southern Baptists employ the “lessons” of biology and scripture to “prove” women’s inferiority, a view of our gender unlikely to be eliminated by another air strike or drone-missile deployment, or by the polite demurrals of a former president.
Sensible, decent Jimmy Carter got it right again. “This view that women are somehow inferior to men is not restricted to one religion or belief. It is widespread. Women are prevented from playing a full and equal role in many faiths. Nor, tragically, does its influence stop at the walls of the church, mosque, synagogue, or temple. This discrimination, unjustifiably attributed to a higher authority, has provided a reason or excuse for the deprivation of women’s equal rights across the world for centuries. The male interpretations of religious texts and the way they interact with and reinforce traditional practices justify some of the most pervasive, persistent, flagrant, and damaging examples of human-rights abuses.”
As this year winds down and the television channels lay fallow before the January kick-off, there's not a lot for a dedicated TV-watcher to do except see which show marathon on which channel will likely suck away six hours of your day if you're careful.
Let me make a suggestion: try the Law & Order: SVU marathon, which airs on Sunday, December 27, 2009, from 9 a.m. eastern on. I say this not because shows about busting up child slavery routes and questioning whether the law is protecting the right person in fetal alcohol cases is a real post-holiday mood lifter. I say this because the show is refreshing. Let me count the ways:
The women on this show tend to be dignified. In a TV landscape where women are routinely shown as hyperemotional and unprofessional (I'm looking at you, Grey's Anatomy and Ugly Betty), watching the no-nonsense Detective Olivia Benson is a cool, calm drink of water. I have big love for Diane Neal as ADA Casey Novak as well. Maybe it's residual trauma from the Ally McBeal era; I'm just grateful when a female lawyer on TV isn't hallucinating or openly weeping over her ticking biological clock.
The detectives on the show are aware of gender and how it may make people susceptible to certain crimes -- but they don't see the law in gendered terms. In other words, this is the exact opposite approach of every story you've ever seen in a newspaper where some crackpot legislator decides that the role of the state is to tell private citizens what's what in their uteri. I'm not suggesting that the show is an oasis of feminism -- but it is populated by characters who do not see the world in terms of "people" and then "women."
Finally, knowing that every Law & Order: SVU episode is going to have the same structure -- reveal of the victim, detective taking point, detecting and strategizing going on, presumed perp caught after a few scenes, the legal wrangling that does or doesn't get the perp off the hook, the ironic final scene that's supposed to make you think -- oh, my gosh, it is soothing to know that no matter how insane the rest of TV's scripted or reality fare may get, there will be one show where Olivia Benson, eyes shining with righteous wrath and a jaw as set as her sense of duty, is fixing the world in under 53 minutes.
OK folks. You know how we feel about this year's Kay Jewelers ad and the holiday-themed pap smear PSAs, but which holiday ads are making you want to throw your remote/magazine/newspaper/laptop into an open fire this year? There's only one way to find out! It's time for OFFENSIVE COMMERCIALS: HOLIDAY SHOWDOWN!
Kay Jewelers:
I know this ad is from last year, but I've seen it on TV this season as well, and it's just as ridiculous this time around. How is this couple in such a serious relationship (celebrating Christmas morning together) if the guy barely knows how to sign? And can that shiny watch really make up for his lack of communication skills? Well, judging by her smiling face and kissing lips, the answer is yes.
I am restraining myself here and only including four holiday commercials in the showdown instead of the hundreds that could have been entered. If you've seen an ad that took the jingle right out of your bells this season, tell us about it in the comments section! Until then, it's SHOWDOWN TIME!
What can the poorest people do to aid economic development in their own communities? A great deal, when given easy access to financial services and remittance flows, says the Director of Fonkoze, Haitis alternative bank for the poor. This short video tells the story of two Fonkoze clients.What can the poorest people do to aid economic development in their own communities? A... more
