Communications, Culture & Society

From ABC News:

From Bloomberg Businessweek:

In Marriott’s personal life, marriage is something reserved for a man and a woman. But he has long been reluctant to impose that view on the company his father founded. Not only could that crimp the company’s $12 billion in sales, it might demoralize employees working in more than 3,700 Marriott properties worldwide. With Mitt Romney’s presidential run and same-sex marriage in the headlines, we spoke about his stance as Mormon leaders were being held up for scrutiny again.

“This church helped me raise a family and has brought great joy and happiness to my life,” he told me. But that didn’t mean gay employees had any less status at Marriott. “We have to take care of our people, regardless of their sexual orientation or anything else,” he said. “We are an American Church. We have all the American values: the values of hard work, the values of integrity, the values of fairness and respect.” Marriott has both a deep faith and a deep understanding of his responsibility as a leader. Many of his shareholders, customers, and employees don’t belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Their values matter, too.

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From Stanford University News:

Since Schiebinger launched the Gendered Innovations project in the summer of 2009, the project has produced 14 case studies to demonstrate how applying sex and gender analysis to research studies has helped create new knowledge and technologies.

The project was initiated with start-up funding from Stanford's Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Schiebinger, a former director of the Clayman Institute, is the editor of the 2008 book, Gendered Innovations in Science and Engineering.

All the project's peer-reviewed case studies can be found on its website, including:

• Stem Cells: Analyzing Sex
• Animal Research: Designing Health and Biomedical Research
• De-Gendering the Knee: Overemphasizing Sex Differences as a Problem
• Heart Disease in Women: Formulating Research Questions
• Pregnant Crash Test Dummies: Rethinking Standards and Reference Models
• Water: Participatory Research and Design

"The website is a resource for researchers," Schiebinger said. "It's globally accessible and freely available to anyone with an Internet connection.

An international cast of contributors

The Gendered Innovations project was developed through six international workshops. In 2011, the European Union joined the project, followed by the U.S. National Science Foundation in 2012.

"The project was created through a unique international collaboration of scientists, engineers and gender experts," Schiebinger said.

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From the Huffington Post:

From The Atlantic:

PROBLEM: Few would argue that the objectification of women is a real thing -- and a real problem -- but as yet there's been no cognitive explanation for it in a literal sense. Do we really look at women differently than we do men, and are they actually objectified in the eye -- and brain -- of the beholder?

METHODOLOGY: Images of average, fully clothed individuals (read: no supermodels in bikinis) were quickly flashed before the eyes of participants. After each one, the participants would then be shown two side-by-side images that zoomed in on one, "sexual" aspect of the individual (for example, a woman's midriff) and asked to identify the version that hadn't been modified. The experiment was also reversed, so that participants first looked at a specific part and then had to identify it in the context of an entire body. The test was designed to clue researchers in on whether the participants were using global or local cognitive processing while looking at the images -- in other words, whether they perceived the individuals as a whole or as an assemblage of their various parts.

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From The Arizona Republic:

The American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona acquired thousands of Pearce e-mails through a public-records request and included dozens of them in a legal motion to block a portion of the law.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last month in a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice that the part of the law that requires law-enforcement officers to ask about a person's legal status in certain situations does not conflict with federal authority. Lower courts could issue a ruling on how and when that goes into effect as soon as today.

The e-mails from Pearce in the court documents include statements such as: "Can we maintain our social fabric as a nation with Spanish fighting English for dominance? ... It's like importing leper colonies and hope we don't catch leprosy. It's like importing thousands of Islamic jihadists and hope they adapt to the American Dream."

They also include unsupported statistics such as "9,000 people killed every year by illegal aliens," and "the illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that's two-and-a-half times that of non-illegal aliens."

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Read the e-mails from Russell Pearce