Communications, Media & Gender

Mainstream media and the communications sector are still largely male-dominated in management, ownership and representation. Women hold only 3 percent of leadership positions in the sector. And despite the parity of female and male graduates from journalism schools in the U.S., women reporters on average make $9,000 less per year than their male cohorts. New media and the internet are offering new opportunities for women’s involvement, with an estimated 7.3 million more women online than men and 23 million women who use blogs, including the emerging “momosphere,” or moms who blog. A vibrant feminist media is building alliances to combat sexism and amplify voices and critical viewpoints. Initiatives from our network, such as SheSource and the Women’s Media Center, are aiming to address the absence of women as experts and opinion leaders in the public sphere.

For women in the workplace, it's still about looks not deeds

Teaser:

MSNBC reports on public reactions to women like Hillary Clinton and Rebekah Brooks appearing in public without make-up.

Editorial:

From MSNBC:

It goes to show that no matter how high up in business or politics a woman gets — or how hard she falls — in the end the focus is often about how she looks and not what she does.

“We’re still held to a double standard,” said Jennifer Siebel Newsom, who produced the 2011 documentary “Miss Representation” about the underrepresentation of women in powerful positions.

“It’s tragic,” she said. “We have an obsession with women’s looks. Unfortunately our culture has bought into this whole double standard that a women’s value is her beauty not her capacity to lead.”

Women certainly feel the pressure to look good. Nearly half of women don’t feel good about themselves unless they’re wearing makeup, according to a study released this year by the Renfrew Center Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on eating disorder research and treatment.

[...]

Source:

MSNBC

URL:

http://lifeinc.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/15/11698778-for-women-in-the-workplace-its-still-about-looks-not-deeds

Date:

May 15, 2012

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Associated Issues & Expertise:

How Academic Biologists and Physicists View Science Outreach

Submitted by asklar on Mon, 05/14/2012 - 10:36am

Scholars and pundits alike argue that U.S. scientists could do more to reach out to the general public. Yet, to date, there have been few systematic studies that examine how scientists understand the barriers that impede such outreach. Through analysis of 97 semi-structured interviews with academic biologists and physicists at top research universities in the United States, we classify the type and target audiences of scientists’ outreach activities. Finally, we explore the narratives academic scientists have about outreach and its reception in the academy, in particular what they perceive as impediments to these activities. We find that scientists’ outreach activities are stratified by gender and that university and disciplinary rewards as well as scientists’ perceptions of their own skills have an impact on science outreach. Research contributions and recommendations for university policy follow.

URL:

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0036240

Women At Work: Jealousy And Envy Impact Women Differently Than Men

Teaser:

The Huffington Post reports on a study, published in the journal Revista de Psicologia Social, that examined the way that feelings of jealousy (defined as "a threat or loss of success in a relationship due to interference from a rival") and envy (defined as "a response to another person who has success, skills or qualities that [you] desire") impact workplace dynamics.

Editorial:

From the Huffington Post:

Have you ever been jealous of someone that you work with? According to a new study, a whole lot of people are -- and those feelings of jealousy impact women differently than they do men.

The study, published in the most recent issue of the journal Revista de Psicologia Social, examined the way that feelings of jealousy (defined as "a threat or loss of success in a relationship due to interference from a rival") and envy (defined as "a response to another person who has success, skills or qualities that [you] desire") impact workplace dynamics. The researchers were especially interested in the way that these feelings impact "intrasexual competition"-- competition between people of the same gender spurred on by the desire to get and keep "access" to the opposite sex.

What they found after studying men and women in the Netherlands, Spain and Argentina was that women's feelings of jealousy and envy can be predicted by intrasexual competition, whereas men's can't. "Women with a high level of intrasexual competition are more jealous if the rival is more attractive, and more envious if the rival is more powerful and dominating," Rosario Zurriaga, one of the study's authors, told the Spanish Foundation for Research and Technology. However, when it came to social skills, both men and women showed signs of jealousy and envy toward individuals who seemed to have an easier time socially at the office.

[...]

Source:

Huffington Post

URL:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/emma-gray/women-at-work-jealousy-envy-men_b_1480030.html

Date:

May 7, 2012

Affiliate:

Associated Issues & Expertise:

Understanding the Female Economy: The Role of Gender in Financial Decision Making and Succession Planning for the Next Generation

Submitted by asklar on Wed, 05/02/2012 - 11:08am

The Barclays Female Client Group, now in its second year, has launched a White Paper entitled: Understanding the Female Economy: The Role of Gender in Financial Decision Making and Succession Planning for the Next Generation. The findings show important distinctions into how men and women approach financial decisions differently and is the only research of its kind in the market.

URL:

http://www.barclayswealth.com/about-us/sponsorship/uk/understanding_female_economy.htm

Women’s Well-Being: Ranking America’s Top 25 Metro Areas

Submitted by asklar on Tue, 05/01/2012 - 10:54am

A report from Measure of America, a project of the Social Science Research Council.

URL:

http://www.measureofamerica.org/womens_wellbeing

Studying how much powerful men and women talk

Teaser:

Yale School of Management Assistant Professor Victoria Brescoll finds that even women in power purposely curtail how much they speak in a group because they’re aware, whether they like it or not, that being too outspoken can be off-putting.

Editorial:

From The Washington Post:

Now an assistant professor at the Yale School of Management, Brescoll has recently published a paper in the Administrative Science Quarterly that looks at how much men and women who hold powerful positions talk in group settings. Her study found that while men who have high-power positions tend to talk much more than men without very powerful jobs, the difference in how much women in high- and low-power roles talk in group settings, on average, turns out to be insignificant. While that may not be surprising to many, Brescoll wanted to find out both why it happens and illustrate its actual occurrence in the real world.

Her hypothesis? Women — even those in power — purposely curtail how much they speak in a group because they’re aware, whether they like it or not, that being too outspoken can be off-putting. “When men talk a lot and they have power, people are like ‘oh, that’s fantastic, I’d vote for him.’ But when women do it, they are seen as being too domineering, too presumptuous. Women perceive this, and that’s why they temper how much they talk.” Or as Stanford professor Bob Sutton put it in a blog post about Brescoll’s work, “The blabber mouth approach works for guys, but backfires on women.”

To examine this question, Brescoll designed three studies.

[...]

Source:

The Washington Post

URL:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-leadership/post/studying-how-much-powerful-men-and-women-talk/2011/04/01/gIQAXHGFlT_blog.html

Date:

April 27, 2012

Affiliate:

Associated Issues & Expertise:

In Our Best Interest: Women, Financial Literacy and Credit Card Behavior

Submitted by asklar on Thu, 04/26/2012 - 10:21am

Prepared by the FINRA Investor Education Foundation, this study finds that women with low levels of financial literacy were more likely to engage in costly credit card behaviors than men with low financial literacy. The findings suggest that increasing financial literacy can improve credit card management and reduce or eliminate gender-based differences in credit card behavior (released April 2012). The study is based on data from the 2009 National Financial Capability Study.

In Our Best Interest: Women, Financial Literacy and Credit Card Behavior (PDF 216 KB)

URL:

http://www.finrafoundation.org/web/groups/foundation/@foundation/documents/foundation/p125971.pdf

Monthly State Update: Major Developments in 2012

Submitted by asklar on Wed, 04/25/2012 - 11:04am

This monthly update provides information on legislation, as well as relevant executive branch actions and judicial decisions in states across the country. For each of the topics, the number of states in which legislation has been introduced is given, as are the names of the states in which subsequent action has been taken. Detailed summaries are provided for legislation that has been passed by at least one house of a legislature and for major court decisions; actions for the current month are in bold.

Abortion
Adolescents
Contraception & Prevention
Pregnancy & Birth
Refusal Clauses
Reproductive Health and Environmental Hazards

URL:

http://www.guttmacher.org/statecenter/updates/index.html

An Upside to the 'War on Women'?

Teaser:

Karin Kamp asks "Is there an upside to the so-called 'war on women'? Could it be mobilizing a new generation of women leaders?" She interviews some prominent women representing the interests of other women to find out.

Editorial:

From the Huffington Post:

Women's issues have been all over the media lately, and not for all the right reasons. Birth control, abortion rights, the Rush Limbaugh Sandra Fluke 'slut' comment controversy, Hilary Rosen's comments on Ann Romney never working a day in her life -- it's really enough to make your head spin. (At least we have one more woman on Forbes' list of billionaires, thanks to Spanx inventorSara Blakely, which had The Story Exchange staff cheering.)

I overheard some young women talking about these issues on the train the other day and that got me thinking... Is there an upside to the so-called "war on women"? Could it be mobilizing a new generation of women leaders? I decided to contact some prominent women representing the interests of other women to find out. Here's what they told me.

[...]

Source:

Huffington Post

URL:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karin-kamp/war-on-women_b_1446322.html

Date:

April 25, 2012

Affiliate:

Associated Issues & Expertise:

Women’s Presses Tweak Their Business Models

Teaser:

Publishers Weekly roundup of the status of feminish publishers.

Editorial:

From Publishers Weekly:

Approximately a dozen women’s presses are actively publishing in the U.S. today, down from about 30 during the 1990s, when feminist publishing and bookselling were at their peak. There are, additionally, several women’s presses sporadically publishing, and a few others putting out regional titles with limited distribution.

While fewer presses specialize in feminist books, those doing so are holding their own in the marketplace, and a few are thriving. Most of the presses contacted by PW reported that sales are steady, while Aunt Lute Books reported a 20% increase in sales this past year, and Seal Press reported a 23% increase.

Several of these publishers are maintaining their viability by redefining what it means to be a feminist press or expanding their operations. All are focusing on publishing books that do well in backlist, such as Seal’s fall 2012 release of Lynn Fairweather’s Stop Signs, a title about domestic violence that the press hopes will generate the same kind of sales as a related 1982 release, Getting Free (100,000 copies), did.

[...]

Source:

Publishers Weekly

URL:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/51622-women--s-presses-tweak-their-business-models.html

Date:

April 23, 2012

Affiliate:

Associated Issues & Expertise:

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NCRW is a network of leading university and community based research, policy, and advocacy centers with a growing global reach dedicated to advancing rights and opportunities for women and girls. We also have a Corporate Circle comprised of senior diversity professionals from leading U.S. and global member companies and a Presidents Circle of college and university leaders who share our commitment. NCRW harnesses the collective power of its network to provide knowledge, analysis, and thought leadership on issues ranging from reducing women’s poverty to building a critical mass of women’s leadership across sectors.

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