Economic Security

From The New York Times blog:

From the PSN blog:

• Prohibiting plans from dropping patients after they get sick;
• Requiring plans to cover preventive care with no co-pays;
• Prohibiting plans from refusing to cover children with preexisting conditions;
• Requiring plans to allow young adults to buy coverage through their parent’s plan;
• Prohibiting plans from imposing annual or lifetime dollar limits on coverage;
• Allowing patients to choose their primary care doctor or their child’s pediatrician;
• Prohibiting plans from refusing to cover emergency care without prior approval from the plan;
• Requiring plans to cover contraception on the same basis that it covers men’s reproductive health care; and
• Requiring plans to give women direct access to ob/gyn preventive care without a referral.

From Inter Press Service:

What does birth control have anything to do with reducing global emissions?

Everything, women around the world would say, because they know how closely linked reproductive health is to issues ranging from poverty and food security to climate change and beyond. This message was precisely what female leaders brought to the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development, but not many were listening, least of all the Vatican.

“The only way to respond to increasing human numbers and dwindling resources is through the empowerment of women,” said Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, former prime minister of Norway and former director-general of the World Health Organisation.

“It is through giving women access to education, knowledge, to paid income, independence and of course access to reproductive health services, reproductive rights, access to family planning,” she elaborated, adding that no other way existed to change the current “pattern of human consumption”.

Female leaders have long been trying to tell the world that sustainable development is not just about deforestation, climate change and carbon emissions. Equally as important to sustainable development are gender equality and human rights, which include sexual and reproductive rights.

But the reality is that globally, 215 million women who want to avoid pregnancy are not using effective methods of contraception. More than two and five pregnancies are unplanned, and approximately 287,000 girls and women die each year from pregnancy-related causes. The world has a ways to go to ensure that women have access to full reproductive rights and health.

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From Kaiser Health News:

From Stanford Social Innovation Review:

"We’d love to have a gender lens, but we’d have nothing to invest in.” I rocked back on my heels, absorbing this statement from the head of the Africa division of a large social investment fund.

Yet he is not alone. Two years ago, when I first talked with the head of a domestic fund investing in women entrepreneurs, she said, “Jackie I don’t have a gender lens.” Her concern was that a “gender lens” made her appear soft, not return-focused.

For the last two years, I’ve led Women Effect Investments, a field building initiative for gender lens investing. In the process I’ve discovered multiple challenges talking about gender in the investment world. It surfaces concerns about quotas and quality, culture and stereotypes. It is seen as soft, unnecessarily feminist, or limiting. I see a huge opportunity in transcending these concerns. Given women’s centrality worldwide to economic development, health, education, and a strong civil society, investing with a gender lens illuminates opportunities and highlights risks.  Take, for instance, the need for electricity in maternity clinics or the challenges that emerge when loan officers are all men. If more investment vehicles employed a gender lens, we could accelerate change for everyone.

Abstract

Although consumer spending typically declines in economic recessions, some observers have noted that recessions appear to increase women‘s spending on beauty products—the so-called lipstick effect. Using both historical spending data and rigorous experiments, we examine how and why economic recessions influence women‟s consumer behavior. Findings revealed that recessionary cues – whether naturally occurring or experimentally primed – decreased desire for most products (e.g., electronics, household items). However, these cues consistently increased women‘s desire for products that increase attractiveness to mates —the first experimental demonstration of the lipstick effect. Additional studies show that this effect is driven by women‘s desire to attract mates with resources and depends on the perceived mate attraction function served by these products. In addition to showing how and why economic recessions influence women‘s desire for beauty products, this research provides novel insights into women‘s mating psychology, consumer behavior, and the relationship between the two.

From the Phoenix Business Journal:

Although women make up the majority of college graduates, they still earn significantly less money than men on average. Financial Finesse found that women also lag in financial planning, especially in money management and investing.
Greg Ward, a financial research analyst for Financial Finesse, said the study showed that many women are behind on financial literacy.

“The biggest significance of this is when you understand that most women at some point in their lives are going to be solely responsible for their finances,” Ward said.

While 89 percent of men surveyed reported a general investment knowledge about stocks, bonds and mutual funds, only 66 percent of women answered the same. In a similar gap, 78 percent of men reported having a handle on cash flow and spending less than they made each month, compared to 62 percent of women.

Women were less comfortable with their non-mortgage debt load than men, with 71 percent of men saying they were comfortable with their debt and only 52 percent of women.

Likewise, men were more likely to have an emergency fund to cover unexpected expenses, to pay their bills on time each month, and to regularly pay off credit card balances in full. Men were more confident that their investments were allocated appropriately and more often understood the tax implications of their investment and retirement accounts.

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From Reuters:

Cancer screening has been a contentious issue in recent years. Even by government-backed U.S. Preventative Services Task Force (USPSTF) standards, which some consider to be relatively conservative, screening rates for breast and cervical cancer were low in the study. Only about half of women in the Oregon-based research met USPSTF recommendations.

"People in rural areas tend to go to the doctor only when they are ill, so they don't get the chance to talk about cancer screenings," said Dr. Patricia Carney, a researcher at Oregon Health and Science University, Portland, who led the study.

Previous studies have shown that screening rates are lower among the uninsured, but that research has focused on people in towns and cities.

For the new study, partially funded by the American Cancer Society (ACS), researchers analyzed a decade of medical charts at two private health practices, and two federally funded public health centers in rural Oregon. The study included more than 3,000 men and women, all aged 55 or over when the study began.

They found that about 10 percent of patients lacked insurance coverage. Those with coverage had either private insurance, or a combination of private insurance, Medicare and Medicaid. The insurance status of about 16 percent of patients was unknown.

According to the report in the journal Cancer, people with private insurance were much more likely to be up-to-date for some ACS recommended cancer screenings than people without insurance.

While 56 percent of women with insurance went without recommended mammograms, which the ACS recommends beginning at age 40, 78 percent of uninsured women, and 70 percent of those with Medicare or Medicaid, did.

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